FilmSnobby Reviews

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Oh, why not.

[5/10 · 30 April 2006]

Hm. THIS is what we've been missing, right? Another cinematic adaptation of a Jane Austen novel! And, by all means, let's adapt Austen's most obscure, least-read work: "Pride and Prejudice"!

Let's face it, Joe Wright's film has a lot going against it from the outset. I couldn't rouse myself to go see it when it was in theaters last year: the prospect of being utterly bored (ANOTHER Austen adaptation?) certainly encouraged the notion that I could wait to see it on a rainy afternoon at home. And the actual execution of the film hasn't entirely dispelled the boredom, as this material is so well-worn that you could almost recite it in your sleep. The cinephile can only think back with gratitude to the example set by Stanley Kubrick, who, after realizing that he couldn't get enough financing to make the film about Napoleon that he had wanted to make, turned to an almost-forgotten novel, "Barry Lyndon", by Thackeray. There are scores of 18th- and 19th century novelists whose works we've never read. Filmmakers: surprise us, for God's sake!

The good news is, Wright & Co. DO surprise us by making an adequately entertaining movie, despite the long odds. Much of the film's success has to do with Austen herself: stick with her (meaning, her themes, her interpretations of her characters, her narrative) and you'll be all right. Screenwriter Deborah Moggach pulls off a marvel of ruthless synthesis with her script. You feel that nothing is really left out; the highest points in the story are raised and illustrated with care, even if the richness of the details must perforce be excised. We're also grateful that Wright, Moggach, and their editors stick to their guns in terms of brevity. The fact is, a 3-hour movie would still be too short, and those rich details would still need to be cut -- therefore, it's eminently sensible that the filmmakers keep the length to just over 2 hours. The only plot element that seems to suffer from this otherwise praiseworthy effort of getting to the point is Elizabeth's flirtation with Wickham. Even if Wickham was always just a tool to get Lizzy's mind off of Darcy, he needs to be a bigger tool than what's evident in the five minutes of screen time the character is afforded here. In other words, he needs to be a real romantic possibility for Lizzy, and his lies about Darcy need to be deeply believed by not just her, but by us, as well. (Austen was a wicked plotter!) The romantic suspense gets lost, to say nothing of Austen's commentary on the predatory social climbers of her time.

All that remains are the performances. Matthew Macfadyen doesn't convince as a proud young grandee. He's morose enough, I suppose, but is also too clearly love-struck to fool Lizzy (and us) about his character and motives. Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennet seems too sloppy and too amiable: we never get the sense of deeply-felt irritation which is at the root of Mr. Bennet's sardonic witticisms. Tom Hollander as Mr. Collins affords a pleasant surprise, investing this character -- too often hammed-up as a slimy buffoon -- with a fussy little dignity and even a certain amount of decency. (Austen had always implied that if he was good enough for Ms. Lucas, then surely WE can tolerate him.) And two of Great Britain's grandest actresses, Brenda Blethyn and Judi Dench as Mrs. Bennet and The Lady Catherine De Bourg respectively, are so well-suited for their roles as to render pointless any discussion of their portrayals: they're both perfect, obviously.

The revelation here, what makes this movie ultimately worth watching, is Keira Knightley in the lead role. Let it be said at once that a Star is born. Ms. Knightley displays a screen magnetism that heretofore had only been hinted at, for one thing; for another, she provides her interpretation with just the right admixture of tenderness, intelligence, and steel. Is she too young for the part? Actually, no: Elizabeth is 22 in the novel, as I recall; Knightley was about 20 during filming. (Her tender age makes her performance all the impressive!) Critics have complained about her girlishness, the giggling, and so on, but I for one thought that Jennifer Ehle from what women the world over call the "Colin Firth Mini-Series" produced by A&E came across too often as an experienced wife of a dozen years with children playing in the backyard. Knightley is far more plausible as an inexperienced young woman just past 20 who is nonetheless smart enough and tough enough to withstand the interrogations of the fearsome Lady Catherine. It IS possible for one of literature's greatest feminist characters to be YOUNG, just as Austen wrote her.

5 stars out of 10.

Independent Lens: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Season 8, Episode 22

American Dream.

[4/10 · 29 April 2006]

(Firstly, I'd like to thank those who've asked to me to continue reviewing. Busy life and all, what can I say. Anyway, here you go.)

Alex Gibney's documentary *Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room* was probably made too soon, considering what I've been reading in the "New York Times" . . . which is that Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling have excellent prospects of dodging major jail time (I'm writing this 4/29/06). Also, the documentary was completed before Enron's accomplice (well, one of them), accounting firm Arthur Andersen, managed to get the Supreme Court to reverse on a technicality a lower court's successful prosecution of them. Meaning, it's a little too soon for mouthing I-told-you-so's from a scenic plateau while peering down on all the hubris-racked executives. Tsk-tsk all you like -- I prophesy minimal accountability from the jackals who operated Enron. Do you think that one of the pipe-line workers featured in the film is really going to get his $300,000 401(k) back? Dream on, idealists!

In any case, *Enron* makes a convincing, if not exactly fresh, case against the deregulation of essential societal needs such as gas, electricity, and broadband, among other things. The documentary asks Americans a fundamental question: Is it okay with you if companies make mind-boggling profits from services you need to get you through your daily life? As a corollary, I'd ask a few more questions: why is it okay that other utilities AREN'T routinely privatized, such as water? Sewers? Road construction? Police and fire? Many "public services" and utilities USED to be privatized many years ago, of course -- what makes gas and electricity different?

An infinite amount of money is the answer. Gibney tells an age-old tale here about the inevitable tendency of wealth to pathologically concentrate itself in the hands of compulsive sociopaths. Blah blah blah -- not a lot new here, folks. I'm not sure we really NEEDED a documentary telling us that Lay, Skilling, and Fastow harbored a King Midas complex -- methinks this was already self-evident from the news of the past 5 or 6 years. The psychoanalysis offered by many of the talking heads (two of whom wrote the book on which this film is based) is in the worst sort of Leon Edel manner: as trite as it is unrevealing. We learn that Skilling took a coterie of his top executives and other pals on "extreme adventures" such as dirt-biking trips in order to overcome, collectively, what the writers suppose is a nerd-complex.

Who cares? The meat of the film -- not touched on NEARLY enough, by my lights -- is how the very nexus of power in this nation, from the banking firms on Wall Street to their servants in state and federal governments, enables and even depends on the pathological greed of bad boys such as Lay & Co. If it makes you feel patriotic, you can call this, as the filmmakers do, the "dark side" of the American Dream, but I aver that such behavior IS the American Dream. Our country depends on organizations like Enron to do its dirty work (i.e., enrich the clever at the expense of the not-so-clever, fund the campaigns of politicians, et al.). When we see more than 90 investment firms sign on to the clearly unethical scams of Andy Fastow, we're reminded that our nation was founded by a bunch of rebels, criminals, and other glamorous types. Spare me the encomiums about the Good People in the Heartland of Kansas -- they never ran things in this country. Andy Fastow is the culmination of America itself. Deal with it.

The movie's hottest stretch is in dealing with how Enron's traders made calls to power-plant operators in California: "Hey, can you provide us with an incident? We need you to shut down." "Okay," is the response. And thus energy prices skyrocketed, making millions for Enron and nearly bankrupting California. But this is really bigger than Enron, isn't it? The larger point for the power-brokers in Washington and their energy company masters was that an elected governor who was unsympathetic to deregulation became the fall-guy for one company's skulduggery. An ex-movie actor, as compliant a puppet as you could please, replaced the governor . . . BY POPULAR DEMAND, via a voter recall! All of which puts the lie to Lincoln's hopeful observation that you can't fool ALL of the people, ALL of the time. Oh, yes you can.

This documentary is not really illuminating for the perceptive folks out there, but it is compelling in a mean sort of way, rather like the figures it centers around. 4 stars out of 10.

The Searchers (1956)

A classic by John Ford; would've been a masterpiece if directed by Sam Peckinpah.

[7/10 · 9 January 2006]

. . . but then, didn't Peckinpah more or less "re-direct" *The Searchers*, over and over and over again? Most of the elements of the "revisionist Western" are already here, in 1956: a true anti-hero as portrayed by John Wayne; the taste for mindless violence exhibited by most of the characters; the bald-faced presentation of racism in the Old West, and how the historical representation of this fact serves as an indictment on American society as a whole. This movie influenced nearly everyone in its wake: Peckinpah, obviously, but also Coppola (cf. *Patton*), Scorsese (cf. almost his entire oeuvre), Paul Schrader, Sergio Leone (no duh), Tarantino, etc. etc. *The Searchers* still holds up today, but it has a few faults -- not niggling ones, either -- that prevent it, in my view, from being a thoroughly satisfying masterpiece.

Ford's style is bolder here than usual. The film announces itself as a determinedly make-believe affair right after the opening credits, when a huge title-card informs us that the setting is "TEXAS, 1868", and the first shot we see is of Monument Valley, Arizona, through an opened door of a homesteader's cabin. Ford plays around with locales, weather, and even day and night: one moment Wayne and sidekick Jeffrey Hunter trod listlessly through the Arizona desert, and in the next cut they're bundled up in winter furs amidst the snow of Montana or who-knows-where. Sunlight and moonlight seem to be interchangeable, even within the context of one sequence. Ford had apparently grown weary of natural realism, perhaps even of the business of making movies (or simple ones, at least). The film is self-consciously epic, almost to a self-parodying degree. The usual elements of a Ford film -- the tough guy, the tenderfoot who worships the tough guy, the heehawing comic relief, white actors pretending to be Indians, the wearying vistas of Monument Valley itself, are all bombastically exaggerated in *The Searchers*. Even the plot, which is nothing more or less than a man's years-long search, up and down the entire North American continent, for his niece after she has been kidnapped by the Comanches, is indicative of overstatement.

What prevents the film from becoming a baroque failure or an accidental art-house oddity is the presence of John Wayne as the racist ex-Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards. This is Wayne's best role, and he gives it the best performance of his career. In fact, I used to like this film somewhat less than I do now, but several viewings of Wayne's work here have won me over to the film as a whole. Perhaps my own increasing age has helped me to empathize with the crusty old reactionary "Uncle Ethan", a man who has lived long enough to allow life's bitter disappointments to calcify his soul. In any event, it's a magnetic, compelling performance. Wayne is never scarier here than when he laughs at something: even his mirth is aggressive and hateful. Frankly, there is nothing -- not even in *Straw Dogs* -- that compares to the joyous and evil glint in Wayne's eyes when, after a member of the rescue party desecrates the grave of a dead brave, Wayne says, "Why stop there?" and commences to fire bullets into the dead Indian's eyes. Or when Wayne says he'll keep going after the Comanches "just as sure as the turning of the Earth." Or when Wayne commences slaughtering buffalo so that the Comanches will have little to eat in winter. I'm rather shocked that Ford convinced Wayne to take this role on: it's a near-repudiation of everything Wayne believed in. By which I mean, Wayne was always the GOOD guy. In a typical Wayne movie, his character would say to a guy planning to shatter a dead Indian's skull, "Hey, never mind that -- we got work to do." Not Ethan. He LIKES that sort of thing.

Thank God for Wayne, because the rest of the cast -- with the exception of a spirited Vera Miles as Hunter's long-suffering fiancée -- is well-nigh atrocious. Jeffrey Hunter does not cut the mustard as Martin. (Too bad James Dean was already dead.) In fact, he's so bad here that he drags my rating down 2 stars by himself. Natalie Wood as the kidnapped niece, dressed in face-paint and fringed Comanche gear, is no paean to credibility, either. But the guy playing "Mose" is so annoying as to encourage one to hit the fast-forward button. I'm glad Ford found this sort of retarded, heehawing hayseed bit funny, but that's no solace for the rest of us. I put up with Andy Devine in *Stagecoach* mostly because the rest of the cast wouldn't let him finish a sentence, thereby minimizing the damage. No such luck with "Mose".

7 stars out of 10.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Gus and Call, 100 years later.

[3/10 · 7 January 2006]

I found this movie to be over-hyped, but I'm nonetheless glad that it was made, as it is truly a landmark film that NEEDED to be made for the mainstream American audience. The movies have been demonstrably successful at raising social consciousness on a variety of issues, and consciousness-raising is clearly called for on the subject of homosexuality in the United States in 2006. *Brokeback Mountain* is a landmark film because it is, as far as I can tell, the first mainstream Hollywood gay romance, starring two hot new A-list stars -- Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal -- who happen to be heterosexuals. (As I said in another of my reviews, advances in civilization are always more recent than we think. This one's happening right now.) All this is fine and dandy, but, as with almost all "landmark" films, *Brokeback Mountain* announces itself as a future historical artifact (today, who watches *Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?* out of anything more than historical curiosity?), is weighed down by its own self-importance, and finally cannot avoid preaching at us. The solemnity here gets tedious very quickly. Whenever one of the characters makes a wisecrack, the audience laughs gratefully, being hungry for some amelioration for the self-seriousness that hangs over the movie like a dark cloud. Love can be tragic, of course, but even Shakespeare provided "Romeo and Juliet" with plenty of comic relief.

The movie is NOT about "gay cowboys"; these guys actually begin as gay shepherds. Screenwriter Larry McMurtry, writer of "Lonesome Dove" (among other Westerns of both 19th- and 20th century vintage), knows that the presence of sheep in a Western setting is always an elegiac sign of encroaching civilization. In other words, sheep means that the old macho ways are dying out. I've not read the Annie Proulx novella on which the movie is based, and therefore can't judge her understanding of this milieu, but McMurtry certainly hammers home the deliberately non-tough symbolism: the boys herd untold thousands of sheep during the first portion of the movie. I suppose this is fitting, but like everything else about the movie, it's also heavy-handed. The story is set largely in Wyoming during the Sixties and Seventies: Proulx, who wrote the story before the grisly murder of Matthew Shepherd (that word again!), was certainly on to something with her subject. But McMurtry feels that he must include a couple of scenes of homophobic violence, in case we missed the point.

Meanwhile, McMurtry has trouble constructing a decent narrative out of such episodic material. The first portion sort of meanders, much like the sheep, until the boys finally get on with it . . . and then, the movie can only sort of hop around the next two decades, quite often dwelling on matters of ancillary interest. Do we really need to see Ennis beat up a couple of bikers who are behaving like skunks at the local 4th of July picnic? (Is this supposed to prove he's really not "queer"?) Or watch Jack sell tractors down in Texas? I suppose the filmmakers are trying to provide a wider context to the love affair, but they spend far too much time doing it. For a love story that implicitly trumpets its own boldness, Ennis and Jack spend remarkably little time on screen together after their first job. We catch glimpses of them trysting at their Brokeback Mountain hideaway, gradually getting grayer and paunchier and generally less sexual. I was oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, reminded of *Same Time, Next Year*, just without the fairly interesting conversations between Alda and Burstyn.

I was also reminded of McMurtry's own "Lonesome Dove", of which this film seems little more than a rewrite tailor-made for one of the pressing issues of the moment. Gyllenhaal is Jack/Gus, and Ledger is Ennis/Call. Amazingly, the corresponding character to McMurtry's Western novel dies as well, and, yes, wants to be buried in the place where he found the most happiness in life, which leaves the other character to mull over how he can fulfill his friend's final wish. Oh well, I suppose it IS clever that McMurtry rewrote his most famous characters -- macho as you could please -- as 20th century homosexuals.

All that director Ang Lee can do with this formless, yet grievously "important", material, is film it beautifully, which he majestically does, taking full advantage of the natural beauty of southern Alberta (standing in for Wyoming). I was grateful for that, and for the uniformly excellent performances from the four principals (Ledger and Gyllenhaal, along with Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway as the long-suffering wives). But as much as I enjoyed the notion of the movies' first gay love affair for mainstream audiences being set in Wyoming -- Dick Cheney's home state -- I found *Brokeback Mountain* itself to be poorly executed.

3 stars out of 10 for cinephiles of EITHER sexual persuasion; more stars for whom this sort of thing is a revelation. The more of a revelation it is, the more stars, and the more you need to see it.

Dark Water (2005)

Teenagers!

[9/10 · 4 January 2006]

Don't know about you all, but I've sort of had it up to here with teenagers. Walter Salles' *Dark Water* flopped because of teenagers. The geniuses up the highway from me at the Walt Disney Company tried to market this psychological drama -- in SUMMER! -- to teenagers as a slasher film . . . OOPS. When the teenagers discovered that the film's primary concern was with a troubled single mother, fresh from a nasty divorce and currently embroiled in a custody fight, they lost patience with it (the screen offering no steaming entrails oozing from savagely slashed pregnant abdomens and such) and commenced downloading ring-tones from Katazo on their cellphones in the darkened theaters. The epilogue to the sorry saga of this film's release? The teenagers infest this website with their 1-star reviews and poor grammar and ALL CAPS SENTENCES. Look, I've got an idea: I think it's high time that the folks at IMDb create an entirely separate website -- let's call it "IMDbTeen" -- in which the children can vent their spleen and leave THIS site for the rest of us to discuss movies. And no, banishing the youngsters to the discussion boards won't cut the mustard -- the Ritalin-addicted kids, thumbs sore from their PSPs, have obviously found their way to the review pages. Or perhaps IMDb, which is owned by Amazon, can follow their corporate parent's lead and force teenagers to identify themselves as such -- the rest of us can then ignore their comments.

Pardon the W.C. Fields rant, but *Dark Water* is too good a film to be hijacked by walking pimple sacks, sorry. Here is a great work of art that has been virtually disowned by its director because of the poor box office returns. Hey, Salles, if you're reading this, there's no reason for you to hang your head in shame over this picture. I, for one, appreciated your baroque homage to Polanski's *Repulsion*, and can even state that the performance you get out of Jennifer Connelly actually surpasses Deneuve's work in that earlier film. Connelly thoroughly inhabits the role -- an unglamorous one that asks this beautiful actress to dress in ratty clothes while suffering from constant migraines. She convinces us as a desperate case, both financially and emotionally, and also convinces us that Dahlia is an honest-to-goodness mom (Connelly has a couple of kids in real life, which not only helps, but is a necessity on an actress' resume if she presumes to play this part). And it's not just Connelly who scores in the acting department: John C. Reilly as the superintendent delivers an immortal monologue (mostly improvised, according to the DVD extras) as he offers Dahlia and her daughter a grand tour of the hideous housing project on Roosevelt Island that is the setting of the movie. "Where's the living room?" asks Dahlia. "This is it," effuses Reilly, "It's both bedroom AND living room! It's what they call a DUAL-USE room. Look at it -- it's huge!" Anyone who has ever dealt with a real estate agent will recognize Reilly's canny mix of friendliness and utter untrustworthiness. A-class talent such as Pete Postlethwaite and Tim Roth also make significant contributions as the building's janitor and Dahlia's lawyer, respectively.

But the prime virtue of the film is in the photography and set design. *Dark Water* is that rarest of horror films: it's set in the city. Roosevelt Island, to be precise, that run-down spit of land across the river from Manhattan, encrusted with Soviet-bloc inspired tenement housing. ("The Brutalist style," as Reilly would have it.) Salles' DP has a field day in this environment, getting some nice aerial shots of the brick and cement rat maze, as well as some low shots pointing up toward the tenement towers' imposing height. The weather is usually rainy (the incessant leitmotiv of the film is water, obviously), the sky is gun-gray, smokestacks dominate the horizon, the overall color palette consists of institutional gray, poverty-row brown, icky black, depression blue. The interiors, specifically of Dahlia and Ceci's apartment -- along with the mysterious 10-F directly upstairs -- is a fond homage to Catherine Deneuve's greasy, miserable apartment in Polanski's *Repulsion*, with some nods thrown towards the Coens' *Barton Fink* along the way (especially in regards to the peeling plaster and moist dry-wall and overall dilapidation).

But is *Dark Water* really scary? Presumably, this would be the point. It's probably not scary enough to scare the pimple sacks, but it's scary enough for those who've had to deal with life's most fundamental problems, such as raising a child alone, or finding oneself crippled by either physical or mental handicaps, aggravated by an unhappy past, WHILE raising a child alone. In other words, it's scary enough for grown-ups, who can find terror in watching their children cross a busy intersection. And in any case, Salles delivers a few choice jolts along the way, which I won't spoil. But the genius of the film is in its atmosphere: an unrelenting brooding menace that feeds off of urban misery. *Dark Water* is depressing and scary.

And splendid. 9 ardent stars out of 10.

The Son's Room (2001)

Breaks no new ground; not the slightest bit trendy -- I loved it.

[9/10 · 2 January 2006]

Affecting drama about a comfortable -- perhaps TOO comfortable -- Italian family who must deal with the sudden and unexpected loss of one of their own. *The Son's Room* is directed and written by Nanni Moretti; he also stars in the lead role of the psychiatrist patriarch. After watching the movie, I Googled a bit about Moretti and learned that the Italians consider him to be their version of Woody Allen. This reputation must rest on an earlier satirical body of work, because I found little of Allen's influence here. (In fact, the way this film critiques psychiatrists and analysis in general, Moretti may very well be the UN-Woody Allen.) I guess I'll have to take their word for it, as only two of his films have actually received distribution here in the States. If *The Son's Room* is any guide, we're missing out on a lot.

It's not that the film shows us something "new"; in fact, the case is rather the reverse. American viewers who remember Redford's *Ordinary People* may accuse Moretti of plagiarism, but he can hardly be accused of plagiarizing the hysteria, the hammy overacting, and the evidently sincere belief in the utility of psychoanalysis that constitute the primary elements of that earlier American film. In this movie, there is no hack writer's fantasy about uptight well-to-do WASPs "denying" their grief, or hiding it from their country club friends. *The Son's Room* is a day-to-day chronicle of how a family deals with the grinding course of grief, and, as such, strikes me as an unusual undertaking. Why? Because there are no gimmicks here; no deep, dark secrets; no "ethnic" shrink (one of the Hack Writer's favorite stereotypes) to instruct the family on how to be emotional. Heck, the hero of the film IS a shrink (and they're all Italians!), but these facts don't mitigate the agonizing loss of a child. Indeed, the family suffers the usual episodes of derangement: Moretti breaks things in the kitchen and lashes out at his patients; his wife is inconsolable and banishes her husband from the bed; their daughter gets in fights on the basketball court. Nope, nothing "new" . . . and perhaps this is why *The Son's Room* won the Palme d'Or in 2001. It ain't new, but it's Real.

Even better, the movie is not wholly a slog through depression. The mood is lightened by the scenes in the analyst's office, in which Moretti listens to a parade of neurotics nattering away about their largely non-existent problems: we get the sex-addict; the hypochondriac; the obsessive-compulsive, etc. Obviously one of the film's main functions is to expose the psychoanalysis racket. Even before Moretti's son dies, he never seems inspired by his work, never seems to actually help his patients, and barely contains his boredom. The movie goes out of its way to demonstrate that when issues of real consequence occur, psychiatry offers no anodynes. When one of his patients gets cancer, Moretti -- in a real, unguarded moment after his son has already died -- bitterly suggests that mental attitude has nothing to with the chances for survival. And, of course, Moretti himself finds no professionally applied salve for his pain . . . such amelioration can only come from time, and from his family. Psychiatry is obviously useless in these cases; it works much better when you don't have any real problems.

I want to finish by saluting the fine, naturalistic performances by Moretti, the lovely Laura Morante as his wife, Jasmine Trinca as the teenage daughter, and Giuseppe Sanfelice -- appropriately close-lipped and mysterious, with just the right amount of a 16-year-old's childish mischievousness -- as the son Andrea. I also appreciated the top-notch transitions that Moretti gets from his editor: the scenes tend to end abruptly, jarring us out of a prolonged involvement with the characters and situations, like rude interruptions. This is a fitting editorial style for a film that concerns itself with an ultimate rude "interruption".

9 stars out of 10.

Pickpocket (1959)

The usual Bressonian purity.

[8/10 · 29 December 2005]

Probably the most influential of Robert Bresson's trio of masterpieces from the Fifties (the other two being *A Man Escaped* and, of course, *Diary of a Country Priest*). *Pickpocket* sowed its seeds of influence in the minds of any number of film artists -- Jean-Pierre Melville most notably (who despised Bresson, apparently), whose *Le Samourai* was a mighty struggle against this film . . . and, most completely, writer-director Paul Schrader, who, you'll recall, wrote the *Taxi Driver* screenplay, which was another story about a loner on the outside of societal norms. And it goes without saying that Schrader's *American Gigolo*, which he also directed, is a virtual rewrite of *Pickpocket*, right down to the egregiously plagiarized finale.

The subject of Bresson's film is not nearly as sexy a conception as Schrader's gigolo, though the milieu is equally as sleazy. Instead of preening Richard Gere, we get acting novice Martin LaSalle as the Pickpocket, who wears one suit through the entire film. (Schrader obviously thought he was being clever by giving Gere a large closet stuffed with designer suits). LaSalle lives in a crumbly walk-up flat in Paris, where his books gather dust and the baseboards hide his humble stash of francs and the occasional wristwatch. He has few friends and is too ashamed to visit his dying mother (I won't spoil the reason why). The only pleasure he derives is from his compulsive work as a pickpocket, and it is in these scenes that Bresson stuns us with his martinet control of both narrative pacing and camera placement. The director lovingly shows us the subtle skills of the street thief: the creeping hands, the split-second scams (such as lifting a wallet from a man's suit breast-pocket while standing next to him and pretending to read a newspaper), the choreographed celerity of movement when the thief works with his partners in crime. There's one sequence that follows LaSalle and his two accomplices from a train station all the way to the train, in which they lift about 15 wallets and the occasional purse. The camera-work and editing here is nothing less than sheer mastery -- a ballet of thievery. And let it also be said that Bresson is no slouch when it comes to suspense. It's an intimate and sweaty suspense: will LaSalle's fingers, as they slowly reach into a purse, be noticed?

As might be expected from a French director of the period, there's also plenty of philosophizing to be found here, and in this case, the philosophy is actually pretty interesting. The movie takes as its intellectual parents the ubermensch riff by Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment". LaSalle asks the cop who's on his trail if society's "supermen", even if they choose to be thieves, should not only be let alone, but even respected as an overall benefit to society. (Thus sprach Kenneth Lay!) Obviously, we can mull that over ourselves, but in the meantime, Bresson is not particularly impressed with the "decent" elements of society. The cop is a pompous blow-hard who can offer LaSalle no alternative to his criminality. Bresson is more or less saying that modern society is contemptible: your acceptance of that thesis, and the importance you place on the occasional 100 francs getting lifted from an overfed bourgeois, will ultimately determine your acceptance of this film.

But perhaps its style will bog you down. As per usual, Bresson breaks virtually every rule of the movies. The use of non-actors in the main roles engenders both assets and liabilities: while the avoidance of the typical actors' nonsense is a definite asset, the liabilities occur when Bresson asks his "interpreters" to finally, well, act. There are a few scenes here where the incompetence of LaSalle (he eventually became a fine actor, but he was virtually plucked off the street by Bresson in 1958) will make you cringe, especially when LaSalle is supposed to be angry with someone. There IS something to be said for professionals -- even professional actors. And if none of this puts you off, perhaps Bresson's perverse narrative style -- including scenes in which a character writes down on a piece of paper the following narrative action, to be followed by the character READING what he has just written down, and climaxed by the character DOING just what he wrote and said he was going to do -- will make you scratch your head and mutter something about the arty pretensions of French directors.

And your comments would certainly be justified in Bresson's later productions. But in *Pickpocket*, I feel, the narrative precision, lack of bloat (the movie is 75 minutes long), and broader philosophical questions coalesce into a stringent masterpiece that must finally win your respect. Besides: you gotta love a movie about a pickpocket who never bothers to lock, or even close, his own front door. See? Bresson can even be funny.

8 stars out of 10.

Bewitched (2005)

The *Exorcist II* Syndrome?

[6/10 · 19 December 2005]

Wow -- haven't seen so many 1-star reviews here since I looked on the *Exorcist II: The Heretic* review page. I think Nora and Delia Ephron's *Bewitched* will go down as one of the most reviled mainstream releases since John Boorman's hallucinatory sequel, and for the same reason: in both cases, the filmmakers -- consciously or not -- twit the audience for their collective taste. Back in 1977, audiences were actually expecting something along the lines of "Exorcist, the Rematch: The Devil Strikes Back!", but Boorman delivered instead a Manichean meditation on Good and Evil. And in 2005, audiences -- if the comments here are any guide -- were expecting a more or less faithful movie version of the old television series. The Ephron sisters, in what was perhaps an attack of elitist naiveté, must have asked themselves "But why would anyone want THAT?", and proceeded to make a movie ABOUT a remake of the "Bewitched" series for television. "People will enjoy the satirical situation, and how it reflects the dismal state of creativity in Hollywood," they must have said to themselves.

Unfortunately for the Ephrons, WRONG. Since it appears that the general public actually wanted a faithful "update" of the old TV show for this movie, it then follows that the general public would actually be willing to consider watching a new version of the old show for next fall season's TV lineup. Therefore, this film was doomed from the beginning. I mean, God forbid we don't treat the old "Scooby-Doo" cartoons as an inviolate "text" when we make the next "Scooby-Doo" movie, right? The negative comments about this movie almost always include the notion that the original "Bewitched" series was, in the words of one writer, "an 8-year run of comic genius". If this is your mindset, then I can't recommend the Ephrons' movie -- all I can say is that, from what I've read, the Ephrons loved the series too, but clearly they didn't feel the burning need to treat that old piece of pop-trash fun as if it was Sophocles.

Satire is a risky business, and it hasn't paid (financial) dividends for the filmmakers in this case. But for those of us who don't have some weird emotional investment in the TV show, *Bewitched* is a frothy piece of meta-movie-making, equivalent to a long, cool glass of gin and tonic water on a summer's day. Nicole Kidman puts in a complete comic performance as the witch moonlighting as an actress whose plays a witch on TV. Channeling Marilyn Monroe's snap, she coos and flirts her way through the proceedings without raising a bead of sweat . . . rather unlike her male lead, Will Ferrell, who sweats copiously while simultaneously mugging, screaming, and the rest of it. He plays a washed-up actor trying to reignite his career on the small screen. There's much humor to be had in this situation, that is to say, at the expense of megalomaniac celebrities trapped in their eggshells of ego, sedulously stroked and maintained by "handlers". The Ephrons have written Ferrell some funny lines, too ("Make me 20 cappuccinos . . . then give me the best one"), but all too often Ferrell feels he must SHOUT them. The actor -- not the actual role, which DOES provide empathy with the "Darren" character that the old show never provided -- is the biggest problem with the film. I can understand why he was cast, for there are many sight-gags that require broad comedy, but the Ephrons give him much too much improvisatory rope with which to hang himself.

All in all, *Bewitched* is not a masterpiece, or anything, but it has been unfairly maligned. Let me put it to you this way: which movie would you expect to be more intelligent and witty? -- this one, or another movie remake of a TV show, like, say, *The Dukes of Hazzard*? or *Starsky and Hutch*? See? *Bewitched* doesn't seem so bad now, does it? 6 stars out of 10.

Syriana (2005)

Documentary, please. Failing that, a mini-series, perhaps?

[3/10 · 12 December 2005]

Much of what is wrong with *Syriana* is what was wrong with Steven Soderbergh's *Traffic* -- both were written by Stephen Gaghan (who takes over directorial duties here as well). Mr. Gaghan demonstrates no aptitude for scene construction or characterization. Once again, Gaghan thinks that if writes a dozen little criss-crossing narratives that (sort of) converge at the end, he can attain verisimilitude. On the broad, policy-wonk level, sure; but the diffusion of focus also surely diffuses our personal investment in the characters and plot. He's good at geopolitics, I'll give him that. Much of what we see in the film seems plausible, despite the fact that the oil-rich Arabic country that is the main setting of the film turns out to be fictional. The scenes outside the U.S.A. certainly carry more interest, to say nothing of coherence, than the board-room scenes on K Street. In the case of the latter setting, I must admit that the movie was more than half-over before I could figure out exactly who the hell Jeffrey Wright's lawyer was even working for, let alone what he was actually up to. The bleak deserts that surround some nasty Middle East metropolis (soulless skyscrapers pointlessly reaching upward to a blanched sky) set the atmospheric tone of the picture. Things threaten to become interesting as we watch the feuding young sons of an aging Arabic monarch scramble for the old man's throne, but the movie doesn't spend nearly enough time with them to make the scenes come alive. (More often than not, Matt Damon as the more progressive prince's "economic adviser" is forced to explain to us what's at stake by way of tedious exposition in the form of cell-phone calls to his wife back home.) The narrative about the young Pakistani émigrés in the fictional Arabic country who end up joining a religious school also suffers from lack of oxygen. Again, the situation is more than plausible, helped along by a smooth, friendly, and devout zealot who recruits the boys into a terrorist cell. And again, the movie skims over the dramatic possibilities inherent in the situation. All in all, the movie is a collection of tantalizing tidbits that don't add up to a satisfying whole. Gaghan is too far-sighted; he needs glasses, so that he can FOCUS.

Even George Clooney's rumpled CIA agent fails to connect to us emotionally, which is somewhat surprising since the film is a fictional gloss on the memoirs of an operative named Robert Baer. The only time we really feel anything for Clooney is when he's being tortured by some Lebanese goons. A meticulously depicted scene, this should be mandatory viewing for those 60% of Americans who feel it's okay for us to torture suspected terrorists. Hey -- you want this sort of thing, then you should be able to watch it, baby. Put up or shut up.

Movies with converging story-lines -- *Short Cuts*, *Magnolia*, *Traffic*, *Crash*, to name just a few examples -- tend to fail because they don't spend enough time developing character, which is the supreme value in fiction. If I wanted an analysis of Big Oil's impact on our relationship with Islamic nations then I'd go to the library and rent a "Frontline" documentary on the subject -- I believe they've made several. Mr. Gaghan is clearly a smart individual; he's done his geopolitical homework. Nonetheless, he needs to learn how to demonstrate the General by illuminating the Particular. If he can't do this, then he should put his money where his mouth is and make a documentary about his concerns (maybe "Frontline" would hire him). And if the problem is the running-time constraints attendant upon traditional feature films, then he should make a deal with HBO or something and make a mini-series that would give him enough breathing room to build viable dramatic situations and characters. As it stands here, *Syriana* is a triumph of complexity over art.

3 stars out of 10.

Spanglish (2004)

Dreary exercise in White Guilt.

[2/10 · 4 December 2005]

Anybody can have an off-day, but it's hard to believe that the man responsible for such classic comedies of manners as *Broadcast News* and (to a somewhat lesser extent) *As Good as It Gets* would go on to make *Spanglish*. James L. Brooks' latest film is not so much a comedy of manners as it is a situation comedy for TV, stretched out to faux-epic proportions for the big screen. The characters are TV caricatures, not real people. Adam Sandler plays an L.A.-area haute-cuisine chef whom one critic dubs "the greatest chef in America"; Tea Leone as his wife is a neurotic spastic, incessantly shooting her mouth off, incessantly jogging, etc. (in other words, the clichéd version of the southern Californian well-to-do hausfrau); Cloris Leachman plays Leone's mildly alcoholic mother, a former jazz singer and one of those "quirky" people who exist only in movies and middle-brow fiction with literary pretensions; and newcomer Paz Vega plays the beautiful and saintly Mexican maid with an equally beautiful and saintly daughter.

One might add the qualifying adjective "improbably" to beautiful and saintly. The movie is a dreary exercise in White Guilt: the wealthy and white Clasky family owns the monopoly on petty neuroses, here. Even their kids are screwed up: the pubescent daughter is slightly overweight, which wouldn't be half the problem it is if her own mother would stop reminding her of it; the younger son is apparently plagued with nightmares, but we're not sure exactly why, and in any case the movie sort of forgets about the little bugger for long stretches. Meanwhile, no one in the house seems to resent the perfection of the live-in maid Flor, with her grounded family values, her eye-popping beauty (Vega is a ringer for Penelope Cruz, but without that actress' supermodel hard edges), and her sweet temper, all of which is contrasted against Leone's bratty, self-centered, adulterous, and physically unlovely character. (Brooks makes the poor woman drip snot from her nose for the last twenty minutes of the film, while the heavenly, marmoreal Vega consummates a sweetly platonic love affair with Sandler.) Even the movie's framing device, the Longest Admissions Essay In History that Flor's daughter writes to Princeton, seems like a stacked deck. Since, at film's end, Vega removes her kid from the tony private school that Leone puts her in, we may assume that the girl achieved singular, unparalleled academic brilliance in the gritty public schools of the barrio. How heartwarming!

Counterintuitively, the movie dances around, rather than engages head-on, the issues of class and race in American society. For instance, the Claskys pay Flor $650 a week, if I heard correctly. What a load. $650 every TWO weeks is a more realistic going-rate for undocumented housekeepers in the wealthier enclaves of southern California, and THAT figure is probably still too high. Oh, but that's right, Flor and her daughter are apparently LEGAL immigrants -- presumably, Leone cuts her maid checks which are deposited in a bank somewhere, instead of handing her cash under the table. As a lifelong southern Californian, forgive my skepticism. (If the movie informed us that Flor was undocumented, I must've missed it when I went to the kitchen to get some coffee, and I'll stand corrected if that's the case.) Clearly, insisting that the film honestly depict the uneasy relationships between rich white people and the Hispanic "hired help" may be asking too much.

Which leaves only the various character studies. I've already talked about the women, but I can't finish the review without mentioning the inadequacy of Adam Sandler. Mr. Sandler is not ready for Prime Time. Tentative, hiding behind mannerisms, clearly not directed by Brooks (what -- would YOU tell Sandler, one of the most powerful celebrities in Hollywood, how to act?), he is the person in the film who doesn't know how to speak English. He strangles his dialog with unnecessary dramatic pauses, open-mouthed staring, and a lot of casting hopelessly about in general. Vega Paz is more clearly understood, and she doesn't speak a word of English for the first half of the movie. If Sandler wants to emulate the Saturday Night Live alumni of yore with extending his range as an actor, he'd be well served by doing some Ibsen and the like for a few years with an acting troupe. Since he lacks the depth of natural talent that a Bill Murray or a Steve Martin was blessed with, a lot of hard work -- practice, practice, practice -- is required in order for him to attain the credibility of his predecessors in terms of dramatic roles. When, for instance, Leone informs him of her adultery, Sandler's reaction is cringe-worthy -- he clearly has no idea how to perform the scene. These comments are not as unkind as they might seem. Sandler may be a decent actor someday, but he's not remotely there yet, and someone needs to tell him that -- otherwise, he'll continue to waste his time and our money.

2 stars out of 10. One of the big disappointments of 2004.

Somewhere in Time (1980)

Refreshing simplicity.

[8/10 · 29 November 2005]

This movie's progenitors would include Henry Hathaway's *Peter Ibbetson*, and, oddly enough, Alain Resnais' immortal avant-garde masterpiece *Last Year in Marienbad*. In the former case, *Somewhere in Time* tracks the earlier film's Surrealist credo that love and libido can overcome such mere obstacles as time and space. In the latter case, this movie shares with the New Wave classic a plot about a pair of lovers at a palatial hotel whose consummation is blocked by Time as well as by a domineering husband-slash-Svengali figure (in this case, an arch Christopher Plummer). It's an open question, of course, if science-fiction writer Richard Matheson (who adapted the screenplay from his own novel) and hack director Jeannot Szwarc (director of such auteurist works as *Jaws 2* and *Supergirl*) really had Surrealism or New Wave cinema in mind when they made this beautiful little film . . . though I seriously doubt Szwarc, a Frenchman, wasn't aware of the similarities to *Marienbad*, a film that helped shape an entire generation of European filmmakers. Maybe his idea here was remake *Marienbad* for a mainstream American audience. If so, I think he succeeded, despite the fact that the film flopped upon its initial 1980 release. If nothing else, the fact that *Somewhere in Time* has engendered a cult following that meets once a year at the Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, Michigan (the setting of the movie) and even has a website and a quarterly magazine (!) proves that Szwarc succeeded in whatever he was trying to accomplish.

Because of its rather simplistic nature, the movie defeats detailed analysis. After all, this is a film about a playwright who WILLS HIMSELF BACK IN TIME to 1912, from dreary 1980, in order to be with the woman he loves. Therefore, let's get to the point. The movie would be a colossal failure without two fundamental elements. Number one? A totally committed Christopher Reeve. This is a film that is ultimately anchored by his credible (and likable) screen presence. Reeve must SELL the idea that he's lying on the bed, trying as hard as he can to travel back in time to 1912 . . . and sell it he does. The other fundamental element required to make the film succeed is a preternaturally beautiful woman as the love interest. Enter Jane Seymour, at the zenith of her mind-boggling physical charms, as Elise, the stage actress who captures the playwright's heart. Attired in Teddy Roosevelt-era diaphanous gowns, she is quite simply an ethereal angel here, making it easy to see why the Somewhere-in-Time Fan Club was founded by a MAN.

The movie takes its romance very seriously (no laughs here), and, perhaps for this reason, is itself not taken very seriously. But its earnestness becomes its overriding virtue, making it stand proudly aloof from the fashionable -- and wearying! -- cynicism of our modern culture. Sure, *Somewhere in Time* can be appreciated on an intellectual level: there's the Surrealist angle of the human spirit transcending the limitations of physics; there's the self-referential theatricality of the thing, considering that a playwright and an actress are the protagonists (perhaps the story can be interpreted as the wistful dream of one character or the other or even both). But the movie will mean the most to those who have ever fallen deeply in love, and it will perhaps mean even more to those who lost that love. This movie ends tragically . . . here on Earth. What happens next may only be wishful thinking.

8 stars out of 10. A note on John Barry's score: it's justly famous, but rather wears out its welcome (there are almost no variations to its lovely but quite simple phrases), and quite frankly some of the chord changes reminded me of "Nadia's Theme". I'm not saying Barry is a plagiarist; but composers, more than other artists, are susceptible to "infection" -- what Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence". All I'm saying is that "Nadia's Theme" was ubiquitous in the Seventies, and Barry probably couldn't escape the taint. In any case, the one breather from the endlessly looped score happens to be Rachmaninoff's "Variation on a Theme from Paganini". Rather unfortunately for Barry, it also happens to be one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and puts Barry's own theme somewhat in perspective (i.e., the shade).

Postscript: Speaking of the score, *Groundhog Day*, a later film about time-travel and true love, deftly pays homage to this film when Bill Murray plays a jazzed-up version of the Rachmaninoff piece near that film's climax. Oh, and OF COURSE, speaking of influences generally -- to end where we began -- James Cameron's *Titanic* completely rips this movie off, in mood, time-period (same year! -- 1912), and in even in its finale when DiCaprio and Winslet reunite in glowing white light on the Great Cruise Ship In The Sky.

Goodfellas (1990)

May I differ?

[3/10 · 25 November 2005]

Overrated in 1990, *Goodfellas* has grown even more overrated with the passage of 15 years. It's based on the -- I daresay -- untrustworthy recollections of a half-Irish, half-Sicilian mobster-turned-informant who recently, I am reliably informed, appears as an addled, half-witted guest on "The Howard Stern Show". The narrative arc, if one can accurately term it that, spans 30 years, roughly from 1950 to 1980. This, of course, gives Martin Scorsese every incentive to soak the background with dozens of pop-culture tunes ranging from Bobby Vinton to Derek and the Dominoes. His use of the last 3 lilting minutes of "Layla" as some sort of ironic counterpoint in the extended montage that reveals the corpses of a dozen gruesomely executed mobsters in various places across New York City only underscores his utterly conventional taste in music. One wonders whether Scorsese would've been happier as a Top 40 deejay instead of a filmmaker.

His conventionality -- a surprising development, given his success with such Seventies classics as *Mean Streets* and *Taxi Driver*, both infused with his uniquely individual aesthetic -- extends beyond the soundtrack to the actual movie itself. Lovers of this movie will doubtless be distressed to learn that the various stylistic techniques Scorsese uses here -- whip-pans, sudden freezes that supposedly add ironic punctuation to the narrative, even the use of pop music as commentary on a montage -- all derive from French (yes, I said French) auteurs from the New Wave school of the Sixties and Seventies. These same lovers of this movie would probably also consider Orson Welles to be an overrated old fuddy-duddy, but that doesn't stop Scorsese from pointlessly laying on at least two sequences of long tracking-shots through complicated spatial arrangements without cuts, the device Welles perfected if not wholly invented. (An even less impressive feat for Scorsese, who benefits from the technological advance of the Steadicam. Welles did it with old-fashioned cameras on dollies and hydraulic cranes.) I believe that all these borrowings betray Scorsese's fundamental, perhaps unconscious, lack of confidence in the power of his story, here.

For the screenplay, let it be said at once, is poorly constructed. The narrative focuses on trivial events, like a gofer getting shot in the foot during a card game or Paul Sorvino slicing garlic to atomic thinness, and then presents the world-famous Lufthansa heist through hearsay. The movie's main character, Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, hears a news report about the heist while in the shower. One may reasonably ask why we're in the shower with Henry when we should be in the getaway car with Robert De Niro's Jimmy Conway and his henchmen. This, of course, leads one to reasonably ask why we're not watching a movie about Jimmy Conway instead of Henry Hill, the latter being, more often than not, on the periphery of the movie's main events. Having Liotta narrate the exciting stuff for us in voice-over is no substitute. Indeed, the movie is cripplingly dependent on voice-over narration, perhaps because Mr. Hill's own story, in and of itself, isn't interesting enough to really warrant a honest-to-goodness movie in the first place. As the movie drones on with Liotta's loquacious narrator ceaselessly filling in the narrative gaps, one suspiciously wonders -- for example -- why Hill and Conway are NOT whacked for bumping off "made man" Billy Bats, while Joe Pesci's Tommy DOES get whacked. All three men were involved in the killing, yet only Tommy pays the price. Why? Does Conway's and Hill's Irishness serve as a magical force-field? -- I don't get it. Well, I did say at the beginning of this review that Hill was an untrustworthy storyteller. From the evidence, it appears that Hill was quite conversant with his mob boss's cooking techniques (hence all the time wasted on cooking scenes and shots of gorgeously laid-out family feasts) and far less conversant with the important incidents that are the subject of this film. Note too how inconsistently handled Henry's character is throughout the film: one moment he pistol-whips almost to death a sexual predator who messes with his girlfriend, the next he's aghast when some punk kid gets carelessly killed. Hmm -- smells like self-hagiography to me.

After an overly-edited, chaotic, 30-minute final act in which a sweaty-faced, puffy-eyed Liotta drives around the suburbs, peering up through his windshield at police helicopters, dropping off hot guns, going to the grocery store, zipping back home to make meatballs (AGAIN with the cooking!), and so forth, he gets pinched for good. Under the umbrella of the Witness Protection program, he finally rats out his mob bosses . . . and it occurs to us that this should have been the focus of the film all along, i.e., the FBI's successful eroding of the criminal code using Witness Protection. But Scorsese crams it in during the last five minutes of this 3-hour movie. A little less time in the kitchen and in the shower, and a little more time getting down to business, might have made this movie pretty great.

As it is, the performers give *Goodfellas* undeniable energy, almost mitigating all its flaws. Fans of good New York actors will forgive this movie everything: Liotta, De Niro, Pesci, Sorvino, and Lorraine Bracco do THEIR job, at least. And perhaps this is why the movie is so well-loved. Colorful characters limned by great performances are entertaining. But, in my judgment, the virtues of verisimilitude can't overcome what amounts to a 3-hour-long non-story.

3 stars out of 10.

Shopgirl (2005)

Pathetic chauvinist fantasy.

[2/10 · 13 November 2005]

A strange new cinematic sub-genre has emerged recently: dramas of late-middle-age starring members of the original cast -- the "Not Ready for Prime-Time Players" -- of "Saturday Night Live". Steve Martin's *Shopgirl*, based on his novella, is the latest entry. One wonders, with no small sense of dread, what's going to come next: Dan Ackroyd as a lonely widower facing prostate cancer? Jane Curtin as a retiring waitress who is faced with the choice of either paying her heating bill or continuing her Zocor prescription? Chevy Chase battling a Viagra addiction? It's becoming apparent that Bill Murray's existential angst isn't his alone. The Baby Boomers have officially turned 60 this year. What this means for the rest of us is that we'll have to face old age with them, given this generation's fondness for navel gazing. Expect a slew of movies in the next several years on the topic of aging gracefully or otherwise. We may even have a sequel to *The Big Chill*, in which the characters will make passes at their grandkids' wives or husbands.

For, as Steve Martin makes clear, Free Love is still an option for these aging hippies. He plays Ray Porter, an incalculably wealthy computer tycoon who divides his time between Seattle and Los Angeles. (He jets back and forth between them on a private plane.) While in L.A., he goes to Saks Fifth Avenue and buys a pair of elegant black gloves, becomes smitten with girl who sells him the gloves, and somehow gets her address and SENDS the gloves to her apartment along with a note asking her to dinner. Claire Danes' Mirabelle, a reserved transplant from Vermont, is the perfect prey for this roué. Martin contrasts Mirabelle with one of her co-workers, a classless, slutty Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, the type who would be too cynically wise to actually fall in love with the old man. For, despite Ray's early protestation to the contrary, Mirabelle's adoring devotedness is exactly what he wants out of this relationship of convenience. He can dominate an innocent girl with the unruffled ease to which he's become accustomed.

I'm afraid I'm not buying any of this. Martin quite explicitly makes Ray a monster, but then goes out of his way to make sure that we like him. After all, he takes Mirabelle to the doctor when she's depressed and later on pays off her college loan. Martin then exacerbates matters by having Ray actually verbalize his awareness of his own fundamental indecency: he says things like, "The financial stuff I can help you with. It's the other stuff . . ." and so on. Oh, please. WHY must we like Ray Porter, anyway? Does it have something to do with the fact that he is Steve Martin's creation, perhaps? Never underestimate the egotism of writers.

And to make sure that the 60-year-old seems like a Dream Come True for Mirabelle, Martin conceives his more age-appropriate romantic rival Jeremy (the grotesquely hairy Jason Schwartzman) as a borderline retard with the most obscure profession I've yet seen in film: a stencil artist for guitar amplifiers. Jeremy lumbers around the early portions of the film in slack-jawed idiocy, leaving in his wake, Pig Pen-like, a cloud of body odor and a trail of body hair. He keeps hitting up Mirabelle for money in order to "pay" for their dates. He drives a crappy car. Get the picture? Later in the film, Jeremy becomes a mature adult after listening to cheesy self-help tapes while touring as a roadie with a rock band, the maturity made evident by Schwartzman's shaved face, slicked-back hair, and natty white suit (by a name-designer) that looks to be pulled from the rack of the Miami Vice fashion police. (By the way, what IS it with these type of movies having a recurring motif of self-help tapes? -- cf. *Lost in Translation*. This is something MARTIN'S generation does! The Dot Net kids mock that stuff!) I'm pretty positive that Martin wrote the novella with a possible film in mind in which he would star as Ray -- and, if so, what a stunning display of pettiness, to say nothing of sheer egomania. Some competition, eh? Do Ray and Jeremy really constitute the choices for a beautiful girl in her twenties: a 60-year-old roué and a slacker who behaves like a 12-year-old? You know, French films frequently tackle this subject matter, but the girl is given a reasonable alternative between a still-vital handsome professional in his forties and a good-looking, charming kid. In *Shopgirl*, it's either the suave King Midas of Social Security age or a bum. Give me a break.

Finally, one gets the sense that it's really all about the money for Steve Martin. A lot of name-dropping going on, here: Armani, famous L.A. restaurants (Ray and Mirabelle eat take-out from Spago at Ray's elegantly post-modern house), and so on. Don't forget Jeremy's transformation in that name-designer white suit. Martin couldn't even come up with a fake name for Saks. If he was trying to be satirical about crass commercialism, it must have sailed over my head: the comforts of Ray's life are presented as a glamorous option for Mirabelle, if she just plays along. Martin, in a third-person narration, sums up the action of the film at the end by suggesting Mirabelle would have stayed with Ray if he had loved her just a bit more. Turns out that, to modify Paul McCartney, money can ALMOST buy you love. It never occurs to this Baby Boomer that a healthy, wholesome, decent young woman might want to build a life with someone her own age. *Shopgirl* is a pathetic chauvinist fantasy that isn't as aware of this fact as it thinks it is.

2 stars out of 10 -- the second star earned by some occasionally fanciful direction by Anand Tucker.

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987 TV Movie)

Now more than ever.

[9/10 · 8 November 2005]

For close to a decade we simply pretended that it never happened. We lost. It was a mistake. But by the Eighties, the United States, strengthened by distance from the event, spent a lot of cultural capital expatiating the Vietnam War: tell-all books; magisterial policy summaries; sordid and violent fiction; meticulous PBS documentaries; TV dramas (remember *China Beach*?); the magnificent work of art that is the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial; and, of course, movies. Aside from that great and powerful Wall, I believe that this humble HBO documentary, *Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam* is perhaps the most artful and cogent assessment of the War. 86 minutes in length, it boasts entirely historical footage from both NBC News archives and soldiers' own video, the urgent and timeless rock music of the period, and, of course, the soldiers' letters to their loved ones back in The World.

The letters, ironically, reveal the only blemish to this wonderful film: the somewhat misguided decision to allow celebrity actors to read them. Funnily, most of these actors were "veterans" of Vietnam War movies: Tom Berenger (*Platoon*); Robert De Niro (*The Deer Hunter*); Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn (*Casualties of War*), Robin Williams (*Good Morning, Vietnam*), Martin Sheen (*Apocaylpse Now*), and so on. One can't shake the feeling that the stars must have felt a kinship -- unearned, obviously -- with the average joes who wrote the letters. When you suddenly hear the instantly recognizable voice of, say, Robert De Niro, you are necessarily taken out of the visceral experience that the movie creates. Although I honor the big shots' intentions (they took no pay for this), their services weren't really required, here.

Thankfully, the selections are brief enough so as to minimize any thespian showboating. And this brevity highlights, rather than diminishes, the eloquence, humor, desperation, and meaning of the soldiers' words. They write about the day-to-day routines of camp, the abject terror of hacking their way through elephant grass wherein the unseen enemy lurks, the beauty of an improvised fireworks show (miraculously caught on film, providing a visual accompaniment to the letter), the seedy delights that await the next R&R excursion in Saigon, the despair of losing your best friends in battle, and so much more. Visually, the film may be even more impressive: there's some amazing footage of bombardments, mortar attacks, firefights right in the midst of the action, and the day-to-day horseplay in camp. Perhaps the most stunning footage was shot in Khe Sanh: a group of besieged Marines, anxious to fight, depressed at being shut in, hair slowly growing to mop-top proportions, wax philosophically about their situation even as that situation grows worse day by day. (Ultimately, there were 77 of those days.) Occasionally, their forced calm gets rattled by a devastating mortar attack on their ramparts from the Viet Cong. Just amazing footage. Of real historical value, too. Speaking of amazing and historical, the North Vietnamese footage of American POWs gingerly celebrating Christmas while in custody will haunt you.

On the periphery of all this found footage, director Bill Couturie keeps a chronological record of the Big Picture, with the assistance of the archives of NBC News. (He somehow located the video of the first 3,500 troops who landed in country in 1964!) On each December 31, title cards inform us of the growing death and casualty tolls suffered by American troops -- by the end of 1968, these numbers have grown to horrifying proportions. Couturie doesn't delve into the background of the conflict, and rightly so: this is the soldiers' story, not a thesis paper by a policy wonk. What does emerge, however, is the utter helplessness of those in command, from LBJ to General Westmoreland to Richard Nixon. One gets the sense that our leaders were trapped in a policy of their own devising. No way out. No victory forthcoming, no matter how many bombs we dropped. A war feeding itself; a self-perpetuating machine. These small-minded men clearly had no solutions -- none, at least, that would salvage enough of the nation's honor to mitigate the whole misbegotten enterprise.

Boy, this all sounds familiar, doesn't it? -- read the news lately? Oh well. Santayana's advice about history is always cited and never followed. In any event, this Veteran's Day (three days from now as of this writing), I'll watch *Dear America* -- now on DVD -- with my father, a Vietnam veteran awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and even a yellowing certificate of Merit from the long-gone South Vietnamese government. For many years, he, like the rest of country, couldn't talk about the war. Now, he looks back on it with wonder, sadness, and pride. For those GenX children of surviving Vietnam Veterans, consider how lucky you are if your Dad was one of the lucky ones to get back to The World alive, and listen, listen, listen. These men and women have much to teach us, now more than ever. *Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam* can help get that conversation started. Thank you, Mr. Couturie, for this important film.

9 stars out of 10.

The Samurai (1967)

Sublime strangeness.

[10/10 · 31 October 2005]

I'm going to go ahead and suggest, in my meager way, some reasons as to why Jean-Pierre Melville's *Le Samourai* is one of the greatest movies ever made, but it's far, far better for you to experience the film for yourself. You now have no more excuses: Criterion has just released it on DVD -- though, puzzlingly, this film doesn't get the deluxe double-disc treatment that the somewhat inferior *Le Cercle Rouge* received. Whatever -- I'll take it.

Simply put, *Le Samourai* justifies -- beyond argument -- the auteur theory in cinema, which states, more or less, that the most artistically rich movies are "authored" by their directors. And how much more enjoyable it is for the viewer that the author in this case, Melville, is mostly concerned with entertaining you! Those who dread the prospect of a French film from the Sixties can rest assured: no Godardian slap-dash cross-cutting, here; no lolling around in bed with a girl, smoking cigarettes and spouting tough-guy Marxism; no confusing back-and-forth displacement of narrative time, a la Resnais. Oh, Melville was a New Wave director, to be sure, but he was NEVER an experimentalist in terms of narrative. Take a film by Godard, even his most famous film, *Breathless*: you have to meet Godard on his own terms, or get left behind (your loss!) But Melville pours his stories into your glass neat, no ice, no intellectual mixer. *Le Samourai* is about a gun-for-hire named Jef Costello (Alain Delon). His job is to eliminate a nightclub owner. He does so, but is witnessed leaving the scene of the crime by the club's piano player (Cathy Rosier). Later that night, during the police round-up, he's taken in as one of 400 or more potential suspects. The cops can't make it stick to Costello, but the superintendent (Francois Perier) isn't fooled by Costello or his airtight alibi. And thus Costello finds himself under police surveillance, and meanwhile, his criminal bosses want to rub him out in case he squeals to "le flics". In other words, the actual story is simplicity itself, and is frankly ripped off from all the B-movie American noirs that Melville loved so much.

But none of this explains the stark originality of the movie. Of course, Melville gets some help. Let it be said that Delon is so good as the hunted hit-man that it almost defies description, let alone praise. Reportedly, he took the part after Melville had read to him the first 7 or 8 pages of the script. "I have no dialog for the first 10 minutes. I love it -- when can we start?" Delon is supposed to have said. Luckily for Melville, he found a kindred spirit in Delon, who, in any case, must have recognized the potentially iconic performance he could pull off if sympathetically directed. And boy, did he pull it off: NO ONE, in ANY movie, has ever been cooler than Delon's Costello. The movie was released in 1967 -- the Summer of Love -- but here's Delon anachronistically dressed in a single-breasted suit and a fedora, and getting away with it. (Well, okay, everyone else is wearing a hat, too, but this IS a Melville picture.) As for the performance itself, it bears comparison to Dirk Bogarde's Aschenbach in Visconti's *Death in Venice*: both roles are virtually silent yet must convey multitudes in a glance, in a movement, in a slight widening of the eyes. This is acting at its most meticulous, most physical, and most compact. Costello hardly ever says anything, but we're totally compelled by him, thanks to Delon's tight control. The influence of this character and Delon's performance has been nothing less than torrential: Pacino's Michael in *The Godfather* may serve as an obvious example.

But much of this owes to Melville's original conception, as well. If Shakespeare needs good actors to carry his plays over, then good actors need Shakespearean-level material to reach their best performances. Melville, as always, flavors his pulpy stews with his own fevered artistic ingredients, the foremost of which is own idea of masculinity taken to the insane extreme. Tainted with Japanese samurai films, American gangster films, and westerns as well, Melville concocts a character whose every act is an expression of pure existentialism. The ultimate result is that frisson of sublime strangeness we as an audience encounter whenever we come face-to-face with a deeply considered and unique artistic vision. The best art is really weird, yet recognizable and unforgettable. *Le Samourai* is among the best art.

10 stars out of 10.

North Country (2005)

Boy, those miners are really MEAN!

[4/10 · 30 October 2005]

The feel-good feminism of Niki Caro's *Whale Rider* from a couple years back becomes a passionate tirade in her new film, *North Country*, based on the landmark sexual harassment case involving miners in the northern Minnesota iron mines. The class action suit was apparently brought in the late Eighties, and finally wrapped up in 1998 -- which may explain why Caro and her screenwriter Michael Seitzman decided that it might be a good idea to simply fictionalize the whole affair. Can't make a movie about briefs being submitted to a court over a period of a decade, I guess. Despite the fictionalization, the movie serves as a timely crash course on how recent the legality of women's safety in the workplace actually is: the characters in the film watch clips from the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings. Sissy Spacek snaps the TV off in horror after Ms. Hill describes Thomas talking about his own penis. These hearings occurred, I believe, in 1991. So, kids, the federal laws on sexual harassment don't date back to the era of black & white TV: "back in the day" was, like, 15 minutes ago. Advances in civilization are always more recent than we think. I can certainly remember the effect of the mining case on my own workplace, even though I'd never heard of it: by the mid-Nineties, we were marched off to sexual harassment sensitivity trainings and were barraged with xeroxes on the subject, to be appended to our Policy Manual. What had seemed like simple common decency had apparently never before been buttressed by the law.

Perhaps because these wounds are still raw, Caro, in depicting this material, goes for the Hollywood Prestige Picture approach, much like Jonathan Demme did in his approach to AIDS with *Philadelphia* back in '93. The signposts are huge and easy to read; the heroes are virtuous sufferers; the villains are pasteboard meanies; the issues are never ambiguous. In other words, *North Country* is simple entertainment, and it succeeds quite well on that level. Even so, I do think that Caro trowels on the villainy rather thickly. We expect to see macho jerks in an iron mine, but the guys in this film are heathen savages, looking and behaving like a San Berdoo motorcycle gang in the grips of a three-day booze-and-meth binge. They literally play in excrement (smearing obscenities on the women's bathroom wall with it) and, in what is probably the first depiction of semen in a mainstream Hollywood film, spray themselves in the women's lockers. Meanwhile, the grab-ass games, adolescent potty-mouth insults, and violent threats are unrelenting from punch-in to punch-out. They don't even let the girls take a pee break, for goodness sake. During all this, we don't really get a sense of Charlize Theron's day-to-day work duties at the mine. Apparently, it's just one terrifying pile-on after another.

Maybe this is just as well for Theron the actress, who admittedly excels in extreme situations. A big, bold actress, dangerously beautiful, she attacks the Powerful Moments with great confidence, leaving all that subtlety stuff to the rest of the top-notch cast, which includes the likes of Spacek as her mother, Richard Jenkins as her father, Frances McDormand as her union rep pal (with a toned-down *Fargo* accent), Sean Bean as McDormand's injured husband, an atypically credible Woody Harrelson as the lawyer who takes on Theron's case, and Linda Emond as the mine's attack-dog defense lawyer. Also, take note of Michelle Monaghan as Theron's co-worker Sherry: a Rising Star, if I may prophesy. *North Country* is ultimately made watchable by these great actors, even if their parts are diagrammatic in the extreme. The obvious case here is Jenkins as Theron's dad: for most of the film he's forced to be an unfeeling, heartless character, who stews in shame about his daughter and doesn't support her when she's suffering at the mine; conveniently, he does an about-face at the union meeting hall, bringing down the house with a great speech that castigates the greasy-haired apes in attendance ("I don't have a friend in this room!"). Jenkins' tone-perfect line reading makes it easy for us to swallow what is otherwise a prime example of Hollywood malarkey of the first order. Say much the same for the rest of the cast's work in relationship to the movie as a whole. *North Country* is ultimately justified by the actors.

4 stars out of 10. Nice Dylan tunes on the soundtrack, incidentally -- though a movie called *North Country* surely required the immortal "Nashville Skyline" version of "Girl from the North Country", in which Johnny Cash duets with Dylan. Such an inclusion would've lifted my rating up to 5.

Capote (2005)

The Truman show.

[9/10 · 22 October 2005]

Philip Seymour Hoffman, who we first noticed in *Scent of a Woman* some 13 years ago when he turned a fairly clichéd character into a memorable character study, finds his apotheosis -- some would say his inevitable apotheosis -- as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller's *Capote*. The writer died in 1984, and furthermore had spent the last 15 or so years of his life in relative seclusion, if you disregard his addled presence at Studio 54 and the occasional "Tonight Show" appearance. Therefore, to someone like myself, reared in the Seventies and Eighties and carrying no burning memories of the fellow, the exactitude of Hoffman's mimicry of Capote is neither here nor there. This is, above and beyond any caviling about how precise Hoffman's impersonation is of Capote, a full-bodied, well-rounded character, whose primary interest in serving the film is to make us consider the wages of art.

Older members of the audience, by which I mean those who remember the Sixties, may be forgiven a degree of burn-out: after all, there was Capote's book "In Cold Blood", the movie on which it was based, and the writer's own self-referential celebrity. Been there and done that? Not quite: this time, we view the story ABOUT the story from the writer's perspective. It is a credit to Gerald Clarke, who wrote the book on which the film is based, Dan Futterman, who wrote the screenplay, and director Miller that this well-worn material becomes urgent and interesting again. On a wider social level, *Capote* makes a damning statement about our current fascination with "true crime" stories, which had been reinforced by Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song" in the Seventies and has finally become noxiously regnant with cable TV's endless hours of coverage of the Peterson case and others like it. I'm not suggesting that people were not interested in this tawdry material before Capote, but the movie implicitly blames him for the shameless modern-day intertwining of writers (or TV reporters) with the crimes and criminals that they're covering. The movie also has something to say about how self-centered writers can be: Capote can only say "What's the fuss all about?" in reference to friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee's success with "To Kill a Mockingbird". After watching Smith and Hickock get hung for their crimes, Capote whines, "I'll never get over it" -- to which Lee (played by the great Catherine Keener) replies with deadpan malice, "You're still ALIVE, Truman." Amen!

However, Capote's self-pity also contains the mere truth. *Capote* is the tragedy of a man who scrapped his own decency in order to write one of the great American novels of the 20th century. We observe the incremental milestones along the path toward greatness and damnation: Capote ingratiating himself with the Kansas locals; befriending the more sensitive and intelligent of the two murderers, Perry Smith; helping to arrange appeals for the murderers so that they'll stay alive long enough for him to collect enough information to finish his novel; smoothly lying to Smith about what he's actually writing about the case, even down to the book's title; and finally living with the consequences of his exploitative behavior. Art is achieved with devastating cost to the artist. Of course, this theme isn't exactly new, but Philip Seymour Hoffman makes it visceral with a performance containing a kaleidoscope of human behavior: cocky and in his element with his high-brow drinking pals in New York; smooth and charming as the "funny fag" stereotype (modeled on characters in the Thirties' films of Ernst Lubitsch and others) in Sheriff Dewey's home; gentle and nurturing to, and even spoon-feeding, Perry Smith during the latter's attempt at suicide-by-starvation in prison; abruptly turning the tables on Smith when Smith continues to remain close-mouthed about the night of the murders. This latter scene, in which Capote lashes out at his subject in that carefully modulated castrato voice of his, will go down in the annals of film history as perhaps the prime example of just how much contempt one human being can demonstrate to another. Granted, Perry Smith was an abomination of a man who deserved execution . . . but Hoffman's icy contempt still stabs us. Inhumanity is not always physically violent.

A difficult film. You will walk out of it feeling uncomfortable and contemplative. There's still some time remaining in the calendar as of this writing (10/22/05), but I doubt I'll see a better American movie this year. 9 stars out of 10.

Two for the Money (2005)

Don't bet on it.

[1/10 · 12 October 2005]

Another entry in the Pacino-As-Mentor sub-genre. You know the drill: young hotshot with hubristic flaw (in this case, Matthew McConaughey, trying to jump-start a flagging career by latching onto Pacino's coattails -- hey, it worked for Keanu and Colin, didn't it?) is discovered by glamorous and delightfully corrupt father figure (Pacino, natch). Young Hotshot learns from Father Figure all the ins-and-outs of a lucrative yet degrading career (this time, it's football handicapping). Father Figure plies Young Hotshot with money and hookers and power, but we all know that this decadent state of affairs is on a collision course with dissolution and despair . . . that is, until the Young Hotshot finds his moral center by rejecting the Father Figure and all, or almost all, that he stands for. (Clearly, Stone's *Wall Street* pretty much set the ground rules for the Pacino-As-Mentor sub-genre.)

We are also meant to take these latter-day Pacino films as a parallel to reality. Again, you know the drill: Living-Legend Actor demonstrates his unquestioned superiority as compared to an Inferior Young Actor. The latter may bear and grin through the process, but he must recognize that he isn't going to get any of the good lines, much less get a chance to chew major scenery before the denouement. Now it must be said that there are actually two good movies in the Pacino-As-Mentor canon: *Scent of a Woman* and *Donnie Brasco*. In the former case, it was a one-man show, anyway; in the latter case, Pacino had met his match as a scene-stealer in the person of Johnny Depp. However, those two movies were serious-minded, not merely an exercise in showboating for showboating's sake. Pacino has made damn certain that his younger co-stars in the films since *Brasco* are nowhere near as charismatic as Depp. By the way, none of this speaks very well about the Living-Legend Actor. Like his contemporary De Niro, Pacino has spent the last 10 or 15 years resting on his laurels. *Two for the Money* is the worst example yet, worse even than *Devil's Advocate*, which at least had the virtues of featuring a naked Connie Nielsen and being chronologically prior to this movie. Well, this is what happens when you're crowned King too damn early -- just ask Marlon Brando. Frankly, I've seen one too many Al Pacino films with the same plot -- and the same overacting from the star -- to be charitable any longer. Did I say "none of this speaks well"? Actually, it's humiliating for everyone involved, including the paying audience. No one's going to accuse Matthew McConaughey of being a Shakespearean actor, but even he doesn't deserve the role of second-fiddle to this intolerable old show-off, with the added implication that he, McConaughey, will never measure up to the Greatness That Is Al.

I've not wasted space on the plot particulars. If you want a synopsis, IMDb provides a no-nonsense summary, though I think I laid out a fairly comprehensive summary in my opening paragraph. Basically, you've seen this movie before. Many times. The particular milieu in *Two for the Money* is the seedy world (underworld, really) of sports handicapping. Pacino runs an office of "bet advisers" -- that is, middlemen between you and your bookie -- and even has a cable TV handicapping show, co-hosted with several of his top guys. One thing the movie got right was the sleaziness of these type of shows . . . but one detail they got dead wrong was the constant use of the words "gamble" and "gambling". If you've ever seen ProLine or other shows of similar ilk, you'll NEVER, NEVER hear Jim Feist and his cohorts say the word "gamble". They ask you to call their 1-900 number to get their picks . . . but if you were from, say, Mars, you'd have no idea what you were supposed to do with those picks. "Gamble" is the F-word on sports-handicapping TV shows -- strictly verboten.

Gambling is against the law, you know.

1 star out of 10.

A History of Violence (2005)

Seed money for the next project that Cronenberg REALLY wants to do.

[3/10 · 5 October 2005]

While watching *A History of Violence*, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching little more than a violent revenge-fantasy, of the type usually promulgated by nerds. The chatty denizens of IMDb confirmed my suspicion: it turns out that the movie is based on a COMIC-BOOK. Oops, sorry -- "graphic novel". I suppose the title should have been the giveaway, for "graphic novels" tend to have pretentious titles. Pretentious, sub-literate text and pretentious drawings, too, but that's neither here nor there. The larger point is that whoever wrote this tawdry tale -- and I'm sure he -- and I'm sure it's a "he" -- is revered as a genius in Comic-Con Land -- is clearly re-working the Hulk story from Marvel Comics: mild-mannered David Banner-type goes berserk, dispatching two bloodthirsty nut-cases who hold up his Small Town, Indiana, diner. "You won't LIKE me when I'm angry," as Bill Bixby pointed out more than once.

So Viggo Mortensen turns out to be amazingly, and unbelievably, competent in hand-to-hand combat and with firearms, firing a Glock 9 like a ten-year veteran of Special Forces, U.S. Army. Otherwise, he's utterly normal, a family man with a pretty wife and two kids. He is, in other words, the perfect "graphic novel" hero: a man whose "superpowers" or "dark side" or what-have-you stretch far beyond the point of credibility. Which wouldn't be so bad if "graphic novels" weren't otherwise drearily realistic. "The Hulk" comics series never pretended to be anything more than fantasy. But we're actually supposed to buy the characters and situations of this "realistic", "graphic novel". The viewer, meanwhile, will roll his eyes in exasperation when it's revealed that Mortensen might have once been a hit-man for a Philadelphia crime-syndicate who ran away from "the life" some twenty years prior. An Irish-mob enforcer? Please. Have you ever seen hit-men? Remember Sammy "The Bull" Gravano or whatever his name was? Or what about those fat, out-of-shape creeps we all saw standing around on the sidewalk with Gotti, courtesy of those FBI surveillance tapes? A mobster's only muscle is his gun. But in *A History of Violence*, Mortensen is still in Strider Mode, in perfect physical condition, still combat-ready after twenty freaking years. I don't buy it, guys.

Maybe I'm getting hung up on the plot, when I should be praising Cronenberg's "daring commentary" on Violence In America, for that's what the majority of the professional film critics seem to be talking about. Which is disheartening, incidentally. Now I've read some of the reviews at IMDb, and some of the smart folks here -- amateur critics, and the more honorable for it -- have already pointed out that Cronenberg's presumed thesis about the inevitability of violence is rendered hypocritical by his absolute GLORYING, his unabashed WALLOWING in the violence he throws up on the screen. Yes, the blood is more copious than in the usual action picture; the effect of bullets tearing into flesh and bone SEEMS to look realistic (though who knows or wants to know?); when someone gets his nose smashed deep into his own skull, it looks genuinely ugly and the camera lingers on the view in a tough-minded fashion. So what? Does Cronenberg really think he's above the fray? If his plan is to pander to the lowest common denominator of an audience which KNOWS it's being pandered to, well, he's still pandering. Clever, self-reflective "knowingness" doesn't absolve him -- or us. This movie belongs in that special group of films like *A Clockwork Orange*, *Irreversible*, and a few others, in which the director and the audience make a cynical pact to exploit each other's festering desire to take a holiday from civility, allowing one and all to indulge the baseness of our common natures even as we rationalize this immature behavior by sprinkling high-minded phrases like "violence in our modern culture" like so much intellectual sugar over the whole bloody mess.

Presumably, Cronenberg signed on to do this lazy hack-work in order to get his next *Spider* or whatever made. Fine, but we have to live with this one in the meantime. I'm giving it 3 stars, instead of 1, out of 10 because, though inherently contemptible, it's also competently done, in terms of narrative brevity, camera placement (especially during the action scenes), and the startling pair of husband-and-wife sex scenes: Cronenberg makes us ponder a rowdy, lustful 69 scene early in the film when Mortensen and Bello are happily married, and a "hate-f--k" scene on hard wood stairs when they're not so happily married later in the film. Been a while since we've seen such married carnality. We might, in fact, have to go all the way back to Roeg's *Don't Look Now* to find it. Perhaps Cronenberg's next picture -- the arty one I'm sure he really wants to make -- will be a remake of *Eyes Wide Shut*. The two scenes here are more shocking than Kubrick's final opus in its entirety.

The Shootist (1976)

"I'm a dying man, scared of the dark."

[8/10 · 30 September 2005]

An odd thing for the Duke to say, but then *The Shootist* is an odd movie when viewed from most critical angles. The movie is just damn unusual, but given the circumstances -- the final performance by one of the most famous actors (one of the most famous Americans, really) in all history -- a truly unique effort was required. Wayne had already had a lung removed before the movie was shot, and during the shoot was having heart trouble. It was clear that the man didn't have too much longer to go (though he surprised everyone by sticking it out for 3 more torturous years), so the director and the writers reshaped the well-regarded old pulp Western novel on which the story is based to fit the living legend like a glove. The results are fairly glorious, but keep the slight caveat in mind that it's a one-man show, here.

And what a man! Recall that Wayne had once befriended Wyatt Earp (yes, THAT Wyatt Earp) on the back-lot of MGM Studios back in the late Twenties. I'm not sure if that really means anything, except for the notion that if Wayne merited the opprobrium of the Achilles of the Wild West, then Wayne himself must have been infused with a mythic touch as well. In many ways, this sense is made clearer in his final film than in any of his others. Despite how obviously unwell he is, there's something lordly, almost god-like, about his presence here. And, for once, and despite the lordliness, the Duke is entirely lovable. Gone is the reactionary, crotchety posturing of such late-career films as *The Green Berets* and *True Grit*. In *The Shootist*, the actor is facing much more compelling circumstances that changing political and social attitudes. Impending mortality apparently made him serene enough about the small stuff that he could take the post-modern Seventies head-on, climbing aboard the revisionist-Western bandwagon with absolutely no difficulty.

And this IS a post-modern Western, despite the cozy late-Victorian interiors and Wayne standing in for all the Old-Fashioned Values. One can only shake one's head in disbelief when Wayne says things like, "A man should be able to die privately" -- our knowledge of the actor's condition makes a meta-fictive mockery of the dialog. On the other hand, the well-earned sentimentality plays a harmonious chord with the post-modern cinematic ideas about the Old West. Don Siegel directed this movie -- a post-modern enough guy, I suppose, but even so, not the most intuitive choice for this relatively non-violent project, though there are occasional splashes of Peckinpahian bright-orange blood, and Siegel DOES evince his usual editorial brilliance with the exciting final shootout in the bar. Speaking of the climax, its ambiguity is startling: Wayne, after dispatching his final foes, ends up shot in the back by a bar-keep. And what final screen image of John Wayne does Siegel give us? Wayne dead on his back in the bar, covered in a blanket, isolated in death, with ironic commentary provided by a gilded stand, in the shape of an eagle, for a potted plant standing a few feet behind the corpse. Preceding this, Ron Howard's character has tossed away the pistol he used to exact revenge on the bar-keep. Wayne nods in philosophical assent just before he dies. What does this mean, anyway? -- a repudiation of the actor's own legend? Had Wayne become a "peacenik"? Who knows. The ambiguities, in any case, are strange and marvelous. Art, in other words.

Just a quick note on the more mundane aspects. The production design is top-notch. Filmed in Carson City, NV, the scouts clearly noted that particular town's unsullied architecture -- Carson is a place that has stayed firmly rooted in its aesthetic origins. There are many subtle touches, such as when the bar-keep has to turn on the ceiling fan -- powered by a rotary leather belt -- with a long stick that resembles a pool cue with a small wrench at the tip. The multifarious and ungainly-looking telegraph poles are appropriate, as are the tremulous "horseless carriages" from circa 1901. All of which, of course, underscores the idea that Wayne's character is way out-of-date, an absurd final remnant of a vanished breed. But magnificent for all that, regardless. Finally, several other Golden Age heroes -- Lauren Bacall, James Stewart, and even John Carradine (who had played Wayne's rival in *Stagecoach* almost 40 years prior) -- provide loving support, even if their roles aren't characters as such, instead showing up as mere satellites that orbit around the Duke.

*The Shootist* belongs in that special, and very small, group of films -- like Huston's *The Misfits* -- that allow us to pay our respects to performers who not only portray what is best and worst in our own selves, but indeed shape our entire popular culture. A must-own if you care about the movies. 8 stars out of 10.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

Not brilliant; but plants a few ideas in the multiplex.

[5/10 · 19 September 2005]

For those who madly overrated Fernando Meirelles' *City of God* from a few years back, this new low-key adaptation from a John Le Carre novel (I know, I know -- "low-key" and "Le Carre" are synonyms) will likely be a disappointment. Myself, I found *The Constant Gardener* to be an improvement, though not enough of an improvement to warrant a whole-hearted recommendation. But it's fairly involving and occasionally intelligent, which naturally puts it above the other mainstream movies currently inhabiting the multiplex.

Let's dive into the faults first. Actually, first a word to the fire-breathing Free Market Warriors dutifully parroting the talking-points from their preferred right-wing AM radio programs: the "thriller" (I use that word in a technical sense) part of the plot of this movie is NOT far-fetched. Big Pharma (and, to be fair to the Free Market Warriors, Big Government, too) has utilized human beings as guinea pigs more than once. I'm not going to belabor this review with links -- Google it, pal. Sometimes, lab chimps just don't cut the mustard. And the obvious riposte to those on these pages defending the saintliness of Big Pharma is that drugs are tested on people EVERY DAY in clinical trials. Does the average hard-up undergraduate or senior citizen padding his Social Security with a $100 payday have the all the knowledge about a particular drug's side-effects? One may reasonably ask if the fictional pharmaceutical company depicted here ("Three Bees") is doing anything fundamentally different. Where I'd AGREE with the Free Market Warriors is that maybe this isn't such a bad thing. In the film, the company is testing a new drug that is supposed to fight a virulent new form of tuberculosis. The icky part is, they're testing it on Kenyans infected with HIV and AIDS. The fictional drug, called "Dypraxa", may have some horrible side-effects -- like death, for instance. Three Bees is cynically, though perhaps understandably, seeing what the hell the drug actually does to people, people whom are already tagged with a death-sentence.

To Le Carre and Meirelles, evidently, testing drugs on the doomed in order to save the rest of the world is a necessarily evil act. I'm not so sure about that. I AM sure that the movie would have been invigorated by the obvious moral ambiguity inherent in the premise. Instead, the writer and director pretend that this ambiguity doesn't exist, making the representatives of the British government nasty jerks who are complicit in the side-effects cover-up. You can see the rest of it coming a mile away: Three Bees lobbyists greasing the financial skids for the British and local Kenyan politicos in order to dodge any "official" whistle-blowing on the new drug. Needless to say, Three Bees will occasionally hire some strong-arm locals to rub out any meddling goody-two-shoes, such as the Rachel Weisz character. Even more needless to say, Weisz -- who is, let's face it, really hot -- feels that she must promise a night of wild sex with a British attaché (Danny Huston) in order to get the message through to the higher-ups that Dypraxa may not be all that it's cracked up to be, quite apart from Three Bees turning the locals into human guinea pigs. The villains are clichés: vile, pot-bellied bureaucrats with rancid libidos and weak stomachs. We've seen it all done before in the Seventies -- and done better.

So: a subject not exactly throbbing with cinematic excitement (Big Pharma in the 3rd World); cardboard villainy; Rachel Weisz with a prosthetic pregnant belly patting the heads of poor black kids; pointless DV HandiCam pyrotechnics accompanied by over-saturated color (usually when Fiennes is doing something really James Bond-like, like driving a car or something) -- all demerits, of course. So why see *The Constant Gardener*? It's the depiction of the star-crossed marriage between Fiennes and Weisz that stays with the viewer. The slow peeling away of Weisz' obfuscations after she is murdered, the nagging suspicions of Fiennes about her fidelity, the deeper secrets she carried -- all these plot elements develop several meaty themes about intimate relationships. How much about one's spouse does one really know? Does an ill-advised marriage become more valuable in retrospect after it's over -- and is that because the parties involved arrive at a deeper appreciation of their former partners after they don't have to live with them anymore? And how prominent is the role of sexual desire in the corridors of power? *The Constant Gardener* suggests that desire is an irresistible, sometimes destructive, sometimes redemptive, force. All of which is pretty heady stuff for the multiplex, and certainly appreciated by this viewer, who doesn't see very much of this sort of thing in mainstream cinema these days.

5 stars out of 10.

Wyatt Earp (1994)

*Tombstone* is better.

[3/10 · 18 September 2005]

I see the debate is lively here as to which was the better 1993 take on the Earp legend, Kasdan's *Wyatt Earp* or Cosmatos' *Tombstone*. If you prefer the former, fair enough, but I'm about to demonstrate why you're mistaken. But the main thrust of my proof is against those here who are petulantly declaring that the two movies shouldn't be compared.

Ah, but if you're presuming to form a critical opinion about this movie, they SHOULD be compared, because the comparison lays bare the fundamental problem with Kasdan's approach to the material. Namely, the director -- who, by the way, I respect, believing him to be a more accomplished director than Cosmatos -- is trapped by an overlong, meandering script whose entire first half should have been redacted with red ink. Okay, here's the problem: after an anticipation-building introduction on the morning of the O.K. Corral gunfight, we're primed for action . . . or at least, we're primed for the build-up leading to the incipient gunfight. But, NO! -- we tumble back all the way to the Civil War era, in which a teenage Wyatt Earp tries to run away from his home to go join his older brothers in the fight. A forceful Gene Hackman as the patriarch nips this in the bud, and furnishes frontier-spun mottoes to the precocious youth that are supposed to explain Wyatt's conduct and personality later in the film. The movie meanders on. We see Wyatt as a young man driving stagecoaches. He travels all around the West, but is saving his heart for a genteel lady back in Missouri. We see him court the young lady. (For 10-15 minutes.) He marries the young lady. Who, by the way, we know from the get-go is going to drop dead. Finally she does, followed by Wyatt going on a tear as an alcoholic horse-thief. We await for someone to bail him out of jail (after all, how can be in Arizona 15 years later if he's going to get hung in Arkansas?); someone does. We're not done. A somewhat surlier Wyatt spends some time as a buffalo-hunter in Kansas, hiring the Masterson brothers as skinners. We sit watching all this numbly, waiting for him to finally get deputized in Dodge. Finally, he does. After which, Kevin Costner's mullet gets trimmed and petroleum jelly is applied atop his head. Uh, we're still not in Arizona, yet. We watch Wyatt keep the peace in Dodge for a while. He calls Bill Pullman's Ed Masterson "affable" several times (this is meant to be an insult). Wyatt's brothers, or some of them anyway, show up with their wives, who resent his high-handed manner and his insistence on moving them all to Tombstone, Arizona with the intention of striking it rich on mining claims. We MUST be getting close to the action, because the characters are talking about Tombstone, but . . . nope, we have to wait till Wyatt is fired by the Dodge City fathers for his head-bashing tactics, which impels him to work as a U.S. Marshall for awhile, the purpose of which is to enable him to meet Doc Holliday (a splendid, emaciated Dennis Quaid) for the first time. The latter, when speaking to Wyatt, ends each of his sentences with "Wyatt Earp?" -- as in, "Do you believe in friendship, Wyatt Earp?" or even "How are your teeth, Wyatt Earp?" This goes on for 5 minutes or so.

Cut, cut. Take out the red pen and swiftly slash lines through all the preceding material. If you're going to tell the Tombstone episode of Wyatt Earp's life, then we don't CARE about any of that other stuff. We don't CARE why Wyatt is the way he is; we'll accept his legend at face value, for God's sake. Sheesh! If you want to tell a story about Young Wyatt Earp, Old Wyatt Earp, or some other aspect of Wyatt Earp, then tell that story. Compare how Cosmatos handled this material in his *Tombstone*: after introducing us to the principal villains, we see the Earp brothers step off the train in Tombstone. See? Simple! I mean, Kasdan tries to make the most out of all the unnecessary material -- that introduction scene, for example, between Costner and Quaid IS kind of funny -- but you just can't cram a mini-series into a 3-hour movie. If we're doing the Tombstone stuff, then get to the damn point, already. As it is now, the movie has wasted so much time with irrelevancies that there's little space left to show why the Earps and Clantons are heading for a showdown in the first place. Wyatt's girlfriend Josie pleads, "Why? I don't understand it!" Neither do we. The movie can only come to rickety halt with an unexciting final shootout in the desert, followed by a tacked-on denouement on a cruise ship.

Finally, Kasdan is not helped any by Kevin Costner. As the young Wyatt, Costner unconvincingly portrays him as a slightly retarded rube. And once the petroleum jelly makes its appearance, Costner falls back onto his Surly Mode: grumpy, expressionless, tending toward psychosis. He's always saying things like, "For two years I've been in a bad mood", or "I'm not in the mood", or "I don't care anymore", or "I'm Wyatt Earp -- it all ends now!" Jeez, what a dour hero. Compare this with Kurt Russell's take on the man: a genial guy looking for a good time, tempered into toughness by the lawlessness of the Old West, but still able to smile. Costner's stern Puritan interpretation belies much of what we see Wyatt actually doing, such as dealing faro in saloons in which he owns a quarter-interest, or sharing his bed with former prostitutes and traveling showgirls. His performance is all wrong for such a man. I, for one, couldn't care less about this sourpuss.

3 stars out of 10.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943)

It's a miracle that it ever got released.

[9/10 · 14 September 2005]

(The whole review is a spoiler, so, you know.) Virtually a 100-minute-long thumb-nosing at the Hayes Office, *The Miracle of Morgan's Creek* is the most relentlessly subversive movie in the Sturges canon. It's one of his very best, too, standing alongside *Sullivan's Travels*. *Miracle*, in fact, may be more purely pleasurable.

The newly released DVD has a pair of informative special features, in which we learn that Sturges submitted the script to the Hayes Office in haphazard, piecemeal installments, thereby obfuscating the blasphemous subtext of the movie. Apparently, the censors never read the script in toto before Sturges finished shooting the picture. While Breen and the other Production Code toilers obsessed over a phrase here and there in the handful of pages that Sturges submitted, they were missing the forest for the trees. Sturges' aim seems to have been to construct a film in which nearly every scene subverts any number of the Code's sacred cows: premarital sex, drunken women, the U.S. military depicted in a non-too-flattering light, foolish peace officers (in fact, everyone in an authority role is made to look foolish), you name it. And of course, the overarching comparison of Betty Hutton's "miraculous" birthing of sextuplets -- at Christmastime! -- to the Virgin Birth is the coup de grace. Sturges even supplies a cow that turns the Knockenlocker living room into an incipient manger. All the while, we're reminded that Hutton is no virgin -- she was knocked up one drunken night by an anonymous G.I. ("I think his name was Ratzkywatzky"). Sturges sneers mightily at the censors by having everyone drink "lemonade" at the farewell balls for the soldiers, to say nothing of Hutton banging her head on a chandelier that is supposed to explain her woozy behavior the following morning. One expects the actors to look directly at the camera and wink. Or at the very least, intermittent title cards blaring "GET it?"

What makes Sturges an artist, rather than just a clever smart-ass, is the humanity he brings to his fierce farce. Eddie Bracken as the 4-F loser is given some amazingly romantic things to say, things that would melt any woman's heart, including the heart of an over-sexed manipulator like Hutton's. In fact, Sturges is adamant that the Eddie Brackens of the world can offer a different type of heroism than what we usually acknowledge that word to mean (e.g., physical bravery). It's a heroism born out of a big heart, tempered by steadfastness, honesty, and ardent loyalty and love. The movie is a celebration of non-showy sacrifice, of the sort Christ prescribed. "Ratzkywatzky", the knocker-upper, the brave soldier, is never heard from again, forgoing one kind of responsibility for another -- the war. But Norval's there, trying to get Hutton out of the several sad jams she's gotten herself into because he loves her. Who's the hero?

The audience will have to make up their own minds, because Sturges is remarkably non-judgmental about these circumstances and characters. The director doesn't frown disapprovingly at the carousing G.I.'s and the small-town girls who provide them "morale", nor does he celebrate them. These people are merely healthy, sexual males and females enjoying life's finest pleasures before those pleasures are snatched away by solitude at the Home Front and bloody death in the theater of war. The people here are rather like figures out of Boccaccio, trying to indulge in a little bacchanalia before the Reaper overwhelms them. *The Miracle of Morgan's Creek*, among its many other virtues, is a vivid reminder of a world at the edge of the precipice, and a stern rebuke to our current commentators who have unaccountably made saints out of this "Greatest Generation". It's a relief to discover that the Greatest Generation folks were lusty savages like our own decadent, worthless selves.

An American classic -- 9 stars out of 10. By the way, I feel I must correct some commentators on the message boards and review pages here, because they're not really grasping the outrageousness of the Hutton/Mary-Mother-of-God comparison. The "Immaculate Conception" refers to Jesus' MOM. His Mom had to be exempt from all stain of Original Sin -- an immaculate vessel to contain and later convey the Son of God to the world. Mary = Immaculate Conception; Jesus = Virgin Birth. If we're going to be the good Christian nation that our brave President wants us to be, we should at least get our mythology straight.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Married to a con-artist.

[6/10 · 11 September 2005]

Preston Sturges was one of those meteoric auteurs whose career is comparable only to Jean-Luc Godard in the Sixties: half-a-dozen masterpieces crammed in as many years, along with several other movies within that same span of time that weren't up to the usual brilliant standard. Unlike certain flops by Godard, however, *The Palm Beach Story*, while obviously not up to the standard of his other World War II-era comedies, is definitely not a flop.

I mean, you COULD miss this one and concentrate on the other acknowledged masterpieces in Sturges' oeuvre, but you'd be missing a lot. For one thing, you'd be missing the startling depiction -- for 1942 -- of a marriage based on sheer carnality. Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert clearly have nothing in common other than healthy sets of glands: he's a straight-laced inventor-type who's promoting a pie-in-the-sky airport idea that entails laying run-ways ON TOP of a city like a tennis racket; she's a bored socialite and incipient con-artist who's had enough of McCrea's virtuous poverty (poverty engendered, obviously, by trying to sell ideas such as airports built on top of cities). Since the socialite aspect of her personality has failed to yield dividends, Colbert decides to give her inner con-artist a try. She demands a divorce, and absconds on a south-bound train to divorce-friendly Palm Beach, with McCrea in bewildered pursuit. Ever the hustler, Colbert sweet-talks a group of drunken millionaires -- "The Ale and Quail Club" -- into buying her a train-ticket, with predictably raucous results. On board, she meets Rudy Vallee, a shy billionaire who shelters her from the rowdy party of drunken boobs. Soon enough she's parting the fool from his money as he escorts her to his palatial manse in Palm Beach.

Colbert, of course, has no intention of really divorcing McCrea -- she merely happens to know that Palm Beach is full of wealthy marks like Vallee who can be counted on to be credulous enough to put up the seed investment for "brother" McCrea's ridiculous airport scheme. On the one hand, Sturges harbored no illusions about the fundamental "decency" of women. On the other hand, this is what makes *The Palm Beach Story* so refreshing. It must have been especially refreshing for Colbert (never lovelier than here, by the way, with long flowing locks and gowns ascribed to "Irene", according to the opening credits), who clearly enjoyed playing an amoral woman for laughs. She was BORN for this type of role. McCrea, on the other hand, is surprisingly all wrong for the part of the husband. So perfect in other Sturges comedies, particularly *Sullivan's Travels*, in which his natural darker edges were required, he seems dour and out-of-place in this straight-up farce. Frankly, he looks like a man with other things on his mind than a Preston Sturges comedy. (There was a War on, you know.) The husband-role fairly screams for a Cary Grant to inhabit it: that is to say, an actor who didn't take himself very seriously. As it stands now, Vallee's billionaire has no proper foil, with the result that we root for Colbert to just marry him, already, while keeping the unsmiling but far more manly McCrea as an occasional sexual hors d'oeuvre.

Perhaps this had been Sturges' intention, anyway, as the denouement is thoroughly unsatisfying (TWINS?), which in turn forced the director to tack on a striking but rather senseless "prologue" over the opening credits. Basically, the logic of the story demands that Colbert should move on to greener pastures, but the morality of the time (OUR time, too, by the way) wouldn't permit that, so we're left with a non-ending. But this, along with the movie's other faults, is atoned for when Vallee's husband-devouring sister, a motor-mouthed Mary Astor, offers the following immortal observation to a non-English-speaking Sig Arno: "Why don't you go AWAY someplace. Surely someone else can use a house-guest; I can't be the only sucker in the world."

6 stars out of 10.

March of the Penguins (2005)

The emperor penguin's new clothes?

[3/10 · 3 September 2005]

Pointing out the numerable problems in a critic-proof film like *March of the Penguins* will doubtless make me come across as a real sourpuss, but I'll give it a shot, anyway, because the movie has become eminent enough, and its faults interesting enough, to merit a rebuttal.

Mainly, the anthropomorphism throughout the film is nearly intolerable. Yes yes, we're all living creatures on the same planet, and most species share essential functions of biology, but director Luc Jacquet photographs -- for example -- a pair of mating emperor penguins as if they were Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee in *A Man and a Woman*. The slow-motion rubbing of beaks, the bowed heads as if they are whispering romantic nothings to each other, the daytime soap-opera score tinkling in the background, eventually amount to manipulative hokum of the first order. It's also unscientific as hell: scientists have yet to conclude that animals "fall in love" as we understand the phrase. And yet the movie announces this thesis from the get-go. After the opening credits, a penguin bursts up onto the ice from the chilly depths below, and Morgan Freeman intones that this little fellow will do a number of foolish things "for love". The ever-present proverbial Professor once again must brandish his Red Pen and scrawl with irritation "PROVE???" in the margin. These particular penguins are monogamous for the breeding period only; other species show monogamous behavior for the entire span of their lives. But monogamy and love, as any divorce lawyer knows, are not synonyms. The filmmakers take a step further down this slippery slope when they label a mother penguin's loss of her chick as "unbearable" for her. Unbearable for us, certainly. But do we have the empirical data supporting the notion that penguins, or any other animals, suffer grief in the same way that we do? When this mother afterward attempts to "kidnap" another penguin's chick, the motivation is attributed to maternal agony and desperation: mightn't it rather be a coldly calculated behavioral instinct? I'm frankly shocked that National Geographic would put their imprimatur on such unscientific nonsense. Perhaps the Society feels that movies like these are needed to instill into sociopaths like oil executives and redneck hunters the idea that all species on this planet deserve our empathy and respect, but taking the low-road to achieve that aim isn't doing anybody any favors, least of all the penguins themselves.

In any case, the movie's thesis sort of falls apart at the end when the nuclear families of the penguins abruptly disintegrate: the adults beat a hasty retreat to the water for fishing and cavorting, leaving the darling chicks to fend for themselves on the ice. "The chicks will never see their parents again," Freeman says sadly. No postcards, no birthday greetings on video-mail. So much for anthropomorphism. Turns out after all that people are people, and birds are birds.

*March of the Penguins* is most successful doing what documentaries like these really do best: educating us on the ways of creatures different from ourselves. You WILL learn about the breeding cycle of the emperor penguin. I just wonder why acquiring this knowledge necessitated such a grim slog through speculative moralizing, accompanied by a tear-jerking score. A real documentary, including interviews with scientists, would have been more edifying. For instance, an expert maybe could have explained why the Antarctic would permit such an imperfect creature a continued existence there. One thing I wondered about was why emperor penguins don't have pouches to store their chicks. Clearly, adaptability is not the same thing as perfection. Or the paucity of natural predators necessitates a high mortality rate. Who knows? The movie successfully shows the hows, but doesn't address the whys in a scientific manner. Apparently, the penguins do it all for love. Okay.

3 stars out of 10.