Patti Smith's Home Movies

Patti Smith was born to be photographed in black and white. I’m surely not the first person to make this observation, but with her uncombed, greying hair and the stark, almost Cherokee leanness of her face and limbs, she does look like she belongs on the front porch of a 19th-century ranchhouse, sitting on a rocking chair with a shotgun across her lap. Or maybe something wilder — her androgynous fondness for wearing men’s jackets and bowler hats recalls Calamity Jane, or some marauder out of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or The Place of Dead Roads, the Western novel written by her friend and mentor William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs’ name gets dropped a lot in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a rambling documentary portrait of the singer and punk icon by fashion photographer Steven Sebring (who, yes, shoots most of it in black and white). So do a lot of other iconoclastic American outlaw artists: Smith picks up a guitar and mentions that Sam Shepard gave it to her; she goes to a cemetery to do a rubbing of Gregory Corso’s gravestone; she talks a lot about Bob Dylan. I suppose when you hang out in Smith’s circle for as long as she has, your anecdotes can’t help but be filled with a lot of famous names, but I don’t know if I’d have much patience hanging out with someone like Smith, who can’t pass by a hot dog stand without mentioning how much Robert Mapplethorpe loved Nathan’s hot dogs.

Steven Sebring apparently had no such problem: he spent more than 10 years making Dream of Life, tagging along with Smith as she puttered around her cluttered New York apartment, sifted through boxes of photographs and souvenirs, visited her parents, made appearances at antiwar rallies, and went back on tour with her band after the deaths of a series of close colleagues and family members. The movie took so long to make that in the first scene, Smith threatens, only half-jokingly, to go on strike, refusing to budge from her corner of the room until Sebring stops filming.

A full decade with your subject gains you a lot of intimacy, but as Dream of Life enters its second hour, you kind of start wondering whether Sebring accidentally got rid of all his good stuff and held onto the outtakes. Not that Smith isn’t a fascinating figure — especially when it comes to the contrast between her private, domestic self, cooing over old baby clothes or laughing fondly at her mom’s collection of ceramic cows, and the firebrand she turns into onstage, a sharp-elbowed harpy in an unironed grey t-shirt. It’s just that Sebring doesn’t seem interested in interviewing anybody or probing Smith for insights into her art, her influences, or her political beliefs — or doing anything, really, other than make a glorified home movie. The footage of Smith’s live shows contains a couple of energetic performances of her hits, but it’s a little too heavy on Smith’s spoken-word poetry (including an endless, strident indictment of George W. Bush) for my taste. Sam Shepard drops by to play a couple of songs on the guitar (with Smith barely able to handle the chords to “You Are My Sunshine”) and she trades stories with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers about having to urinate in water bottles during long trips.

These scenes would be tasty crumbs in a different movie, but in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, they’re kind of the whole meal. But Smith diehards who’ve spent long hours staring at the album cover from Horses and wished it could move will have their dream come true.

The Best Of 2008: Sometimes I'm Happy, Sometimes I'm Blue

Often, in the doldrums of March and April, I start to wonder where all the good movies are going to come from. Where are the ones that I’m going to fall in love with, the five-star specials that I can put on my year-end Top Ten list? The problem can seem especially acute in Edmonton, where we have to wait so long for the smaller films, the festival favourites and the microbudgeted indies, to arrive on our screens.

And yet, year in and year out, the films do arrive, no matter how many specialty distributors go out of business or how many interesting directors get gobbled up by the Hollywood system, or just die altogether. They come from the unlikeliest places (a Mennonite community in Mexico, a flyspeck town in Israel) and feature the unlikeliest actors (the girl from The Princess Diaries, a Romanian eight-year-old who’d never acted before). Here’s my list of the 10 best (plus six runners-up).

The two extreme ends of the emotional spectrum were represented by these two films. I wish I could be a little more like Poppy Cross, the resolutely (some might say tyrannically) upbeat heroine of Mike Leigh’s wise, funny character study, but I suspect that my temperament is closer to that of Caden Cotard, the mopey, physically decaying playwright at the centre of Charlie Kaufman’s staggeringly ambitious puzzle-movie. Interesting thing: Happy-Go-Lucky is more philosophical than it looks, while Synecdoche, New York is more emotional.


This family drama combines the best elements of director Jonathan Demme: the music-lover who made Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, the documentarian who made The Agronomist, and the big-hearted humanist who made Melvin and Howard and Something Wild. Anne Hathaway is getting the Oscar buzz as the prickly bridesmaid Kym, but the standout performer for me is Bill Irwin as Kym’s father, a good man trying so hard to keep peace between the daughters he both loves but doesn’t quite understand.


Guy Maddin is a Canadian treasure, and this delirious tribute to his snowy, sleepwalking hometown is his most accessible film yet: absurdly funny in its recreation of tall tales from Winnipeg’s past, passionate in its outrage over City Hall’s disrespect for iconic local landmarks, and oddly emotional in its recreations of old Maddin family arguments. Perhaps the greatest Canadian film ever made?


Yes, Speed Racer. I don’t care how many dismissive reviews you show me; the Wachowski Brothers’ outrageously colourful ode to the joys of moving really, really fast wasn’t just the most blissfully enjoyable film of the summer, it was also the most formally innovative. Jeer if you like; the miraculously fluid editing in Speed Racer represents a breakthrough in visual storytelling. Go to the cineplex in 15 years, and I bet you’ll see its influence everywhere.


James Marsh’s documentary about acrobat Philippe Petit’s technically-illegal-but-who-cares-about-legalities 1974 tightrope walk between New York’s Twin Towers seems to have a profound emotional effect on everyone who sees it. Even the cop who arrested Petit is inspired to unusually poetic phrases when the press interviews him. A beautiful, soul-replenishing movie.


It was gratifying to see this grim, gruelling, formally challenging abortion drama from Romanian writer/director Cristian Mungiu achieve a modest commercial breakthrough in North America. I’m not sure what the magic ingredient was, other than a combination of especially positive reviews and a genuine desire on the part of the public to see a movie, any movie, that dealt intelligently and realistically with this subject matter.


Tarsem’s big, crazy, ambitious, unique, at times ludicrous but mostly awe-inspiring fable about a paralyzed 1920s Hollywood stuntman who befriends a little girl staying in the same hospital, spinning her an elaborate fairytale in hopes of manipulating her into stealing enough medication for him to kill himself. It’s like Alejandro Jodorowsky decided to make a kids’ movie!


Eran Kolirin’s bittersweet comedy/drama about an Egyptian police band marooned in a small Israeli town recalls the great ’80s films of Scottish director Bill Forsyth — there’s the same gentle fish-out-of-water humour, the same tenderness towards its characters, the same faith in the ability of total strangers to form human connections, no matter how fleeting or tentative.


Mexican director Carlos Reygadas graduated from the showy provocations of his previous film Battle in Heaven with this austere but deeply moving film — parable? fable? melodrama? — about a Mennonite man torn between his love for his wife, his love for his mistress, and his love for God. Canadian writer and first-time actor Miriam Toews contributes a performance of Liv Ullmann-like clarity and complexity.


Eccentric, occasionally perplexing, but always visually inventive, Todd Rohal’s low-budget indie comedy begins with Will Oldham aimlessly driving a boxy, bright-orange car down the Pennsylvania highway and ends with little Katy Haywood riding around and around on an amusement park ride. Like them, the movie doesn’t really go anywhere either, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff to look at and meditate on during the journey.


RUNNERS-UP: Be Kind Rewind, Elegy, The Life of Reilly, The Order of Myths, Shine a Light, Wall•E

DIDN’T SEE ’EM/DIDN’T OPEN IN EDMONTON IN 2008: Ballast, Che, A Christmas Tale, The Class, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Hunger, Revolutionary Road, Still Life, Waltz With Bashir, Wendy and Lucy, The Wrestler

Where's Lucy

Wendy spends most of Wendy and Lucy tottering on the very edge of the border that separates merely being broke from dropping out of society. Her car has broken down in a small town somewhere in Oregon (she’s driving to Alaska as part of a fuzzy plan to restart her life in a new location); she has about $500 to her name, not enough for even a cheap motel; and when she gets hauled off to the police station for shoplifting a can of dog food and a couple of pieces of fruit, she returns to the store hours later to find that her dog Lucy has disappeared from where she tied him up. The only person who helps her is an older guy, a security guard at the Walgreen’s where her car is parked, who lets her borrow her cellphone to keep in touch with the pound. During their final conversation, he presses a few crumpled bills into her hand. “Don’t argue,” he says. “Just take it.” It looks like there’s maybe $12 in there. That’s probably more than he could spare — but gee whiz. That’s not much.

Wendy and Lucy is a film about human limitations, about people not quite able to get by or do enough to help the people (and animals) around them. It’s the spiritual opposite, then, of something like Seven Pounds, and it’s to director/co-writer Kelly Reichardt’s credit that the film never seems as if she’s imposing some kind of pessimistic worldview upon the material. It’s one of the most in-the-moment films of the year: we get no backstory for Wendy, no indication of what inspired this car trip, no information about her education level, her sexuality, her cultural tastes. We simply watch as Wendy deals, step by step, with her situation and make our conclusions about her character that way, as she sneaks sinkbaths in the women’s room of a nearby gas station or yells ineffectually at the teenaged prick at the supermarket who got her arrested or spends a chunk of her precious savings to put up some “lost dog” posters around the neighbourhood. She even scatters her clothes in a few key locations — clothes she surely can’t afford to lose — in the hope that Lucy will be lured back by the scent.

At a certain point in the film, Wendy even winds up sleeping under a blanket in the forest, and when a crazy man discovers her there, Reichardt keeps her camera tight on Wendy’s frozen, terrified eyes as the man delivers an incomprehensible, angry rant and she tries to figure out if he’ll finish it off by killing her or merely raping her. There are great actors who always seem aware that an audience is watching them (Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey), and then there are actors who barely seem to realize there’s even a camera pointed at them — Michelle Williams gives one of the second category of performances with her work here as Wendy. With her hair dark and cut short, wearing a cheap blue hoodie, brown shorts, and a mysterious, dirty-looking bandage on one ankle, she’s definitely deglamourized herself, but not in a way that calls the least bit of attention to itself. She merely looks ordinary — a young woman with enough spunk to set out on her own to look for work in Alaska, but naïve and desperate enough to make the trip in an ill-equipped car and maybe one-fourth the proper budget.

Williams’ performance is free of histrionics, or appeals for pity from the audience, or seemingly any fancy tricks or affectations whatsoever, and yet the final 10 minutes of the film, in which Wendy confronts the hopelessness of her situation, are as devastating as anything I’ve seen in a film this year. Just looking at the image at the top of this review, of Williams looking through the fence, on the verge of becoming a different type of person than she was just four days ago, makes my eyes fill up with tears.

Of all the great films that came out in 2008, Wendy and Lucy may be the simplest. It’s so simple, in fact — barely 80 minutes long — that it almost seems like anyone could have made it, like there’s no trick to it at all. And yet in practice, hardly anybody does. What’s Reichardt’s secret? Does she even know? Or does she simply do what Wendy does: deposit herself in a strange location and walk around searching for something, hoping she’ll find what she wants before her money runs out?

Pitt The Elder, Pitt The Younger

A baby is born looking like a tiny, wizened old man: deaf, half-blind, with wrinkled skin and arthritic joints. But as the years pass, he grows steadily younger. He becomes a sailor, traveling around the world, from Florida to Russia and doing a tour of duty with the U.S. Navy in World War II. He inherits a thriving factory and becomes a rich man. He visits brothels. He has an affair with the wife of a British diplomat. He marries a beautiful dancer, and they spend the first few months as husband and wife essentially living in their bedroom. They have a daughter. He gets steadily younger as his wife gets older and leaves them to “find himself,” traveling through India and Tibet. Eventually he becomes a boy again, then a baby, but is so senile that he forgets everything he’s experienced.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells an incredible story, and yet I found myself oddly unmoved by any of it, held at arm’s length by David Fincher’s surprisingly impersonal direction, the overly episodic, narration-heavy script, the fussed-over production design, an opaque central character, and a tiresome framing story set, bewilderingly, in a New Orleans hospital in the hours before Hurricane Katrina. To steal a metaphor from Mad Men, the film is a gold violin: it's beautiful, but it doesn't make any music.

What message are we supposed to derive from this peculiar movie? “You never know what’s coming for you,” says Queenie, the Magical Negro who adopts the infant Benjamin when he’s abandoned at an old folks’ home by his father — a sentiment that echoes that line about life being like a box of chocolates from Forrest Gump, which, like Benjamin Button, was scripted by Eric Roth. The line feels like the film’s thesis statement, but in fact, you do know what’s coming: you know Button will continue to get younger and more beautiful, that his wife Daisy (Cate Blanchett) will get older (but will still keep her looks), and that they’ll soon drift apart because of it. Either way, I’m not convinced that a platitude like “You never know what’s coming for you” is enough of a hook to hang a nearly three-hour movie on.

Other than the reverse-aging gimmick and the character name, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has very little in common with the F. Scott Fitzgerald story that inspired it. In the original, Benjamin’s father does not give his child up for adoption, his marriage (to a woman named Hildegarde instead of Daisy) is covered in four brisk pages, and instead of setting out to sea, Benjamin enrols in Yale. Like the film’s Benjamin, though, he does eventually enlist in the military, and participates in Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. The tone of the short story is as gnomic as the film’s, but it seems more in touch with the strangeness of Benjamin’s situation and presents life with his unique medical “condition” as more of a nightmare version of existence, one that keeps him from ever fully making friends or establishing comfortable relationships with his father, his wife, or his son. There is nothing in Fincher’s sentimentalized film to match Fitzgerald’s troubling yet poetic concluding paragraphs as Benjamin, now an infant, loses all his memories of “his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls” and sees only “the white, safe walls of his crib... and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called ‘sun.’”

The makeup and computer effects that put Brad Pitt’s head only a tiny, aged body — and then gradually age him back into a smooth-faced 20-year-old — are seamless, and Pitt sells the film’s conceit with some excellent physical acting. Cate Blanchett, as the love of Benjamin’s life, looks fantastic, although her performance is undermined by Fincher’s extensive use of CGI — when you see her dancing, you can’t help but wonder if that’s actually Blanchett up there onscreen, or if Fincher has merely composited her head onto an actual dancer’s body.

Maybe that’s why Benjamin Button seems so emotionally remote: it’s not the story of a man’s amazing life; it’s a movie about a walking, talking special effect. Compare this film to Man on Wire, the awesome recent documentary about acrobat Philippe Petit’s 1972 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in New York City. You’re seeing something miraculous actually happening in front of you in Man on Wire, and it’s so beautiful you want to cry. Petit is now 60 but he doesn't look a day over 30 — could he be aging backwards as well?

The Flesh Is Thrilling, But The Spirit Is Weak

Gabriel Macht is the name of the blandly handsome blond hunk Frank Miller picked to play the title role in his film version of Will Eisner’s influential comic book series The Spirit. Before this film, Macht spent more than a decade as a journeyman actor in a string of undistinguished TV-movies and low-profile features, playing everyone from William Holden in The Audrey Hepburn Story to Gram Parsons in Grand Theft Parsons. It’s a shame that his big break comes in a movie as spectacularly awful as The Spirit, but he can take some consolation in the fact that he wears a mask through the entire picture — absolutely nobody will associate his face with this mess.

Macht’s co-stars, including Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega, and Samuel L. Jackson, aren’t so lucky — their faces are plastered across the screen for all the world to see, speaking Miller’s leaden, campy dialogue, pretending to find Macht irresistible, and pretending to understand why they have to spend so much of their time dressed up in Nazi uniforms.

The plot is a blend of noir pastiche and pulp-paperback mysticism: Macht is Denny Colt, a cop who dies in the line of duty, mysteriously comes back to life, and reinvents himself as a shadowy vigilante — part Batman, part Shadow — prowling the tenement rooftops, fighting crime, and delivering gravel-voiced voiceover monologues about the city being his lover. His nemesis is The Octopus (Jackson, giving a performance that’s at once flamboyant yet bored), a criminal genius out to get his tentacles on a vase containing the blood of Hercules, which he says holds the key to immortal life. Also in the mix is Sand Saref (Mendes), Denny’s childhood sweetheart, now a slinky jewel thief with a dream of acquiring the Golden Fleece.

But that plot description doesn’t do justice to the sheer awfulness of Miller’s script, which makes one terrible, inexplicable choice after another: the idiotic mud-soaked opening fight scene, during which The Octopus brains The Spirit with a toilet; Louis Lombardi’s “comic relief” multiple role as The Octopus’ army of retarded clone henchmen, all of whom have names ending in “-os” for some reason (they all wear t-shirts reading “Ethos,” “Logos,” “Pathos,” all the way down to, moronically, “Dildos”); the use of a photocopy of Eva Mendes’ ass as a major plot point; the scene where The Octopus accidentally creates a mutant henchman that consists of a tiny head on top of a hopping foot. I had the same relationship with The Spirit that Kif from Futurama has with Zapp Branigan: it seems like every 40 seconds or so, it comes out with something so stupid I can’t help but shudder and make an audible little groan of dismay.

The film’s ultra-stylized black & white & red look will inevitably be compared to that of Sin City, which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez, but I was reminded more of the hazy, ugly sepia tones of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the 2004 Art Deco adventure movie that helped pioneer this new wave of greenscreen comic-book movies. I have to ask: how many of these movies have to bomb before the studios realize that audiences really don’t like comic-book movies set in the 1930s and ’40s? After the box-office failure of Sky Captain, The Phantom, The Shadow, and The Rocketeer, you’d think they’d learn their lesson. No one can recapture the magic of Raiders of the Lost Ark — and as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull proved, even Steven Spielberg can’t do it.

I can’t imagine the fanboy community greeting The Spirit with anything but scorn. And as someone who absolutely loathed his previous film projects, Sin City and 300, I have to admit to taking some satisfaction in seeing a guy whose brutal, misogynist fantasies earned him a reputation as a “visionary” getting taken down a peg or two. I suspect it will be a very long time before Miller is allowed back behind a camera.

What sadder is the way this film bungles the chance to introduce audiences to one of the more unusual protagonists from the early days of comics. Frank Miller has accomplished something here that even The Octopus couldn’t manage: he’s killed The Spirit.

Paper Doll

I'm not embarrassed to say I voluntarily watched Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, and I'm even less embarrassed to say I was totally charmed by it — Abigail Breslin makes a pretty adorable little Depression-era newshound, and a cast piled high with the likes of Wallace Shawn, Stanley Tucci, Joan Cusack, and Jane Krakowski sure doesn't hurt, either. Kit Kittredge is my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick this week for CBC Radio — click here and you can hear me make my case for it at greater length.

The Road Chess Travelled

There should be more biopics about record producers and promoters. Everyone I’ve seen has been pretty terrific, from American Hot Wax (about pioneering rock ’n’ roll DJ Alan Freed) to 24 Hour Party People (about Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson) to writer/director Darnell Martin’s new film Cadillac Records, about Chess Records founder Leonard Chess. They can’t sing, they can’t play instruments, and no one would pay one thin dime to watch them perform onstage, but I’m fascinated by the way so many good performers might never have become great if the right person hadn’t been working invisibly for them behind the scenes, introducing them to the right people, pairing them up with the right material, seeing something in their talent that even they themselves never noticed. If you help bring great art into being, does that make you an artist too?

I don’t know if Darnell Martin has brought great art into being with Cadillac Records — the film is at once too sprawling in its attempt to include the stories of nearly every major artist who recorded for Leonard Chess in his Chicago studio; and too hemmed in by biopic conventions — but she’s assembled an ace cast and assigned all of them larger-than-life roles. Oh, and I suppose the music isn’t half bad, either.

We’re already an hour into the film before Beyoncé Knowles makes her entrance as Etta James: blonde of hair, long of eyelash, wearing a form-fitting green dress that must have made every man in the cast and crew weep when she emerged from her dressing room. She then launches into a rendition of “All I Could Do Was Cry” which is every bit as spectacular as that dress — I get the feeling that Knowles still isn’t taken very seriously as an actress, but if this version of the song doesn’t count as wonderful acting, I don’t know what does. She tells a complete story with this number — two stories, actually: the self-contained story within the lyrics of the song, and the unspoken, private story Etta James is remembering that’s enabling her to sing it so passionately.

Jeffrey Wright goes in a different direction with his performance as Muddy Waters — cooler of temperament, more apt to slyly observe the goings-on from the side of the room rather than calling attention to himself in the middle of it. (That is, except when he takes the stage — he is the Hoochie Coochie Man, after all.) Wright cuts quite a figure, speaking in a silky mumble, wearing a dapper suit and an impeccable pompadour when he’s in public and a cleaning-lady kerchief on his head when he’s at home — along with songwriter/bassist Willie Dixon, he’s the slow-and-steady survivor of the bunch, his reluctance to change with the times making him seem that much cooler when his sound comes back in style.

Mos Def is a hoot as Chuck Berry — when Alan Freed says that “Maybelline” will make Berry famous and Leonard Chess rich, Berry stands up and gets Leonard to switch seats with him. Columbus Short, the least-known actor in the main cast, acquits himself well as harmonica giant Little Walter, essentially performing his own stardom-to-the-gutter biopic on fast-forward. And Eamonn Walker, almost unrecognizable from his days as Kareem Said on Oz, makes a terrifying Howlin’ Wolf. It looks like Walker is wearing some kind of padded suit to make him look bigger, but the oddness of his artificial physique, plus his stiff-legged limp, actually works to Walker’s benefit, making Wolf seem even more alien and unnerving. He wasn’t born in Mississippi; it’s more like he was conjured out of it.

But Wolf seems to understand that fast-talking big-city operator Leonard Chess better than anyone else — he’s the only character in the movie who refuses to let Chess boss him around or snow him about paying him his royalty cheques. Chess undoubtedly loved music and considered many of the musicians on his label his friends, but he had little compunction about keeping them in the dark about the terms of the contracts he signed them to and how much money he actually owed them. He preferred instead to reward them with Cadillacs and houses — a strategy that enabled him to look like a generous boss showering them with surprise “gifts.” I like how Adrien Brody plays Chess the blues lover and Chess the shady businessman so straightforwardly, as if there’s no contradiction whatsoever between these two sides of his personality. After all, Chess likely didn’t see a contradiction either.

Cadillac Records doesn’t feel like the definitive version of this story, but if anyone tries telling it again a few years from now, they’ll need to be even sharper and luckier than Leonard Chess to gather this much talent together under one roof.

Eternal Darkness Of The Spotless Mind

It’s kind of a miracle: despite their seemingly uncommercial subject matter, their somewhat off-putting sense of humour, and their intellectually challenging approach to storytelling, somehow not only have Charlie Kaufman’s scripts attracted the top actors, directors, and designers in Hollywood, but they’ve won Oscars and even achieved a respectable level of box-office success. The career of Charlie Kaufman is a beacon of hope to aspiring screenwriters everywhere.

Or at least it would be if you didn’t actually watch his movies. It’s hard to think of another writer whose provides a bleaker, more despairing depiction of life as a creative artist than Charlie Kaufman. From John Cusack’s tortured, struggling street puppeteer in Being John Malkovich to Nicolas Cage’s tortured, self-loathing screenwriter in Adaptation to Sam Rockwell’s tortured, sociopathic game-show host in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Kaufman’s characters have never acquired the slightest shred of happiness, fulfillment, or wisdom through their art; instead, art diminishes their spirit, alienates them from their families and loved ones, and ultimately kills them or drives them insane.

And so, the central joke in Kaufman’s latest film Synecdoche, New York (his first as a director), is that when theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) lands a MacArthur “genius grant” that gives him the freedom to realize any theatre project he can dream of, no matter how massive, it’s more a death sentence than a cause for celebration. Cotard’s body is falling apart already — he develops sores on his face, he falls prey to unaccountable seizures, he loses the ability to cry or produce saliva, his leg starts jiggling uncontrollably, he appears to be aging at a faster rate than anyone around him — but when he begins working on an autobiographical theatre installation big enough to fill an empty warehouse, the untitled project begins to seem as much of a disease as any of Cotard’s physical ailments.

It’s a cancerous project that consumes and metastasizes everyone who comes in contact with it: Hazel (Samantha Morton), the pretty box-office attendant Cotard begins dating after his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) runs off to Germany with their daughter Olive; Claire (Michelle Williams), the beautiful actress with a crush on Cotard; Sammy (Tom Noonan), the mysterious man who stalks Cotard for years before auditioning to play Cotard in his warehouse project; not to mention the hundreds of actors and technicians who’ve spent the last 17 years rehearsing their lines and building sets without any sign of an audience ever showing up. Identities shift, genders blur, time loses all meaning, and Cotard himself gets older and sadder, to the point where even his memories of his beloved Olive — who has apparently grown up without him and become a tattooed lesbian stripper in Berlin — cease to provide any comfort. Cotard becomes an extra in his own play, imaginatively exhausted, trudging slowly and unnoticed through the grey, miserable wonderland he’s built while various fake Cotards take over the running of the project.

The movie is monumentally depressing, but it should also be said that the first hour or so is as funny as anything Kaufman has ever written, full of absurdist exchanges of dialogue (Cotard, reading the morning paper: “Harold Pinter just died. Wait, no, he won the Nobel Prize”), offbeat running jokes (like Cotard’s therapist’s worsening skin infection, apparently caused by her strappy high-heeled shoes), and crazy visual setpieces (like the snippet we get of Cotard’s production of Death of a Salesman, in which he attempts to enact a car crash onstage). When Cotard reads in a magazine that someone has given little Olive a full-body tattoo, Claire can’t understand why he’s so upset: “Everyone has tattoos!” she shouts, lifting up her shirt to reveal a gigantic devil tattoo covering her entire back. Cotard, utterly nonplussed, replies, “Well, I’ve never noticed that before.”

I suspect that I’ll be making that same comment a lot the next time I watch Synecdoche, New York, which seems almost too layered to completely take in the first time through. After the screening, for instance, my friend and fellow SEE writer Michael Hingston noted that the scene late in the film involving a younger version of Dianne Wiest’s character had already appeared on a TV screen much earlier in the film as part of a pharmaceutical commercial. I bet I missed dozens of similar touches.

What I came away with the first time through was a deep admiration for Kaufman’s ambition, and for how his fiercely miserabilist worldview is tempered by his unusual empathy for his female characters. Samantha Morton especially comes off well here — she often gets cast literally as a muse (as in Sweet and Lowdown, Mister Lonely, and Dreaming of Joseph Lees, among others), and she performs that role again here for both Cotard and Kaufman, remaining dazzled by the possibilities of creativity long after all the other participants in Cotard’s project have been bled dry by it. Kaufman pulls one of his slyest casting jokes when Emily Watson appears late in the film as the actress hired to play Morton’s character. I was sure Sally Hawkins from Happy-Go-Lucky would show up soon to play Watson, but Kaufman doesn’t take things that far.

Indeed, it’s too bad that Hawkins never appears, because Kaufman really seems like he could use some cheering up. Hell, forget Kaufman: I just saw Synecdoche, New York a few hours ago and I’m so bummed out I don’t know if I ever want to write another word.

Uncertainty Principal

My favourite moment in Doubt is entirely wordless. The nuns at a Catholic primary school in 1964 are eating dinner, with the terrifying, imperious Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the school principal, presiding at the head of the table. Even during a communal ritual like this one, the room is agonizingly silent save for the scrape of knives against the plates. The youngest woman in the room, by quite a wide margin, is the chipmunk-like Sister James (Amy Adams), who extracts a piece of gristle from her mouth and puts it on her plate... whereupon she notices Sister Aloysius quietly regarding her, disapproval radiating from behind her rimless spectacles. That’s all it takes for poor Sister James to cave in: without a single word being spoken, she grimly takes the inedible clump of fat from her plate, puts it back in her mouth, and begins chewing again.

Doubt is at its best in these small displays of Sister Aloysius’ power, over lapses that only seem trivial to everyone else: she disapproves of everything from ballpoint pens to taking sugar with your tea to the singing of “Frosty the Snowman” at Christmastime. She’s one “mean old clam,” to use Tina Fey’s expression, and she especially disapproves of Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who makes the heretical suggestion that nuns and priests should try and behave a little more like human beings toward their students and the members of the congregation. Flynn has befriended Donald, the school’s only black student, and when Sister Aloysius hears about a mysterious, apparently emotional encounter between Flynn and Donald, she requires no prompting to conclude that Flynn is guilty of some form of sexual impropriety.

But it’s impossible to know for sure what actually happened: Flynn offers a perfectly innocent explanation for what happened, but it doesn’t quite account for his or Donald’s odd behaviour later that day. Plus, as Flynn himself says in the sermon that opens the movie — a speech which dutifully sets out writer/director John Patrick Shanley’s Big Theme — doubt is a constant in all of our lives, and indeed may be one of the only things that holds us together. I’m not convinced that Shanley’s script makes a very convincing argument for that proposition — surely the only reason we have doubt about what happened between Flynn and Donald is because he declines to show it to us — but it does a very clever job of toying with your perceptions of Flynn, who seems plausibly innocent, then guilty, then innocent again with practically every other scene.

As a director (this is the first time he’s stepped behind the camera since 1990’s Joe Versus the Volcano), Shanley hammers home his points too loudly, whether he’s making an obvious contrast between the nuns at dinner and the priests rowdily joking and smoking as they dig into their blood-red slabs of beef, or shooting Streep from an ominous low angle, as if she were Vincent Price in The Witchfinder General. (He also gives Doubt the most portentously Gothic weather patterns since Wuthering Heights.)

But as a writer, Shanley (who was inspired by his own boyhood experiences in Catholic school) fills the film with telling social details that vividly recreate the mores of this strange bygone time — the awkward social dancing classes in the gymnasium, the way Flynn automatically takes Sister Aloysius’ seat behind her desk when he visits her in her office. I was reminded a little of Mad Men in the way Doubt shows how the early ’60s, which can seem like such a modern period, had social customs that can seem as peculiar and alien as an Edith Wharton novel.

That old world is the territory of Sister Aloysius — I’d call Meryl Streep’s performance “juicy,” except the character seems so pinched and dry. I’m not sure if Streep gives Sister Aloysius much inner life, but she definitely nails the externals — the darting, cunning eyes, the Bronx bray that she slips into on the rare occasions she becomes emotional. She’s a character to haunt any Catholic schoolboy’s nightmares, and of that I have not the slightest ounce of doubt.

Stray Observation: There's a shot in the film of Philip Seymour Hoffman looking up a staircase at a stained glass window with a glowing eye at the centre of it — an eye that I suppose is meant to represent the eye of God. I can't help but wonder, when he was filming that scene, if Hoffman was thinking, "Say, what a great example of synecdoche!"

A Brief History Of Timecrimes

Héctor, the paunchy middle-aged hero of Timecrimes, is having the worst day of his life. What’s worse, he’s having it three times over.

Since the fun of a time-travel movie like Timecrimes is watching the plot unfold, then fold back upon itself over and over again, I’ll try to reveal as little of the storyline as possible. Suffice it to say that when Héctor looks through his binoculars and sees a beautiful naked woman standing in the woods behind his country home, he probably would have been wise just to remain seated in his deckchair. That way he wouldn’t get stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors or chased by a madman with a bandaged face in a filthy coat — could it be Liam Neeson in Darkman? And he certainly wouldn’t have stumbled into a nearby experimental research silo or tricked into climbing inside the gigantic metal tank in the middle of the room.

Yes, the tank turns out to be a time machine. And when Héctor climbs out of it, not only is he soaking wet, but he’s travelled a couple of hours into the past. The alarmed lab technician (played by writer/director Nacho Vigalondo) warns Héctor to stay put and just let the time-travel paradoxes resolve themselves naturally, but things don’t play out quite that simply, and soon Héctor finds himself in the middle of a time loop so absurdly complicated that even Doc Brown himself would need to sit down for a few days with some graph paper to unravel it all.

And yet the whole narrative package is as airtight as that mysterious tank of time-travelling fluid. I’m usually pretty bad at spotting plot holes, but as far as I could tell, Vigalondo’s script doesn’t have a loose logical thread anywhere. (Even more impressively, he keeps you oriented within the storyline with a minimum of expository dialogue.) You can probably figure out a couple of the twists pretty easily, but Vigalondo is actually way ahead of you the whole movie — each time we voyage through the events in this extremely hectic couple of hours in Héctor’s life, we see it from a new perspective that simultaneously solves mysteries from the first telling and raises new questions that get resolved the next time through. The whole thing is always just a little bit cleverer than it seems — just clever enough to be captivating instead of baffling.

I was also pleased by the choice of Karra Elejalde to play Héctor — in this age of Daniel Craig’s Bond and Matt Damon’s Bourne, it’s so refreshing to see a suspense movie revolving around a character so out of shape that he needs to rest even when he knows a scissor-wielding maniac is hot on his trail. Apparently, an English-language remake is in the works — I can’t find any news on who might be playing the lead, but Richard Jenkins would be a great choice.

There are some rumours swirling around about who’s going to be sitting in the director’s chair — some say George Romero, while others say David Cronenberg has the inside track. Cronenberg has a cool intelligence that might be right for this material, but there aren’t the kinky psychological layers to the situation that I would think would need to be there for Cronenberg to truly be interested in the project. (Although it would be a good chance for him to see how far actor-doubling technology has come since he made Dead Ringers.) Timecrimes is very much a screenwriting exercise right now, and not much more — although the ultimate fate of the naked girl is something Cronenberg might be able to develop into something nicely disturbing.

And come to think of it, there’s another half-buried theme in Timecrimes that might get Cronenberg’s juices flowing: the film leaves ambiguous whether Héctor is simply making sure events play out the way fate says they’re “supposed” to, or whether some of what happens are things he set in motion himself. Is Héctor a time-travelling boogeyman, or just playacting at being one? And how many Héctors will it take to get everything back to normal again?

78 Years Old, And Still Beating Up Punks

We hear The Growl in the very first scene of Gran Torino. It’s a thin, dry rumble, like the sound of the stone pillars rising and retracting into the cavern floor in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an ancient noise echoing with murderous contempt for the modern world that’s been incubating for decades — and it emerges from a place deep inside the throat of Korean War vet Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) as he stands in the church beside his dead wife’s casket and he sees his teenaged granddaughter, who’s shown up for her grandma’s funeral in a midriff-baring blouse that shows off her belly piercing. Walt makes another Growl when he regards his son, who took a job selling Japanese cars even though Walt worked most of his life on the Ford assembly line. And we hear Walt make yet another Growl at the wake when a kid from the Asian family who lives next door shows up to borrow some jumper cables. “Have some respect, zipperhead!” he barks. “We’re in mourning here!”

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention — Walt doesn’t much care for Asians (even though the Detroit neighbourhood he lives in has pretty much been taken over by them). Even after Walt develops an unlikely paternal bond with the kid from the wake —a shy, easily bullied kid named Thao (Bee Vang) — and befriends his spunky older sister Sue (Ahney Her), he doesn’t stop peppering his conversation with every ethnic slur in the politically incorrect thesaurus. It’s “gook” this, and “slope” that, and an offensive nickname for everybody else, from “Dragon Lady” to “Fishhead” to “Eggroll.” Gran Torino is, among other things, an argument for the social-lubricating power of racist name-calling; in one hilarious scene, Walt teaches Thao how to converse “like a real mean” by taking him to his barber (John Carroll Lynch), who cheerfully calls Walt a stupid Polack and gets called a dago retard in return.

During a recent episode of the podcast You Look Nice Today, the hosts wistfully batted around the idea of starting up a “man school,” an all-male institution of higher learning that would equip its students with basic masculine skills, from working with tools to hiding all displays of emotion. (Their ideal instructor, they decided, would be a wax mannequin.) It’s a silly idea, but that’s exactly the kind of education Walt provides Thao — and I don’t know if you have to be a guy for the film to have this effect, but the concept is unbelievably appealing. You have no idea how much I would have loved it if Clint Eastwood had taken me under his wing when I was Thao’s age and bought me my own toolbelt or taught me how to swear or let me polish the vintage 1972 automobile that gives the film its name.

Because Gran Torino has been released at the end of the year, in the middle of awards season, and because Eastwood has become such a respected old pro as a filmmaker, it’s being regarded as a potential awards contender. The idea that such a crude and campy little potboiler could be regarded as an end-of-year prestige picture is a little bit rich — but there’s no denying that Gran Torino’s B-movie sensibility packs a whole lot more entertainment value than dreary Oscar bait like The Reader or Seven Pounds. Not that I wouldn’t smile with glee if Eastwood got a Best Actor nomination — Walt is the ultimate Old Coot role. One minute, he’s coughing up blood into a sink, the next he’s climbing out of his pickup truck to rescue Sue from a bunch of black street toughs, and then a little while later he’s aiming a shotgun at a bunch of Asian gangbangers, giving them a few patented Growls, and demanding — he actually says this — “Get off my lawn!”

Failing that, I hope Eastwood at least gets a nomination for the song he sings over the closing credits, if only so that he can perform it during the telecast. “Gentle now the tender breeze blows / Whispers through my Gran Torino,” he croaks, in a voice that makes Chet Baker sound like an octave-leaping showoff. Actually, Eastwood should sing all the nominated songs — that may be the only way I could make it through that Miley Cyrus song from Bolt.

Mumbai To All That

If you hear a critic referring to a film as a “crowd-pleaser,” don’t be fooled: “crowd-pleaser” is not the term of praise that it appears to be. Critics don’t consider themselves a part of the crowd, and so a crowd-pleaser is a film that other people like. Or got tricked into liking by a lot of sneaky directorial manipulation that the critic easily saw through.

So let me make it clear that when I call Slumdog Millionaire a crowd-pleaser, I’m definitely counting myself among the crowd, as smelly and gullible as they can sometimes be. I was pleased by this movie’s energy, I was pleased by its appealing young cast (consisting largely of nonprofessionals), I was pleased by its Dickensian take on Indian life (in particular, the vast, overcrowded slums of Mumbai), and I was pleased by the shameless rags-to-riches appeal of its central premise: an uneducated kid named Jamal (Dev Patel) appears on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and correctly answers question after question — not because he’s a secret trivia buff, but because each question miraculously (perhaps even karmically!) corresponds to a key event from his life.

As a lifelong game-show nerd, some of the mechanics of this part of the plot bugged me — the real show would never ask a question that cinchy for the jackpot! — but there’s something irresistibly appealing about the notion that this vast cloud of cultural information about history, literature, songs, movie stars finds a way to filter down to the lowest level of society, forming a pattern of cause and effect that’s no less beautiful for being invisible.

Jamal doesn’t know how much he knows about the world. He knows what Rama looks like because of a vision he had during the anti-Muslim street riot that killed his mother. He knows the 16th-century poet Surdas wrote the devotional song “Darshan Do Ghanshyam” because of a boyhood encounter with a Fagin-like criminal who taught his army of street urchins to sing it. (He would blind them too, in order to make their begging more sympathetic to passersby.) And he knows Amitabh Bachchan starred in the 1973 movie Zanjeer because... well, come on. This is India. Everybody knows Amitabh Bachchan — although Jamal may be the only one who literally crawled through a pool of shit to get his autograph.

The one thing Jamal knows he knows for sure is that he’s in love with Latika, a girl he met when he was eight and whose fate seems intertwined with his, in a series of separations and reunions worthy of a storybook romance. (Or an Amitabh Bachchan movie.) Keeping them apart are a gallery of gangsters, street criminals, showbiz phonies, sadistic policemen, and Jamal’s dark-angel brother Salim. Jamal puts in his time cooking in kitchens, fetching tea at a telephone call centre, and even guiding tourists through the Taj Mahal.

Add in the triumphant Bollywood dance number that concludes the film, and it could sound like directors Danny Boyle (whose eclectic résumé includes Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and the kids movie Millions) and Loveleen Tandan are methodically working their way down a checklist of stereotypical “Indian” images and settings, the way Baz Luhrmann did for his home country in Australia. But there’s a big difference between stereotypes and archetypes, and I think Boyle, Tandan, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle bring just the right bigger-than-life tone to this material — the images are colourful without being merely picture-postcard pretty. It’s rare for even Bollywood films to bring their cameras into the inner streets of Mumbai, but Slumdog Millionaire’s adventurousness was rewarded with remarkable images capturing the energy of this place (skyscrapers next to dumps! corrugated tin roofs as far as the eye can see!), as well as the grinding, systemic hopelessness of it all.

Does the fairytale story, with its impossibly beautiful heroine and its impossibly virtuous hero, occasionally seem at odds with its grim setting? Sure, but no more so than, say, The Thief of Baghdad, to pick a movie set in a similarly exotic locale. Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t fetishize poverty, or say there’s anything inherently ennobling about it. For all its fancifulness, it feels like it’s talking straight, and it feels like it was made with Mumbai instead of just about it.

Indeed, Boyle is apparently preparing a Hindi version of the film for release within Indian theatres. I bet it’ll be a crowd-pleaser.

’Peg O’ My Heart

I've always felt a little guilty about not putting more Canadian content into my radio segments about "Hidden Gems" on DVD — I am doing them for the CBC, after all — so I was pleased as punch this week to direct CBC listeners' attention to Guy Maddin's wonderful quasi-documentary (and Filmspotting favourite!) My Winnipeg. I even got to sound as though I cared one way or the other about hockey! But give me a click and you can decide for yourself how convincing my enthusiasm sounds.

I'm Gonna Tear Your Milhous Down

Many thought Frank Langella deserved an Oscar nomination last year for his work in Starting Out in the Evening, playing an aging New York writer named Leonard Schiller; many think he’ll get one this year for Frost/Nixon, playing a president that the intellectual, liberal Leonard probably would have loathed. But the two roles are not as dissimilar as they might appear: both men have formidable intellects; both have been exiled from the worlds that they once travelled in; and both are hoping, so late in life, to find a point of entry back inside. The big difference is that Schiller’s crimes are writ small — crimes of emotional coldness and personal failing — while Nixon’s are vast and public. And only in a public forum can he offer his apology.

Not that any kind of apology seems forthcoming as Frost/Nixon begins. When the ex-president agrees to a series of TV interviews with British comedian and talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen), there’s a good chance that Frost won’t even be able to get financial backing for the project and that Nixon might pocket his $200,000 advance without even stepping before a camera. And even when the interviews do take place, with a desperate Frost carrying the bulk of the cost out of his own pocket, Nixon has every reason to believe that he’ll be able to talk rings around his politically inexperienced interviewer — perhaps even redeeming himself in the eyes of the public in the process.

Frost/Nixon is based on the stage play by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, and who has a knack for finding and dramatizing underexplored little corners of recent history — usually involving young, callow men encountering towering world leaders and struggling merely to keep their heads above water. I have a hard time, having recently watched the original Frost/Nixon Watergate interview on DVD, that Frost was as easily distracted a dilettante as Morgan makes him out to be — he seemed very sharp to me — but the David-and-Goliath conflict in Frost/Nixon is so entertaining, I can hardly object. The sick look that creeps across Frost’s face during his first interview session, as Nixon deflects all his “hardball” questions with interminable, clock-killing anecdotes, is perhaps the film’s comic high point. Sheen even duplicates Frost’s tic of absently tugging on his finger — as if wishing the gesture would cause a parachute to open and whisk him away somewhere nicer.

Langella is getting much more attention than Sheen for Frost/Nixon (much as Helen Mirren did for The Queen), but Sheen’s Frost is the character I was much more invested in. Maybe that’s because I’ve done many celebrity interviews in my life as well, and often feel myself to be as much of an intellectual lightweight as he does. My thinking on political issues is not terribly deep, and I have to admit to identifying with Frost’s inability, during the early preparation sessions for the interviews, to hold all those complicated historical facts in his head. And so, Frost’s emergence in the climactic sequence as the man who finally gets Nixon to own up to his wrongdoing in the Oval Office (or at least to admit that he “let the American people down”) is an appealing professional fantasy. (As is the scene where he meets Rebecca Hall during a flight to California, chats her up, seduces her, and convinces her to join him in his visit to Nixon’s beachhouse before the plane even reaches the runway.)

Langella plays his final few scenes beautifully: the long silence he takes before he offers his on-camera mea culpa; the strange post-interview moment where he pets a stranger’s dachshund; a final encounter with Frost where he tells his adversary how lucky he is to be able to enjoy parties and being around people. But I’m not completely sold on this performance — Langella seems constrained by the deep voice he’s adopted for the role, even though it doesn’t sound particularly like Nixon’s. Or maybe I’m just too much of a fan of Philip Baker Hall’s towering Nixon in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor to give any other interpretations of Nixon a fair shake.

What would the real Nixon think of these shadow versions of himself haunting the big screen, I wonder? If you were to ask his ghost, would he admit to ever seeing Secret Honor? Would he have laughed at Dick? Langella or Anthony Hopkins: which one does he think did him justice? Now that’s an interview I’d love to get.

Bonin' The Librarian

Is there anything The Reader could have done to win me over to its side? In all honesty, I’m not sure there was. Whenever I meet people who express prejudices against entire film genres — who claim they can’t stand musicals or “chick flicks” or Westerns or silent movies — I always react with frustration at them. Why can’t they be more like me, I wonder? So open to every type of cinematic experience! So willing to find art lurking in the unlikeliest DVD case, be it cheapo horror movie or comic-book adaptation or children’s movie!

But my self-proclaimed cinematic omnivorousness reaches its limit when it comes to those end-of-year Miramaxian prestige pictures directed by people like Scott Hicks, Anthony Minghella, and Stephen Daldry. Your Cold Mountains, your The Hourses, your Shines, your Snow Falling on Cedarses — movies that bear the signature not of an auteur, necessarily, but of an entire aesthetic based on literary pedigree, taste, directorial restraint, high production values, and a certain middlebrow book-club notion of “quality” and “importance.” They’re movies with a lot of quiet, constant strings and piano on the soundtrack and a lot of stoic displays of suffering. The actors’ accents and costumes are usually impeccable — noticeably impeccable, in a way that makes you feel you’d be remiss not to comment on them approvingly. Not to paint with too wide a brush here, but they tend to be movies favoured by the daily newspaper reviewers but rejected by critics writing for film journals and websites. It must baffle many newspaper readers to hear someone pan a movie like The Hours, especially since the negative response tends to be based not on the specific story of the film or the performances, but a rejection of the film’s entire aesthetic — an aesthetic whose primary goal, after all, is to impress moviegoers with the film’s very excellence of quality.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that The Reader, Stephen Daldry’s film version of Bernhard Schlink’s novel about a teenage boy’s torrid relationship with an older woman in 1950s West Germany, is not my kind of movie. I will say that I respected what Kate Winslet does with the role of the woman, whose name is Hanna — the contrast between her lovely, curvy, frequently unclothed body and her hard, unreadable face is fascinating to watch. But on the other hand, one could argue that the mere fact that it’s Kate Winslet playing her — and the awareness we bring to the film of Winslet as a cool, intelligent, very appealing celebrity — softens a character who should be much more difficult to like. There’s a revelation about Hanna that occurs halfway through the movie (and which I don’t want to spoil) that doesn’t hit you as hard as it should — and I think it’s partly because you don’t really believe it, not with Winslet in the role.

I suppose Daldry deserves some kind of credit for not making this film, with all those scenes of Hanna in the tub with her young lover Michael (David Kross, not the comedian) reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover to her, seem laughable. On the other hand, the film’s lack of vulgarity seems like kind of a flaw as well — Daldry films the sex scenes as tepidly as the courtroom scenes, with just enough flashes of nudity to nod in the direction of frankness, but not enough to get into trouble with the MPAA either. And there’s something about Kross (who I’m sure is a personable, hard-working young actor but whose bovine features remind me of Philip McKeon from the TV series Alice) that dampens the sensuousness of those early scenes for me. His face just doesn’t register pleasure — did Daldry miss a joke somewhere in there that Michael gets more visibly excited reading to Hanna than he does while he’s fucking her?

And maybe it’s just me, but the whole that Michael’s true bond with Hanna isn’t the sexual one, but the one he forms by reading to her, seems like a bookworm-flattering literary notion that works better on the page than on the screen. Maybe we just don’t hear enough of Michael actually reading to her. The film uses books more as high-toned props (as in the scene near the end where Winslet stands on a platform of books arranged on a table, and all you can think of is how much work Daldry must have put into making sure all the little stacks of hardcovers were exactly the same height).

Will any teenage boys see this movie and be inspired to read to their girlfriends in bed? I guess it couldn’t hurt to give it a try — but I hope for their sake that they choose a book a little bit sexier than The Reader.

The Musicgoer: Frida Hyvönen's Silence Is Wild

FRIDA HYVÖNEN
Silence Is Wild
(Secretly Canadian)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

“Dirty Dancing,” the leadoff track from her new album Silence Is Wild, begins with Frida Hyvönen recalling being 14 and spending entire afternoons with a friend of her older brother, dancing to Kylie Minogue records. “It was almost like Dirty Dancing,” she says, “minus the United States / and instead of a resort / it was the Folkets Hus basement.” But just when you think the song will settle for being an exercise in fond ’80s nostalgia, Hyvönen jumps ahead 15 years when she unexpectedly reunites with the love of her life, who’s now a chimney sweep.

A chimney sweep! That’s typical of the unexpected leaps Hyvönen makes over and over again on this album, which is like a Jens Lekman disc crossed with Rufus Wainwright. Occasionally her melodies meander, as on “Sic Transit Gloria,” but there’s not a single song on Silence Is Wild that doesn’t contain a fresh or startling lyrical idea —usually several. On the closing track, “Why Do You Love Me So Much,” Hyvönen shrugs off the idea that anyone could possibly find her the least bit charming, but it’s too late: she’ll have captured the heart of any listener with taste long ago.

Polanski, Salò, Reygadas, Costello

Wow, I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately — too many for the conventional “Moviegoer Diary” format to keep up with. Looks like it’s time for another quickfire round! (WARNING TO MY MOTHER, WHO SOMETIMES VISITS THIS BLOG: Please, please, please skip the entries about Salò and Battle in Heaven. You really don’t want to know about these movies, mom, I promise you.)

SALÒ

Okay, so I finally capitulated and forced myself to watch Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious, much-banned 1975 film based on the works of the Marquis de Sade. I had to view most of the “Circle of Shit” sequence through a crack in my fingers just wide enough to read the subtitles, but I got through it. And can I just say one thing? That young actress who plays the girl forced to eat a coil of fresh shit? She must have the worst agent in the world.

Beyond the extreme transgressive content of the film, I found a lot of what goes on in Salò confounding, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there’s something artificial — something deliberately deadened — about the behaviour of everybody onscreen. The action takes place in a fascist-controlled region of Italy near the end of World War II, where four powerful local officials kidnap 18 teenaged boys and girls, and bring them to a luxury mansion, where they subject them to various tortures and humiliations. And yet there’s a strange sluggishness to these captives, almost all of whom seem incapable of summoning up even a token level of resistance to their enslavement. Their situation is so bizarre, yet the outrageousness of it never registers on their faces.

The other thing that took me most by surprising in Salò is how so much of the debasement that takes place in the film is directed at the captors themselves, who get pissed on, who participate in the shit-eating, who parade around in public wearing women’s clothing, who revel in telling stories about being sexually violated. Is there something about sadism, or Pasolini, or the fascist mindset that I just don’t understand here? Are these men and women so disgusted with themselves that the only way to exorcise that self-loathing is to give themselves a small taste of their own scatological medicine?

I don’t know if this says more about Salò or more about me, but it was almost a relief when Pasolini moved on from the “Circle of Shit” section to the climactic “Circle of Blood,” where all I had to deal with was images of people getting their tongues cut out and their genitals burned with candles. It’s kind of astonishing to think that not only did this film get financed, with some of the greatest artisans of 1970s Italian cinema (costume designer Danilo Donati, cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, composer Ennio Morricone) working behind the camera, but that, thanks to the new Criterion DVD edition, it’s actually become the most widely available film in Pasolini’s entire oeuvre.

P.S.: I checked out Italy Tourism’s website for the city of Salò. Not surprisingly, this film does not get mentioned.

RATING: Well, this one kind of exists beyond ratings, doesn’t it?


WHO DONE IT?

After Salò, I needed a palate-cleanser, and so, inspired by a recent blog entry on Mr. Peel's Sardine Liqueur, I turned to this 1942 romp starring Abbott and Costello as a pair of soda jerks who attempt to solve a murder that takes place during a live radio broadcast.

There was a TV station in Buffalo, New York when I was a kid that used to run Abbott and Costello movies every Saturday — and wow, doesn’t the idea of showing movies from the 1940s as kids’ entertainment seem unimaginable nowadays? Who Done It? is hardly a great movie (I was so relieved to see that Mr. Peel couldn’t figure out who the killer was or why he committed the murder either), but there’s something about its silly, what-the-hell innocence that I found totally winning.

It’s hard to think of a comedian who worked visibly harder for his laughs than Lou Costello — he spends most of Who Done It? mugging for the camera, walking into walls, walking into doorways, and making loud whoops whenever he gets frightened or frustrated or basically feels a strong emotion of any kind. Suffice it to say, he whoops a lot in this movie.

There are plenty of dumb jokes in this thing — when Abbott tells Costello to give the cops the slip, Costello tears a small piece of paper off a pad and hands it to the nearest policeman — but a surprising number of them sneaked past my defences and made me laugh anyway. I loved it, for instance, when Costello gets so scared that he jumps right out of his shoes — and then so discombobulated that he tries putting his hat on his feet and his shoes on his head; or when he tries to escape the cops by running through a door and locking it, not realizing that it’s just a freestanding prop door on a radio soundstage. (The movie’s setting, a New York radio station, gives the film plenty of nostalgia value — especially the sequence that shows a live taping of a show called Murder at Midnight, complete with one actress whose sole duty on the show appears to be delivering the bloodcurdling scream that opens every episode.)

The crappiness of the film’s production values are also a refreshing thing to see in the era of Tropic Thunder. The film’s climax, which takes place on the roof of a New York skyscraper, is clearly staged in front of a fake backdrop, but I can’t imagine a single viewer raising an objection. The biggest special effect in Who Done It? comes when Costello sees the killer coming for him and literally runs through the wall, leaving a Costello-shaped hole behind him.

RATING: 3/5


ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED

Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary about Roman Polanski’s legal woes spends less time than I would have thought about the details of Polanski’s actual crime and concentrates instead on what even the prosecuting attorney, Roger Gunson, was a case of a judge pursuing a vendetta against a celebrity criminal. I knew only the broad details of the case (and, as Zenovich’s film proved, I had even a lot of those details wrong), so Wanted and Desired was an instructive viewing experience.

I particularly enjoyed a couple of incidental moments of ’70s cinephilia within the film. When Gunson mentions that he was able to familiarize himself with Polanski’s films because the NuArt movie theatre happened to be showing a Polanski retrospective that month, Zenovich gives us a brief shot of the NuArt calendar — which immediately brought back a flood of memories of the calendars that the Broadway Cinema in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario used to issue every month. The cramped layout, the crude, cut-and-paste pre-Photoshop art direction, a different double feature every day of the week, the late-night showings of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards... ah, those were the days.

I also felt a pang of nostalgia at the clip from Playboy After Dark where Hugh Hefner introduces Polanski to the viewers at home as the director “best-known for his film Knife in the Water.” Knife in the Water! Hefner just casually assumed the mass network audience would be familiar with Knife in the Water! And this is after Rosemary’s Baby came out! Is there a single international director who would get invited onto a late-night talk show in 2008? Okay, fine, I’ll give you Roberto Benigni, but you’re only proving my point.

RATING: 3.5/5


BATTLE IN HEAVEN

Carlos Reygadas sure does know how to nail his opening shots, doesn't he? Like most critics, I was wowed by the sunrise in Silent Light, and the opening scene of his previous film Battle in Heaven is similarly arresting, albeit in a much more confrontational way — the camera slowly pans down the body of a homely, overweight, middle-aged Mexican man, complete with thick eyeglasses, unkempt beard, and combover, to reveal a much younger woman, Ana, on her knees in front of him, giving him a blowjob. The camera then executes a seemingly impossible maneuver so that we’re now looking straight into the girl’s face just as a tear leaks out of her eye.

Judging from Silent Light and Battle in Heaven (I haven’t seen his first feature, Japón), Reygadas appears to have an unusual gift for staging what I can only call “once-in-a-lifetime shots” — moments that contain such an impossible, singular confluence of natural elements (sun, wind, light) and physical action from his non-professional actors that it seems like a small miracle his camera was there to capture it. The tearful blowjob in Battle in Heaven is one of those moments — it’s such a stunning technical achievement that it almost cleanses it of its exploitative elements. The movie contains several more; I’m particularly fond of a long scene where Marcos takes a long walk, trudging through a muddy creek and up to the edge of a cliff while a bank of thick fog (smoke) eddies around him.

And yet there’s a spontaneous quality to Reygadas’ visuals as well; Battle in Heaven contains a lot of posed, static compositions, but you always feel as though his camera could come unmoor itself at any moment and drift off like a helium balloon. That’s what happens in one of my other favourite scenes, which begins by showing Marcos and Ana having sex, but then the camera wanders away from them, onto the balcony of their apartment, and performs a lackadaisical 360-degree pan of the view outside. By the time it returns to Marcos and Ana’s bed, they’ve finished their rutting... whereupon Reygadas cuts to a graphic but weirdly fascinating shot of Marcos’ slowly deflating penis.

Battle in Heaven is full of shock images like that one, and yet at the same time, it keeps its lurid actual storyline offscreen — it turns out that Marcos and his wife have, for reasons that Reygadas never reveals, kidnapped their friend’s baby, only to have it die in their custody. Part of me wonders if Battle in Heaven is meant as a spoof of sexy criminal-couple noirs like Body Heat or The Postman Always Rings Twice — we get the same premise but with zero action, the same preponderance of sweaty sex scenes, but with two unattractive, obese people humping away.

And yet, Battle in Heaven is impossible to look away from — like Stanley Kubrick, Reygadas has a gift for compositions that are somehow compelling and hypnotically watchable above and beyond their content. Does that make sense? There’s some alchemy going on here, some perfect mathematical combination of film stock, lenses, light, and framing that Reygadas has figured out that keeps you glued to every scene, every movement of the camera. I wonder if a lot of it has to do with the quality of light he achieves in this film and in Silent Light — it’s as if the light itself has somehow been scrubbed clean of imperfections, so that even the grotesque images he throws at you possess such clarity that they seem redeemed. He’s a formidable filmmaker, and I suspect he hasn’t even begun to marshal his full powers as a director.

RATING: 4/5

The Pursuit Of Sappyness

Seven Pounds is approximately two hours long, and it spends almost the entirety of that time hiding its premise from you, and wondering why Will Smith is behaving so strangely. Why is he refusing to talk to his brother? Why is he sneaking into the hospital room of a beautiful cardiac patient (Rosario Dawson) and watching her sleep? Why is he buying a gigantic, cylindrical glass tank for his motel room and putting a jellyfish inside it? Why does he call up a blind customer-service guy (Woody Harrelson) at a meat-by-mail business, only to viciously insult him? And why does he smash up a chair immediately after hanging up?

The answer turns out to be both stranger and more banal than you expect. By the standards of normal human behaviour, Smith’s plan is nuts — involving identity theft, all sorts of creepy, passive-aggressive stalker behaviour, and a climactic bathtub scene that really has to be seen to be believed — but by the standards of “uplifting” Hollywood dramas, the self-sacrificing saintliness of Smith’s motives is depressingly familiar, especially if you’ve already seen movies like Pay It Forward, The Bucket List, or Reign Over Me. Smith is on a mission to make a difference in people’s lives... although the fact that he’ll only help them if they meet his standard of “goodness” is an moral wrinkle to his plan that the film never really wrestles with. Think of Smith’s character as a cross between Bagger Vance and Jigsaw from the Saw movies — he wants to help you live your life more fully, but he’s going to judge you unmercifully first.

The film was directed by Gabriele Muccino, an Italian director who apparently has established a rapport with Smith, having directed him to an Oscar nomination in 2006 in the superior heart-tugger The Pursuit of Happyness. Muccino works well with Smith, tamping down his natural charisma so that he seems less like a gigantic movie star and more like a really good-looking regular person. But in Seven Pounds, Muccino can’t find a way to vary the tone of the script — almost every scene is pitched at the same level of tasteful sombreness, with lots of gentle piano tinkling on the soundtrack and Smith wearing the same pained expression for everybody he meets.

He somehow even manages to look miserable in his scenes with Rosario Dawson, whose dying heart patient emerges as the film’s love interest. One wonders whether this movie was written with more regular-looking people in mind — at one point, the shapely, sensuous Dawson tells Smith, “I used to look really hot,” as if such an idea is unimaginable, given what a hideous, disease-ridden wretch she’s now become. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how that line survived the finished film. Didn’t Muccino notice the crew members rolling their eyes during every take?

Whatever — I was still grateful for Dawson’s presence, however improbable it might be. Those big eyes, that full mouth, and that strong jaw seem so mismatched that it’s impossible to stop staring at her and marveling at how beautifully they all work together. And even though she’s playing the soulful dying girl, one of the biggest sentimental clichés in the book, she has such a naturally charming, simple, offhand acting style that none of the sentimentality of the part sticks to her. Her character owns a vintage printing press (I know, I know, but bear with me), and in one scene she explains to Smith how the old-school printers would try to “kiss” the paper when they imprinted the image on it, without leaving an indentation. That’s how Dawson acts — she just kisses the part, but still leaves a vivid impression behind.

But my God, no amount of underplaying or delicate direction or narrative hide-and-seek can disguise the ridiculous premise that this entire movie hangs upon. More questions arise: has Will Smith become one of those actors whose persona is so huge that they can only be plausibly cast as either superheroes or martyrs? Why do so many movies and TV shows about medical procedures use titles like Seven Pounds, 21 Grams, 4 Oz., 3 Lbs., and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days to suggest the seriousness of their themes? And what is Seven Pounds supposed to signify, anyway? Is it the average weight of the human heart, as the publicity material claims, or is it the amount of bullshit in the script?

Peremptorily Pre-Empted!

No DVD Hidden Gem segment, this week, folks... On account of the current Canadian parliamentary crisis, the local CBC Radio broadcast was prorogued by a special report from the national news desk. I don't know if Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton will be able to oust Stephen Harper, but they've successfully ousted me.

Anyhow, you'll have to wait until next Thursday to find out what film I was going to spotlight. (But here's a hint: do the words "snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg" mean anything to you?)

Moviegoer Diary: Quickfire Edition!

I’ve been spending the last few days working on a long essay about Michael Haneke’s two Funny Games films I’m contributing to a monograph being edited by local film scholar Bill Beard, and in the process I’ve gotten a little behind on my movie blogging. So I thought I’d take a break from all that heavy thinking and jot down some quick thoughts for you about the last few films I’ve watched. I’m sure Haneke would find something to object to in all of them.

SHINE A LIGHT

Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert film was a very pleasant surprise, since most critics seemed able to muster only mild enthusiasm for it. Granted, it doesn’t represent an epochal moment in pop culture like Gimme Shelter, nor does it capture a significant concert in the life of a band like Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. It’s just a charity concert the Stones did in New York for the Bill Clinton Foundation — the venue was unusually small and the guest list (Jack White, Christina Aguilera, Buddy Guy) a little more stellar, but for the Stones, this is basically just the latest in a long series of live gigs, not much different from the ones on either side of it.

But it’s still an absolutely terrific movie, with a momentum that just does not let up. Even in a tamed format like this show — a charity performance with a former U.S. president in the audience — songs like “Some Girls,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” and “Shattered” still have bite. (To my mind, The Stones’ music — biting, sexy, dangerous, never satisfied, always craving more, more, more — has aged so much better than all those borderline-novelty songs by those complacent Beatles, it’s not even funny.)

The first few minutes of the film, in which Scorsese attempts, with little success, to persuade Mick Jagger to tell him which songs they’re going to play, contain more phony drama than the last two minutes of an episode of The Amazing Race, but who cares? Scorsese’s a natural comedian, and he plays the part of the anxious director to perfection. (“We don’t want to burn Mick Jagger,” he tells the lighting director. “That would be bad.”)

I also can’t decide which I covet more: Mick Jagger’s uncanny energy, or his wardrobe. He wears a fantastic series of shirts in this film — from a T-shirt that probably cost $400 to a shiny white dress shirt, unbuttoned past his chest, that probably ran him $2,000 — and I wanted every one of them.

RATING: 4.5/5


TRANSPORTER 3

I’d also like a crisp black suit and a white shirt like the one Jason Statham wears in this film while I’m at it. And one of those high-performance Audis. I’m not sure if the kittenish, freckle-faced Ukrainian girl in the backseat comes standard or if you need to pay extra for her, but if the dealer could throw her in with the deal, that would be awesome.

As I’ve mentioned recently on this blog, I’m a huge fan of the Transporter series. There’s nothing guilty at all about the pleasure I take in them, either. I think Jason Statham is a pretty much ideal action hero — he sells the fight scenes, he has a glorious physique but not a trace of bodybuilder narcissism, and he’s a much better, subtler, funnier actor than he gets credit for — and the car chases and the fight scenes are choreographed with a wit that never fails to make me laugh out loud with delight. (The bit in T2 where Statham subdues something like three bad guys just by taking off his cashmere sweater? Genius!)

Transporter 3 is probably my least favourite entry in the franchise, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a ball at it. The big drawback for me is Natalya Rudakova, who plays Statham’s passenger Valentina, and whose annoyingly frivolous party-girl character didn’t seem like a worthy foil for Statham’s all-business Frank Martin. (I did like her freckles, though — I can’t think of another actress that heavily freckled who’s played the lead in a Hollywood movie, and I bet that was the main reason Luc Besson cast her. Something about those freckles just makes you want to stare at her.)

I also was a little distracted by director Olivier Megaton’s staging of the action sequences. He employs an interesting editing technique — it’s almost as if he’s shaving off the beginning and ending of each individual shot in an effort to constantly go to the “heart” of each piece of movement. I wasn’t confused — Megaton stages the fights so that you always know where the characters are in relation to each other — but I found that the editing interrupts the flow of the action just enough to become distracting.

T3 contains a couple of potential jump-the-shark moments that make me a little worried for Transporter 4. There’s a bit where a gigantic bad guy literally throws Statham through a brick wall — it’s a violation of the laws of physics that’s egregious even for the Transporter movies. And the ending, with Frank Martin apparently settling down with Valentina (and even bringing her along on his fishing trips!), introduces a level of domesticity into Frank’s life that I can’t believe he’d welcome. James Bond and Jason Bourne are lone wolves, and Frank Martin should be no different. Some bad guys had better kill off Valentina right at the top of Transporter 4 — and Frank had better spend the next 90 minutes driving after them!

RATING: 3/5


KUNG FU PANDA

I checked this one out after noting that it earned 16 nominations in this year’s Annie Awards, for animated films and TV shows, while the much more critically praised Wall•E got only eight.

I suspect the disparity in the nomination totals has more to do with the way the awards are set up — with its small cast of characters, Wall•E was at a disadvantage in the “vocal performance” and “character design” categories. In any case, while Kung Fu Panda may not be as special an achievement as Wall•E, it’s still a completely satisfying piece of entertainment, beautifully animated, cleverly plotted, full of jokes that hinge on character behaviour rather than pop-culture references, and featuring a genuinely endearing main character, lovably voiced by Jack Black (doing a quasi-retread of the would-be luchalibre wrestler he played in Nacho Libre).

I see Bolt outdid Wall•E in the Annie nominations as well, with nine. Hmmm... I’ve heard good things about that one too. Have we entered a period where children’s cartoons have become more rigourously plotted than the comedies designed for grown-ups?

RATING: 4/5


MISTER LONELY

Denis Lavant’s performance as a Charlie Chaplin impersonator living in a commune populated entirely by celebrity lookalikes is, bar none, one of the year’s greatest acting feats. In a key scene, his wife (a Marilyn Monroe impersonator played by Samantha Morton) leans over to him in bed and says how sometimes she can’t decide if he reminds her more of Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler — and Lavant brilliantly evokes both figures at the same time, the hapless romantic and the martinet who can barely keep his fury at the world bottled up inside him.

I’m not sure Mister Lonely (which was written and directed by Harmony Korine) holds together as a movie, but it does contain a high number of small astonishments, including the sweet, achingly vulnerable presence Diego Luna brings to the role of a Michael Jackson impersonator; the way the guy playing The Pope, whom I had assumed all along was a non-professional, turned out to be veteran actor James Fox; the shocking yet, in retrospect, inevitable conclusion of the Marilyn Monroe subplot; and the demented scenes, completely unconnected from the main story, involving a priest played by Werner Herzog and a bunch of Third World nuns who begin jumping out of airplanes without wearing parachutes. (“God wants to see us flying!”)

The scene near the end of the film — let’s call it “the egg scene” — may be the most astonishing one of all: a row of hardboiled eggs that have been painted to resemble Michael Jackson’s friends from the commune, all singing along to an Iris Dement song. Maybe you have to see it for yourself. But for me, there are few tonal mixtures more potent than poignancy and ridiculousness (ridoignancy?), and this scene nearly knocked me out flat.

RATING: 3.5/5