Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Seven samurai movies that aren't The Seven Samurai

In a certain way, watching the Brattle's schedule of samurai movies last November provided a similar experience to the Harold Lloyd series earlier in the year. I came into that a big Keaton fan and came out with a new respect for the relatively unknown Lloyd; similarly, I came into the samurai series a fan of Toshiro Mifune, but came out quite fond of Tatsuya Nakadai.

I don't like Mifune any less, but I couldn't help but notice that he is, to a certain extent, always Toshiro Mifune. Nakadai, on the other hand, disappears into his roles more. I think this is at least partially because I was far less familiar with Nakadai, but it was still jarring to be opening the IMDB for reference on each of these movies and realize that the same guy starred in four of them and you just didn't realize it at the time. Part of it was that Nakadai was playing older in many cases, and maybe the make-up work was different. So were the beards.

Other observations: The genre as a whole seems to work better in black-and-white. There were a pair of good-looking color movies, but the simplicity of monochrome suits the samurai aesthetic: It keeps the gray robes from looking bland against the natural world, and reinforces the rigid codes of honor, even when the movie is trying to subvert them.

Also, I wonder if samurai films fill the same niche in Japanese culture that westerns fill for Americans. It's a way of life that is obsolete but still in the venacular. Wandering ronin aren't so far off from American gunfighters, and both have strong themes of trying to maintain order despite a strong central government being out of reach. Both fetishize the weapons and their use more than a little. It's easy to make escapist adventures in these millieus, but it's also not terribly hard for a gifted filmmaker to do intelligent social commentary.

The same can be said about martial arts films from the Chinas, with fighting styles standing in for weapons. Wong Fei-hung would be a samurai or U.S. Marshall if he were born elsewhere. I can't, off the top of my head, think what the equivalents would be for other cultures. England has Robin Hood and Arthurian legend, but I'm not sure what the French western-equivalent would be.

On to the films...

Samurai Saga (Aru kengo no shogai)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

Well, why not do a samurai version of "Cyrano de Bergerac"? It's a classic story, filled with grand, doomed romance and the occasional swordfight; every culture has that somewhere in their past, along with ostracizing those who look different. It's far less of a stretch to put Cyrano in feudal Japan than it is to put him in a Colorado resort.

It doesn't hurt at all to have Toshiro Mifune as the warrior-poet with the big nose. Here, Cyrano's name is Heihachiro Komaki. He's a big, burly guy whose broad nose and scruffy appearance distract from his skill with the sword; one wouldn't necessarily expect him to write a good haiku, either. The object of his affection is beautiful young Lady Ochii (Yoko Tsukasa); she is smitten with Jutaro Karibe (Akira Takarada), who feels the same but cannot find the words to woo her. There are plots and schemes and arranged marriages to further complicate things, overcoming which will require Komaki's wit and blade.

Read the rest at HBS.

Sword of Doom (Dai-bosatsu toge)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

Samurai movies are often tales of righteousness and honor, good men struggling to do what is just within a corrupt system. There are elements of that within Sword of Doom, to be sure, but a great deal of the movie is centered around the bad guy. Lucky for us, Tatsuya Nakadai is a highly engaging screen villain.

His character, Ryunosuke Tsukue, is a monster. His first on-screen victim is an old man visiting a mountaintop shrine with his granddaughter Omatsu (Yoko Naito). Soon afterward he is involved in a duel with low-level samurai Bunnojo Utsuki, and Utsuki's wife Ohama (Michiyo Aratama) begs him to allow Bunnojo to escape with honor and status, offering herself as reward. Tsukue decides to take both the kill and the girl, becoming an assassin for hire under an assumed name. The dead man's brother, Hyoma Utsuki (Yuzo Kayama) vows vengeance, but before he can face Tsukue, he must be trained by a master swordsman (Toshiro Mifune).

Read the rest at HBS.

Kill! (Kiru)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

Look at that title. It seems simple enough, so straightforward that it almost has to be a parody. Right? That's the right track, but few mere parodies are so elaborate in their set-up as Kill!, or as witty in how that set-up plays out. And that's even without acknowledging that Kill! does a fine job as samurai action, even if you're not inclined to laugh at the genre.

Kill! opens with Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Hanji (Etsushi Takahashi) meeting while taking turns trying to chase down a chicken, since it has been a while since either has had much of a meal. They are both ronin, of sorts: Genta has abandoned the samurai lifestyle, sick of the compromise and corruption, while Hanji has sold his farm to buy a sword, even though there is far more to being a samurai than carrying the sword. The local yakuza have no work for them, although a local lord might. It doesn't take long for things to become a mess, with Genta pretending that Hanji has killed him so that Hanji can secure a position, a group of honorable samurai holed up in an old mountain fort, and the leader of the mercenary samurai sent to rout them is only in it for the money to buy the freedom of his beloved.

Read the rest at HBS.

Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbiki no samurai)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

Reluctant heroes are a storytelling staple. It gives the writer a reason to build the tension, develop the villain slowly, set up a variety of ways that the tale could go, even if you know in your heart of hearts that the direction is pre-ordained. It gives the audience a certain amount of identification with the protagonist, because most of us know that our first reaction to a dangerous situation would probably be "don't get involved". And, when they finally do get involved, the audience knows that the bad guys are in for one heck of an ass-kicking. As the name suggests, this film gives us three reluctant heroes.

Sakon Shiba (Tesuro Tamba) is a wandering ronin just looking for a roof to sleep under for a night, but the mill he chooses is occupied by Jimbei and Tasugoro, a pair of elderly farmers who have kidnapped Aya, the daughter of the cruel local magistrate. He gives them enough advice to avoid a bloodbath. The magistrate offers two prisoners their freedom if they deal with the situation (it would not look good to send troops after two old men); one of the prisoners, samurai Kyojuro Sakura (Isamu Nagato) kills a man en route and later switches sides, touched by the farmers' plight. Finally, he sends Einosuke Kikyo (Mikijiro Hira), the samurai in his service who prefers to be a threat than an actual weapon, but when Kikyo, too, decides he is serving a dishonorable master, it's time to call in the mercenaries to keep the letter that the farmers have written from reaching the visiting lord.

Read the rest at HBS.

Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron (Kumokiri Nizaemon)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

I'm going to be honest here... I can't remember the details of what happened in this movie. I remember the basic storyline, and I remember that it looked kind of spiffy, but a backlog of reviews to write stretching out to three months often means that the details to mediocre films like this one sort of fall out the back of one's head. Normally, I'd try looking for other reviews online and using their plot summaries to refresh my memory, but there don't appear to be any, at least not in English, for Google to find.

There's potential - the opening scroll of text describes two enemy organizations: A gang of thieves led by Kumokiri Nakaemon (the always-great Tatsuya Nakadai), and a ruthless band of samurai police headed by Shikubu Abe (Shogoro Ichikawa). Abe will stop at nothing to lay Kumokiri low, not even putting innocent girls in harm's way, while both try to infiltrate the other's organization. Kumokiri, by the end, plans to disband his gang anyway, after they rob the treasury of the Lord to whom he once swore fealty.

At two hours and forty-five minutes, Bandits is epic-sized, and it's got the elements that often make such a long runtime worthwhile: A large cast of characters, a story that unfolds over years, and enough betrayals and double-crosses that one desires a little space between them, so that a status can become quo before being upended. And yet, it still seems overly-elongated. We don't get to know the characters well enough for this extra time spent with them to be worth it, so they actually seem thinner than normal. There's also not really a strong sense of time passing; we get captions stating the year at intervals, but it often seems like the filmmakers are trying to make the story grander by making it longer. They may skip two years, but we tend to find people right where they left off.

Hideo Gosha can still direct the heck out of an action scene, though, and the ones he gets to work with let him show off his craft. He's given two or three heists, some of which turn into ugly battles, and choreographs his games of cops 'n robbers as good as anyone. He and cinematographer Masao Kosugi make fine use of color during daytime scenes, and during the rest of the time the night fits like a fancy stolen coat.

Almost every entry I did find when looking for information on this picture describes it as one of the best samurai films of the seventies, although that may just mean that the seventies were a pretty dire period for samurai films.

Samurai Rebellion (Jôi-uchi: Hairyô tsuma shimatsu)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

As great as samurai movies, I sometimes have a hard time getting invested in the stories. After all, these stories often hinge on formal codes and hierarchies that are alien to me. But even if you're as thoroughly ignorant of eighteenth-century Japan's culture as I am, it's not hard to be hooked by Samurai Rebellion - after all, what's more universal a story than a man fighting to preserve his family?

Of course, the family must first be assembled. We meet Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune), a middle-aged samurai who has long served the family of Lord Masakata Matsudaira (Tatsuo Matsumura). The Lord tires of his haughty and disrespectful mistress Ichi (Yoko Tsukasa), and decrees that one of the Sasahara sons take her off his hands by marrying her. Isaburo initially finds this demeaning, but when son Yogoro (Takeshi Kato) falls in love at first sight, the father relents.

Read the rest at HBS.

Hara-Kiri (Seppuku)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Samurai Cinema)

I never really got the whole suicide concept; I tend to fall into the "all life is precious" and "where there's life, there's hope" camp. Hara-Kiri touches on the situation where it starts becoming comprehensible to me, the "n cannot survive but n-1 can" Cold Equations scenario. You don't have to understand or approve of suicide to be moved by the drama of Hara-Kiri, though: You just need to recognize cruelty and hypocrisy.

As the opening narrative crawl informs us, there was a surplus of samurai in 1630: As the abolition of one clan and general peace among the others left the employment prospects for those without masters dire, many lived in poverty. One such ronin is Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tasuya Nakadai), who comes to the Iyi clan's stronghold to request the use of the grounds and a swordsman to commit seppuku. The retainer who meets him rolls his eyes and mumbles "another one?"; after the clan leader was moved enough by one man's story to offer him a position, many insincere ronin have made the same request, hoping to at least be sent away with money. Retainer Saito (Rentaro Mikuni) warns Tsugumo that there will be no payoff this time, but Tsugumo says he knows, and relates the story of how he came to this position - a story which soon indicates that Tsugumo's plans go beyond killing himself.

Read the rest at HBS.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Oddities: G.O.R.A., Budd Boetticher, Darwin's Nightmare, Ushpizin, Nine Lives

There are boutique films, there are niche films, and then there are boutique niche films. It is four that latter category that places like the Brattle and Harvard Film Archive exist. I saw four of these movies toward the end of the Brattle's Movie Watch-a-Thon fundraiser, although not so much to prove a point that I was committed to unconventional films. There was really not a whole lot left; I saw a bunch of movies during that month, and Ushpizin (for instance) was the only thing that was matinee price at four in the afternoon that Saturday.

I admit to kind of being just a little bit disappointed in G.O.R.A.. I'd been hoping to see it at Fantasia, but it was during the second half of the festival and I got a screener for something else instead. The trailer on the program's DVD, as you might expect, contained almost all the F/X and grand vista scenes from the movie, so it looked snazzier than it was. But, hey, Turkey is a country that I had never seen a movie from, so I can make a mark on an imaginary checklist.

I wish I'd gotten to see more of the Budd Boetticher series. And I would dearly love to see the raw footage of A Man Can Do That's sit-down with Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino. In my imagination, it's these guys talking about one of their favorite directors of westerns for two hours. In my fantasies, it's a weekly TV show on Bravo.

So, to the reviews!

G.O.R.A.

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (New Turkish Cinema)

I love sci-fi. Not to the point of praising bad examples of the genre, but I will try just about anything the genre offers up, and the more exotic, the better. I saw this on the schedule at Fantasia and immediately thought, okay, Turkish sci-fi comedy, I've never seen a movie like that; heck, I didn't know they made movies in Turkey. I was really disappointed when I couldn't fit a screening into my travel plans or acquire a screener, so I was happy to catch up with it at a Brattle screening a few months later. And even if this isn't the greatest entry in the genre, it's still a unique specimen, and what's the point of being a fan of science fiction if you're not open to new storytelling experiences?

The story follows Arif (Cem Yilmaz), a small-time tourist-trapper in Istanbul who is abducted and brought to the planet GORA by Commander Logar (also Yilmaz), who has designs on the beautiful Princess Ceku (Özge Özberk). She wants no part of the power-hungry lunatic, as she confesses to her robot friend 216 (Ozan Guven), but she doesn't seem to be getting much choice in the matter. She and Arif meet up, and escape from the city together, where circumstances will inevitably force them to save the planet.

Read the rest at HBS.

Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Ride Lonesome)

Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That makes me feel bad about for the most part giving the Boetticher series at the Harvard Film Archive a miss. It was bad timing - I was just coming off the Brattle's Movie-Watch-a-Thon and wanted out of theaters, I wound up working late, and one of the days I was free was the day they had the only Boetticher film I'd seen (and not been hugely impressed with), The Tall T, because the movie Bruce Ricker and Dave Kehr made certainly raised my interest in Boetticher as both a man and a filmmaker.

Oscar Boetticher Junior's story isn't a rags-to-riches tale, but one of a man trying to claim his own place in the world and not always having it work out well. The small son of a successful hardware salesman, he pushed himself to excel in sports as a child, then learned how to be a matador in Mexico, competing professionally for a while. He found himself in Hollywood on his return to America, where he toiled in various jobs on studio lots until he got a chance to do some second unit work, which lead to using his expertise as a technical advisor on Blood and Sand; he would later write, direct, and produce bullfighter epic Bullfighter and the Lady. He eventually paired with star Randolph Scott for a series of successful mid-budget Westerns for John Wayne's company in the 1950s before directing The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. During the 1960s, though, Boetticher's maverick streak would become his undoing, as he threw his entire effort into another bullfighting film, Arruza, which would become the very model of the career-destroying disaster.

Read the rest at HBS.

Arruza

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Ride Lonesome)

Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate is generally held up as the gold standard of movie debacles, and it's hard to argue with a film which nearly bankrupted a studio that had been in existence since the silent days. But for all the carnage it caused, it just bled money. Budd Boetticher's Arruza was a more total disaster for the people involved.

Boetticher's idea, apparently, was to make something like The Jackie Robinson Story, a fictionalized biography whose subject would star as himself. The man who captured Boetticher's interest was Carlos Arruza, widely considered Mexico's greatest matador, who had retired at the top of his game, purchasing one of the nation's top cattle farms where he would breed champion toros. When one of his animals gets loose, he herds the beast back on horseeback, which inspires him to learn a different form of bullfighting, rejoneador rather than picador. Michael Jordan retiring from basketball to try his hand at professional baseball is not a bad analogy, although Arruza's new sport was considered less prestigious than his old one (and Space Jam is a better movie). Boetticher's wife, Debra Paget, would be the leading lady.

Read the rest at HBS.

Ushpizin

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2005 at Landmark Kendsall Square #9 (First-run)

I feel like a bit of a heel for not liking Ushpizin more than I do. I talk a good game about how being edgy is over-rated, especially in comparison to being heartfelt; I say the one of the things I love about foreign films is being exposed to different cultures. When something big-hearted and unfamiliar like Ushpizin comes along, I feel like I should appreciate it more. Instead, I find myself looking at my watch, trying to suppress a yawn because I don't want to offend the older folks who don't need the subtitles, and afterward noting that it had really good intentions.

The movie opens with scrolling text to inform Gentiles (and less-religious Jews) of the rituals surrounding the Succot holiday, which involve (among other things) living in a wooden shelter, acquiring a citron fruit, and showing hospitality to any guests (the ushpizin of the title) who may appear at one's doorway. For Moshe Bellanga (Shuli Rand), times are tight, and he's afraid he won't be able to afford these things, even though he and his wife Malli (Michal Bat-Sheva Rand) are praying for a child. However, things work out, or at least they seem to - the guests they are blessed with (Shaul Mizrahi and Ilan Ganani), are in fact convicts who didn't return to prison at the end of their furlough.

Read the rest at HBS.

Darwin's Nightmare

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements)

The blurb on the calendar played up the ecological angle: A foreign species introduced into a new environment destroys the native fauna, sending the ecology into a tailspin. Though some time is spent on how a small population of Nile perch quickly came to dominate Lake Victoria, biodiversity is not actually the focus of the film. Instead, Darwin's Nightmare focuses on how the perch dominates the area's economy just as totally as it does the lake, and how despite being able to export an abundant, renewable resource, the region remains impoverished.

Why? Globalization, apparently. Russian planes arrive, fill their holds up with Tanzanian fish fillets, and fly them to Europe. The fish are so plentiful that the fishing boats and processing centers are only somewhat profitable by paying the workers almost nothing (it's not like potential employees are in short supply). So the locals subsist on fried fish heads while their bounty flies overseas, with malnutrition and disease constant problems.

Read the rest at HBS.

Nine Lives

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Recent Raves)

How can you tell the difference between a "real" independent film that manages to snag some well-known actors and a studio project that gets released under the "classics" banner? I'm guessing that one way would be to look at those actors' interviews with the media. As much as an independent filmmaker may be able to convince, say, Glenn Close to work for scale as a favor to a friend, that's not going to get her to take a break from other commitments to do interviews. That's why a movie like Nine Lives, with its very impressive cast, is able to come and go almost completely unnoticed (if it even came to your town at all).

Of course, part of the reason you don't get the stars doing press is because this film doesn't have a real lead to push. It's a sort of anthology film, nine segments that each follows a woman for ten or fifteen minutes before moving on to a different character's point of view. Some of the stories overlap in obvious ways; others share characters but place them in incongruous situations. The last story appears to be entirely self-contained. If there's a single premise that unites the segments, it's that love is a responsibility, and sometimes even a burden, as well as a source of joy.

Read the rest at HBS.

Next up: The Brattle's Samurai Cinema series from way back in November. I'm starting to despair as I look at the "to-review" list again, so I'll probably start doing capsules for recent movies soon. The stuff where I had to ask the HBS/EFC guys to put the movie in the database, though (like the samurai films), I figure I owe them a full review. The pipe dream is to get caught up by the SF/31 marathon a month from now (or at least within a reasonable distance).

Friday, January 13, 2006

SILENCE! - Seven silents and Frankenstein

...with Frankenstein included because it was part of the whole silent-Halloween weekend thing I did between Somerville and the Coolidge. And of course, it was the one I'd wished had been left alone.

As much as I like the Harvard Film Archive, I don't know how often I'd go there if not for silents. The Brattle is the main focus of my classic-movie watching time, and there's often just not enough time to hit both. But the Brattle only rarely shows silents - I think in the seven years I've been here, there have been three series: Harold Lloyd last year, a Chaplin/Keaton/Tati series a couple years earlier, and a Maddin/Brothers Quay series a couple years before that. Other shows are booked on fairly rare occasions, like when there's a new score to debut. When I lived in Portland, I think The Movies on Exchange Street had Nosferatu for a week - and they cropped it to 1.85:1, meaning intertitles and heads were cut off.

Which is fine; silent movies are sort of an acquired taste, and a niche, and I imagine only non-profits can really show them regularly (The Silent Movie Theatre in L.A. is unique, and the first place I'll visit should I ever make my way out there). So it's only academic institutions like the HFA and occasionally the Museum of Fine Arts that show them on the big screen.

And yet, I'd still like more. Part of the charm of silent movies, of course, is that they're not just silent, but old, from the early days of cinema where what you see is very close to exactly what was shot, and where the filmmakers are still discovering how to make movies. But part is how reducing the importance of words and dialog allows these movies to concentrate on the techniques that are unique to film as a medium: Motion, environment, body language writ large. Imagine how great the Star Wars prequels would be if releasing them silent, with only John Williams's underscore, were practical. It's almost unfair that later directors seldom get a chance to work this way.

Heh. This stuff is so niche that half of the films in question aren't even in the HBS database, so enjoy the full reviews for those:

High Treason

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Film Architectures)

I must admit that I have a soft spot for old sci-fi. I love looking at how previous generations envisioned the future and threw themselves into depicting these visions. I feel a twinge of annoyance whenever someone disparages that kind of movie for how it "gets the future wrong" or looks fake compared to new visions that is only equaled by my reaction to when another professes to love them for being "campy" or "cheesy". The first reaction comes of being spoiled and/or ignorant, but the latter is just patronizing. High Treason may be silly, but that's because it was kind of silly in 1928, too.

The movie posits that in the far off year of 1950, "United Europe" and the "Atlantic States" share an uneasy truce. As the film opens, an incident at a border crossing sets the nations at high alert. This is of great concern to the World Peace League, headed by the renowned Dr. Seymour (Humberston Wright), ably assisted by his daughter Evelyn (Benita Hume). Despite her dedication to the cause, Evelyn is currently dating a soldier, Air Force Major Michael Deane (Jameson Thomas), although that alliance may fracture should it come to war. What our heroes in London don't realize, however, is that the situation is being manipulated behind the scenes by a group of arms manufacturers in New York.

A great deal of the fun of this movie is looking at the 1950 that the filmmakers imagined in the roaring twenties, full of skyscrapers, blimps, television phones and ladies wearing form-fitting jumpsuits for a night on the town. It is not meant to be a prediction of the future, of course, but an allegorical one; I imagine that much early-twentieth-century science fiction used the mid-century point the same way later generations would use "the year two thousand", as shorthand for a time by which there would be great change but which the audience or their children would live to see. The design isn't wholly unreasonable, really, when you look at it from the perspective of a generation that had seen cities sprout like weeds in the American West and technologies like airplanes, automobiles, radios, and even motion pictures become ubiquitous since the turn of the century. 1950 London isn't a utopia, but it's a pleasant and exciting place to live, and the realization of it is at time impressive - the model work is crude by todays standards, with visible strings and crude detail, but other bits of effects are impressive. I admit to spending some time racking my brain at how they got the video phones to work in 1928: This is before the blue screen, and the devices weren't always wall-mounted to enable the use of rear projection. If it's matte work, it's darned impressive early use of it.

Speaking of being ahead of the curve, High Treason was actually shot as talkie, although silent, intertitled prints were also produced for the majority of theaters that had not yet installed sound. It is this silent version that was screened, which leads to some odd moments - a nightclub scene where young people dance to unheard music; demonstrators breaking into "the peace song" which is just not effective as intertitles. (Also, the venue's usual piano accompaniment for silent movies was absent, which is kind of nerve-wracking; the brain expects both eyes and ears to be engaged) I'd be interested to see the original, sound version, but I believe prints are scarce and in poor condition.

The cast is solid enough, given that they're basically playing types: Jameson Thomas is upright and honorable as the soldier who sympathizes with the Peace League but took an oath; Benita Hume is a pretty flapper who has still absorbed her father's hardline stance on right and wrong. Humberston Wright is exactly what the film needs as a man whose very passion can prove to be his undoing - strong and authoritarian, but tunnel-visioned to the point where he might start talking about ends justifying the means.

Of course, as much as High Treason comes down on the side of the pacifists in its words, when it comes down to actions, it does seem to like, well, action. The opening border-crossing incident takes a while to sort itself out, but once it does, generates some good suspense, and the terrorist attack on the Peace League's headquarters yields some nice destruction of miniatures. At other times, the audience can't help but feel that director Maurice Elvey is more interested in showing pretty girls than high ideals, or find that the meetings of the munitions manufacturers are much more thrilling than those of the protesters. Maybe Noel Pemberton-Billing's original play was more honest in its desire to show peaceful means working, but L'Estrange Fawcett's screenplay gives the audience more spectacle and more excitement, even if the message gets a little lost in translation.

Or maybe not completely lost; pacifist doesn't necessarily mean passive. The film's ideas are noble enough even for this day and age, and it does a better job than most of making the presentation of those ideas exciting and entertaining. Sure, it's not as slick as the films that would follow it, but it makes good use of what it's got, with the result being more enjoyable than many later films with more resources.

The Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Imgining the City) (Live piano accompaniment)

The Man with a Movie Camera is exciting to watch, even seventy-five years later. It is, at once, a document of Soviet Russia in the late 1920s and a dizzying work of cinematic artistry years ahead of its time. It is, for people who love film as a medium, absolutely essential viewing.

It's curious to see what a relatively even-handed look it gives the young Soviet Union. Shortly after screening this film, the Harvard Film Archive ran Aelita, Queen of Mars, which has no compunctions about wearing its ideology on its sleeve. Man with a Movie Camera does often seem to attempt to portray the USSR in its best light: The Moscow streets are bustling, filled with cars and excited people. The trips out to the countryside also show a busy people, building the country's industrial base. And yet, we see a fair amount of poverty, too, workers wearing old, beat-up clothes and people waiting in the lines that would come to define the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

More than the location, though, what makes it so essential is the thing that makes its title something of a misnomer - director Dziga Vertov is, through much of this movie, a man with two movie cameras, one shooting everyday scenes in and around Moscow and another filming him shooting everyday scenes in and around Moscow. It's kind of an audacious trick - imagine a stage magician showing you how an illusion is created before doing each trick. That's what Vertov does here, and while it's fascinating to process junkies like me, it's also fascinating to those with less curiosity as to how things are made: Our cameraman is climbing to great heights and bolting cameras to cars driven at high speed; there's a thrill of danger and respect for someone dedicated enough to their craft put themselves in harm's way to get a bit of film.

Indeed, this film shows us moviemaking from start to finish, as some shots show us Vertov setting up a movie theater in an empty hall, actually putting chairs in line, hanging a screen, and setting up a projector, with curious people lining up to see what may be their first movie (and looking bewildered by what they see in this non-linear documentary, actually). I actually found myself thinking of Goodbye Dragon Inn during these segments - where that film at times seemed like a eulogy, mourning the death of people going to film, Man with a Movie Camera is being present at its birth as the subjects gawk at the camera, Vertov figures out how to use it, and people come to see the result for the first time.

The editing is also noteworthy; the film cuts between locations and perspectives almost randomly, and yet the film comes together as a seamless whole. It's avant-garde, for sure, but not in an aloof way. The Man with a Movie Camera is required viewing to be familiar with the history of film, but also an entrancing experience in its own right.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2005 at the Somerville Theater #1 (CrashArts Presents the Alloy Orchestra)

The Phantom of the Opera impressed me. That's not particularly hard to do, I admit - I like movies a great deal and tend to be generous in my appraisal if I like any specific feature. What struck me upon watching Phantom, though, was that even though the film is eighty years old, I had of course seen stills of the title character, and the promotion for this restored print and live accompaniment boasted of what was to come, I still found reasons to sit up straight in my seat and make some noise in shock or delight when called for.

The story, of course, is familiar from multiple productions - Chirstine (Mary Philbin), a young opera singer, is tutored by Erik (Lon Chaney), a master who hides out of sight, the Paris Opera House's legendary phantom. The adoring Erik sabotage's Christine's rival to win her a lead role, and eventually abducts his protegé into his realm of catacombs when it appears the surface world doesn't appreciate her beauty and talent, leading her more conventional beau Roaul (Norman Kerry) to give chase.

Read the rest at HBS.

Frankenstein (1931)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2005 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (Halloween) (projected video, live accompaniment)

Universal, of late, has been looking for ways to market its classic monsters to a new, young audience. They've recently announced a series of sequel novels from Dark Horse Press; they've inflicted bad Stephen Sommers movies on us. I can't help but think that the best way would also be the most cost-effective: Get some prints into theaters during slow months, and let the audience see just how good these films are.

It's not a flawless plan; I've got no doubt that there would be a lot of people laughing at the dated performances and talking back to the screen. But that's okay; it gets them in the theater, and gets them paying attention. And even if the audience is initially disrespectful, James Whale's lean, efficient filmmaking will stick with the audience, as will Boris Karloff's immortal performance, which many may only know from stills or parody.

Read the rest at HBS.

Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2005 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (Halloween) (projected video, live accompaniment)

You know what I hate about most vampire movies? That they make the vampires sex symbols. Please. Sex is a life-giving process, whereas vampires are walking corpses that drink the lifeblood of others, but are laid low by religious icons and the rays of the sun, the ultimate source of all life. They're death. The way I figure it, the more ugly and cadaverous they make vampires, the better. So, it's probably no surprise when I say that Nosferatu is the greatest vampire movie ever made.

Nosferatu is, infamously, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with the action transposed to Germany. Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), an apprentice estate agent, is dispatched to Transylvania to conduct some business with the reclusive Count Orlok (Max Schreck). Orlok, a bald, pale character with long fingernails, pointed teeth, and a demonic visage, has some bizarre sleeping habits, and the local villagers won't come near his castle. He takes an interest in Hutter's wife Ellen (Greta Schroeder), and soon is on his way to his new home. Death follows in his wake.

Read the rest at HBS.

Wings

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (World War I on Film)

Wings, as the reader may or may not know, was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (or "Best Production", as it was called at the time), and is extremely likely to stand as the only silent to win that honor. Were it remade today with roughly the same script and equivalent special effects, it likely would not be considered a contender for such honors, although it would probably still be a huge popular hit.

After all, the public went for Pearl Harbor (at least, more than the critics did), and that film borrows somewhat from this predecessor: Two young men, working-class Jack Powell (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen), the son of the richest family in town, sign up to train as pilots during World War I. Both fancy themselves rivals for the affection of classy Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston), though in truth she only has feelings for David. Jack, meanwhile, is mostly oblivious to the interest of tomboyish girl-next-door Mary Preston (Clara Bow), though she will also make her way to Europe, joining the army as a driver.

Read the rest at HBS.

Aelita, Queen of Mars

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Film Architectures)

It is a testament to director Yakov Protazanov's craft that someone viewing Aelita can watch and enjoy it for most of its running time without realizing that it's a pretty darn heavy-handed piece of propaganda. That's not necessarily a fatal blow; any time one watches an old movie or reads an old book, it is somewhat necessary to consider the context of the times, and communism's collapse was far from inevitable in the early 1920s (and to suggest otherwise in a Soviet-produced film would be an extremely bad career move). Sadly, though, the propaganda is followed up by the hoary cliché, which is annoying no matter what the ideology of the film (or filmmaker) (or sponsor) may be.

It starts off innocently enough. Los (Nikolai Tsereteli), a construction manager for a project near Moscow, tinkers with rocketry in his spare time. His devoted wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi) does clerical work where she is needed. They are fairly happy, though they live in a crowded apartment with one-time aristocrats unhappy with their current lot in life. This is watched from Mars by Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva), the young and relatively powerless queen of an empire whose prosperity is paid for by the blood and oppression of workers living underground. She adores watching the passionate, romantic Earthman, and plots to continue using the telescope even when she is denied access. Things are taking a turn for the worse for Los, too, as Natasha is seduced by the secret meetings of her once-wealthy neighbors. After an action committed out of rage, Los flees in his homemade rocket (with, of course, a pair of stowaways), which is, of course, primed for revolution.

From the viewpoint of twenty-first century America, the rah-rah communist propoganda is kind of amusing, although for the better part of the movie, it's not insulting. Sure, the one-time nobility are the villains, but life in the Soviet Union isn't perfect - the apartments are rather crowded, Los is working long hours and has difficulty finding a place to work on his non-State-Sponsored project, and there's something less than ideal about a society that doesn't have a place for Natasha to look killer in a black dress. The communist ideal is a good one, and Los's belief in it marks him as noble in contrast to the aristocrats bemoaning the loss of privilege that they were born to. It's not until later, when Los is on Mars forging hammer-and-sickle emblems and making stirring speeches about how a civilization should be run, that one feels that maybe he's pushing the point a little hard, and, hey, you ran from this perfect society because it led you to commit a violent crime.

At any rate, it is not the propoganda quality of the picture which leads to its classic status, but its vision of Mars, which is justly famous. Every single detail is immensely impractical, of course, and the Martian living and working spaces look far more like sets for a stage play than anything that someone would actually use. They're beautiful, though, lush in their absurdity, somehow managing to be both open and busy at once. The end result is not nearly as complete a fictional world as Lang's Metropolis, though certain themes are shared in its construction - housing the poor in a dark, underground city has been a staple of speculative fiction for as long as the genre has existed. The costuming is similarly whimsical, in that I can use the word "whimsical" because I don't have to wear it.

The film works, for most of its running time. Both the fantastical and down-to-earth segments are well-shot, and if they seem naive now, they're believable products of their time. And the characters are well-drawn and relatable; even the staunchest libertarian capitalist can identify with the Loses' enthusiasm to help build a country where everyone would get a fair shake, or Aelita's excited eavesdropping on the exciting Earthmen. That's why it's such an unhappy blow when in the last act, they stop being universal characters with flaws and imperfections and become representations of class-warfare doctrine. And the very end is the sort of thing that always drives me bonkers, both erasing the consequences of a character's actions and deflating the fantasy elements.

There are some silent films that hold up no matter what the year, and others that are mainly good for getting an idea of the history of film. This screening of Aelita was part of a "Film Architectures" series at the Harvard Film Archive, which isn't always the dry, academic environment it sounds like, and it tries valiantly to be more than merely educational. In the final analysis, it doesn't quite manage that, but it does at least try.

What's Going on in Beely Circus? (Was ist los im Zirkus Beely?)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 December 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Special Event) (Live piano accompaniment)

One of the things I'd always assumed about the silent era was that international distribution was easier and more common; after all, to bring an English-language film to Germany or vice versa, a studio would just have to replace the intertitles or cutaways to written notes with translated versions. No fake-seeming dubbing, and the audience was already expecting to read the dialogue. This does not seem to have been the case, though: Metropolis, for instance, had a terrible time securing U.S. distribution, and the films of Harry Piel are all but unknown to the Anglophone world.

If What's Going on in Beely Circus? is representative, then this is perhaps not a tragedy on the order of the world not knowing the works of Chaplin or Murnau. It's still a remarkable vanishing act; at the peak of his popularity, Biel's films occupied over a third of his nation's screens. Now, he not only exists in obscurity, but much of his prodigious output is simply lost (Beely Circus is the only feature that survives in its entirety). It's a shame, not just because all lost works are unfortunate, but because Piel - called "the dynamite director" after the amount of action scenes included (and explosives used) in his pictures - so dominated the German box office that he could scarcely have avoided being a major influence on a generation of German filmmakers.

In Beely Circus, Piel directs and stars as Harry Peel, a man-about-town secure enough in his wealth that he does not seem to have to either work for it or mention its source. As the film opens, he's reluctantly getting dressed up for a night at his exclusive club. It's a sort of stodgy environment for this man of action, but old friend Robert Jackson (Ralf Ostermann) will be there, recently returned from South America. They barely have time to speak, although Harry will hear from him later that night, calling from a pay phone as he's attacked at the auditorium he had recently acquired. Harry promises Jackson's pretty sister Rose (Ilona Karolewna) that he'll investigate, although police detective Bull (Fritz Greiner) would prefer he left the matter to the authorities.

Harry is a pugnacious protagonist, somewhat in the Douglas Fairbanks mode - handsome, athletic, and clearly ready to buckle any swash that needs it. He's a roaring twenties action hero, overflowing with energy, uncomfortable in the tuxedo he wears at first, and ready to confront any problem he might find head on. Beely Circus is a murder mystery story in form, but Harry isn't the sort of amateur sleuth who cracks a case by looking for tiny clues or asking witnesses and suspect questions where the tiniest detail may be important. He'll occasionally go undercover, but prefers relying on his fists and raw nerve. Toward the middle of the film, he's thrown in a room with a tiger, which most would consider dangerous, but Harry Peel is so tough that he can basically stare it down and then have the big cat follow him around to intimidate people in later acts.

I figure that was the appeal of Piel's films - that Harry was this larger-than-life pulp hero who could handle any problem with direct action. He swings on ropes, tames wild animals, finds secret passages and falls in with the dead man's sister because, in this sort of movie, that is the natural order of things. He chases criminals but still sticks it to the man in his dealings with the police. Pretty simple stuff, but fun in that way. It's a basic meat & potatoes action movie, and though it doesn't feature any huge set pieces, it seldom slows down close to a stop.

Pity so few of Piel's movies survive. Beely Circus isn't going to be one of my favorite silents, but the guy was popular for a reason.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

The latest in 3-D: Magnificent Desolation, Sharks, Chicken Little, The Polar Express

A few random comments from me and my brothers Matt and Dan while watching The Polar Express with our step-nephews Christmas day (and some I made up):

"See, he's thinking there, and reaching conclusions based upon what he's learned and observed. That'll have to stop."

"Remember, Jacob, don't imitate what you see in this movie. I know you love trains, but if a strange train pulls up to your front door in the middle of the night, it is not okay to get on."

"Same goes for if they offer you hot chocolate."

"Is it just me, or does the kid look like George Bush?"

"See, even though all of the kids on this train were invited on personally by the conductor, they're apparently still in big trouble if they don't have their ticket. This teaches kids a valuable lesson about adults being insane and being willing to throw you off a train if you don't follow their rules."

"Apparently, only about a dozen kids a year get to learn Santa is real. The rest of you have to deal with the torture of uncertainty."

"Wow, that was close - the engine just barely got past the ice! But I guess the rest of the kids drowned."

"Especially the poor one."

"Oh, yes, especially the poor one."

"I'm warning you right now, if you pull on my beard like that, you're the one who will be making the funny noises."

"Man, apparently nothing but trouble comes of being nice to the poor kid."

"You know, we should probably dial it back. Jacob may not be ready for our level of sarcasm."

"Really, this movie should be banned for the lessons it teaches kids. Remember, Jacob, even if your mom hasn't specifically told you this, don't try to walk across icy rails a hundred feet in the air in your bare feet at the North Pole."

"No, you won't fall off, but your skin will freeze to the metal, and pulling you off will hurt like... uh, the dickens."

"I so wish we had a pneumatic tube system to get around campus."

"That's a lot of elves."

"Well, Santa is planning to attack Mordor."

"So, let me keep track - Tom Hanks plays the kid, his father, the conductor, and the hobo, right?"

"He's also Santa Claus."

"Well, yeah, I knew that. I mean, have you ever seen the two of them in the same room?"

"Explains why he gets $20M a picture - this operation doesn't look cheap."

"Hey, where'd that other kid come from? He wasn't on the runaway train and pneumatic tube!"

"You know, if this guy doesn't believe in Santa by now, he's the dumbest kid on Earth."

"So, wait - those reindeer, who a couple of elves were able to keep on the ground, are going to life that giant bag."

"Which, by the way, looks like the world's largest meatball."

"Uh, at this point, kid you don't 'believe' - you know."

"All he asked for was the bell, and it fell out his pocket?"

"Right - it's like the aliens in Contact."

"Aw, isn't that heartwarming. That poor kid just made the best friends of his life and he'll never see them again. They don't even know each others' names so they can write to each other."

"What's the note with the bell say? 'Looks like you dropped this, Mr. C."

"AH-HA, so we were half-right: Tom BOSLEY is Santa!"

... um, anyway, on to the reviews:

Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3-D

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2005 at the Aquarium (first-run)

Here's the thing about Magnificent Desolation: It's full of beautiful 3-D images, reminiscences about the Apollo program, information on the history of space travel. It is awesome to see, immersive, and exciting. You can bring kids and watch them be awed and amazed. You'll feel the same way.

And then, after you've left the theater, halfway to the subway, it'll dawn on you: It's all special effects.

It's special effects to be proud of, to be sure: Renedered at a high enough resolution to look good on an IMAX screen. Twice, so that it's in 3-D. The physics of regolith being kicked up and scattering in an airless, one-sixth gee environment look right. I oohed and aaahed shamelessly. It's the next best thing to being there.

Except... Why are we settling for that? I had my thirty-second birthday about a week after seeing this. Men have not walked on the moon in my lifetime. We shouldn't have to use CGI to show kids what it would be like to walk on the moon; we should be able to send a camera crew up on a commercial spacecraft. I don't imagine I'd be able to afford to take my vacation there, but it's frustrating to think how much could have been done in the last three decades but hasn't been.

Kids won't mind; thirty-three years is an inconceivable amount of time to them. And everyone should be able to look at this and see the visual splendor and the astonishing achievement that landing on the moon was. Executive producer and narrator Tom Hanks loves the space program and has full-on hero worship for the people involved, and that shines through. He and the other filmmakers walk a nice line creating a film that is accessible and entertaining to children while also being fairly enjoyable for adults. Many other IMAX films with an aim to educate and advocate as well as entertain hae falled far short of that.

But, man, it's all special effects. I love special effects, and I'm the first to sneer at somebody who dismisses something for being CGI, but when I go to a movie in this sort of environment - a museum of sorts, a place that celebrates science, that shows you real amazing things - having to see a recreation of a place where we were able to send people with cameras over thirty years ago serves as a reminder of how sometimes, things really aren't what they used to be.

Sharks 3-D

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2005 at the Aquarium (first-run)

At some point this year, there was a thread on the HBS/EFC forums that started from a a picture of a gigantic tiger shark being hauled in by some Cape Cod fisherman participating in a contest titled "why do [people] have to kill sharks?" My answer - because they taste delicious - was not popular. I was, in part, being provocative, despite the truthfulness of my answer. Sharks are, in addition to being good eating, magnificent creatures; the ocean's alpha predator and vital parts of the eocsystem for millions of years, and worth preserving.

It's the latter perspective you're going to be getting from this motion picture; it is, after all, presented by the Ocean Futures Society rather than, say, Legal Sea Foods. It is, thankfully, less heavy-handed than it could have been, despite being narrated by a turtle who serves as our guide. It's pitched toward kids, obviously, but is more interested in imparting information than guilt.

And, of course, pretty pictures. IMAX, and 3-D IMAX especially, puts the audience directly in a picture in a way few other media can, and an ocean setting frees the audience from the bounds of gravity so that amazing things can come from any corner of the screen and move in any direction. Director Jean-Jacques Mantello and cinematographer Gavin McKinney make good use of this three-dimensionality, sometimes overloading the eyes with fantastic imagery. They're also not picky about their subjects; if they got good shots of rays, turtles, or sea lions, that makes it into the movie.

IMAX movies of this sort are, once you're aware of the basic information they're trying to get across, all about looking good. One can't deny Sharks does that; it's a strikingly beautiful piece of film.

Chicken Little

* * (out of four) (* * ½ in 3-D)
Seen 5 November 2005 at the Loews Boston Common #16 (first-run) (3-D digital projection)

Disney is following now. It's a sad state of affairs, when you think about it; a bit over a decade ago, other studios were forming animation departments in the hopes of cashing in on the success of Disney features from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King. They didn't succeed until they stopped trying to out-Disney Disney, and now, in the wake of that success, we get Chicken Little - a kind of sad attempt by Disney to beat DreamWorks at their own game.

It's all there - a CGI world designed to mimic present-day America (except with barnyard animals), a celebrity voice cast, a soundtrack that's a mishmash of pop songs from different eras, and a string of pop culture references masquerading as jokes. If you stripped the vanity card off the front, what's the actual difference between this and Robots or SharkTale? Not much. A certain part of me says that's okay, that Disney doesn't have to be special, but if a movie is going to aim to tread familiar ground rather than be different, it should at least tread that familiar ground nimbly, and this is something Chicken Little fails to manage.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Polar Express

* * ¼ (out of four) (* * * in 3-D)
Seen 4 December 2005 at the New Englad Aquarium (re-issue) (3-D IMAX Experience)

When I saw The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D the morning of December 4th (I was trying to cram as many movies into a 36-hour period at the end of a "Movie Watch-a-Thon" fundraiser as possible and it was Boston's only 10am show), I was duly amazed by the 3-D presentation but left rather cold by pretty much everything else. Pretty, I thought, but pointless in another medium. I emended that assessment upon seeing my step-nephew not bounce off the walls for an hour and a half watching his new DVD on Christmas Day, despite the, um, "gentle mockery" of the movie delivered by my brothers and me. Keeping the attention of a six-year-old with a stocking's worth of Christmas candy in his system doesn't make The Polar Express a good movie, but does mark it as potentially useful.

To give the movie its due, when The Polar Express is operating as a roller-coaster ride - much more literally than many of the movies to which this sobriquet is applied - with the titular train zooming through a succession of lovingly-rendered perils on the way to the North Pole, it can be an awesome sight, especially if you're seeing it on a screen six stories high and through a pair of polarized lenses. Unlike with Chicken Little, I strongly suspect director Robert Zemeckis had 3-D presentation in mind when making this movie, although he keeps the throwing things at the audience to a minimum in order to make it palatable for people seeing it in conventional theaters or on DVD. The audience's stomach lurches sympathetically when the train zooms down a hill or skids on a frozen lake, and more than one kid near me in the theater tried to reach out and catch snowflakes. When this is a movie about things, it is an astonishingly staged film whose visuals will be difficult to top.

When it's a movie about people, though, it is one of the creepiest things ever produced as children's entertainment...

Read the rest at HBS.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Boutique-y Stuff: Keane, Touch the Sound, Jesus Is Magic, The Constant Gardener, Pride & Prejudice

You know the holidays are approaching when what's playing at the boutique places and what's playing at the multiplex start to run together. I get Pride & Prejudice playing at the mall - folks know Keira Knightley's name and like her being English and spunky - but why does Landmark Kendall Square pick up The Ice Harvest? I suppose noir-ish stuff doesn't play so well in mainstream theaters, but, still, that's not really a terribly artsy movie (and promoting it as the new film by the maker of Caddyshack and Groundhog Day doesn't do it many favors, as it's not really a comedy and doesn't have Bill Murray). In good news: The Brattle has evidently raised enough money to extend its schedule just a little bit into the new year, and the first week of showings there in 2006 are Muppet movies. I'll feel better when I see a schedule for January and February, and much better when I see one for March/April, but I'm taking what I can get. Keane * * * ½ (out of four) Seen 22 November 2005 at The Brattle Theater (Recent Raves) William Keane has problems. At first we think, well, sure, of course - his seven-year-old daughter is missing, which is enough to set anybody on edge. But his daughter's been missing for months, and as he searches the bus station where she vanished, he seems to lose track of things. Sometimes he seems to be talking about the disappearance like it happened months ago, other times like it just happens. He impulsively jumps on a bus out of town when he thinks that that is the key to finding her, and creates a disturbance to get off when his thinking shifts. That's our first look at Keane's title character, and he never gets less disturbing. We soon learn that he's receiving disability checks and spending chunks of them on drugs and booze. He seems to be pulling himself together, and then Lynn and Kira Bedick enter his life. The question is, will this mother and her seven-year-old girl stabilize William, or send him off the deep end? Keane is played by Damian Lewis, who gives a frighteningly naturalistic performance. There's no excess theatricality to his technique, despite the fact that he's playing a character who may be completely off his nut. He perfectly replicates the guy a couple seats away on the bus, chattering to himself, not immediately threatening, but not someone you want to get close to. Even in his more friendly, lucid moments, Lewis makes Keane a man on edge; you can practically hear him ticking. The question, of course, is whether that ticking is counting down to an explosion, a collapse, or something else. Amy Ryan is great as Lynn Bendik, fragile and angry in her own way. She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and in some ways doesn't seem to be holding it together even as well as William. It's a very real performance, cringe-worthy at times, but nothing ever rings false. Just as good is young Abigail Breslin, perfectly guileless as Kira. There's nothing over-precious about her. Which, from what I gather, is sort of writer/director Lodge Kerrigan's stock in trade. This is his third film, and like his first (Clean, Shaven), it deals with disturbed and desperate people without romanticizing or flinching. It makes for an uncomfortable watch, but also a spectacle that it's difficult to look away from. Things can go terribly wrong, especially once we start to think that William is starting to get his crap together, even though his growing calmness always seems to come hand in hand with questions about his grip on reality. Unnerving to watch, but very satisfying. Likely-dead EFC link Touch the Sound * * * * (out of four) Seen 23 November 2005 at The Brattle Theater (Recent Raves) The promo copy sums this movie up: Evelyn Glennie is one of the world's most talented and renowned percussionists, despite the fact that she is profoundly deaf. It's a natural, immediate hook that would make for an immensely frustrating movie if Glennie was a less charismatic screen presence. Fortunately, she holds up her end of the movie while director Thomas Riedelsheimer documents her with both great appreciation and his own artist's touch. Ostensibly, this is meant to be a document of Evelyn Glennie and Fred Frith recording a new, totally improvised album in a German building set for demolition. That's only a small part of what we see, though - Ms. Glennie spends time performing on the streets of New York, teaching drums to a deaf teenager in a Glasgow school, giving a concert in Fuji City, Japan, and visiting with her brother at the family farm back in Scotland. You can tell by the changing hair colors that the movie was filmed over a considerable amount of time, and then pieced together in a non-linear manner. Well, not quite non-linear; the scenes of Fred and Evelyn in their "studio" start with their arrival and seem to continue more or less in order. But since this is a documentary about the here and now, rather than the progression of Evelyn's life or even the evolution of her work, Riedelsheimer mixes things up, not giving us any hints about the order in which these threads occur. He's not trying to tell us a story, but trying to give us a snapshot, so the question of where Evelyn is at point A and point B or how her life changed in between is irrelevant. So, he finds which moments work when placed adjacent to each other and stitches them together that way, even if it means jumping halfway around the globe and back again. He is extremely good at shooting good-looking footage, too. Riedelsheimer serves as both his own cinematographer and editor, and what's really striking is how well he integrates chaotic and decidedly un-photogenic environments into an absolutely gorgeous film. It helps that this is probably not the sort of documentary whose storyline and focus evolves during filming and editing; Reidelsheimer probably knew from the beginning what sort of movie he would wind up making. It lets him frame shots off-center or with a distant focal point to create striking images, or poke around to find them. This is no small achievement; it takes a concerted effort to find beauty in a fish market, a run-down farm, and a hollowed-out industrial building. A great deal of this comes from Evelyn Glennie's enthusiasm for her art. The only moments during the movie where she does not appear outright enthusiastic are the interview segments, where she becomes a mere talking head trying to describe indescribable things - how turning off her hearing aid allows her to "hear" better with her entire body, for instance, or briefly dropping into the sort of artist-speak that can make a general audience feel stupid. But when we get to watch her, we get it. We see her demonstrating the method of listening with one's skin and hands to a deaf student. We see her open a box full of different objects to try on a type of Japanese drum she apparently wasn't familiar with. But mostly, we see her play, in both senses. She's a performer, and her music is both lively and skilled; she applies great technique to the most basic way we have of making music. But it's her way of playing in the other way that unleashes the most delight. Every chaotic place she goes has new things just laying around, items of different shapes and sizes and materials, that will make new and different sounds when you hit them with a stick, or bow, or brush. Parts of the building in which she and Fred Frith are recording have strong echoes, but where other musicians may shudder at the idea of introducing that kind of randomness and distortion into their work, these two find that echo to be just one more exciting toy to play with in order to make music. Watching this movie didn't really make me truly understand how Evelyn Glennie hears differently than I do; my brain's too hard-wired to get auditory data from the eardrums to process all but the crudest sympathetic vibrations coming from the rest of my body. I envy her ability to perceive the world in a way I can't. Still, I think I understand her delight in finding a new sound: I felt something I imagine must be very similar watching this movie. Likely-dead EFC link Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic * * ½ (out of four) Seen 26 November 2005 at Kendall Square #1 (first-run) Someday, hopefully someday soon, somebody in Hollywood is going to figure out how to use Sarah Silverman. Whenever she shows up on a talk show or other event where she's not playing a character, she comes across as smart, sexy, playful, and funny. Whenever she tries to play a part, though, I always get the nagging feeling that she should be better than what we're seeing on-screen. Such is the case with Jesus Is Magic, a short concert film with skits and musical numbers interspersed. Here, her character is an exaggeratedly self-centered comedienne who jokes about grim or controversial subjects but has all the capability for understanding and empathy of a spoiled brat of fourteen. The humor comes from the audience recognizing that it's an act, or the realization that deep down inside, we all look at the world from a perspective of "how does this affect me?" Or at least, it does about half the time. Ms. Silverman's got good comic timing, and some of the bits where she gets off the stage and does a skit or number have a sort of exuberant absurdity. It's a good thing, because a brief post-credits scene demonstrates very clearly that it's not just what you say, but how you say it. Indeed, for material that involves casual racism, callousness, and vanity, it's mostly how you tell it, because the joke itself isn't very funny. And that's okay, I suppose. I suspect an audience member's reaction to this movie depends heavily on how much the meta-joke, or whatever you call it, works for him or her. Once you get past "oh my god, she's making jokes about 9/11" to "it's funny because a self-absorbed character like her would feel harder hit by finding out something's not low-carb than a massive terrorist attack", several later bits are kind of just re-iterations: "Oh my god, she's making jokes about AIDS, but it's kind of funny because..." And so on. She's not a complete one-trick pony, but she does go to trick number one quite a bit. Not a bad movie, and it walks its tightrope well - not the one between being disrespectful and being funny, but the one between courting controversy and recognizing that doing so can be a cheap trick. The Constant Gardener * * * ½ (out of four) Seen 26 November 2005 at Kendall Square #9 (first-run) City of God knocked me on my ass, in part because it was so unexpected - I generally don't expect to find amazing films at the secondary venue of a second-rate film festival. So, when I saw director Fernando Meirelles's name attached to The Constant Gardener, I was more than a little excited. I was also a more than little nervous, though - he wouldn't be the first talented director to make a great movie in his backyard but stumble when suddenly working on different continents, in new languages, with more money than was available in Brazil but also many more expenses. Fortunately, these added challenges only mean that Meirelles makes a movie that is more likely than not the best film playing at the multiplex rather than a debut masterpiece. That's all the more remarkable to me considering that the source material is a novel by John le Carré; what I've read of him has always struck me as pretty dry. Besides, it means he'll be spending a lot of time working with upper-class English characters, who have a reputation for displaying less emotion than Brazilian street kids. Take Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes). A proper English gentleman he is, pursuing a career in the foreign service, his life is totally in control until he meets Tessa (Rachel Weisz). A fiery activist, Tessa doesn't quite awaken Justin's slumbering idealism, and given all the time she spends with handsome African doctor Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Kounde), it may seem that their marriage is one of convenience - a beautiful wife to accompany him to formal events and a diplomat husband to provide cover and access for her investigations. And maybe, at times, that's how it works; marriages can fall into patterns where there's little visible passion. The film opens with an event sure to clear out the cobwebs, though: Justin identifying Tessa's body. The official explanation is bandits, but Justin's not stupid; he knows about the drug company Tessa was investigating, and he's not going to let her death be for nothing. I wonder at what point the disjointed timeline was introduced in the filmmaking process - was it in the original novel, Jeffrey Caine's script, or was it Meirelles's idea? It's an interesting choice, because it makes the flashback segments almost wholly emotional rather than informational. We know what Tessa is investigating fairly early on, and we know where it's going to lead her. When we see those segments, we see them as they must be in Justin's memory - full of missed opportunities to say "I love you", to get out of the garden he meticulously tends to assist Tessa with her passions, etc. What's interesting about Ralph Fiennes's performance in the "second half" - the portions that take place after Tessa is killed - is how he manages to to simultaneously increase Justin's determination and despair. They're not two emotions one normally thinks of as re-enforcing each other (an inverse relationship is more typical), but it makes him a much more interesting character than the reserved, protocol-following man of the "first half". It's beautifully tragic, really - as Justin becomes more admirable, he simultaneously becomes more an object of the audience's pity. Rachel Weisz and Hubert Kounde have simpler roles, as idealists out to do The Right Thing for Africa, but that doesn't make them less important; we have to believe in them, Tessa especially, for Justin's quest to hit home. Ms. Weisz, especially, does a nice job of being Fiennes's opposite in terms of outspokenness but at the same time being his equivalent emotionally. In terms of how she really feels about Justin and, maybe, Arnold, though, she can be just as reserved as Fiennes, and that makes the quiet moments when this is revealed more quietly powerful. After them, though, the cast falls more into the realm of quietly competent, with Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Gerald McSorley et al doing the shady-but-unfailingly-proper thing (it actually takes a while to sort out which characters are which). Pete Postlethwaite turns in a nice performance as a doctor with a great weight on his conscience. It occurs to me that I've been able to get nearly to the end of the review and only tangentially touch on the film's ostensible plot - investigating a drug company that is using Africa as a laboratory and dumping ground for spoiled drugs. Although it's not as important an element as Justin's emotional journey, The Constant Gardener does okay as a get-angry movie. Another cast and crew could remake it as such with a love story in the background and wind up with a movie just as good. It's actually kind of a negative; there's a line in the credits about how the story is fictional, but what really goes on would turn your stomach. I wonder if, perhaps, the producers meant to make a more overtly political movie, and wound up sacrificing that intention for a more romantic drama. If so, at least they created good drama. There's plenty of movies that try to be both idealistic and dramatic but manage neither. That, at least, is a trap The Constant Gardener never falls into. Likely-dead EFC link Pride & Prejudice * * * ½ (out of four) Seen 26 November 2005 at AMC Fenway #8 (first-run) There's just too much Pride & Prejudice around. That modernized, transcontinental version with Aishwarya Rai was just in theaters, what, six months ago? One of my former roommates left behind a DVD of an A&E mini-series that can't be too many years old. The IMDB shows a few others. I've got no particular issue with remakes and new adaptations per se, but does it really need to be done more than once or twice a generation? Ah, well. At least this is a nice iteration of the story. That story, of course, is that the five Bennet sisters need to find husbands, but can't afford much of a dowry. New neighbors and their wealthy friend may provide an answer for oldest sisters Jane (Rosamund Pike) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), but there's also the chance of intrigue and heartbreak. Jane is quickly taken with one Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods), and he seems to reciprocate, while a more antagonistic chemistry appears between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen), Bingley's dour friend. In the meantime, a distant cousin arrives looking for a wife, as does an old friend of Darcy's - though Darcy is far from pleased to see him. If I had to guess what made this story so appealing that it has been adapted so many times since Jane Austen first wrote it, I would guess that it's how the Bennet sisters collectively present all the various traits a young girl may find within herself in a more or less positive way: Elizabeth is highly intelligent and independent-minded. Jane is a romantic, overflowing with love to give to the right person. Lydia and Kitty are excitable, impulsive, and boy-crazy, while Mary is awkward and unsure of where her strength will lie, though confident she'll have one. It's a story that can hook young women early, with the strong craft needed to stay appealing after the teen years. Keira Knightley's protagonist is strong-willed and independent enough to not come across as too passive for a modern audience to identify with but still a believable product of her time. Screenwriter Deborah Moggach and director Joe Wright pace things pretty well. It's an adaptation of a novel with a whole bunch of characters, but manages to spread things out so that almost everyone makes a solid impression. I'm not sure exactly why you need both Lydia and Kitty Bennet, but the book's got five sisters, so... The various threads connect well enough, although the movie does at times feel rather episodic, occasionally making little jumps in time and location that sometimes seems anything but the most reasonable course of action. Then again, it may have seemed reasonable two hundred years ago. The trick, I think, is striking the right balance between ritual and romance. The courtship process may sometimes seem devoid of passion, but it also lacks lies, pretending to something you're not, or uncertainty as to what the next step should be; it's like the grand, screen-filling dances scattered throughout the film, engaging despite how precisely choreographed they are. Still, the story is about matches that get made for reasons other than expediency - the quick attraction between Bingley and Jane and the more reluctant, negotiated respect that forms between Darcy and Elizabeth. Their mating game has rules, but they are rules where one can win as well as lose. The cast is agreeable. Keira Knightley's Elizabeth could very easily be a teenager in today's world, smart enough to recognize the world's unfairness but not nearly experienced enough for that sort of cynicism to have made a permanent home in her heart and frightened off any romantic notions she may have. Jane, meanwhile, is made pleasant and admirable by Rosamund Pike despite not being as ambitious or modern as her sister. MacFadyen is handsome yet grumpy as Darcy, while Simon Woods has an easy, laid-back charisma as Bingley. Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn give good support as the Bennet parents - Sutherland is just a big, slobby hulk of a guy who would refuse his daughters nothing if he had anything to give, while Blethyn makes Mrs. Bennet the type who must run a household with specific goals. Also having very specific ideas is Dame Judi Dench as a rather imperious noble who can't quite see the worth of the Bennet girls beyond their humble station. Pride & Prejudice is an oft-told story, but for good reason: It holds up better than a lot of other two-hundred-year-old novels about young women. Stick a cast this good in it, and you're in business. Likely-dead EFC link

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Sort-of-real life: Capote and "Tennis, Anyone..."

Donal Logue & Kirk Fox's Q&A after the Monday fund-raising screening of "Tennis, Anyone...?" at the Brattle may be one of my all-time favorites, if only because no-one asked the "how much did this cost" question. And when Logue brought money up himself, it was in a refreshingly humble way - mentioning that it cost half a mil, and mocking people who said they "only" had $4M to make their movie ("can you get that out of your ATM? No? Then that's a lot of money!"). I wish I'd remembered to bring something to be autographed, since my brother Dan is a big Grounded For Life fan. But, then again, Dan works for the Portland WB affiliate and probably had opportunities before now.

It was cool, though - Logue mentioned that he saw a lot of great movies at the Brattle when he went to Harvard back in the eighties, so he seemed enthused about this being a fund-raising screening, and imploring us to spread good word of mouth on his movie (probably the only time I can remember host Ned Hinkle ever suggesting people go to Kendall Square). He'll be hosting another fundraiser there on Sunday, for one of the charities mentioned in the movie. It's pretty decent, and worth a look.

Independent films like this are why I'm kind of excited at seeing what will happen when HD-quality camcorders start to take off. Logue mentioned that they got the film free, and did a lot of shooting sans permits, but what it costs to make a movie is sort of mind-boggling to me - this shot for just seventeen days, with Jason Isaacs, Stephen Dorff and Danny Trejo the only thing close to name actors who weren't partners in the film's production (Paul Rudd seems to have been doing an uncredited favor for a friend)... And between camera rental and everything else, it still cost five hundred thousand dollars. That's a lot of money, but the day's coming when you'll be able to produce an HDTV-quality movie on consumer equipment. How much will something like this cost then?

Anyway, a cool/not-cool about Rick Fox.

COOL: Not shying away from saying that Jason Isaac's prick of a character was based on Tom Siezemore.

NOT COOL: Hitting on the college girl sitting right behind me. I mean, dude, you just made a movie mocking Hollywood stereotypes here.


Oh, and I also wrote a review for Capote.

Capote

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2005 at Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (first-run)

When we first see Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his popularity seems very odd, even for the crowd he runs with. He's schlubby and self-centered, and his jokes aren't nearly as funny as his voice. Capote the man draws attention less for being attractive or charismatic than for being peculiar and appearing utterly indifferent to his effect on people. Capote the film, being so focused on its title character, has much the same appeal.

As the film opens, Capote has grand plans for his next work, a "nonfiction novel" , though the right story to use as a basis eludes him. He finds inspiration in the story of a gruesome crime in Kansas, with an entire family killed by two intruders. He travels there with childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who serves as a buffer between small-town people and the thoroughly citified Capote, gathering information wherever he can, whether it be from Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), the crime's lead investigator, or Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), one of the accused. He finds Smith's personal history quite similar to his own, and helps to fund the killers' appeals - though his motives are more complicated than sympathy for someone with a similar background.

Read the rest at HBS.

"Tennis, Anyone...?"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Special Fundraising Screening)

There's no getting around that a chunk of "Tennis, Anyone..." is autobiographical. The thing that entertainment news addicts will remember as having actually happened doesn't happen until almost the very end of the movie, but even before before then, the film is filled with a number of characters, situations, and digressions that don't really become story-critical at any point. It hands together, though, doling out two funny bits for every philosophical one, and pulling together at the end.

Danny Macklin (Donal Logue) and Gary Morgan (Kirk Fox) are actors who meet up shooting a direct-to-video movie in Mexico. Danny's been at it longer and is at it full-time, while Gary has a day job as a tennis pro, having once been on the tour. Danny mentions that he used to play in high school, and they promise to stay friends after the movie wraps. They don't see each other until a year later, when Danny's got a popular sitcom and a failing marriage, and Gary suggests Danny join him at a celebrity tennis event. One of those leads to another, which leads to another, and another...

Logue and Fox not only star as fictionalized versions of themselves - the characters' backgrounds match those of the actors - but also served as producers, collaborating on the screenplay, with Logue directing. Friends and family show up in small roles. Since they made it well outside the studio system, they dodge the need to conform any specific template, and can leave in scenes that would be the first to hit the cutting room floor (I can see a studio executive yelling "what is all this 'RIA' stuff Gary's talking about his dad saying? And what's with the guy building a mountain?").

It does mean that the leads aren't, perhaps, as sharply defined as they would be in other movies. Logue and Fox are, for the most part, playing themselves, and when you're doing that, the temptation both when writing and acting is to put down what you'd do in real life. Thing is, people in real life are fuzzier than people created for a two-hour movie, so the characters don't necessarily have these very specific behaviors that the audience can identify and use as shorthand. This is a bigger problem with Logue's Danny than with Fox's Gary; Gary is the one who does wacky things like deciding his character should die in a scene, despite already having shot a later scene, or taking Danny to a strip club a week at a rather inopportune time. Danny's the straight man, getting put into ridiculous situations and flailing. Also, Danny's job as a sitcom lead, and thus the work-related stress, is a bit hard for most of us to grasp - fifty thousand dollars and episode probably sounds pretty good to most of us, but the job obviously only middling success in his chosen field. Rick used to be a pro tennis player, but we see him working at a country club and wanting to be an actor. It is, I think, easier to relate to trying to break in than having broken in.

The other characters they encounter on the "celebrity tennis circuit" have clearer purpose within the movie. Jason Isaacs's Johnnie Green is the villain, a hateful and arrogant sitcom star who has made the leap to features and is a little too "on" for the crowds. Kenneth Mitchell is his soap-star double partner. Stephen Dorff and Paul Rudd are tennis-loving stars of country music and pornography, respectively, and Maeve Quinlan is the former pro covering these events for The Tennis Channel. It's a joke on these celebrity charity events that it's always the same people at every event (kind of like John O'Hurley in the real world), and they come off as something between eccentric and pathetic.

It's a funny movie, though, with Danny seeming to find himself in a series of bizarre situations, from a disastrous stand-up bit where Green convinces him to dress in desert gear to tell racist jokes to the inevitable revelation of just who his wife was sleeping with. It's astonishing how grounded this movie is, with its Hollywood setting and string of weird incidents. Credit to Logue and Fox for hitting a nice balance.

And, most amazingly, no-one takes a tennis ball to the groin until the last act. That it happens is predictable, but satisfying.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

And it's official

Thirty-nine movies, seventeen at the Brattle and twenty-two elsewhere. Only guy who filled his card and that's good for the most points (if not the most money). Won myself a new iPod Shuffle.

I'm kind of glad it's over; one more week and I'd have been going to Rent and Yours, Mine & Ours.

Happily, it looks like things are looking up for the Brattle. Ivy said that they expect to have raised $200k by the end of the year, which is short of their original plans/expectations, but they think it's good enough to go to the landlord with. Which is good for everyone.

The Final (?) Movie Watch-a-Thon Recap

Movie seen at the Brattle: (12/3) Darwin's Nightmare.
Movies seen elsewhere: (12/2) Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, Aruzza (if allowed) (12/3) The Passenger, Ushpizin, Jarhead, (12/4), The Polar Express: The IMAX Experience, Aeon Flux, What's Going on at Circus Beely? (if allowed).
Money pledged so far: $50 entry fee + $64 flat donations + $10 x (17 Brattle Films + .5 * 21 to 23 other films) = $389.00 to $399.00
Why the Brattle Theater Matters
Details on the Movie Watch-a-Thon
Where to send cash in support
Mail me if you'd like to pledge some dollar amount per movie

So, that's the apparent final tally. The wrap-up party is tonight at 5pm, so I'll see how impressive an achievement that is. 38 to 40 movies in three-plus weeks isn't bad, though from what I gather there were folks much more enthused about signing up donees than I was, getting the thousand needed to refund their entry fee a week or two ago.

Now, I'm bushed. The combination of last night's 11pm movie and this morning's 10am one has me juuust a bit worn out. A ten-movie weekend doesn't seem like doing much (even if there is a fair amount of walking involved), but I'll be quite happy to get on a somewhat less intesne schedule. Especially since I've seen a lot of less-than-exciting stuff lately. King Kong can't come soon enough.

EDIT: And, of course, if you've pledged something, it's time to pay up. If you pledged $1/movie, that's $28.00; the multiplication is pretty easy (let's assume Circus Beely counts and Aruzza doesn't. Aruzza is only 72 minutes long (but there were folks in the audience who couldn't take that!) and was kind of an adjunct to Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That. And I won't be seeing Circus Beely until 7pm tonight.

Anyway, Here's that link again.

Friday, December 02, 2005

I'm running out of movies to see.

Seriously. At some point this weekend, I will probably see the likes of Rent, Aeon Flux, and The Polar Express in order to try and fill the Movie Watch-a-Thon card. Yours, Mine, and Ours is not out of the realm of possibility.

The big, prestigious Oscar-bait movies really can't come soon enough. I'm dying here. There's a snowboarding documentary opening on two screens in Boston this weekend because there's nothing to see. The AMC MovieWatcher newsletter has information on three movies from India in limited release. You can't tell me that this would be the case if Hollywood or the indies had something more exciting than Aeon Flux coming out this week.

The Movie Watch-a-Thon Recap:

Movie seen at the Brattle: (11/30) Key Largo, (12/1) The Maltese Falcon.
Movies seen elsewhere: (11/29) Aelita, Quen of Mars, (11/30) Shopgirl.
Money pledged so far: $50 entry fee + $50 flat donations + $9 x (16 Brattle Films + .5 * 15 other films) = $311.50
Why the Brattle Theater Matters
Details on the Movie Watch-a-Thon
Where to send cash in support
Mail me if you'd like to pledge some dollar amount per movie

The Latest Reviews:

A History of Violence

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 November 2005 at Arlington Capitol #2 (second-run)

There's an temptation, when discussing movies like Ghost World, The Road to Perdition, and now A History of Violence, to deliberately omit references to their "graphic fiction" roots (to use the newest term employed by people who don't want to use the phrase "comic book"). If you like the movie, you don't want to turn people off by having them immediately compare it to Batman & Robin, or even the good examples of the spandex genre. Even if you like comics as a medium, and regularly gobble up as much autobiography and crime as brightly-colored action/adventure, you might just shrug and think, hell, I don't want to fight this battle again. And maybe you shouldn't; looking at the finished product, A History of Violence is an excellent movie regardless of the quality or form of its source material.

But, on closer examination, several of the qualities that make it unique appear to come directly from the graphic medium. Take the strikingly individual character designs, like Ed Harris's ruined eye or the pair of thugs whose hotel robbery opens the movie. Consider the graphic violence, a bit less stylized than what you'd find in Sin City, but still willing to linger on the blood & guts because it makes a striking visual. Notice how some sequences play out without words, while the dialogue is quick and punchy, like it has to share a three-square-inch panel with the action. None of these techniques are unique to comics, of course, but the look and feel does set it apart from other films.

Read the rest at HBS.

Walk the Line

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2005 at Loews Harvard Square #1 (first-run)

My mother and her parents like country music, unlike most of the kids I knew in the Maine suburb where I grew up. Because of this, I tended to dismiss whole swaths of music as boring, because I was a kid and this was stuff old people listened too. So, it wound up taking me far too long to recognize the actual coolness of folks like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash.

Cash, as this movie will tell you, grew up a dirt-poor sharecropper in the deep South, put in some time in the Air Force, married his high-school sweetheart (Ginnifer Goodwin), then moved to Memphis hoping to break into the music business. He succeeded, but the time on the road and the drugs he scored there destroyed his marriage. On the plus side, it's there he meets June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), who will become his muse, his on-stage partner, and the love of his life.

Read the rest at HBS.

Derailed

* * (out of four)
Seen 19 November 2005 at AMC Fenway #6 (first-run)

Do so-called thrillers get much more tedious than this? I don't think so. Sure, there are examples of the genre where the production values are worse, or the script is more egregiously stupid, but that variety is more likely to feature uninhibited trashiness, or the type of plot twist that causes jaws to drop in disbelief, rather than simple head-shaking. [i]Derailed[/i] never gets near the sublime, and only briefly manages the ridiculous.

Some Damn Fool (Clive Owen) with a Beautiful Wife (Melissa George) and a Sick Daughter (Addison Timlin) meets cute with a Sexy Lady (Jennifer Aniston) on a train. They flirt, meet up for lunch a few times, and soon find themselves looking for a hotel. Just as they're about to do something their spouses really wouldn't approve of, a Violent Frenchman (Vincent Cassel) bursts in, knocks Some Damn Fool stupid, and has his way with Sexy Lady. She, of course, doesn't want to report it, fearing reprisals from her Unseen Husband, even when the Violent Frenchman opts to blackmail Some Damn Fool, demanding he deliver to him the money he and Beautiful Wife have saved to buy medicine for Sick Daughter. Is Some Damn Fool going to take this? Of course he is. But will he take it twice?

Read the rest at HBS.