Picked Flick #34: Bram Stoker's Dracula

Normally, I would avoid stacking so many entries so swiftly atop one another, especially since Illusions, the previous Picked Flick, is an underseen gem that I'm eager to call attention to. Still, today is the happy day of Nathaniel's long-incubating Vampire Blog-a-thon, marking an ideal showcase for the next film on my countdown. I hope you enjoy this post, as well as all the others in the Blog-a-thon ... but at the risk of sounding self-serving, don't forget to scroll down for Julie Dash!

Bram Stoker's Dracula portrays two ardent, flamboyant, and perpetually haunted love affairs, one of which begins in the 1400s and spans more than 500 years until the 1890s, the other of which begins in the 1890s and spans more than a century, through 1992 when the film was released, and through 2006, and after. The first of these loves, exquisite but also inhuman and adrift in its timelessness, is the erotic, spiritual, and finally organic bond between Count Vlad Dracula of Romania (Gary Oldman) and his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder). Dracula fights with fervid conviction in a holy war in distant lands, impaling his enemies in an intended tribute to his God and to his wife; already we may sense some confusion between the two, a confusion which Francis Ford Coppola's absintheate mise-en-scène of lurid colors and superimpositions works hard to amplify. Returning home to find Elisabeta tricked into despair and excommunicated as a suicide, Dracula perjures his soul with such grandiloquent acts of blasphemy that he is doomed to live forever, no longer a man yet marooned among mortals, alienated from his love but tortured by her reincarnations (which torture all the more because Ryder inhabits them with such prissy and dumb discomfort). Meanwhile, as the shape-shifting Count chases Mina Harker, his wife's uncanny duplicate, to her home in Victorian England, a new sideshow technology of shadows and silhouettes, of cranks and flickers and distractions, has bemused the urban populace. Dracula's London is a London of kinetoscopes and zoetropes, and Coppola is witty, risky, and besotted enough to saturate his movie with the ghosts of the cinema's own beginnings, to plumb the antique past of the medium as an adventurous artery into a new and heady present.

The movie is proudly, almost over-emphatically vampiric, toying with its own shape, purloining liberally from all of the arts, confusing its chronologies and sometimes confounding its own plot, reflective of and awestruck by the mercurial methods of lead actor Gary Oldman, and almost cruelly willing to lay bare the limitations and vulnerabilities of an unlikely supporting cast. Bram Stoker's Dracula is made of equal parts folly and terror; its very definition of love amounts to a fusion of these two elements, each drinking liberally from the other, interfused so that we are less and less prepared to observe any difference between the two. The film is both a strange and a logical one for Coppola to have made, merging the generational torments of the Godfather series with the hallucinogenic anti-dramaturgy of Apocalypse Now and the curious, occasionally abject self-ridicule of Peggy Sue Got Married. Bram Stoker's Dracula is a movie that slides outlandishly between an extraordinary belief in itself, writ large as a belief in the cinema, and an equally extraordinary drive to flout and undermine its own ambitions. How else to account for the scrupulous production design and exacting star performance that we behold in Dracula's castle, while Keanu Reeves stumbles and falls, resolutely unsaved from himself, through every moment of the very same scenes? How else to receive a movie that can locate and even sublimate a persuasive romanticism within the guise of wild expressionism, culminating in scenes as beautiful as Mina's candlelit seduction by the forlorn and raven-haired count, but also trash itself out with shock-cuts from a kitschy beheading to a bleeding, fatty slab of English roast beef? When I first saw the movie, I marveled only at the beauty in Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, so rich in its colors and proud in its artifice, but now I can detect something of Ballhaus' history with Fassbinder, the way the images shuck us unpredictably between immersion and bafflement, sometimes flattering the actors and sometimes catching them off-guard, ironizing their presence in the movie as well as our own.

For me, Bram Stoker's Dracula distills and sacralizes a form of aestheticized passion, the kind that insists on both the virtuosity and the foolishness in artistic experiment and self-exhibition. The film finds its director living on the outward edge of his mind's eye and inviting a plethora of fellow artists to join him there, all of them enraptured with the arts that constitute the cinema if also a bit skeptical, maybe even a bit cynical, as regards the final product. This peculiar, prevailing attitude both for and against art, both for and against camp, deliriously carnivalesque, is a mighty challenging climate for a movie to grow up in, but then again, it fosters the kind of creative highs that a more serious movie or, in some ways, a less serious movie would never be able to touch. I'm thinking here of Eiko Ishioka's costumes, a nonpareil panoply of wacko but prepossessing conceits: an external armor of internal musculature, Victorian gowns in saccharine shades of mint and pink, a funeral shroud topped with a reptilian headdress. I'm thinking, too, of Wojciech Kilar's churning and thunderous score, which would be too overfull and insistent for almost any other movie but which sees right into the brutish, beating heart of this one, running up and down the scale of ardor and violence. I'm thinking, too, of the expansive and sometimes incongruous sound design, which gets away with inserting some whirring, chirping electronics into a scene where Dracula's brides encroach upon Mina and Van Helsing inside a Wagnerian ring of fire; and of Greg Cannom and Michèle Burke's hair and makeup designs, skewering Victorian masculinity, recycling but also satirizing stereotypes of feminine delicacy and Slavic swarthiness, ushering Oldman's Dracula through not just an array of wild guises but entire phyla of bestial existence. In many ways, Bram Stoker's Dracula is just too, too much, but its fusion of literary and cultural archetypes with avant-garde novelties of vision and sound makes so many films look thin, frightened, and underfelt. It's as though Coppola, his own career all but scuttled and his chosen medium increasingly eulogized, is throwing every new and old inspiration he can find at the screen, and saying, baying, crying, laughing, joking, fuming, declaiming, "Here, for better and for worse, is a movie that's alive." (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1992 Columbia Pictures/American Zoetrope

Picked Flick #35: Illusions

If Boyz N the Hood, one notch down on this list, represents a high-water mark but also a truncated possibility within the black commercial cinema, Julie Dash's Illusions survives as a gleaming nugget of underexplored, almost esoteric potential in the black art cinema, and the feminist cinema, and the formalist cinema, and the cinema of satire, and all of the other cinemas that Illusions embodies, upbraids, and smartly reassesses. Dash would eventually achieve greater notoriety as the director of Daughters of the Dust, a shimmering and polyvocal fable about the non-asssimilated Geechee cultures off the Carolina coast, and a complex and idiosyncratic miracle of markedly independent, culturally embedded filmmaking. A major foundation of Daughters' enduring mystique, not to mention a doleful fact about American movie culture, is that no feature film directed by an African-American woman had ever circulated in stateside commercial release until Daughters—a full year after causing a stir and winning an award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival—finally bowed in select American cities in 1992. Even without its consequent status as a cultural benchmark, the syncretic and oracular view of history in Daughters, simultaneously anthropological and mythological, as well as the detailed mise-en-scène and the ravishing manipulations of light and montage are the cornerstones of the film's success.

Illusions, though it lacks any trace of Daughters' dazzling visual palette, and though it concentrates on a smaller and simpler cast of characters, clearly prefigures the pliable and critical perspectives on history that would characterize the director's justly famous feature. Indeed, part of what makes Illusions so cogent and transfixing, despite a muddy sound mix and the other technical vicissitudes of a film-school project, is that its deceptively straightforward scenario is so rife with contradictions and diverse implications that a half-hour film about a handful of people can reverberate in so many directions. Illusions' central figure is Mignon Duprée (Lonette McKee), a mid-level producer and project supervisor on a fictional Hollywood lot called National Studios in 1942. Few if any women of that time would have occupied a position like Mignon's, but her intelligence, diplomacy, and stern persistence quickly impress, and the wartime context—we see rows and rows of female telephone operators and office workers, many of them charmed by the military officers who are "advising" the studio's output—furnishes its own alibi for Mignon's unlikely post. The present day's task requires Mignon to oversee the re-looping of a musical whose soundtrack was poorly synchronized, and whose female lead isn't much of a singer anyway. Mignon, brusquely managing the technicians in the soundbooth, is calmed and then engrossed by Ester Jeeter (Rosanne Katon), the young, gregarious, and unsophisticated session singer whom the studio has hired to salvage the number. Ester sings beautifully, utterly unconcerned with the political frissons surrounding her recruitment as an invisible black vocalist to redeem an all-white film. Meanwhile, Mignon's behavior grows erratic and her comportment unsettled in response to Ester's singing, leading to the revelation that Mignon herself is passing as white in her professional life. Her intuitive connection to Ester and their logical alliance within the ideological hierarchies of America's dream factory are nonetheless dangerous to Mignon's own security, not just in her job but in her very skin.

Illusions proceeds through some deft and subtle sleights of hand, building toward an emotional climax that may or may not qualify as "empowering," and demonstrating considerable resolve in leaving so many of its key questions unanswered. What is the nature or future of Mignon's acquaintance with Ester? How long has Mignon been working at National Studios, and how long will she remain there? Has she actively dissembled about her racial identity or has she simply (if "simply" is the right word) allowed her colleagues to naturalize or ignore the signs of her own otherness? These are all examples of the narrative riddles that Illusions elects not to resolve, but even more fascinating to me is the complexity, if not the inscrutability, of the film's politics. Is Mignon's labor, even her very presence in the flowchart of power at National Studios, a progressive achievement in itself, or must she use her position on someone else's behalf—and how or for whom is she to do this? What to make of the fact that the film's discourses on gender and race grow both richer and narrower as it continues, and Mignon's personal traits and circumstances subsume our earlier perspectives on other women, other races, other battlegrounds, literal and political? What to make of Dash's technical gamesmanship, using a vocal track of Ella Fitzgerald to dub Rosanne Katon in the role of Ester, such that the "real" singer isn't "really" singing, and thus refusing a clichéd linkage of blackness to authenticity? Illusions has been considered and critiqued from a multitude of positions in the decades since Dash made it, but rarely among more than academic audiences, and seldom with a full account of the movie's countless and enigmatic significations. Like Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, another monument within black women's moviemaking, Illusions resists the diminishment of black women within documented history and within Hollywood scenography, not by excavating a true-life tale of improbable heroism but by fabulating a scenario that never exactly happened, tugging at our gullibility while nonetheless stating a powerful case for the necessity of invented archives, origin myths, interbraided politics, and historical revisionism. Illusions might speak most powerfully to and from the standpoints of black women's experience, but in one way or another, as we make our way through this nifty hall of mirrors, we're all liable to catch some wisp of our own reflections. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1983 American Film Institute

Picked Flick #36: Boyz N the Hood

I remember like it was yesterday the televised moment when Kathleen Turner and Karl Malden strode onstage to announce the 1991 Oscar nominations, transcending the usual levels of obligatory hype by unveiling two Academy "firsts" that surged with real excitement. And what different breakthroughs they were: Disney's tuneful and resplendent rendering of Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film to earn a nomination as Best Picture, and in a double-barreled achievement, 24-year-old John Singleton became the first African-American and the youngest filmmaker to be nominated as Best Director, for his severe and proudly didactic debut Boyz N the Hood. The times truly seemed to be a-changin', even if Singleton's rallying cry, born equally of anger and despondency, was still jockeying for space with the avatars of white middlebrow liberalism; in the category of Best Original Screenplay, Boyz stood side-by-side with Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, another hit film about race relations in contemporary Los Angeles that nonetheless appeared to spring from an entirely different cosmos. Bear in mind, too, that 1991 was also the year of New Jack City and Jungle Fever, with Ernest Dickerson's Juice and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust lurking just around the corner in January 1992. In the same twelve months that witnessed the public proclamation and the first, pathbreaking successes of the "New Queer Cinema," a New Black Cinema seemed equally viable and just as culturally urgent, furnishing common cause to established (mostly white) critics, urban (stereotypically black) audiences, and a rising and complicated tide of suburban (white youth) enthusiasm. Boyz was, in every way, the biggest hit of the bunch, and despite the grim despair that permeates its climactic cycle of violence, it augured most brightly for the future.

Is it possible now to watch Boyz and feel no pangs about Singleton's subsequent trajectory? Despite their generic diversity and ambitious premises, neither the distaff road-movie rumination Poetic Justice nor the inflammatory campus drama Higher Learning nor the historical commemoration Rosewood nor the sexually cautious but adventurously acted Shaft remake nor even Baby Boy, styled as a sort of post-date to the Oedipal tensions and turbulent maturations in Boyz N the Hood, generated much heat; by the time of his relative commercial successes, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Four Brothers, Singleton seemed to have capitulated to strict studio mandates, starting over at a lowly rung of an industry he was once so keen to crack open. Perhaps it is a convenient, retrospective fallacy to see in Boyz an allegory for the cruelly limited ecosystem of black Hollywood, where even the brightest talents have a hard time breaching the stern perimeters of ideology and corporate subservience. Or maybe Boyz—scripted, shot, acted, and edited with a clenched and gathering force that excuses its occasional gracelessness—derives its very potency from Singleton's first-timer energy, and the proper response is therefore not to mourn the disappointments that followed but to preserve our marvel at the might and the moment that Boyz so definitively embodied. As obedient as the film is to Hollywood grammar, conceived and rendered through utterly conventional and occasionally overstated techniques (dramatic close-ups, portentous inserts, dated and trivializing music), it sits almost wholly at odds with mass-manufacturable Hollywood sentiment. The passion behind the story, the hotheaded political outpourings, the relentless dichotomies of hope and danger, lucidity and impulse that fuel the montage bespeak the kind of personal signature that no one much expects from Hollywood movies anymore. Singleton strips his art of almost all ambiguity in the service of thematic and emotional and political transparency. Whether he was or is capable of greater formal sophistication than this seems beside the point; Boyz finds the boldness, the directness, the persuasive power in Hollywood style, rousing its audience toward renewed belief not only in the script's Afrocentric memes of economic and educational self-determination but in the modes of Hollywood storytelling, marshalling every beginner's trick in the book toward a tragic purgation of pity, anger, and fear.

The annihilation of Ricky Baker, harrowingly realized as both a repulsive coincidence and a graven inevitability, remains one of the most shocking and affecting deaths in modern movies. It occasions a test of virtually every character and relationship in the movie—the patient pacifism of Tre Styles, the flinty and precautionary wisdom of his father Furious Styles, the frightened but solicitous empathy of Tre's girlfriend Brandi, the unappealing but ferociously optimistic favoritism of Ricky's mother Brenda, and most of all, the loyalty and heavy-browed pessimism of Ricky's brother Doughboy, whose unexpected inheritance of the movie's moral weight is one of Singleton's most audacious moves as both writer and director. Through Doughboy, and through Ice Cube's superb inhabiting of the character, Boyz articulates the very logic and credence behind retaliatory, intramural violence that so much of the movie—particularly Furious Styles' various sermons on various local mounts—has worked hard to denounce. The impossibility of Tre's choice at the end of Boyz, whether to help avenge his closest comrade or to honor his family and his own beckoning future by recusing himself, strikes equally at our heads and our hearts, positing an ethical dilemma that is all the more gruesome for its very rootedness in everything Boyz has recounted and reflected up to that point (as opposed to abstracting a moral paradox and erecting a thin, beatific scaffolding of Movie around it, as in Sophie's Choice or The Green Mile). However forthrightly the film implores us to "Increase the Peace," Boyz conveys a rigorous sense of how difficult and self-alienating this seemingly faultless imperative can be, and Ice Cube, without glamorizing or glorifying Doughboy in the slightest, invests the character with his own critical, introspective grasp of this predicament. The choices these characters must make, so thickly in the midst of their youth, their frustrations, and their desires, present a crucible that no one really escapes; even when some closing captions inform us that Tre and Brandi succeeded in their quest for an all-black college education, the film never actually leaves their neighborhood. I suspect that Singleton believes that part of Tre and Brandi will always be stuck on these small lots and gridded streets of South Central L.A. No one, Singleton included, makes it out of this film unscathed, but instead of simply hectoring us with the hypothesis of cruel cultural determinism, Boyz enables us to feel this tragedy. We grasp the paucity of choices that present themselves in a world like this (the racial ghetto, the working class, the abandoned city) while the film nonetheless exhorts us, as well as its own characters, to choose—to change, quite simply, the world. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1991 Columbia Pictures.

Picked Flicks #37: Hud & Cool Hand Luke

Exactly five minutes and thirty seconds of Hud transpire before Paul Newman enters. The time is hardly wasted, resplendent as it is with James Wong Howe's widescreen black-and-white photography, marrying pristine formal composition and sublime light and contrast to the parched desolation of a fossilized Texas; shimmering as it also is with a quiet Elmer Bernstein score that both shares and fosters the brimming-heart melancholy of the images. Long, flattened horizons; long, flattened cars; grass and scrub flattened by wind; long, wide roads; wide brims on tall hats atop tall men and boys with long gazes and flat voices; longing; ways of life, long but now flat. Hud evokes all of these things, quickly and fully, and if the tone and camerawork sometimes tilt into self-mythologizing, the myth exerts a strong claim, a persuasive allure. And then, speaking of allure, Brandon de Wilde's awkward, proud, lonely, and sentimental adolescent Lonnie Bannon goes looking for his roustabout uncle Hud, tracking his pink Cadillac (inevitably) to the curbside of some under-attended housewife, pipping and then blaring the horn on Hud's own steering wheel to call his uncle forth from some lithe, clammy iniquity. The screen door pops open: Hud. "Honcho," he calls to his nephew, leaning against a porch railing, insolent, the cock of every walk, "I just hope for your sake that this house is on fire."

Child, the house is definitely on fire. In a crossword puzzle, Hud, in or out of italics, would serve well as a three-letter synonym for sex. And yet, for an actor so universally and deservedly associated with the quality of decency—with bounteous charity, compassionate politics, a legendary marriage, faultless generosity toward his co-stars—Newman's haughty indecency in Hud is a perennial shock, feeding risk and danger into the movie but also into Newman's own performance, because it doesn't come naturally. Newman shapes Hud's libido into something elemental to the character and the story but also, from an actorly standpoint, far from effortless. Where Brando's Stanley Kowalski melds virility with vulgarity at the character's core and mantle, Newman's prowess but also his limits as an actor open up an interesting chasm between his essential, irrefragable manliness, inhabited as casually as a flannel shirt through a five-decade career, and his technical, occasionally studious projection of sexuality. Among the actors to whom he was initially most compared—Brando, Clift, and Dean—Newman is simultaneously, for me, the least gifted and the most interesting. Brando's acting, practiced and deliberate though it is, feels buried down in his marrow, Clift's and Dean's wound and tangled around their nerve endings. Newman's the only one whom one can imagine spending his life another way (in business, in public service, in friendship, in good health), and though the urge to act seems to run deep, allowing him a physical spontaneity and a palpable conviction on screen, what he delivers as acting comes across as a very conscious, careful process, self-reflective and scrupulous. His casting in Hud is therefore even more inspired than it looks. Everyone on screen, especially Melvyn Douglas' humiliated patriarch and Patricia Neal's tart housekeeper (disillusioned and saddened by her own self-protective wisdom), wrestle with those id-level responses to Hud that are a grounding conceit of the script, but they also, because of Newman, engage mentally with Hud. Their questions hum in the air: how could a son so insistently disappoint and rebuke a father? How could a man so degrade himself before a woman, seizing what he might have gotten by asking? How could Hud be so careless with a brother's memory, so inadequate to his shadow? These questions are richer than they might have been in Hud because Newman—tactfully and artfully, but also because this is the sort of actor he is—creates Hud as a sum of conscious choices, not an animal or an icon. His vicissitudes, shames, affronts, and inadequacies are the evolving products of a human life, not the contours of an allegorical figure. He seems like he could change, but he doesn't, or won't. He retains a core of decency which he rarely allows to breathe, for reasons which are his own, though Newman invites us to guess at them.

Four years later, in Cool Hand Luke, Newman stepped into another leading role that the screenwriters and the director can't help but position in the realm of the parable. They haven't fully agreed, with each other or with themselves, about what kind of parable, so Christic imagery dukes it out with midcentury rebel chic and also, amid the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, with a vision of lean, able masculinity Taylorized beyond belief and slung between the alternatives of compliance and execution. Conrad Hall, as gifted a cinematographer as Howe but temperamentally dissimilar, dapples the cast in natural light and allows the camera to draw energy from their exertions, their impudence, their bonhomie. Interior scenes are less visually interesting, though one of Luke's best scenes is one of its quietest and most static: the hero's covert interview with his dying mother, Arletta (the incomparable Jo Van Fleet). Through it all, Stuart Rosenberg's movie toggles back and forth between a portrait of community and an ode to the individual, but somewhere along the way, its thematic ambivalence and episodic structure start to feel like major virtues: Cool Hand Luke is one of our most lived-in and pleasurably paced odes to nonconformity, magnifying the athletic, good-natured gratuitousness of the hog-wrestling scene in Hud to full feature length. Newman looks and acts much more at home in Lucas Jackson's skin than in Hud Bannon's eroticized armor, basing this performance not on productive paradox but on flexibility, charisma, alertness in the moment. He trims the more florid gestures and supporting performances to human size—adding a further dimension to Luke's eventual plea that his comrades start living for and through themselves, not vicariously through him. Those interesting moments of crisis notwithstanding, Newman's utter confidence as an actor steadies the movie through its shakier passages, and he thus lifts the curtain on the second, long stage of his career. By this bifurcating arithmetic, Hud is the best example of Newman as Student, adapting himself to a difficult movie, deepening the film through his own hard work and contradictory traits; Cool Hand Luke is the best example of Newman as Teacher, of a movie adapting itself to Newman, surviving its most dated effects and questionable story choices by dint of the actor's contagious aura of integrity, versatility, credibility, and good sense. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

(Images © 1963 Paramount Pictures and © 1967 Warner Bros. Pictures)

Picked Flick #38: Home for the Holidays

One of my favorite costume-props in modern American movies, right up there with Margo Tenenbaum's Izod dresses, is Claudia Larson's ribbed and massive magenta coat in Home for the Holidays. As Claudia (Holly Hunter) is quick to observe, especially when cornered by an enminked high-school classmate from a lifetime ago, this isn't her enormous coat: "I, of course, lost the stylish one that fits me in the airport." Upon arriving to her parents' crammed and gewgawed home for an inevitably awkward Thanksgiving, Claudia is coerced into this mulberry nightmare by her huskily antic mother Adele (Anne Bancroft), who foists it upon her before Claudia has even claimed her baggage. This means, yes, that Adele brought the coat along before she could possibly know that her daughter needed one: an early sign that the impossible yet possible family in Home for the Holidays is both perceptive and preposterous, knowingly and even uncannily predictive of each other's needs and hurts even though they are unable to salve them, for themselves or for each other, which state of affairs the film regards as merry, sad, and a little bit grotesque.

Home for the Holidays is a tottering but strangely durable object, just like the Larson family it chronicles. The Time Out Film Guide dismisses Home as "a modest film (in every sense)," but I take exception on two grounds: that the film's modesty is just as much a credit as a demerit, and that the structural detours, lopsided gags, and vastly disparate tones in this film are often quite immodest. Nothing in the movie asks you not to notice these asymmetries, and the resulting chaos of moods and performance styles illuminates something in the script, and in holiday rituals themselves, and maybe even in middle-class American families, that a firmer directorial hand and a more balanced film would never be able to access. So, skimming away the elements that plainly don't work—Steve Guttenberg, the farting grandmother (Geraldine Chaplin being less to blame than her silly part), the deliberate spilling of a stuffed turkey carcass over the head of a fuming sibling—a good deal of Home for the Holidays feels nervy, adventurous, and unapologetically disillusioned. The script, for one, is full of broken syntax, non sequiturs, lines that are interrupted or else just trail off, and distended sentences that cry out for loopy, riffy enactment. Here is Bancroft's Adele admonishing her grown daughter for abandoning her love of painting: "All I know is, whenever anybody comes in here, they make a beeline for your brother Tommy's picture. 'Who did that?' they say. 'My oldest, my smartest daughter,' I answer, but she's busy squandering her God-given talent filling in the holes in some dead people's pictures in Chicago, the Windy City." What makes the whole line, the whole speech, is "the Windy City." Aside from the gratuitousness with which a mother reminds a daughter of her own brother's name; from the rude way she actually reminds herself, mid-sentence, to name favorites among her brood; from the implication throughout the movie that few (if any) outsiders ever do pass through this room; from the indictment of the portrait itself, which bespeaks no talent whatever; from the bruising obliviousness with which Adele gets the nature of Claudia's job totally wrong; there's the standing fact that Adele doesn't end her thought anywhere near where she began it. In fact, she dead-ends herself in a little cul-de-sac of empty, accumulated knowledge. The film teems with off-rhythms like this: lighting and makeup are insistently unflattering, despite several scenes of dressing, bathing, and primping; Claudia always loses the words of the songs she sings; the whole cast, stunningly well-matched for physical resemblance, are vocally all over the place; speeches and toasts digress into outright opacity; everyone in the film drives poorly, and too quickly. Like one of Adele's rattling speeches, the film doesn't end anywhere near where it began, charting an arc from comically embittered candor to wild romantic mythmaking. But then, there are deep structural rhymes, too, as in the twinned prologue and epilogue. At the outset, the hermetically closed serenity of a Renaissance painting that Claudia restores in extreme close-up, breaking the whole of the artwork into isolated vignettes. At the end, more vignettes: a montage of faux home-movies depicting islands of ecstatic happiness in the life of every character, though we have already learned by now that the surrounding context for these moments is something less than happiness. Surely, we must apply this pattern to the optimistic mirage of new love that almost concluded the movie. Of course, we hope we're wrong, and I don't think the film faults us too heavily for hoping.

Home for the Holidays has a spirit and an ostensible shapelessness that are pure Cassavetes, enveloping a script that only seems to reach for the precise calculations of 1930s screwball comedy. Gene-splice Cukor's Holiday with Cassavetes' Love Streams, deny the mise-en-scène either beauty or the defensive affectation of obvious unbeauty, and assign as director one of our most controlled, businesslike, coolly mannered actresses, who had helmed only one movie before this one and none since, but who is clearly jazzed by the vandalish act of producing an id-driven, deeply felt, but sloppy-at-the-edges movie that rewards all the impulses and admits all the angers that she tends to suppress as an actress, and you get a movie as weird as this one. An off-kilter prose poem of run-on sentences. And sentence fragments. A raucous comedy tuned to the chords of middle-age, and thus closed off, almost by definition, to the typical (young, male) audience for raucous comedy. A cast of top-flight actors, united only in having been so underutilized in bright but vaguely disappointing careers, and pushed in this instance well away from their comfort zones. Note, though, that Foster's embrace of cacophony at the level of acting, to include her heroic patience with Robert Downey Jr.'s exhilarating overplaying, has been firmly prevented from afflicting either the soundtrack (prim, predictable, Polygram-stamped) or the stabilized color palette (chestnut browns, burgundy, gold, black, and winter white, plus those offending yet scrupulously managed splashes of hot pink).

I know what you're thinking: much of the above reads like reasons to dislike the movie. My partner, aghast at this film's inclusion on this list (and at such a high rung!) gently exhorted me to reiterate that this is a list of favorites, not a list of "bests." Home for the Holidays is indeed a favorite, but also, for me, something of a best: a dramedy about the funny-harsh messiness of families that truly doesn't blanch at being funny-harsh and messy. A middle-brow entertainment, a holiday picture of all things, that preserves the spiky energies of a rehearsal and the dubious, even iconoclastic instincts of a passive-aggressive analysand. And a movie that halts, three or four times, for moments of truth between characters—the final antipathy between two sisters, the gorgeous love between a sister and a brother—that differ entirely from almost anything the movies ever show us, and that carry the rest of this shaggy-dog film to glory. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1995 Polygram Filmed Entertainment/Paramount Pictures.

Picked Flick #39: The Hours

The Hours, both Michael Cunningham's novel and Stephen Daldry's film, continue to frustrate and upset me, in ways that are at this point indistinguishable from fascination. Sometimes that fascination is purer, more awed. At other times, both the book and the movie emanate a powerful mediocrity, a distinct aroma of cliché, of unmet ambitions. I often furrow my brow at the relentless lyricism of Cunningham's prose, which, in this book as in others, strives rather arduously for showy, synesthetic images where more modest narration would happily suffice. He writes as though with each paragraph he hopes to secure our vote, some badge of our readerly devotion, even though the heady conceptions of his books sometimes trip over all the stylistic filigrees. And yet, Cunningham broaches subjects and themes that are difficult to articulate, or even to acknowledge, and he is capable of real astuteness in how he treats them: the ways in which death can feel impolite, just as caretaking can be officious and desperate; the worrying, thin line between liking someone enormously and loving them merely adequately, and how a shift from one to the other can be more painful than any dislike or hatred; the ways in which people look to art, especially books and music and movies, for telepathic prompts for their own life-choices.

The movie version of The Hours shares the arresting ambitions and the psychological acuity of the book, as well as its prosaic and vaguely elitist excesses. To my mind, in recent popular cinema, American Beauty is the movie's closest cousin, both of them built atop scripts that can seem courageously lucid and dismayingly glib within single scenes or transitions, both directed in a glossy, theatrical, actor-friendly style that serves and also sabotages the material by playing up the artifice. You can hold your ear up to American Beauty or The Hours and hear a worrying howl from deep within the upper bourgeoisie, demanding and deserving to be taken seriously, but you can also somehow hear the production teams slapping their own backs about the casts they've hooked, the certainty of prizes, the Big Issues they broach. However, while the moods and structures of American Beauty, for all of its technical audacity, feel smaller and more market-tested as the years go by, The Hours totally engrosses me. I keep sitting before it, open-minded, sometimes open-mouthed. It becomes clearer, for one thing, that the movie has darkened the book considerably. Disapproval of Richard Brown's esoteric, self-obsessed novel is more general. Vanessa Bell is more unhinged, almost repulsed, by the ravenous loneliness of her sister Virginia Woolf. Laura Brown already intends suicide as she drops her son with an indifferent neighbor. Clarissa Vaughan lets slip a major, unwitting insult to her daughter, and instead of nursing a fond, fumbling reminiscence with Louis Waters on her comfy living room couch, she erupts and nearly dissolves in her cold kitchen, where the light is the color of frost, the faucets detonate for no reason, and Louis looks on, agitated and annoyed, from practically a mile away across the countertop. This last scene is my favorite in the movie: its scary unraveling of Meryl Streep, usually so composed and sometimes to a fault, encapsulates the wholly credible and almost lymphatic unease beneath the film's mannered language, the roiling score, the sometimes precious match-cuts.

I suppose it's no mystery that such a disciple of modern film actresses as myself would get swept up in this movie. I have been known to listen to the Kidman-Moore-Streep commentary track on the DVD while I clean or cook. Still, The Hours collects so many disparate, exciting actors into such a range of parts that it's almost hard to get a bead on the performances: secondary players like Miranda Richardson and Eileen Atkins grow more interesting over time; my regard for all three star turns cycles up and down; and character approaches that click well in one scene, or against one particular co-star, feel subtly wrong in or against another. In some ways, the movie cuts more to the point of Cunningham's novel than his own prose really can: the whole piece activates such complex, elliptical relationships among notions of acting, essence, ritual, privilege, performance, gender, art, sex, and death that it somehow deepens the themes to see the bodies, scrutinize the faces, smell the money, feel the flatness of the screen. A major concern of The Hours is the ambivalence of love, the working out of conflicted emotions over time, even over generations. Fitting, then, that I keep wrestling with this book and this movie, frowning at their shortcuts and platitudes, hooking onto their sublime moments, assigning both texts in course after course, wondering where our attachments to art really come from, how fraught they can be with disapproval as well as wonder. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2002 Miramax Films and Paramount Pictures.

Picked Flick #40: Bring It On

An infelicitously timed telephone call from my father made me late to the theater for my first screening of Bring It On. I hate to be late, and I'm never ever late to movies. Making matters worse, I made my friend late, too, which means that we didn't even know until the second time we watched Bring It On about the all-cheering character introductions at the film's beginning. In other words, having already gorged ourselves gleefully on the movie's unflagging and ennobling pop energy, the pristine palette, the tartly drawn characters, the strength and economy of the editing, the freshness of the script, the giddy spectacle of the cheerleading routines, the infectious teen spirit of the actors, the robust but delicate tenor between spoof and sincerity, we waited and waited for the DVD release (having caught Bring It On on the very last night of its second-run tour through Ithaca, NY) and discovered to our delight that there was even more movie to enjoy. Bring it on, indeed!

I haven't met anyone who thinks Bring It On is a bad film, though I can only assume such characters exist. Rather, in my experience, Bring It On cleaves its viewership into two camps: those who see a merely adequate but derivative and utterly unspecial movie about cheerleading forchrissakes, and those who see the Grand Illusion of modern high-school comedies. I have found that it is difficult to communicate across the divide between the agnostics and the devotés. It's even a little bit difficult to communicate among the devotés, because for the converted, to be in the presence of Bring It On is to be bathed in total, self-evident pleasure. Explanation falters out of what amounts to unnecessity, but let's try. Let's start with the single frame I have reproduced here, from a mutedly climactic scene where duelling squad captains Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) and Isis (Gabrielle Union) exchange succinct, slightly tense, but generous advice about how to keep their cheerleaders in perfect formation during their respective routines at the national competition. Note that almost every primary color as yet discovered by man is evidenced in this shot, but the overall effect is more engaging than garish. Note that the strong, diagonal, and yet flattering designs for the uniforms of the Rancho Carne Toros and the Compton Clovers toe a precocious line between a silly, unexploitative sauciness and a tough, sporting conviction about the tasks at hand. Note that the framing plays up a symmetry between Torrance and Isis, conveying that these longtime rivals have entered into something like a mutual understanding, even as the sharp contrast between the two backgrounds—blue and white color bars behind Isis, a percolating crowd behind Torrance—continue to set them off from each other. Actually, I emend myself: Torrance is the Prime Meridian of this shot, exactly dividing the two background fields on either side of her, subtly reminding us that the scene isn't so much about a standoff between the mavens as a turning point within Torrance herself, who now meets Isis as a fond equal without relinquishing any of her own competitive zeal. Chicas, you can pause or replay Bring It On liberally and find care, undertones, and tiny formal ironies like these. It isn't Orson Welles, but for crying out loud, when was the last time color, composition, blocking, and design were this precisely calibrated in a teen comedy?

And not just any teen comedy, either, but one with a bevy of diversely likeable characters? Starring a pedigreed teenage actress who bounces right into the kind of role that pedigreed teenage actresses often convince themselves, understandably, that they should avoid? Scribe Jessica Bendinger knows what she's doing, basing things around a somewhat standard-issue plot for movies like this (the rich white girls are stealing the poorer black girls' routines, but the latest white girl Feels Bad About This!), but sticking the expected resolution (the white girl makes guilty, philanthropic amends) into the center of the picture, where it elicits a properly brusque refusal from characters who don't want or need to be condescended to. Bring It On manages to get its PC cupcake and eat it, too: double-standards are memorably laid bare, but a strict, objective meritocracy remains firmly in place. That means, the best bringers still win, and how! The final plume in the movie's hat, or maybe the pom-pom in its hand, is director Peyton Reed, whom nobody seems to have told that teen flicks require impersonal direction, largely to keep the actors in frame and under Seventeen lighting. Instead, Reed shapes the scenes he wants, none of them better than a piquant flirtation at a bathroom sink that doesn't need any dialogue. He even wrings some fresh laughs from one of those boilerplate sequences I hate, the kind of montage in which 19 stereotypes and walking punchlines fail at a task, nearly failing at their own humanity, so that the 20th person looks like a comparative gem. Bring It On isn't a comparative gem. It's just a gem, rallying all the pep that pop movies can muster and sticking with you afterward. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2000 Universal Pictures.

Picked Flick #41: Jackie Brown

Reservoir Dogs wasn't my cuppa, but I can see that it has its virtues. Pulp Fiction glistens and grooves, an almost immaculate pop object, and yet I never seem to reach for it when I'm shuffling through my old favorites. The first Kill Bill boasted a beguiling structure and some whizz-bang craftsmanship, especially in the action scenes, which made it only more surprising and intriguing that Kill Bill, Vol. 2 slowed to such a relative crawl, plumbing for feeling instead of laying on the pizzazz. These movies all hold together beautifully, and yet—when you absolutely, positively got to thrill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes. Jackie Brown is the AK-47 in Tarantino's arsenal, which is all the more surprising because, on the surface, the director seems to have more on his mind than blowing us away.

Jackie Brown starts hitting pitch-perfect notes in the opening credits, and it literally never stops. Pam Grier, dolled up for her job as a stewardess for Cabo Air, glides into the right edge of the frame, while Bobby Womack's creamily desperate anthem "Across 110th Street" sets a pristine, hummable stage for both the character and the movie. It's such a simple gesture, capturing Jackie so quickly at her coolest, then gradually hastening her toward the airport gate as she realizes she's running out of time. The whole movie will plot this same course, not just because Jackie stays all but invisible for the next half-hour (and therefore has to hustle a little to reclaim her own film), but because Tarantino's direction and his script are so exquisitely keyed in to Jackie's pragmatism and her panic: "I make about sixteen thousand, with retirement benefits that ain't worth a damn... If I lose my job, I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with." Jackie's basic, wholly adequate motivation for lawlessness is that from where she's standing, she can see the dying of the light. When she drags herself out of jail, she worries about how bad she looks. When she sits down with her obviously smitten bail bondsman, the first thing they discuss is how to quit smoking without gaining weight. Pam Grier is so pert, charismatic, and funny in the role that there isn't anything cloying about Jackie's anxieties, just as there is nothing overly precious about the film's presentation of them—even when Tarantino lays down a vocal track of a much younger Grier singing "Long Time Woman" as a funky and succinct counterpoint to this older, soberer, but still very funky version of herself. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jackie Brown is how unfoolish and—a very un-Tarantino word—how wise this film looks and sounds while espousing a then-34-year-old, nonblack, male filmmaker's vision of Jackie's predicament. Though the colors and songs are all Tarantino-brite, the framings are contemplative and often very simple, even amidst key episodes in the criss-crossy plot; as the narrative accelerates and the vise of possible failure closes around Jackie and her weathered but plucky accomplice Max Cherry (an invaluable Robert Forster), the film never deviates from its carefully restrained pace and rhythms. Almost every sequence is designed such that seemingly simple actions communicate several things at once: Jackie trying on a new suit, Bridget Fonda refusing to answer a phone, Robert De Niro looking for his car in a parking lot, Lisa Gay Hamilton making nervous contact with Jackie in a food court. Every one of them is crucial to Jackie Brown's plot, but they've all been filmed with the frisky, on-the-fly texture of grace notes and improvs. The film has an exacting, exquisitely calibrated structure, loping forward and then looping backward, but the steady hand and living, breathing humanity behind every moment lend Jackie Brown a warm, plausible, and deeply enjoyable spontaneity.

Tarantino and Grier have "got" Jackie the way Mankiewicz and Bette Davis "got" Margo Channing, within a comparably ambitious script and a similar marshaling of the actress' own backstory and persona into the service of the character. Too, if Jackie is Margo, Samuel L. Jackson is the Addison DeWitt of ghetto crime. His charisma, irony, and verbal dexterity are such that the audience instantly falls for him, but then our breath really catches as the actor and the film lay bare the discomfiting essence of the character. Ordell Robbie is, obviously, an even tougher, more vicious piece of work than Addison, but he still profits mightily from Tarantino's knack for spinning wily fun out of a fundamental, uncompromised melancholy—since Ordell, no less than Jackie or Max, lives and acts from a critical juncture between his youth and his legacy. Almost any one-line sample of Jackson's dialogue and delivery is a devilish, delicious, highly profane movie unto itself: "My ass might be dumb, but I ain't no dumb ass" or "You think I'm gonna let a little cheese-eating nigga like this fuck that up?" or "Shit, Jackie, you come in this place on a Saturday night, I bet you need nigga repellent to keep motherfuckers off your ass!" Jackie's response to this last is a very modest "I do okay," but for Jackie, as for the film, that's a monumental understatement. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1997 Miramax Films/Mighty Mighty Afrodite Productions.

Picked Flick #42: Kiss of the Spider Woman

Do titles get any better than Kiss of the Spider Woman? When I first heard about the movie, reading over the lists of Oscar nominees in the local TV Guide—it was the last year before I actually watched the telecast—I couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't vote for it, or how a movie with that title could be anything but hypnotic, dangerous, creative. When a poster appeared under a "Coming Soon" placard at the single-screen theater of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, I marveled at the exotic graphic design, the enticing indigoes and aquas of the central image, the diagonal affectations of the fonts. When I learned at the beginning of high school, amid the faintest inner whispers about my sexual dispositions, that the story concerned a gay man and a political radical sharing a prison cell in South America, and that the Spider Woman was one of several fantastic movieland figures that the window-dresser described as vicarious pleasures for the Marxist, I knew I had to find the movie. I didn't know what either a window-dresser or a political radical was. Even as I gobbled the movie three or four times during my five-day rental allotment from Mr. Video in Hanau, Germany, I never quite absorbed Valentin's role or perspective. Even as I read the superlative novel, and then performed Molina's opening monologue in theater classes and local drama competitions, my hold on the story was only half-formed, tipped voluptuously in favor of one of its protagonists. Only in college, during my almost annual returns to this story I thought I knew so well, did I start to comprehend not only that a whole second movie awaited my discovery, rooted in forms of protest and discrimation that I had only begun to grasp, but that my early adoration of the film, which hung (I thought) with such sophistication on the shoulders of a young teenager, floated atop a complex network of projections, evasions, narcissisms, misreadings, and a rather blithe giving over of myself into the most comfortable aspects of fantasy.

And so Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film in which I had recognized glimmers of myself with such early and total astonishment, stunned me just as much by calling out my naïvetés and myopias—not from some new or rejected frontier of knowledge, where I was used to being shocked or upbraided by life, but from an already treasured and intimate object. It's no mystery to me how Babenco's film sets this sort of trap, at least for a certain kind of viewer. Where the early sequences are lusciously cinephiliac, with their mocking but affectionate recreations of dubious melodramas, and their willowy transitions from that universe of screen memory to the clammy, witty, and exciting reality of the jail cell, the later sequences assert their politics more forthrightly, with the hard lighting, strained faces, and tightened editing of other Latin American political dramas, like Luis Puenzo's The Official Story or Babenco's own magnificent Pixote. Fans who take Molina's epicurean escapism at nearly face value, as I did, are likely to feel like the second hour sells them out. The seductions of John Neschling's music or Patricio Bisso's versatile costuming don't evaporate as the film reaches its grave climax, but they shape-shift in a way that requires a full immersion in every side of what Babenco, working from Puig's ingenious template, has constructed up to that point. Almost by definition, the movie divides its sympathetic audience of marginalized liberals, forcing them to recombine by movie's end in a richer, more expansive spirit of solidarity: quite literally, and purposefully, less fabulous than the earlier chapters. It's a hugely ambitious journey that the movie takes, with impressive if erratic artistry. Nothing in the movie, not the acting or the editing or the camerawork or the story structure, is immune to miscalculation here or there, but Kiss also achieves substantial, flavorful successes in each of these areas. Best of all, because it is subtle and intelligent in raising questions about storytelling, spectatorship, sympathy, borderzones, clichés, stereotypes, and sexual politics—terrains where a great many movies start bonking you over the head, or else just flee in all the wrong directions—Kiss of the Spider Woman consistently surpasses its own flaws, challenges your own sureties, turning them all into productive questions rather than simple blemishes.

Kiss of the Spider Woman debuted the same year as The Purple Rose of Cairo, just a few rungs down on this list. Both movies understand and reward the unique devotions and pleasures of the passionate moviegoer, even as they dissect such devotion with an often uncomfortable accuracy. I learned even more from Kiss, and I feel even closer to it, because its range of themes and arguments is a little broader, and it humbled me from ever assuming that I've got any movie fully pinned down, no matter how much I love it or how many times I've seen it. Several of the film's pleasures are "simple": Sonia Braga is exceptional, Hurt and Julia have terrific moments, the screenplay's twists are truly surprising, and the whole movie looks and sounds great (especially for its low budget). It's a medicine wrapped in a morality lesson baked into a succulent dessert. When the damned thing ever finally arrives on DVD, we'll all have cause to celebrate. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1985 HB Filmes/Island Alive.

Picked Flick #43: The Corporation

As delightful and hopeful as it has been to observe the popular renaissance of nonfiction film within the mainstream market during these last five years, I've been worried by the trends of self-righteously simplified rhetoric and of over-reliance on arbitrary stock footage (e.g., random bombs while we hear about the Cold War, random Arabs while we hear about Bush family interests in Saudi Arabia). I keep my fingers crossed that more documentarians will show the stamina to live alongside and observe their subjects in real time, as in the superb Love & Diane, instead of building retroactive jigsaws from available archive materials; and that more filmmakers will trust that your subject doesn't need to be explicitly political in order to yield major intimations about social structures and hierarchies, like Spellbound did; or, best of all, that historically and politically premised documentaries will harvest meaty, substantial connections between past and present circumstances, without always prescribing the responses of their audience.

This kind of haughty, anti-intellectual approach is most thrillingly avoided in the tantalizing and fact-soaked film The Corporation, an emblem of leftist cinema at its most honest and effective. Indeed, The Corporation does a magisterial job of raising all sorts of urgent alarms about the traumatic effects of modern capitalism, without privileging reductive cant over concise, illustrated argumentation, and without preaching only to the pre-converted. The premise of the film's opening sequences is sublimely simple, but unexpectedly imposing: that is, to define what a corporation is, exactly—one professor at the Harvard Business School abashedly realizes that nobody has ever quite put this query to him before—and then to sketch the conceptual contours and legal entitlements that don't just allow but require corporations to maximize profits without any ethical qualms or qualifications. From here, the movie hurtles into its second conceit, aligning the hard-wired behaviors of corporations with the basic symptoms of diagnosed psychopaths, and then through a roulette wheel of eloquent case histories. Many of these, like the extended pièce de résistance about how FoxNews quashed their own story about America's contaminated milk supply, achieve the expected goal of arraigning white-collar pirates and amoral dollar-chasers, but the detail and power in the arguments are more supple and lifelike than one usually finds in films of this type. Plus, the pirates often furnish their own swords on which to fall. Wall Street trader Carlton Brown admits that he and every other trader he knows spent September 11, 2001, gleefully selling gold to the highest bidders and relishing the market's good fortune, quite literally. Lucy Hughes, a chirpy vice-president from Initiative Media, tips her hand about how she abets toy manufacturers and other clients to brainwash children into demanding their products. "Is it ethical? I don't know," Lucy admits, but it's the job she has to do, and she does it well. Chris Komisarjevsky, a corporate spin doctor whom some Orwellian neologist has rechristened a "perception manager," describes his job as though the corporations themselves—rather than, say, impoverished laborers or lampooned environmentalists or snookered consumers or corraled protesters or, in one especially vile anecdote, Bolivian citizens who were taxed by Bechtel for the privilege of drinking their own river and rain water—were the victims of an enormously sentimentalized marginality. "I help corporations have a voice," Komisarjevsky testifies, "and I help corporations share their point of view about how they feel about things." Though we almost never hear the interviewers' prompts, it takes a seasoned and careful approach to draw out motivations and rationalizations from such a broad spectrum of CEOs, activists, traders, historians, professors, consultants, and spies. Furthermore, these accounts always refine our sense of how capitalism operates, from its skyscraper summits through its middle management to its immiserated workers: the full canvas of the movie is richer and more important than the local shocks, cheers, or hisses occasioned by any given detail.

Even more to the filmmakers' credit, they film all of their interview subjects before the same black background, in the same light, so that we must actually listen and ruminate on our own behalves in order to assess the value of each person's perspective. If we have trouble discerning whether Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, ex-CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, is an unexpected voice of reason or a miscreant in heavy denial, or whether Roy Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet, is an epiphanic convert to geo-friendly policy or a canny soothsayer bending to the shape of a new market, the film offers no editorialized clues to sway us one way or the other. Some of the factual assertions are sobering and intractable, and you walk away edified, as from an especially potent lecture: who among us realized that, in practice, the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution didn't so much enfranchise former slaves, as per its stated intention, as it enfranchised corporations with newfound permission to own property, engulf other businesses, perpetuate themselves indefinitely, and assert the same rights as living citizens? Other material in The Corporation is energizing and practical, like the rising success rates of anti-corporate agricultural crusades in India, and the concatenation of websites and NGO referrals that conclude the movie. The movie's moral barometer is sensitive, and its funny bone is lively. Sure, some of the stock footage feels like empty accompaniment to voice-over accounts, but the film's overall graphic conception is smart and elucidating: one particular motif, resembling a maze or spreadsheet of problematic corporate practices, is a terse, purposefully overstuffed reminder of how effulgent and multifaceted the problems of corporate capitalism really are. The Corporation knowingly bites off more than it can chew, but it still chews on more than most films even bite off, and it is persuasively grounded in our world's complex reality, without drying up into a husk of scholastic finger-wagging. It's the Lord of the Rings of modern documentaries: epic, vivid, wise, well-paced, expansive. It's the kind of movie that makes you want to do more with your life. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2003, 2004 Big Picture Media Corporation/Zeitgeist Films.

Picked Flick #44: Shame

Across all of the arts, I think that the most urgent and sophisticated depiction of war is the one Bertolt Brecht constructs in his play Mother Courage and Her Children, in which the rumbling of military convoys and the cracks of artillery are mostly offstage echoes. The focalizing character is Anna Fierling, dubbed "Mother Courage" for both laudatory and facetious reasons, who strains to make a living for herself and her three bastard children while trudging through the muddy, scabbed grounds of the battlefields and surrounding towns, selling her second-hand wares to whomever, on whatever side, of whatever nationality or political persuasion, is willing to part with a buck, or a mark, or a krona, or a pair of boots, or whatever. Brecht helps us to understand war as a series of dark negotiations with one's own ethics, with one's own being, and with the competing ways of construing oneself as a communal figure: as a partner, a parent, a patriot, a pragmatist, a profiteer, a bystander, an objector. No one now living—at least no one paying any attention—can doubt the continuing relevance of this viewpoint, and the need for its proclamation: war, when it is happening, and it is almost always happening, is never "over there," it is always here, in its reverberations, its roots, its dollars and cents, even in the most isolationist refusals of war's reality.

Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame presents itself in as un-Brechtian a style as it possibly could, but the intelligence and the inclusiveness with which it examines war as a social and human condition are very nearly on a par with Brecht's. In Bergman's Persona, made two years previously, Liv Ullmann reacts with mute shock and terror to televised images of martial atrocities in Southeast Asia, and to the horrifying conviction of a Buddhist monk setting fire to himself in protest of man's inhumanity. War provides a crucial context for the vicious psychological retrenchment that Persona subsequently explores, particularly via the Ullmann character, but Shame confronts the issue in a much more direct and thorough-going way. Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Ullmann and Max von Sydow) are married concert musicians who live out a rustic existence on a Scandinavian island—farming and raising chickens, struggling to get the radio and the truck engine to work, ferrying to the mainland for necessities and the occasional luxury indulgence. In Shame's first scene, Ullmann and von Sydow wake in their beds (not, crucially, the same bed), and as she rather brusquely dresses and washes her face, he forlornly recounts a dream of the previous evening. An undeniable chill, if not quite a hostility, exists between these people, though its relative severity will rise and fall through the first half of the film, sometimes warming to an optimistic intimacy, sometimes tumbling into a scary antagonism. Meanwhile, we learn quickly that whatever unnamed country of which the Rosenbergs are citizens, albeit quite secluded ones, has been rent for several years by civil war, whose armies might invade their own environs at any moment. In many films, even ones by Bergman, these dual narratives would serve as metaphors or reflections of each other: the on-and-off combat within the Rosenbergs' marriage and the literal war that, for now, is only visible in the processions of military trucks and the low-flying jets that occasionally pass overhead. The genius of Shame, though, rendered with stomach-turning immediacy and realism, is that we experience all of this as one narrative. The gnawing discontent between Eva and Jan is directly conditioned by the war; it is one of the thousands of tongues through which the war speaks. She expresses contempt for his tearful, paralyzed anxieties; he doesn't understand how she can listen to so much more of the radio coverage than he and yet reflect so much less sensitivity and fear in response; she wishes he would fix the fucking truck, partially so they will have a means of escape if marauding armies do appear, and partially because he's such a goddamned procrastinator in general. About a half-hour into Shame, with a speed, a potency, and a plausibility that are equally hard to bear, the martial conflict explodes at the Rosenbergs' very own door, frightening them to their cores, annihilating their privacy, and serving to draw them back together but also to make them scowl even more deeply at each others' shortcomings. Again, these personal clashes are not sidebars or collateral effects of the war: they are part of what war is. As circumstances deteriorate even further in Shame, so too do the relations between the Rosenbergs.

Along with how it pervades our personalities, slips under our very skins, the other vile and best-kept secret of war is its shapeshifting ability. Like a flammable liquid, it pours itself into any space or vessel, and is prone to ignite anywhere. The second half of Shame, now that the Rosenbergs realize how immersed they are in the crisis, shows how arbitrarily they are pawned between the opposing factions, how their friendships and their enmities become hopelessly confused, how in a very Brechtian fashion—if not, again, in a Brechtian idiom—war becomes a marketplace for terrible barters, including sexual ones, which give onto their own cycles of self-defeating revenge. If I'm making Shame sound like harrowing viewing, then I'm doing it justice; few films are so excoriating in their images or their trajectories. But there is nothing abstruse or reductive or inaccessible about it: it doesn't need manichean figures of good and evil like Platoon, or peekaboo movements in and out of the maelstrom like Saving Private Ryan, or even the ornate and remote meditative koans of The Thin Red Line. Ambitious and indispensable as Malick's movie is, its motivating quarry is the philosophical knot of war, whereas Shame draws the rutted map of war's psychology, in bold and grievous strokes recognizable to any audience, and liable to frighten and humble them all. Ullmann, exquisitely forceful and believable in her role, has exactly one Bergmanesque soliloquy about the states and layers of being and suffering, but even this builds to a ringing, legible, and haunting conclusion. Imagining the war-torn world as the collective nightmare of humanity, of a global conscience in a restive, inattentive sleep, she asks herself, "What happens when the person dreaming all of this and all of us awakes, and is ashamed?" (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1968 Svensk Filmindustri/Janus Films.

Picked Flick #45: Frankie & Johnny

(This is the post I really should have contributed to Nathaniel's Pfeiffer Blog-a-thon last April, but it was just too soon in the countdown to rush it up. I meant every word I wrote at the time about my second-favorite Pfeiffer performance, but things only get better here...)

Michelle Pfeiffer may well be the most beautiful actress in Hollywood, and though she's rarely cited among the Streeps and and Moores, her talent is terrific and underrated: she's extremely attuned to her characters, capable both of mannerism and intuitive openness, and malleable to the divergent needs of a wide range of directors, genres, and projects. Despite all of this, however, she seems genuinely unsolicitous of attention. One almost gets the sense that she'd prefer to go unnoticed, and that it's both a blessing and a curse for her to be so skilled and well-rewarded in a profession that requires such extraordinary levels of scrutiny. She doesn't work that often, and when she does, she frequently opts for parts in movies that feel destined to escape critical or popular regard. Sometimes the parts aren't even that good, and you wonder, why is an actress of Pfeiffer's caliber and acclaim willing to break her reclusive patterns in order to star in Up Close and Personal or To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday? Why is it that even when she stars in a film with a built-in pedigree, like the Oprah-certified The Deep End of the Ocean or the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres, the films don't ignite, despite how good she is in them? Is some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy at work? Are audiences so intimidated by her Garboesque appearance that they miss how proudly middlebrow her tastes run, how, at least on screen, her fundamental guardedness gives way to such emotional transparency? Even in upper-crusty endeavors like Dangerous Liaisons and The Age of Innocence, she telegraphs emotions, very subtly shading them but still making them big enough for large crowds to relate to—as opposed to, say, the more architectural acting styles of co-stars like Glenn Close and Daniel Day-Lewis. Even while traveling among totally different filmmaking idioms and adjusting her performmances accordingly, the uniting feature is that she always finds the identificatory points, situating her characters on a perfectly even keel with the audiences (especially, you feel, the women) who will be watching her, and stressing the common humanity that links Age's Countess Ellen Olenska, tainted by divorce and decorously spurned by the late 19th-century Manhattan aristocracy, with Ocean's Beth Cappadora, a wounded Wisconsin mom who likes milk with her pizza.

In my mind, this paradoxical blend of glamour and agoraphobia, these keynotes of humility and sadness that connect the women she plays, reach their apotheosis in Garry Marshall's Frankie & Johnny, exactly the sort of film that tends to zip straight from a quick release to a rental-store shelf. Regardless of how capably Pfeiffer modifies and recalculates her looks in almost every role, the rigid preconception that she was too beautiful for a part played onstage by Kathy Bates muffled any hope of her performance being taken very seriously. Having Marshall's name attached as director couldn't have helped, but for both the star and the director, the film still represents their peak accomplishment: her apex in a career of admirable successes, his solitary but impressive excuse for calling himself an artist. Frankie & Johnny delivers one of the most elusive chimeras in mainstream moviemaking: a romance that has the look, the rhythm, the one-liners, and even the premise of a comedy but is actually not a comedy. Its low notes and minor chords are just as foundational and just as constant as its bright spots and perky exchanges. Its resolution, however proudly optimistic, is also quite tentative. In sum, it's an adult vision of two complicated people converging, finding an ointment but not a cure for the ways in which they have been hurt. It's a romance where people remain throughout who they were in the first scenes. The script, adapted by Terrence McNally from his own play, expands the action and widens the cast, but it brooks remarkably few compromises with the testy, nervous, mercurial attraction between Frankie and Johnny: the way he comes on too strong, smitten but also a little arrogant; the way she refuses what seems to arrive too easily and unexpectedly at her feet; the way he romances her and pleads with her but occasionally betrays something ugly; the way she loosens up and has some fun testing the waters, but never quite stops building up walls, slamming doors, and changing her tune. Pfeiffer, owning the movie while the wonderful Pacino agreeably serves it back to her, is eminently believable at every instant. She's funny and tart at work, she relishes small victories like bowling a strike and winning at handball, she keeps scenes alive while acting behind a countertop or inside a cramped New York bathroom. In the terrific, mood-setting opening—the one moment in the movie when we leave the city—Frankie has the nervy, suspicious jitters while visiting her family in Altoona, PA, but her candor and clarity are beyond reproach when she confides to her mother at the kitchen sink, "Maybe I'm not the happiest person in the world, but that's not your fault." Like Pfeiffer herself, Frankie wants to be left alone, but she also wants to be found.

Garry Marshall doesn't quite prove in Frankie & Johnny that he's got a firm handle on the known world—meaning, for example, that struggling busboys who quit to be screenwriters still live in fantastic two-story loft apartments. But compared to the laundered, insane exuberance of Pretty Woman, with its constant denials of its lurid and reactionary content, Frankie & Johnny feels wise, unpushy, generously ceded to the actors and the writer, peppered with punchlines and gag shots but willing to let top-drawer cinematographer Dante Spinotti do his thing. Seemingly truncated plot threads, like Pacino's reconnection with his ex-wife and alienated children, actually gain strength from being peripheral: there's a credible, refreshing sense in the movie that Frankie and Johnny's courtship does not subsume every one of their private voyages and trials. Even the song score Marshall chooses is of an utterly different species than Pretty Woman's market-friendly avalanche of radio hits; it privileges the expected and shimmering Debussy, a funkily melancholic title track by Terence Trent D'Arby, and a song called "It Must Be Love" by Rickie Lee Jones that, like the movie, is either an uptempo ballad or a cautiously muted pop declaration, depending on how you look at it. The production design of the diner is excellent. The supporting notes supplied by a then-unknown Nathan Lane and the perennially underutilized Kate Nelligan are delectable. A faux-rose that Johnny whips up out of a dyed-red potato, a fork, and a celery stalk swipes the all-time movieland prize for whimsical, endearing diner chic, narrowly squeaking past Jeffrey Wright painting Claire Forlani's portrait in his pancake syrup in Basquiat. Frankie & Johnny is so unpretentious that its fine, layered, beautifully coaxed instincts at serving its script and its characters and its audience are easy to overlook. Don't. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1991 Paramount Pictures.

Picked Flick #46: Titanic

When I first started teaching film, Titanic was invaluable to me, because every single student in my course had seen it, often more than once. As a result, for shared, shorthanded examples of camera angles, color filters, process shots, the comparative scope of a scene vs. a sequence, etc., and just as living proof that movies can unite people and endow us with common language and experience, Titanic was—in the treasure-hunting lingo of Brock Lovett & Co.—a trove, a jackpot. These days, it's hardly worth the trouble of invoking Titanic, because cracking the thick crust of derision or, at best, embarrassed affection is too arduous and digressive a task. Talk about hitting an iceberg: I recognize that even in 1997 and 1998, plenty of people were roundly unseduced by James Cameron's ballad of Jack and Rose. By now, though, Titanic seems to have sunk from a global preoccupation to an abashed recollection or a blacklisted memory.

Both the initial embrace of Titanic and its harsh disavowal, at least in the crowds where I hang out, betray a degree of emotionalism uncommon in the giddy world of movies—testament not only to how the film distinguishes itself from other epic-scale blockbusters by stoking emotion instead of cultivating detachment (it is, in this regard, the anti-Matrix) but to how the sinking of the Titanic itself, with all due respect to the people who died, resonates more in the history of affect than in any real chronicle of worldly consequence. Of course the event was triggered and conditioned by much vaster and more complicated forces—industrialism, social stratification, a booming market in luxuries, a new impetus behind global travel—but it's hard to feel as though any of these concepts operate in any truly complex way within the story of the Titanic, which unfolds as cleanly and simply as a parable. The poor paid for the luxuries of the rich, but death leveled them all. Idealism and ambition ran afoul of a major shoal of hubris. Many, many people died at once, and the foregoing circus of media jubilation around the ship's maiden voyage (as damp a phrase as anyone ever coined) made the deaths somehow more awful by making them so public—a bleak irony, too, since part of the horror of this story is the dark, freezing, lonely privacy in which the ship met its fate, so chillingly captured by that one extreme long shot of the distress flare, a pathetic white comma on the blank black sheet of the oceanic night. Titanic has an ideally sized plot for a movie, and for eliciting mass enthusiasm and identification, because despite the size of the ship and the scale of its infamy, the story's contours remain so manageable. In absolute contrast to something like the JFK assassination, the essential gist and ramification of the story can be quickly known, and since popular imagination has kept it afloat within an envelope of gently precautionary pathos, the tale offers a perfect porthole into broad fields and brushstrokes of feeling: romance, awe, sublimity, sentimentality, gravity, fear, manmade inequities as well as cosmic ones. Cameron's script isn't nearly as ambitious as those he wrote for the Terminator films or for the exemplary Aliens. Nonetheless, his extraordinary visual acumen and his keen regard for the audience's investments even in kinetic and logistic-heavy scenes prepares him perfectly as the director to animate Jack's doomed resourcefulness, Rose's coltish but galvanized resolve, the shipbuilder's avuncular regret, and all those "minor" moments of couples laid together in bed to their final rest, strangers gripping to handrails, waitstaff bolting through the corridors, deckhands crumbling in the face of the panicking crowd, "survivors" condemned to watch what they have just escaped. And he keeps all this in balance while presiding over a gargantuan, exacting, and detailed set, a mythic vision to hold alongside Griffith's Babylon.

Shame about the dialogue, and the high school lit-mag deployment of suicide as a plot device. I know, I know: that song. Many of the performances could stand some tweaking (more than that, in Billy Zane's case), even allowing that they've been evacuated of nuance so as to approximate the idioms of shipboard fictions, and also to purvey the script's distilled emotional states in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Too bad that, for all the justified finger-wagging at class oppression onboard, the world below decks is still something of a fratboy revue of gambols and beer steins, and the story still ends with a crafty and hardworking prole giving his life so that an aristocrat might live. If Titanic were truly building to an intellectual or editorial point, it would have a hard time persuading anybody that Jack's death offered the gorgeous, necessary precondition for Rose's rich, full life of riding ponies and turning pots. But palpably, these aren't the waters in which Titanic means to sail, at least not essentially. Every shot, every terrifically paced and judged cross-cut and interlude—increasingly so, in the film's formally heroic second half—squares the viewer right inside a romantic imagination of beauty and danger that movies almost never attempt anymore. The range of sentiments and the visual lucidity through which Titanic presents itself are tangible and recognizable to almost anyone of any age, and maybe that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as an endorsement of the film's refusal to be cynical, or to be simply and flatly procedural like The Poseidon Adventure or Airport, or to wave the flag of its own virtuosity in as shrill and off-putting a way as James Cameron does in his public appearances. The movie knows when to stop showing us smashed hutches and looming rudders against the sky and to contract instead around moments like the one that always, always gets me: Rose, secured on a lowering lifeboat, realizing as Jack recedes in an extreme low-angle shot that the life she is saving for herself is not one she wants to save, and so she clambers back onto the dying animal of the Titanic and runs right back toward Jack. The most sophisticated dramaturgy in the world? No—but at least for me, it reverberates just as much as watching Dorothy walk outdoors into Technicolor or Luke discover that his archenemy is his father or a treasured, long-buried childhood toy melt away in a furnace. Call me crazy, but I'll go down with this ship every time. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1997 Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox.

Picked Flicks #47: JFK & Nixon

People often ask me when my addiction to movies began, and I think I'd have to trace it to the years 1990-92, when I was growing up on an Army base in Hanau, Germany, where one of the most reliable and accessible entertainments for people my age was the single-screen movie theater. Movies arrived from America on a 3-6 month time delay, which at the time only added to their mysterious allure, since hype built for so long and under such different, more relaxed, and more reliable word-of-mouth conditions from the hypermediated onslaught of today's advertising. Living in a foreign country with only one English-speaking TV station (commercial-free to boot) further slowed the faucets of standard PR. These were also the years when my family bought our first VCR, so I could finally see both old and new movies of my own choosing, and with relatively little cultural noise dictating my opinions about what I was seeing. The only impediment on the theatrical side of things—a huge consideration then, though it seems now like another life—was having to finagle admission into R-rated movies. The fellow who worked the ticket counter didn't give me too much trouble despite disliking me, growling once that "you sure seem to have a lot of aunts and uncles" (read: strangers in line who agreed to shepherd me inside). The only two times I really had a problem hurdling over the R-rating, when the sleepy theater on cobblestoned Pioneer Kaserne suddenly sprang into high alert, were for Madonna: Truth or Dare, which outraged my ardent fandom and confirmed the evident social panic about uninhibited women, and for Oliver Stone's JFK. The censorious, highly disapproving vigilance that swirled around this movie was an altogether weirder case to me. American talking heads only ever supply "sex and violence" as the Scylla and Charybdis waiting to assail wayward youth, but neither appeared to be at issue in JFK. Granted, the theater staff did attempt to couch their quivering stinginess about Stone's images in terms of gore, of all things: no teenager, ostensibly, could possibly handle those wrenching replays and closeups of the Zapruder film, even though the predatory flayings in The Silence of the Lambs and the cheek-biting, family-stalking, capsizing menace of Max Cady in Cape Fear had just come and gone without similar caveats. Synthesizing the bizarrely fraught atmosphere at Pioneer with the cyclone of debate echoing from American media, I was perplexed as to what particular candy, laced with exactly what barbiturate or perverting element, JFK was offering to its endangered, corruptible audiences.

I can't remember now if my parents were unavailable or just uninterested in JFK, but my brother (good man!), hooked me up on the underground railroad with his high-school government teacher, and I was in. The movie totally blew my mind, as the phrase goes, but without just circumventing or opiating it. JFK's unimpeachable technical brio and its breathless dicing together of what feel like millions of film-fragments are enormous achievements in themselves. I can see where, as rhetorical devices, and even more as historicizing methods, they would leave much to be desired, but to cite an axiom that somehow always needs defending, JFK is not a legal brief but a movie—admittedly a movie with bullish designs on levering open the locked and sealed government case files, but also, quite patently, a "movie-movie" whose self-conscious flourishes of sound, music, montage, visual embellishment, changes in film stock, exaggerated characters, a highly caffeinated supporting cast, and pivotal arias of exposition and deduction (Laurie Metcalf's, Donald Sutherland's, and finally Kevin Costner's) all flagrantly announce the artifice and constructedness of what Stone has assembled. He and his crack team of collaborating artists devise stunning visual and audio analogues not just of paranoia but of outraged collective justice and of the massive, wormy coral reef of history, with its infinite chambers and pores, many of which never see the sunlight. Yes, it's a flawed film: Costner is too lightweight, Sissy Spacek's perspective as the lonely and agitated wife is almost nothing when it could have been something, and every time the film comes within a hundred feet of homosexuality, the performances, dialogue, and filmmaking all start stinking like wilted Southern verbena. Still, in a strange way, the lapses of JFK have always corroborated what is artful and almost frighteningly earnest about it: Stone works so fearlessly from the gut, with such unembarrassed fidelity to his sensibility, that the warts-and-all pursuit of ugly truths feels truly impassioned in this film. Not for Stone the decorous boilerplates of most courtroom dramas or tasteful liberal-historical tableaux, and almost single-handedly, JFK eliminated any need to make excuses for detritus like Ghosts of Mississippi, half-efforts like Mississippi Burning, or even decoy denunciations of invented crises, like the decidedly minor Guantánamo crisis in A Few Good Men. Stone already knows that both literally and figurally, we can't handle the truth—we can't touch it, and we can't accept what we can't touch—but he's able to use far more than foot-stomping speeches to register the point and its implications. In fact, conjoined with JFK's scalpel-edged critique of mainstream historical record is an equally sharp dismantling of our most naïve habits of image-reception. Not only does Stone recombine fresh and archival footage with the fervor of a mad geneticist, but he gamely stages illustrated versions of Jim Garrison's conjectures as well as the Warren Commission's, and of several gradations in between. Even when the script is one-sided, the film never is. JFK drives so many nails into the comortable conflation of filmed imagery with reality, is it any wonder that the film was so willfully misunderstood?

As with the Minghella duo a few rungs down on this list, JFK stimulated new appetites and ideas in my filmgoing which were even better rewarded by a subsequent effort from the same creative team. I've already posted a full review of Nixon, but if you've got seven hours free to watch the two films back to back, they remain fascinating companions. Whereas the coin of the realm in JFK is its vertiginous scrim of lightning-historical collage, asserted as an inherently greater force than the individuals scurrying around with their treacheries and truth crusades, Nixon remembers that history is still shaped by people, and that the unease and extremes of history cycle backward as the groundwater in our psyches and our private biographies. Again, some of Stone's touches are just too much: summits in China and in Texas and at J. Edgar Hoover's poolside still feel like trips to the fruitstand. Still, the broad, stentorian strokes in the dialogue and the visuals are plausibly illustrative of Nixon's mostly unsubtle grasp of his own life, and of what he was doing with everyone else's life. The ensemble of actors feel more like a united organism, rather than a series of showy walk-ons, and by allowing us more time and a slower pace to absorb the film's structure and its ironies, Nixon achieves what film biographies almost never do: it proposes a complex, counter-intuitive, and intricate new idea about an extremely well-known figure, portrayed against a detailed canvas of his intimates and his era. Nixon is almost certainly my favorite film about American politics, but it's also my favorite film of a Shakespearean tragedy. That Shakespeare didn't happen to write it is the result only of his living at the wrong time—a 400-year historical accident, though of course, in Stone's world, there are no historical accidents. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Images © 1991 Warner Bros. Pictures/Ixtlan Corporation/Regency Enterprises and © 1995 Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi Entertainment.

Picked Flick #48: Irma Vep

Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep crouches and teases from a funny, sexy, slinky space halfway between the chapbook and the manifesto. There is no doubt that Assayas, however offhanded his technique, means to shake up the French cinema. His characters can't stop bitching about the safe and stolid pictures that keep plodding around on Gallic screens, even as they join together to make a film of their own. Their shifty, shaky leader in this enterprise is René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a once-fêted director about whom everyone now seems especially dubious. René has somehow succeeded in wheedling Maggie Cheung into flying halfway around the world to France in order to star in his remake of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade's six-hour film serial of 1915-16. Unfortunately, René flummoxes himself and everyone else each time he tries to articulate why he is making this movie and what indeed he means for it to be. He has fiercely specific ideas about individual shots and scenes, and he forces his cast and crew through an intensely mannered, deliberately antiquarian project that none of them quite understands—and yet, when he watches the rushes at the end of a full day's work, he is apoplectic with disgust. More and more, Irma Vep insinuates that René isn't just a stern, eccentric taskmaster but a genuinely ill person. He vanishes from the set in the middle of the shoot, the victim of a rumored breakdown, at which point the studio recruits another director to steward the project.

That's about it for story in Irma Vep, but what bewitches about the movie are its crafty, on-the-fly methods of capturing the stop-and-go rhythms of filmmaking, to such an extent that the nascent film-within-a-film is itself almost an afterthought, albeit a beguilingly odd one. Reviews routinely called Irma Vep a satire, but it's never perfectly clear that René's remake of Les Vampires is such a folly after all, and nor is it obvious that Assayas is exaggerating all that much the swirling tumult in and around a set. Ironically, the more heatedly René disavows his labor, the more the cameraman, costumer, and cast members devise their own excited inklings about the film's artistic potential. Then again, most of these characters are so quicksanded in their own private neuroses that it's a minor miracle that any film is coming together at all. Markus (Bernard Nissile), René's cinematographer of 15 years, is infuriated by the director's wordless dismissals of each day's work. The producers seethe with bureaucratic stresses and with petty suspicions of their colleagues. Laure (Nathalie Boutefeu), the second-billed actress, is diplomatically supportive of René's ambitions, at least until she learns that she'll inherit the lead role if the new director, José Mirano (Lou Castel), succeeds in appropriating the film. Most memorably, Zoé (Nathalie Richard), the perpetually frazzled and temperamental wardrobe supervisor, keeps trying to suture the flimsy latex of Maggie Cheung's principal costume—a zippered catsuit modeled less on Feuillade's original character than on Michelle Pfeiffer's Batman Returns get-up—while simultaneously nursing a potent but anxious crush on Maggie herself. While all of these characters repeatedly explode at each other, Maggie Cheung is almost supernaturally gracious and flexible: a refreshing detour from actress-as-diva clichés, not to mention an extremely able performance in the always difficult role of oneself. In a sense, Irma Vep takes shape as a series of challenges to Maggie's equanimity, but she keeps her cool not just around this retinue of barking headcases but in the face, too, of Eric Gautier's restive handheld camera. Then again, Maggie may be harboring her own secrets: in the one sequence where she separates from the group, she appears to sneak into a nearby hotel room and burgle an expensive necklace, while the naked owner gabs on her telephone mere steps away. Given its uncertain placement within Irma Vep's montage, Maggie may simply be dreaming this trespass, but something about the sheer, risky gratuitousness of her theft resonates with René's artistic vision and, indeed, with Assayas' own: all three artists play elaborate, improvisatory games with exotic objects. For both René and Assayas, Maggie herself is this object—and if anything, she understands René better as his psyche further unravels and his fetishistic fascination with her becomes more overt. "That's desire," she says, with kind, even-keeled understanding at the end of his confessional rant, "and I think it's okay, because that's what we make movies with."

It's hard to write about Irma Vep and capture what is so special, playful, and exploratory about the movie. One major reason is that Assayas operates from such a jazzy visual sensibility that words are poor communicants for his signature fixations—for example, recurring shots of Maggie in her leather facemask, or the subtly sustained sequence shots in which Zoé's unrequited crush graduates from a subplot to a major assertion of the film. There's also the fact that, shaved of its last five minutes, Irma Vep would amount to a reasonably smart and enjoyably frisky sketch about art, recycling, and paranoia. Instead, Irma Vep unleashes a whopper of an open-ended finale: proof positive that you don't need a plot-twist, nor even much of a plot, to send your audience reeling out of the theater. As the crew of Les Vampires 2.0 gather to watch a rough assembly of footage by their hospitalized auteur, Assayas does more than call the bluff of René's skeptics. What he has crafted is so fearlessly, unspeakably strange that this modest, desultory movie suddenly quakes with the distilled force of aesthetic mystery. Forget Guy Maddin, or plastic bags blowing in the wind, or those blinding cityscapes at the ends of Happy Together and Adaptation. Though Assayas would reach further and score higher in demonlover (many of whose central motifs are already active here), Irma Vep bears the signature of a filmmaker who can stand far enough outside himself and his medium to see what is truly remarkable and also unsettling about both. He concocts, via a story about resurrecting old images, a tantalizing foretaste of the weird, hypnotic, possible futures of movies. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1996 Dacia Films/Canal+/Zeitgeist Films.

Picked Flick #49: The Purple Rose of Cairo

"I've met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything." So muses Mia Farrow's Cecilia in one of the most perfect and most perfectly played lines of dialogue Woody Allen ever wrote, a line that is equal parts honey and rue, just like the movie. Cecilia is a poor waitress, in at least three senses of the word: pitiable, without money, and wincingly bad at her job, lost as she often is in two kinds of daydreams. Some are about the movies she has recently seen, others about those soon to arrive in town. Even compared to the down-and-out customers and co-workers who surround her, even in contrast to her thuggish husband Monk (Danny Aiello), Cecilia's plight is especially dolorous, her happiness particularly moth-eaten. For some reason, this is how movies always portray inveterate filmgoers—who would haunt a moviehouse except someone in dire need of consolatory distraction?—but The Purple Rose of Cairo infuses real and enormous feeling into its characterization of Cecilia. She is constantly inspired by the movies to leave her husband and her current life and to imagine better versions of both, but then she is predictably rebuffed by how difficult it is to transform one's lot so utterly, and so she comes back. Her world is one of continual returns, and fairly early in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the misleading allure of popular fantasy seems almost as cruelly sad as the threadbare upholstery and the dim, amber-colored lighting in her apartment.

Did I mention, though, that The Purple Rose of Cairo is, at least in large part, a comedy? Alert as it is to the insuperable remoteness of reel life, it also concocts a dazzling, warm, and utterly joyful figure for the sheer pleasure of movies—the inexplicable way in which their silver flickers come to feel like a space you could happily inhabit, and the even more outrageous way in which cinephilia (which sounds a little like "Cecilia") starts to feel like a reciprocal adoration: if you love the movies enough, you start to sense or at least to dream that they love you right back. On her fourth or fifth trip to a matinée of The Purple Rose of Cairo, cheekily rendered as some mad Hollywood combo of Egyptian adventure, cabaret revue, and high-society romance, Cecilia is first noticed, then hailed, then magically wooed by the sweet-spirited movie character Tom Baxter, who literally walks off the screen to join her. The plaintive mood of small-scale tragedy has been so convincingly set by the preceding half-hour that the sudden rabbit-hole into comic farce is as unexpected as it is delightful. The rest of the movie, peppered with delicious dialogue and acted to perfection by the delicate Farrow and a buoyant Jeff Daniels, follows Cecilia's rapid courtship with Tom, then her run-in with Gil Bellows, the flustered actor who played Tom Baxter (and is also played by Jeff Daniels), and then her agitated decision about which of these figments—the matinée idol or his lovestruck alter ego—shall usher her over the new horizons of her life. The high spirits of the movie also encompass a zesty brothel interlude with Dianne Wiest and Glenne Headly; the Pirandellian fracas among the other Purple Rose characters whom Tom has abandoned; and a climactic montage, diced with expert period details and hammy innuendoes, in which Tom escorts Cecilia through the Hollywood dreamworld. All of these set-pieces and plotlines enliven the movie and invigorate the audience, but even they cannot compare to a short scene in a pawnshop, where Gil Bellows croons standards to Cecilia while she accompanies on ukulele, and the film leaps right into the stratosphere of movie bliss.

The Purple Rose of Cairo doesn't quite end how you expect, though it probably couldn't end any other way, and in wielding the masks of comedy and tragedy so deftly within the same film, it obviates any need for future Allen endeavors like Melinda and Melinda. Beyond the suppleness of the writing and the infectious, perfectly timed energies of the performers, The Purple Rose of Cairo works because the actual filmmaking emanates nostalgia and exuberance in such equal, doting measure. Cinematographer Gordon Willis, one of the truly indispensable figures in American movies, reanimates old-Hollywood idioms as perfectly as he did in Allen's Zelig, but with a sense of fun and depth that the one-joke premise of the earlier film didn't quite allow. For all of these reasons, Purple Rose situates you right in Cecilia's shoes: you recognize the limits and the artifice of movies, and you hope there is something more in your life to go home to, but nor would you want your life without the movies in it. The Purple Rose of Cairo was the first movie we saw in my high-school film studies course, where it was paired with Hitchcock's Vertigo, an even starker myth about the appeals and the dangers of gorgeous surfaces and emotional projections. In my mind, Purple Rose is also a natural companion to The Wizard of Oz, even though a reverse journey from color into black and white marks the threshold of fulfillment in this case, and the adage that "There's no place like home" echoes with even greater ambivalence. Beyond invoking connections to such undebated masterpieces, The Purple Rose of Cairo, in its admittedly tinier way, reveals itself with every viewing to be a masterpiece of its own, a witty and wise amalgam of innocence and experience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1985 Orion Pictures.

Picked Flicks #50: The English Patient & The Talented Mr. Ripley

Anthony Minghella's The English Patient is a waning moon of a movie, full of terrible torture and recurrent explosions, but more powerful still in depicting the low sputtering of a candle, the dimming of a flashlight, the erosion of love, the wearing away of borders. The film's fundamental attitude, notwithstanding its multiple cataclysms and its memorable howls of bereavement, is of poignant, downcast serenity. Proceeding along a gossamer thread of slow fades and lingering dissolves, The English Patient doesn't plumb the horrors of war—the deaths, the displacements—so much as it radiates a pearly, sometimes choking sadness that is the plausible aftermath of war, but also of love, and even of life itself: a mournful tranquility with which we, like the world, absorb our shocks and weather our storms. Experiences, the terrible as well as the transcendent, disperse and ripple outward into the mundane and unknown. They melt each other's boundaries, even when we're working hard to distinguish them. Beauty and memory and knowledge recede even as they are awakened or unearthed. The morbid eventfulness of the opening scenes, full of rasping soldiers and felled planes and exploding landmines, sets up only a few of the maze-like inroads into the movie's concatenated narrative; more importantly, these scenes rush to provide a context for that mood of bruised, wistful grief that defines Michael Ondaatje's novel as well as Minghella's adaptation. The heart of the film, then, lies not in major story points but in seemingly ornamental shots like that of Juliette Binoche trimming her hair in the window of an abandoned monastery, or another in which she uses piles of books to fill the gaps in a decimated staircase. Later—though actually much earlier, in the film's serpentine temporal logic—when Ralph Fiennes' leonine Count Almásy and Kristin Scott Thomas' patrician adventurer Katharine Clifton are stranded inside a jeep during a terrible sandstorm, the emotional core of the scene is not the deep desperation of their circumstances, nor the lusty attraction blooming between them, nor even the inevitable chaos that will afflict their cohort once their affair begins. What that scene is really about is stealing a moment of unclaimed time, so that Almásy can tell this gilded beauty about the names of North African winds, and so she can hear him and be moved by what moves him. It is a rare, fleeting moment away from warmaking and mapmaking, away from worldly consequence, and it is precious for that very reason.

Granted, the film does not always benefit from Minghella's taste for romantic projections or his fervently literary emotionalism. His best visual and tonal ideas arise in that opalescent monastery where Binoche takes care of Fiennes, but not so his most rigorous concentration on plot or character; in fact, Minghella quite defies the emphases in Ondaatje's novel and inflates the Almásy-Katharine liaison into an erotic reckoning so potent it's almost embarrassing. Other problems emerge from the clash of impulses between aestheticism and political anatomy, and from Minghella's vague, uneven management of key characters like Willem Dafoe's Caravaggio and Naveen Andrews' Kip. But if all of this makes The English Patient a film of moments more than a sturdy whole, the moments are often glorious, and even as I confess my awareness of the movie's limitations, I maintain that its blend of bathos, adventure, contemplation, and cosmetic luster remains hard to beat. Kristin Scott Thomas fuses sexiness and intelligence in such layered, fascinating ways that she almost single-handedly validates the film's entire project of eroticizing ideas (or is it of intellectualizing eros?). Binoche finds an ideal film and character for her translucent style of acting; her early reading of the line "I don't know anything" tells you all you need to know about the character. The sound design is dense and often pristine, doing just as much as Stuart Craig's excellent production design and Ann Roth's typically subtle costumes to mask the film's low budget and, better, to foster its ambitions.

Three years later, Minghella returned with another prestige literary adaptation, and this time he had more money to throw around. But beyond being even more plushly outfitted than its predecessor, The Talented Mr. Ripley is in nearly every respect the more impressive, surprising film. Minghella tinkers with Highsmith even more than he did with Ondaatje, but rather than bend the material in more conventional directions as he did in The English Patient, he warps and weaves Ripley into an object of even more sidewinding, epicurean perversity than the novel is. Where The English Patient is suffused with death and immersed in the impermanence of things, The Talented Mr. Ripley has the guts as well as the chops to turn a story about killing into a parable of invention, of production, illuminating not just how Tom Ripley turns himself into someone else, but how each new imposture and each new murder actually creates something new—a new sense of who and what Tom is, of who and what he craves, of where he is going, of what he has been up to all along, of what the world must be, at essence, if Tom and his story are possible. Even though we, unlike any of the characters, know what Tom is doing and how he's managing it (often barely), we still end the film with an uncanny sense of several Toms existing, of not knowing where or how to fix him, of not quite believing there is only one Tom. And unlike The English Patient, the film takes perfect measure of every character and performance. Cate Blanchett's heartbreakingly gauche heiress and Jude Law's apollonian narcissist are the crowning glories, though Gwyneth Paltrow's seething anger at being so constantly abandoned, underestimated, and ungratified is a more impressive acting achievement than most reviewers admitted. I saw The English Patient four times in the theater, besotted by its conception and by the pure beauty of how it looked and sounded; Ripley, though, is the film I now dip into more often, and the one from which I learn more. Both films offer enticing signs that all is not lost in the territory of the upscale period drama, and that even within our illiterate age, ardent booklovers can both make and enjoy spectacular films. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Images © 1996 Miramax Films and © 1999 Paramount Pictures/Miramax Films.

Picked Flicks: The Halfway Point

So we've made it through the first half of my Picked Flicks, the awkwardly named but fervently admired movies that I am proud to endorse as personal pets, even if none of them is quite Citizen Kane. Again, the Top 100 is about admiration, even though I do love almost all of those films; the Picked Flicks, from which the Top 100 titles are purposely excluded, are about love—even though, as you've hopefully gleaned from my write-ups, love often stands on the shoulders of some kind of admiration. It's all academic, and more than that, it's all extremely silly. But you know, it makes me feel good to write about good movies, which are often the hardest ones to characterize and the easiest ones to take for granted. I appreciate your following along—humoring me, really—thus far.

As we head into the top half, things will start to change a bit, mostly insofar as the films will skew even more contemporary. From #51 to #100, I included 14 films produced before I was born, which already isn't much, but on the top half of the countdown, there are only six (roughly, since it's hard to quantify the ties). It probably stands to reason that favorite movies are often formative ones, and for every movie-lover I know, these are often the movies that got us started on the theater-going habit, or which lit up before our eyes just as the addiction was really taking hold. In my case, this means that the 1990s play an inordinately strong role in what's coming. As much as I worship The Wind and Camille and The Seventh Seal and Mothlight, they aren't what I pop into the DVD or VCR for comfort, company, cheer, or obsessive revisitings....and those are the movies this list means to honor.

Coming up soon, then, in the next block of ten, give or take my constant rejiggering: two Best Picture winners (#46 and #50), two past presidents (#47), three punctures in the wall between real and reel life (including #42, #48, and #49), an impostor (also #50), a foreign war (#44), a short-order duo (#45), a sister doin' it for herself (#41), and a century-old monster that shows no signs of shrinking any time soon (#43). Any guesses, either for this bracket or for what's up top?

Picked Flick #51: Erin Brockovich

In a stunning demonstration of the Newtonian physics of movie stardom, Julia Roberts both loses and acquires her cool in Erin Brockovich, a movie that struts right past and, when necessary, stomps right over the hoariest clichés of Liberal Crusader Cinema. Any paean to this film must pay obeisance to Roberts' presence and performance in the title role, but what's most striking to me about her iconic turn is that "presence" and "performance" describe nearly opposite vectors of her work. Much more typically, a showcase for a megastar like Roberts aligns who she is (or who we perceive her to be) with what she does as a performer—and so, to take some easy examples, Garry Marshall practically keys the lighting in Pretty Woman to her generous, toothy supersmile, and he interpolates that lusty, cackling, blooper take of Richard Gere snapping the jewelry case on her fingers, such that her spontaneous whoop is indistinguishably Vivian's and Julia's whoop. Sleeping with the Enemy and The Pelican Brief play up the fragile tremulousness of, respectively, the newly anointed star who had best not put a foot wrong and the "comeback" queen trying hard to stay in the game while the shadowy forces of Hollywood PR try to paint her as a waning commodity. Erin Brockovich, though, like My Best Friend's Wedding and Notting Hill except better, amplifies our loyalty to this star while palpably, almost perversely calling attention to her most dubious and off-putting qualities. After instantly winning us over in the first sequence, pleading for a job that we're sure she won't get and probably doesn't want, Julia allows her high-voltage charisma to take care of itself ever afterward, choosing instead to emphasize how crabby and chirpily ruthless Erin can be, how pinched she is by her borderline bankruptcy and by snoopy co-workers. Her line readings are mercilessly good, especially when she's flaring up with ire or its cousin, self-pity: "I was Miss Wichita for God's sake... did I tell you that?" Pacific Gas & Electric arrives into the movie as yet another thing that annoys Erin, abrading her ever-abraded sense of fairness—barely any different from the lawyer's office that doesn't return her calls or the long-haired, engine-revving neighbor who has the temerity to be attracted to her. Erin is a hero who is also a pill; the script, limned with zingers and an unbeatably triumphalist character arc, gets the vinegar treatment from a wonderfully emboldened Roberts, who finally gets to use that haughty edge which marred some other performances as a productive tool for tempering and complicating this one. Steven Soderbergh, savvy to an extreme, captures Erin's righteous pluck as well as her almost free-floatingly disdainful attitude, and he captures these and other idiosyncrasies in shots that remain character-driven and respectful of her roving intelligence, even when the script starts to crank out the plot logic. Working both with and against the screenplay, both with and against Roberts' lavishly adored persona, Erin Brockovich activates an almost molecular field of humming electricity around this newly revealed actress. When Walter Benjamin wrote about "aura," Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich is what he had in mind.

And yet, it's as misleading as it is nearly unavoidable to consider Erin Brockovich a star vehicle, because Soderbergh's eye and his guiding hand are just as attentive, as creative, and as revelatory with regard to everything and everyone else in the film. Even the title is misleading: Erin Brockovich sounds like the story of one imposing woman, who, incidentally, could hardly have chosen a better name for herself: soothingly vowelly at the outset, and then, without a moment's notice, armored and aggressive with hard, intimidating consonants. But where, in that deceptively monolithic title, could we possibly sense the perfection with which the movie nails the entire Hinkly community, the weirdly telegraphed malice of overstuffed manila files, the dead air of an office where co-workers stolidly tolerate each other, and where new arrivals hang their dreams of individuality on the prospect of choosing their own code for the Xerox machine? How can we know that Albert Finney's Ed Masry will emerge just as roundedly and memorably as Julia's Erin, or that just when Erin is getting pretty easy to take at face value, Cherry Jones will pop up to slam a door in her face with ample justification, or Aaron Eckhart will withstand another caustic, patently defensive, and narcissistic put-down from this ersatz champion of the little people? "What about you, George?" Erin huffs, as though it simply hasn't occurred to her that other people need her, and that more than that, they need the parts of themselves that she has colonized along her admittedly valiant warpath toward social justice. Erin Brockovich isn't just about a woman who bucked the system but about the way that even a fully warranted outrage, hers or ours, often spills over into careless, omnivorous contempt. Like My Best Friend's Wedding, it doesn't quite end as you'd expect, but it's enormously freeing to the actress, the film, and even the entire genre that new gradations of "resolution," new compromises in tone and perspective, are finally permitted.

Like many critics, I trumpeted Traffic a little more loudly than I did Erin Brockovich when they so famously debuted in 2000. It isn't so much that Traffic has aged poorly as that I haven't had a single impulse to watch it again; my memory is of having a stout admiration for Soderbergh's ambitions, his seriousness, and his organizing skills, but of trying to muscle that admiration into an actual enthusiasm, which deflated before I could even write a proper review. (Truly, this was back when I really wrote reviews.) Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, remains one of the decade's sturdiest and most perennially rewarding entertainments: edited like a dream, paced like a racehorse with nothing to prove, accented with smart shifts in makeup and costume that far exceed the tarty first impressions, and lit with real acuity. Those zingers still zing. In several scenes where Erin gets what she wants with a flashy grin and a folksy demeanor—at the Water Board, in the Jensens' home—the film delivers much funnier and richer riffs on how Julia fabricates and manipulates her Julia-ness than Ocean's Twelve ever quite manages. Erin Brockovich gets me cheering for Erin every time, but also empathizing with the people wriggling under her stiletto pumps or cowering from her fury behind their tackboard cubicles. It also gets me thinking about why I am reacting this way, and about the value and the costs of Erin's fierceness, and why we're all so pissed off these days (enough so for Erin Brockovich to become a national folk hero), and about the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of being so constantly pissed. The movie, itself a little pissed, betrays its own lapses in tone and judgment, but you forgive them because like everything else in the film, they are interesting, entertaining, precautionary, and true. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2000 Universal Pictures.

Picked Flick #52: Sherman's March

Ross McElwee's Sherman's March may be the most convincingly lovelorn movie I have ever seen. When it was released on American screens in 1986, half a decade after McElwee lensed all of the footage, the movie would have made a terrific double-feature with Eric Rohmer's The Green Ray, a quiet, enormously compassionate, but wonderfully un-precious narrative about a lonely, attractive, but moody French thirtysomething who can't find anyone to go on vacation with her, doesn't feel comfortable in any of the places she goes, and very nearly resigns herself to a singleton's life. McElwee's memoir, filmed in the immediate aftermath of an unexpected breakup with his New York City girlfriend, offers a more homespun, masculine variation on similar themes, though McElwee's problem is not so much a dearth of companionship but a bewildering abundance of women who briefly "click" as lovers but who soon find reasons to part ways, except when McElwee beats them to it. Sherman's March, then, records his humorously hangdog sojourn through the American South: the director's home territory, densely populated with relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are trying to atomize his creeping dejection and couple him off with one Dixieland bachelorette or another. One of the first, funniest, and most revealing cuts in the movie carries us from McElwee's stark, empty loft apartment in Manhattan—a direct precursor of the one in When Harry Met Sally... where Billy Crystal passes the hours by throwing playing cards into a bowl—to a stationary shot in the lushly verdant North Carolina woods, where McElwee's extended family has convened an entire armada of eligible Southern magnolias, all under the flimsy pretext of a group picnic. As the women pass single-file by McElwee's camera, the military undertone of the shot is not accidental, and in fact it resonates with McElwee's other problem: when he was dumped, the nearly bankrupt filmmaker had just collected a grant to make a historical documentary about General William Tecumseh Sherman's slash-and-burn cavalcade through the South during the American Civil War. McElwee is hugely, genuinely intrigued by Sherman's story, but in the face of long-lost girlfriends who turn out to be recent divorcées, and synchronized-swimming belles of Virginia, and guitar-playing sirens, and rockabilly blues women, and lavishly impatient matchmakers, who has any headspace left for history? Sherman's March strives admirably—sometimes poignantly, often hilariously—to teach us some things about the notorious Yankee marauder, but much to our slightly pitying delight, the gravitational pull of McElwee's broken, optimistic heart is far and away the strongest influence on the film.

One reason why McElwee's film so bountifully transcends its limited and narcissistic premise, distinguishing itself from the mid-quality Woody Allen movies to which so many 1980s critics compared it, is that the women for whom McElwee pines emerge as layered, credible, unexpected figures in their own right—persuasive and interesting objects of love, rather than simple avatars of some generalized "womanhood" or empty mirrors in which the filmmaker sees mostly himself. Quite to the contrary, McElwee continually detects interests, expertises, energies, and even manifest foibles in these women that inspire him to be with them, and often to be like them. As much as his dashed hopes for romance provide the film's driving conceit, it is palpable throughout that he is hugely, creatively, and indeed hormonally inspired by his encounters with Mary, the middle-class fashion model for charity auctions; Pat, the deluded but indomitable aspiring starlet; Claudia, a kind and generous single mother with wispy premonitions of the Second Coming; Winnie, a doctoral candidate in linguistics living a hermit's life on a coastal island; Jackie, a onetime lover and now an anti-nuclear activist in South Carolina; Dedee, a singer and girl's-school teacher who gradually reveals her ardent Mormonism; Joyce, an affable rock 'n' roll frontwoman and sometime lounge singer in red leather pants; and Karen, an introspective lawyer who can't make up her mind about Ross or about her longtime on-again, off-again boyfriend Ken, who collects life-sized statues of hippos and rhinoceri. If Sherman's March evokes Allen, albeit in an utterly different regional milieu, it conjures only the best: Annie Hall, with a whole cornucopia of very different Annies. The same energizing, appealing radiance also emanates from women in the film who aren't McElwee's inamorata, such as his sister Dedee, who confides conspiratorially about her recent eye-left and "fanny-tuck" surgeries; and the vulgar, protean, uproarious Charleen, a former teacher and mentor who threatens to castrate Ross if he doesn't put down his camera when he's on dates, and who tries to school her errant pupil in the ardent vocabularies of love. Inside of eight minutes, she advises the nebbishy Ross to intone to the ill-at-ease singing Mormon, "'You're the only woman I've ever seen, I would die for you, I life for you, I breathe for you!' It doesn't matter that you don't know her! That's irrelevant!"

Charleen means what she says, just like she means it when she refers to the Civil War as "the late, great unpleasantness," and just as everyone in this offhandedly riotous movie means every crazy, dreamy, downcast, eggheaded, space-cadet thing that they say. Pat's spontaneous account of her ideal starring role is an early set-piece—it involves her curing cancer on a tropical island with her Tarzan lover, before traveling to Venus over a score of Stevie Wonder songs, getting macheted at the neck by her jealous paramour, and returning to Earth as a floating head-cum-prophet of love. The utterly credulous Claudia introduces Ross to an amateur Civil War enthusiast who gripes that the Confederacy has gotten a terrible rap, and that its only mistake was that "slavery should not be enforced, it should be a right—if you want to be a slave, be a slave; if you don't, fine." By no means are the women only presented as figures of fun, in part because Ross is no more clued-in than they are about the functioning world of grown-ups, in part because he is so sincerely and obviously attracted to them, and in part because a few of them, Winnie and Karen in particular, offer such shrewd and impressive retorts about Ross' own shortcomings and deceptively meek form of bullishness. Unlike a tedious exercise in detached, condescending picaresque like Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, or even a comparatively wiser film like Payne's Sideways, Sherman's March is lovingly humane even when it mopes, pokes fun, or leaps to connect the dots between bachelorhood, battlefield violence, and nuclear proliferation. On repeat viewings, the film's tone and perspective gets more complex, while the jokes stay funny, and the technique evinces more craft beneath what looks like a resolutely on-the-fly chronicle. The "characters," if we want to call them that, quickly doff their guises of stereotype and show us sparkling, surprisingly, sometimes silly facets of humanity leading, for better or worse, with its needy, greedy, smiling heart. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1986 First Run Features.

Picked Flick #53: Min and Bill

If, as surely does happen, Oscar-winning actresses congregate in heaven for their own exclusive socials, Marie Dressler sticks out like more than a sore thumb. Here was an actress of such stout frame, heavy brow, and rectangular jaw that she makes Shirley Booth look like Gwyneth Paltrow. By all rights, Dressler should have been too big, too thick for movies, excepting perhaps the Odessa Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin; she's a dead ringer for the doomed, outraged giantess who marches her dead child back up toward the marauding soldiers. Somehow, though, in the early 1930s, as the birdlike Lillian Gishes and Mary Pickfords of the silent era passed their torch to the peppy comediennes and glamour goddesses of the studio era, Dressler rose to the absolute top of her profession. More than just a comeback queen, having faded in the wake of antique triumphs like Tillie's Punctured Romance (directed by Mack Sennett in 1914, and co-starring Charlie Chaplin), she emerged as a veritable superstar, briefly without peer. Consider this extraordinary reminder from Matthew Kennedy's terrific biography: "At the time of her death in 1934, Dressler was the most beloved film star in America. According to an August 1933 Time magazine cover story, her films then earned an average of $800,000 each—a sum far exceeding the draw of all other stars. The honor of box-office champion was officially given to her in 1932 and 1933 by the Quigley Publication and the Motion Picture Herald's nationwide poll, which asked 12,000 motion-picture exhibitors to name movie stars with superior earning power. Dressler topped Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Mickey Mouse. There were Marie Dressler puppets, dresses, fan clubs, and commemorative flowers."

All this for an actress whose alter ego in Min and Bill calls herself an "old sea cow." Typically of Dressler's manner, in this and other films, she utters the line in a tone that registers toughness, good humor, resignation, lucid practicality, a fainter twist of sour than you'd think, and an earnest but highly subliminal invitation to Bill (Wallace Beery), her boarder and possible paramour, to contradict her. He doesn't, but then, he needn't: the rich relationship between this man and this woman is terse, tempestuous, but palpably felt and fully realized. The title figures are not obviously in love, at least not in an obviously romantic way, but they are fully, crucially, almost unquestioningly implicated in each other's lives. They share meals and confidences and barbs. They enjoy liquor together, and nurse each other. They have great, terrible, rocking rows: just watch how Dressler pummels the imposing Beery and knocks him all around a room—and then goes after him with an axe, gutting the door of the closet where he's hiding, in what is obviously not a process shot. Most importantly, they are guardians and protectors of Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), a teenaged girl whom Min has raised after her loose, dypsomaniacal mother Bella Pringle (Marjorie Rambeau) left her as a babe in Min's boarding house. When Bella sallies back into their lives, Bill shares Min's alarm that Nancy may be taken away, but he's also helplessly attracted to this svelte, easy figure. The status quo of this ersatz, fish-smelling family won't stay the same, but how and to whom will Nancy escape, especially now that boys have come calling? Will defending Nancy turn Min against Bill? Is his fascination with Bella a partial rejection of Min? Why is there a slapstick boat chase in this movie, and how does Dressler glide so swiftly from that sort of sequence to the stark poignance of Min walking home, kicking a can along the sidewalk, uncorking huge emotions without seeming to let any out, and avoiding cliché at almost every turn?

Min and Bill, in a deft and efficient 66 minutes, offers a semi-comic spin on the kind of dockside melodrama popularized by Eugene O'Neill in works like Anna Christie (adapted to the screen the same year as Min and Bill, with Dressler in the cast). Something about the wharfs, a perennial locale for late-20s and early-30s cinema, prompted actors, directors, and other artists to crystallize strong, almost rough emotions within concise but deceptively layered story structures. While Min and Bill is less visually poetic than something like Sternberg's The Docks of New York, director George Hill's straightforward style nonetheless serves the material and the actors perfectly. Dressler and Beery clearly connect with the audience and with each other in ways that modern movies rarely ask, and which even the greatest bygone stars seldom achieved. The hefty, exaggerated muscularity of their acting, the very quality that might on the surface seem dated and uningratiating, locates Min and Bill on a subtle, exciting, hugely entertaining, and era-specific intersection between theater and film. Almost everything about Min and Bill is subtly, humbly impressive, and Rambeau's supporting performance is a real livewire, years before the Academy got around to acknowledging second-tier roles. Thank goodness they got it right with Dressler, though. In single moments or shots, her face may seem to work too hard, or her physique may imply a short route into typecasting, but her presence, her choices, her humor, her energy, and her gravity are utterly distinctive, and all to be savored. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1930 MGM Films.

Picked Flick #54: Suddenly, Last Summer

Sometimes even the major, personality-shaping fixations in our lives recede for a while, but then forcefully reassert themselves at unexpected moments. Literally, in this one week, I am experiencing a mini-revival of my Tennessee Williams fandom, on three wholly different fronts. Professionally, as my students pass in their senior thesis projects, I have pulled my own undergraduate thesis out of the mothballs: a structurally daffy, theoretically promiscuous, but mercifully unhumiliating argument about Williams' plays as pre-Foucauldian parables of panoptical social regulation, taking Not About Nightingales as the central text. In a public context, Warner Bros. has just released a seven-disc box-set of films adapted from Williams plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Baby Doll (which is actually an original Williams screenplay), Sweet Bird of Youth (a slightly neutered version of one of my favorite plays), and two DVDs devoted to A Streetcar Named Desire, which figured further down on this list. Theologically, today is May 19, which was not Katharine Hepburn's birthday, but it was the day she often cited as her birthday—May 19, 1909, rather than May, 12, 1907—in order to shave two years off of her age.

Suddenly, Last Summer features one of Hepburn's best and steeliest performances, and certainly her most gleamingly villainous. She literally enters the movie from a great height, soaring down in a rococo elevator, spouting redolent mythologies about herself and her dead son Sebastian—the ghostly, depraved Rosebud of this particular mystery. Now get ready for this plot: Hepburn's fabulously venal Violet Venable has called one Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to her eerie palace in order to persuade him to lobotomize her niece Catharine (Elizabeth Taylor), whose first-hand account of Sebastian's outlandish death has landed her straight in the booby-hatch. Catharine's story is quite a whopper, pivoting on details like pedophilia, prostitution, homosexuality, and cannibalism: it would seem that Sebastian has been gobbled by a ravenous band of young Spanish street-hustlers. Being a Williams play, this Guignol tale is, of course, a benchmark of truth. Instead, it is high society and social institutions that are unmasked as killing lies: the deceptive, carnivorous will of old-money aristocracy, embodied by Hepburn's Violet and her garden of Venus flytraps, and the buyable ethics of modern corporate medicine, represented by the endowment-hungry trustees of Monty's hospital. Granted, political content is not the first thing one might look for in Gore Vidal's mad adaptation of Williams' play, itself as purple as a low-hanging cluster of grapes. The script needlessly and distractingly pads the sensational atmosphere with predictably googly-eyed sanatorium scenes. Clift, recklessly sunk into this maelstrom of insanity, crosses his arms and darts his pupils in several scenes as though he is barely, quietly holding himself together, while his famous pal Liz Taylor sallies forth with her lurid monologues without quite adding much to them. Still, Suddenly, Last Summer fascinates almost as much as it entertains, which is tremendously. Director Mankiewicz, having helmed some of the greatest Hollywood movies about dubious, contested tales (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives), cleverly whets our appetite for the naked, bleeding truth, even as his direction of the actors and his gamely bold production design make clear that he is most interested in the nervy climate of repression and panic that surrounds the breech-birth of a horrible family secret. When Mercedes McCambridge, the most proudly perverse of 1950s character actresses, shows up as a fluttering flibbertigibbet, the movie's fruity compote gets even more aromatic and flavorful. It simmers enticingly, and sometimes, gloriously, it boils right over.

In short, if it's camp you want, it's camp you'll get, as when Monty gives a blond male nurse a visible once-over, or when Liz starts struggling with a locked door in the wrong place at the wrong time, triply imprisoned by an iron-barred causeway, an expressionist camera angle, and a triangulated bra. The movie makes it so easy for conservative culture vultures to tear away at it, like the flesh-eating birds that feast on baby sea turtles in one of Hepburn's centerpiece monologues. Tear they did: Suddenly, Last Summer sparked a bonfire of disgusted protest in 1959, but the movie, even more than the play, belongs in that beastly menagerie with Faulkner's Sanctuary, Pasolini's Salò, and Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, aggressively vulgar works in which a hard, proud skeleton of social critique and complex implication is nonetheless palpable, even to viewers as green as I was at age 15, when I first saw the movie. Floating between its scenes of family terrorism, pulsing beneath the shiny enamel of Williams' lyrical prose ("Most people's lives—what are they but long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it up but, finally, death"), triumphing over the drag-revue flourishes like Hepburn's emu-feather hat and Liz's perpetually breathy delivery ("We! pro! cured! for! him!"), there is something remarkably formidable about Suddenly, Last Summer. It makes you chuckle, sometimes against its own interests, but it also lingers like few "better" films ever do, and in that way at least, it's a better Williams film than those bashfully catered affairs that Richard Brooks whipped up out of Cat and Sweet Bird. Just you try flossing it from your mind. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1959 Columbia Pictures.

Picked Flick #55: The Cremaster Cycle

Matthew Barney's five-part Cremaster Cycle hurricaned its way into Ithaca, NY, in the spring of 2004, powered by a tremendous reputation that was nonetheless, at least to my hinterland ears, vague in its details. With apologies to all the visual artists and museum devotees who probably roll their eyes at Cremaster fans like me—the same way I am nonplussed when, say, people learn of Toni Morrison when she pops up on Oprah—I had heard that the films were not made in the sequence implied by their titles, that they were collectively named for the tiny muscle that raises and lowers the testicles in moments of arousal, and that they aggregated all manner of sculptural, digital, narrative, mythological, and material experiments into a behemoth visual undertaking that anyone curious about the future of movies should take some pains to see. And so I saw. And as opposed to the letdowns I have experienced in the face of other curator-approved, "post-cinema" movies (for example, Bill Morrison's Decasia, a series of arresting ideas and images that persist at least three times too long), the Cremaster movies were truly electrifying: baffling but terrifically engaging in their more arcane motifs, and persuasive as the kind of tout court double-dare to filmmakers and audiences everywhere that avant-garde classics like Un chien andalou or Meshes of the Afternoon or Dog Star Man or Empire must have been in their own days.

While an oft-promised DVD collection from Palm Pictures remains a dream perpetually deferred, I have only my two-year-old recollections of Barney's formidable imagery and curiously interwoven "plots" to write from. Of course, the whole reason why the Cremaster Cycle ranks so high on this list is that Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory. I saw the movies in superficially "numeric" order (i.e., 1 and 2 on one night, 3 the next, and 4 and 5 after that), but even following that schema, you implicitly sense that 4 and 1, the first films produced, supply the erstwhile Rosetta Stones to what more fully follows. These, the shortest installments, condition the viewer into the remarkable plasticity of Barney's visions, his outré cosmetic mutations of his own body, his recurring propensity for gonadal tropes and visual puns, and his fusion of mass-cultural signifiers like zeppelins, stadiums, land-speed races, and flight attendants with his carefully considered though highly subjective apprehensions of specific occult histories: drawn from the Isle of Man in Cremaster 4, but also from Hungary, Utah, and New York City in subsequent iterations. Both within each movie and across the whole series, Barney expectorates a kind of gestalt system that no one can comfortably articulate—not even he, I suspect, based on the "synopses" at the entrancing but opaque Cremaster website. What is remarkable about the project, then, are its eerily instantaneous claims on your sensory life and your sense-making apparatus. Fashioning febrile touchstones out of the illusionist Harry Houdini, the murderer Gary Gilmore, the architectural peculiarities of the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim Museum, the mating rituals of bees, the salt flats of the Western U.S., the emerald archipelagos of the Irish Sea, the Lánchíd Bridge of Budapest, and a full MGM cast of satyrs, nereids, headbangers, and anthropomorphic hybrids, the Cremaster films summon a force of subconscious recognition that is perversely hard to account for in anything we see or hear. The linchpin materials—smelted Vaseline, Victorian couture, body paints and plasters, shimmering silks and satins, rolling grapes, twittering birds, Art Deco surfaces just waiting to be scuffed, a lattice-work of seminal and fallopian passageways—all express the pliability, viscosity, impermanence, and unresolved becoming of all things. Thus, the potent emotional resonance of the Cremaster Cycle is due as much as anything to these media of expression, their constant flights and drops, their splittings and mergings, their plyings and smashings, and, perhaps most of all, to the melancholy flattening of every gummy resin and lofty spire and shaggy wig and crenulated frieze into two-dimensional flickers.

Every Cremaster fan harbors a favorite installment, and mine is certainly the second. Even though I lack much of a compass for navigating Houdiniana, Mormon lore, or the strange career of Gary Gilmore, Barney's figurations of Gilmore's murderous loneliness—as a mucous membrane encasing his car at a gas station, as a penis shrunk to paper-clip size, as a plaintive rodeo in desolate surroundings—evoke a blend of pathology and extraordinary pity on a par with Patty Jenkins' Monster, despite how fully Barney challenges every extant recipe for transmitting moral and psychological concepts on film. I also love the sad, grand riffs on the generic staples of the Western, and as a hard-and-fast Cronenberg disciple, I take a simpler, half-disgusted interest in the colloidal jellies and creepy supernaturalism of the opening "conception" scene. When I first composed this list, I meant for Cremaster 2 to occupy its own spot, but then—partly by noticing that I had misidentified a still from Cremaster 3 in the banner image for this feature—I realized how much my investments in every Cremaster segment seep and pour into the others. Having therefore proven inept at compartmentalizing my memories of these movies, I am now opting for the more cowardly but also more truthful position of commemorating them all in their uncanny wholeness: a totality far greater than the sum of its prodigious, elliptical parts. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image reproduced from www.Cremaster.net.

Picked Flick #56: Postcards from the Edge

For reasons I have just specified below, Sandra Bernhard would have won my support for the Best Actress Oscar in 1990, even though Without You I'm Nothing is obviously not the sort of vehicle to which the Academy pays any mind—not only because they resist formal experiments, but because they don't even like to laugh. Unless, that is, the responsible party is someone like Meryl Streep, whose tragic-dramatic prestige conversely assures them that a little merriment never killed anyone. In Postcards from the Edge, Streep sufficiently tickled the voters' funny bones to at least score her a nod the year Bernhard should have won. Streep and Bernhard: few people's idea of a seamless pair, but they do share a knack for zeroing in on their targets, especially their punchlines, without hiding the mechanics of how they're doing it. Streep is a kind of performance artist: you watch the woman she's playing, and you simultaneously watch her play that woman. Sometimes, yes, this method can feel a bit clinical, especially when, as in Out of Africa or Dancing at Lughnasa, the tricksiness of her preferred style is out of proportion to the dullness of the character. At her best, though, Streep's "intellectual" quality is actually a conduit for a bountifully generous entertainer's impulse: both the character and its construction are invigorating spectacles, and for an audience to be gifted with both at once is like following a full and zesty meal with a rich and flavorful dessert. You can even eat them at the same time! You can go back and forth! Meryl's here to give give give. Take what pleases you. Enjoy it all. She, at least, is having a ball.

Postcards from the Edge hails from that period in Streep's career when she suddenly and understandably appeared apprehensive about forever playing pietàs and martyrs and wailing women from across the Earth's four corners. She had a Funny Period the same way Picasso had a Blue one, and though I haven't actually seen any of its other avatars (She-Devil, Defending Your Life, Death Becomes Her), her work in Postcards is so lively in detail that, again, you feel like you're getting several performances for the price of one. Meryl tokes up, she zones out, she trips, she sings twice, she shoots guns twice. But the real action is in the shifting sands of her face and her tiny symphonies of physical accents, whenever she's about the deceptively simple business of selling a line or a scene, or even a fellow actor's performance. Watch what a comic tour-de-force she finds just by crouching among a wire-rack of costumes on a movie-set, her eyes and her relative posture our only inlets into a twelve-tone coloratura of comic humiliation. Waking up, unexpectedly, in a rehab center, she parses out into multiple comic beats what many actors would fold or purée into a single affect: her dazedness, her breath, her shame, her fright, the blinding whiteness of the light and the room, the puzzling discovery of a plastic hospital bracelet around her arm, her dawning recognition that news of her predicament has certainly, already sprinted to undesired destinations. Carrie Fisher has filled her autobiographical script with choice one-liners and her trademark sensibility for observing life askance. "I have feelings for you," confesses a sun-kissed Dennis Quaid, to which Streep responds, "Well, how many? More than—two?", and while the line is a great gift to her (and there's way, way more where that came from), her muffled, almost foggy playing of it is a cadeau to Quaid, an earnest tryer who rarely knows, and certainly didn't know in 1990, how to anchor a scene or vary its rhythm. Streep forces him to shake things up, just like she keeps Shirley MacLaine's campy grandiloquence on a liberal but certain leash, letting her do her Thing, even getting her own zappy charge out of it, but also keeping everyone in service of the movie, especially of Fisher's voice. Like Streep, Fisher is possessed of a sophisticated hamminess that she isn't at all bashful about trotting out, so it's no surprise that the two women are such ample enthusiasts and protectors of each other. Fisher's overriding and self-analytical theme, that she has no idea who she is or who she should be, or whether those two concepts even remotely go together, also creates a winning ironic frame for Streep's own chameleonism: watching her change shape and mental fabric, even within seconds, weds the familiar pleasures to some new questions about exhibitionism and avoidance.

Watching so many modern film comedies, I can't help wishing that they had been made fifty years ago; it's the single genre where the drop-off in quality strikes me as the most precipitous, largely because filmmakers' confidence in things like words, speed, and economy have shriveled to the size of a maraschino cherry. Postcards, though, is a rare example of a film that wouldn't be funny at any brisker pace, or with more rapid-fire actors. A more intricate style wouldn't add much—and besides, at zero cost, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus is already having fun moving Streep around the foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds of his shots, and she mines different kinds of comic gold depending on where she is: a miracle. Finally, in a major departure from most Hollywood comedies about Hollywood, Postcards feels credibly conditioned in what the industry actually is and how a set might actually feel: the anodyne hallways and lots and trailers, the dead intervals between camera set-ups, the way in which Streep's humbled B-lister keeps getting into personal fender-benders with producers, directors, wardrobe assistants, and crass starlets. Hollywood as a way of life, with its own cadences and its own soil, tillable for its very own jokes, is largely divorced from the clichés of celebrity and grotesque wealth. This Edge, then, is a terrifically accessible place, recognizable as a movie about parents and children, about Achilles heels, about the weeks and months of life that seem totally ceded to personal embarrassment, whether or not you have a drug problem, whether or not your mother is Debbie Reynolds Shirley MacLaine Doris Mann. For her part, Meryl Streep will return at two more points higher on this list, in more recognizably Streepish vehicles, but of all of her movies, this is the one that's most easily and comfortably open to visitors, especially old friends, and it never ages or disappoints. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1990 Columbia Pictures.

Picked Flick #57: Without You I'm Nothing

"They call me... Peeeea-ches!" Sandra Bernhard sings, with shrill and seemingly misplaced pride, looking utterly ridiculous in her calico West African robe and matching headwrap, and certainly no less ridiculous with her arms now raised in triumph at the finish of this, her rendition of Nina Simone's terse and forlorn "Four Women." The spirited sincerity of her performance is matched only by the stunning incongruity of both the performer and her approach. We could hardly have imagined that Bernhard was headed here when, in a short prologue, she addressed us from her backstage makeup mirror, trimming a few split-ends and testifying in the deadest possible pan, "I have one of those hard-to-believe faces: it's sensual, it's sexual. Sometimes, it's just downright hard to believe." Even if you aren't an English professor, you want to emend the redundancy. Or you may, like the sozzled, affronted, and undisguisedly bored patrons in Bernhard's audience, want to make a shuffling break for the exits.

In short, ten minutes into Without You I'm Nothing, everything has already gone wrong—although every viewer will probably cite a different epiphanic instant when the tawdry errancy of the film reveals its brilliant comic design, exposing that the uneasy laugh you're having at Bernhard's expense is actually the laugh she's having on you, and on herself, and on almost everybody. Like Margaret Cho's I'm the One That I Want further down on this list, Without You I'm Nothing is a perfect screen transfer of what Bernhard frequently touts as a "smash-hit one-woman show." Bernhard, though, unquenched by her clever conquest of the stage and her fearless lampooning of her own image, reimagines her material as a scabrous, slippery, and uproarious subversion of the stand-up documentary. Which isn't to say that Without You I'm Nothing doesn't deliver, quite lavishly, as a purer and simpler form of comedy. Bernhard, after a garish close-up of her ankles in wine-colored tights, themselves planted in chintzy gold high-heels: "When I was a little girl, I used to come home for lunch every day, and I'd pretend that my mother was a waitress in a roadside café: 'I'll have a side-order, ma'am!' A side-order consisted of a chunk of white-meat tuna, a dollop of mayonnaise, some carrot strips, and potato chips. And then I'd sit at the counter, and ignore her." Later in the same monologue, now taking shape as Bernhard's envious ventriloquizing of her neighbors' blissful Gentility: "I'd fantasize that I had an older brother named Chip, and a little sister named Sally, and my name would be either Happy or Buffy or Babe, one of those big sexy blondes who plays a lot of volleyball... 'Oh, God, Chip, you are so cute! I wish you weren't my brother so I could fuck you!'" In her next persona, as a blowzy chanteuse: "We've been all over the country, me and my Jewish piano player... I would love to dedicate the show tonight to all of those who enjoy Remy Martin, because I love to sit around my motel room after my show in my bra and panties and say to someone, 'Get me a Remy Martin with a water back, God damn it!'"

Maybe none of this is funny in transcription; in fact, if it reads as crashingly, irredeemably dull, this would suit Bernhard's comedy perfectly. Only half the fun resides in Bernhard's priceless oscillations among a dozen diva archetypes—the disco nightmare, the quivering addict, the crooner with the murderous melismas ("Me and Mrs. Jo-o-o-o-o-ones"), the soured Supreme, the shameless product endorser, the fulsome patterer, the high-class auction fiend who thinks she's best friends with Andy, the gay icon in the age of genital panic ("I would feel just a little bit better if you would apply some spermicidal jams and jellies to the area"). The other half springs from her almost scary willingness to push every envelope of cliché, foolishness, coarseness, ethnic and subcultural appropriation. If ex-best-friend Madonna, classically skewered here, is the undefeated champ of trendy pilfering, Bernhard is an unbeatable anatomist of the thieveries, parodies, and pillories that are the spines and the mitochondria of pop entertainment. The bad jokes are made funny—hilarious—by the good ones. The throwaway lines and gestures are as memorable as the big numbers. The critique of white celebrities' desperate courting of black approval has got Bulworth beat by 20,000 leagues. The deployments of lighting, angle, and montage are as deft but also as silly as the spoken-word caricatures, and the whole thing is weirdly, riotously exalting. And if that "Age of Aquarius" finale in The 40-Year-Old Virgin had you chuckling, just look at what Bernhard does with, and to, "Little Red Corvette." (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1990 M.C.E.G. Virgin Home Entertainment.

Still to Come, in the 50s

Speaking of being less than halfway through, we're only seven films out from the midpoint of my favorite films countdown. I probably won't be able to post again until Friday evening or so, but coming up in the next seven entries, none of which are ties: a sassy lass, a Southern sojourn, a spiky self-caricature, a Hollywood memoir, a wharfside melodrama, a whole lot of goo, and a guy who totally gets eaten. Think you know where we're going? You know where to post your guesses. I'll be polling you, too, for your favorites among #s 51-100, because list-making should never be confined to just one person.

Picked Flick #58: In the Mood for Love

Pardon me for a moment as I swan off to buy some noodles. From a street vendor. Dappled by a sudden spray of rain. In my cheongsam. Hair piled high. Accessorizing perfectly with my natty enamel noodle-pail. [Sighhhhh]

You know, as many times as I have defied the old homily and, indeed, tried this at home, it never quite works out. I rocked a lot of ramen noodles in my years of graduate-student penury, but even with Michael Galasso's indelible theme surging through the kitchen and all the lights turned down low, trying to keep my elbow straight and my neck proud and my hips in a perfect pendulum, wouldn't you know that the elusive spark of sad, swollen Romanticism, of rue dans la rue, never came close to igniting. The only part I successfully conjured was "sad," and not even in the way I intended. Oh, but don't be laughing. Y'all know you tried, too.

As with The Crying Game, but working in an opposite direction, I have experienced a pretty notable swerve in my repsonse to In the Mood for Love. In this case, I have grown almost habituated, if such a thing is possible, to Love's rapturous mise-en-scène and its intricately woven sound elements, hypnotized and transported as I am by the miracle that is Maggie Cheung. I love the word "equipoise," but I wonder if it describes any single thing in the universe so well as it does Cheung's absolute and yet sensationally un-fussy control over the line of her body, the most minute calibrations of every feature, every lash. Sitting in a chair, casting her eyes over a newspaper, her posture is not an I or an S or an L, but some kind of sublime, pristine character missing from our alphabet. Her playing of scenes like Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow's evening out at a restaurant is suffused with an emotional urgency that is almost chemical, nowhere manifest and yet everywhere felt; by comparison, even such an accomplished telepath as Julianne Moore seems like she's doing handstands and flagging out semaphores in the somewhat analogous scenes in The End of the Affair. Other actors have dazzled in Wong's movies, though usually by sculpting themselves into ravishing emblems of cool like Brigitte Lin in Chungking Express or Carina Lau in Days of Being Wild, or black holes of devouring need like Leslie Cheung in Happy Together, or plaintive alter egos like Tony Leung in almost everything. But Cheung in In the Mood for Love exhibits an utter, respectful reverence for the art-object that Wong is creating around her, without ever seeming merely ornamental or rooting herself into any one attitude or affect. She is sad, resigned, perceptive, aroused, a good neighbor, a rattled wife, a creature of new and sudden impulse, a pilgrim returned to former haunts, and in every one of these guises, she has the clarity and soft color of blown glass, but also the veins and arteries of a human person.

As for the film, I must admit to wishing that the coda at Angkor Wat didn't feel quite so monumentalizing of what is, at heart, a gorgeous empherality. In general, I sometimes feel about Wong that, if this makes any sense, he makes movies for people who read magazines that I wouldn't like—the shimmering sheen, the insistent motifs (both visual and sonic), the lingering sense of a fold-out centerfold spread are all, at times, a little much. In short, I do love Wong, but I do have to be in the mood. Happy Together is my favorite of his films, partially because it's the most willing to rip itself open and trace some real edges in the material, without losing the power to stun us with unexpected elegance, artful caesuras. Still, even more than that film, In the Mood for Love concocts such a potent aura of feeling, deepening and darkening its flavors with each re-viewing, that my lingering disputes with Wong's aesthetic all but float away while I'm watching. It's cinema as absinthe. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #59: The Crying Game

Neil Jordan's The Crying Game lives and dies by the power of the narratives it produces, both within the movie and among its audiences. I saw the movie when I was in high school, and yes, I had already surmised the Twist. Oscar's taxonomies only confirmed suspicions that I had already gleaned from the unique sort of hubbub swirling around this tiny picture. People I knew seemed as proud not to have "figured out" the riddle as they normally were to outwit one—what was that about? Time Magazine devoted a stand-alone story to the movie, which was exceptional enough, but then when I re-read the article to figure out why it read so strangely, and I noticed how stringently the whole article refused personal pronouns, my inner switch really clicked. For me, though, Knowing the Secret was only the start of the voyage, and the fun. As a 15-year-old, privy only to the dimmest and most distant Morse Code bulletins about my own desires, the prospect of seeing a movie where homosexuality figured so decisively—and presumably in a way that avoided or at least challenged the old stereotypes, since otherwise, would Time have cared?—was almost unutterably delicious. My older brother and his friend saw it the night before I did, and though they were both totally stunned by "the" revelation, neither of them were all that moved. They drove me to the same shopping-mall multiplex the next night so that I could see for myself, and then joined me right following for Scent of a Woman. Thank goodness Scent hardly required more than a modicum of attention, so I could easily sit there replaying The Crying Game over and over inside my mind, hyperstimulated to a level that verged on the narcotic.

Watching The Crying Game now is nothing like the same experience, for any number of reasons. Both in my personal life and in the wider culture, the film's images of a gay watering hole and its verbal and visual rhetoric around homosexuality seem almost quaint. Maybe in 1992 The Crying Game already looked quaint to people who had actually visited a gay bar or a drag performance, or who had real-life honest-to-God queer acquaintances. As for me, I was watching from a vantage of such conjecture and fantasy that I remember feeling wholly seduced, not by the secrets but by the surfaces: how beautiful Dil was, how much I liked her form-fitting wine-colored suit and Miranda Richardson's heavy cable-knit sweater (thus commencing my 14-year affair with Sandy Powell), and best of all, how capably and, in my opinion, sophisticatedly the film interwove its sexual themes into other political arguments. In a film that, as far as I had been told, pivoted entirely on one big reveal, it seemed to me that The Crying Game was about sexuality only to the extent that it was about everything else that it was about. Captation, friendship across enemy lines, a lover's grief, unwelcome revenants from the past, hot and cool approaches to protest and subversion... The Crying Game didn't deny or derealize queer sexuality, but nor did it divorce sexuality from a bigger, gnarlier knot of human problems, and this, for me, was its Big Twist. As little as I had let myself really think about homosexuality, I had thought even less about terrorism and guilt and secret honor, and even less than that about how sexuality could bleed through, in, around, and as those other ideas. Similarly, as floored as I was by Jaye Davidson's performance as Dil—not his casting but his performance—and as therefore aggrieved as I was by Oscar's preference of Gene Hackman, I also clocked Adrian Dunbar's searing indignation, Stephen Rea's recessive sadness, Miranda Richardson's shifting web of motivations, and Jim Broadbent's unobtrusive whimsy as the barman. The Crying Game, just as much as Howards End the same year, was my introduction to great character acting; understandably, it took another year or two for me to recognize that people outside of Britain knew how to do this.

When I watch the film now, I am conscious of an enormous reversal in my relation to it. At times, the mystery of Dil seems actively to impede the flow and clarity of the picture, and a few of her boozy, pill-popping, floridly bruised, bondage-inflected episodes near the end feel none too advanced from Celluloid Closet tropes. The innuendoes of admiration and genital contact in the opening scenes between Rea and Forest Whitaker are much too obviously suggestive of later turns, although it's still a powerfully understated study in tacit, almost illicit affinity between hostage and patrol. Anne Dudley's score is as impressively Hitchcockian as Jordan's writing, and even if the screenplay, which I remembered as such a sinuous exercise in subtle connections, now feels a little bullish and schematic, I'm still duly impressed by the performances and by Jordan's success in getting his own head into such territory in 1992, much less that of his rapt global audience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flicks #60: The Baby of Mâcon & The Pillow Book

I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that Peter Greenaway is not the child of two humans, but the offspring of a building and a painting, born on the hottest day of the year in some very, very chilly place. His cinema might be the most immediately identifiable of any English-language director, and maybe of any director, period: he doesn't seem to have seen or cared about the work of other filmmakers so much as he has traveled the world to behold giant plinths and catafalques, leafed through Da Vinci's notebooks and Euclidean proofs, and made the best of a poor situation, committing his imaginary worlds to film because it's the only form that anyone is willing to subsidize. Effectively, he's been making CD-ROMs since the days when people still bought music on cassette tapes. His images dissolve into and hyperlink to each other, massive as all creation when they aren't cropped and subdivided into defiantly atypical aspect ratios. Art, math, money, and frank sexuality intersect in his movies, just like on the internet—just like everywhere, really—except that with Greenaway at the helm, this collision of humanity's great passions winds up looking like nothing any other person would ever conceive, and perhaps not like anything that any other person would ever want to see. Greenaway leaves a lot of moviegoers cold, and conversely, some of his most ardent supporters are curators, academics, and high-cultural separatists who are rarely caught in any screening venue where popcorn has ever been sold. I almost walked out of the impeccably mounted and ferociously acted The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, whose sour misanthropy seems aimed not just against people but against movies themselves. The Belly of an Architect might have been a better intro, 8½ Women might have been better consigned to the dustbin of stunted ideas, and as for Prospero's Books, though I'm now quite taken with its multimedia collage of Elizabethan idioms, it didn't really impress me until my third or fourth try.

Despite this spotty track record, Greenaway is a director who interests me tremendously; I'm not easily put off by someone who will work this hard to make such exquisitely eccentric objects, alternately impenetrable and rife with insinuations. Twice, his epic blends of the epicurean and the rectilinear have produced something that really floored me. Go figure, then, that my favorite of Greenaway's movies, The Baby of Mâcon, is the one that's still illegal in the United States, presumably because it's the one that comes close in its esoteric way to saying something that the United States needs to hear. Julia Ormond, happening upon a director even frostier than she is, comes wickedly alive as a hot-blooded French woman in a 17th-century village beset by famine, plague, and fallow fields. The only sign of new life in Mâcon is the pristinely beautiful baby that springs, incongruously, from Ormond's obese and haggard mother; boldly braiding her own self-interest into the town's thirst for a positive omen, she claims the flaxen-haired infant as her own virgin birth, and then seduces the local bishop's icily skeptical son (Ralph Fiennes) with the brazen magnificence of her lie and the voluptuous offering of her body. Every main character is paradoxically addicted to the ideal of holiness and the spark of carnality, leading to the sorts of perverse hypocrisies and self-gratifications that, in Greenaway's films, always get you killed in an especially macabre way. If anything, The Baby of Mâcon is even more lavishly mounted than most Greenaway pageants, and even more Artaudian in its sickening climax of violence. By staging the film as a Jacobean revenge drama—Sacha Vierny's camera glides fluidly but anxiously through the tense action, the offstage grumblings, and the murmuring audience of puffy aristocrats and smudgy commoners—Greenaway poses questions about voyeurism and cruelty that encompass both his viewers and himself, further layering the implications of this scary horror-melodrama about fundamentalism, superstition, jealousy, and prurience.

After the international PR disaster of The Baby of Mâcon, Greenaway's next film was the luxuriously synesthaesiac The Pillow Book, an absolute corker of a 90-minute movie that unfortunately continues for 45 more minutes, working hard in the process to numb and obliterate everything that is almost impossibly gorgeous in the preceding material. Vivian Wu plays Nagiko, a haughty Japanese model with an insatiable yearning for having calligraphy painted on her skin. Wu is a shrilly maladroit presence, and the premise wouldn't work at all if it weren't realized in such sinuous detail, but so it is. The Pillow Book lists two directors of photography, three production designers, four costume designers, and two calligraphers in the opening credits, and indeed, the movie comes closer than any other to constituting its own elaborate, absorbing museum—one where you're encouraged to sniff and caress the artwork, to strip the clothes off the models, to run the paint along your tongue like it's a spice. This unparalleled mise-en-scène, the creatively embedded frames, and the arresting sonic mix of Japanese pop, monastic chants, and avant-garde rock together yield a new kind of movie, a three- and almost four-dimensional environment. Customary film grammar hardly accounts for how the movie works, either when it's scoring or when it's flailing, and if its structural repetitions ultimately grow a bit tedious, its fearless peculiarity and almost aphrodisiac blend of skin, music, and curvaceous lettering make it worth digesting in multiple doses, even if they're small ones. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #61: Female Perversions

Were any of you alive for the days when I was still Picking Flicks? Or, like the New Deal or the Loch Ness Monster, is it something you've just heard about? Somehow, I've let this ball drop since all the way back in January, when we left off with Best in Show at #62. Shortest possible explanation: my bad. If you're new to this blog and don't even know what I'm talking about, find out here. Otherwise, without further ado...

In a just world, not to mention an extremely entertaining one, Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions would hold the utopian potential to unite two truly disparate audiences: first, the academic eggheads who know that the movie, virtually alone in the modern cinema, is a fictionalized adaptation of a monograph of psychoanalytic literary theory, and second, the swells of tabloid-chasers and thrill-seekers ushered toward the movie by the title alone. It would be easy, and probably right, to say that Female Perversions is unlikely to match the expectations of either audience, but I think it's more interesting to consider how the movie actually rewards them both, at least partially. Scholastic theory on gender and sexuality can sometimes be so desiccated of the juices and shivers and intimate, saucy introspection through which sex is actually lived and breathed; on the other hand, standard-issue erotic thrillers and sexploitation films are often bizarrely disarmed of any guiding concept of what actually is sexy, or of what actually inhibits sex, or rhymes with it, or assumes its value when sex itself isn't available or, for whatever reason, desired on its own terms. Female Perversions, not just because it melds Freudian archetypes and fleshy, femmey spectacle, possesses a genuinely erotic flavor. It has the sexiest thing a movie can have: a distinct point of view, persuasively showing us what this director, or at least this film, considers titillating, pedestrian, shameful, furtive, funny.

Tilda Swinton stars as a hotshot lawyer named Eve. Right off the bat, you can tell that subtlety isn't the movie's elected forte, and yet, why and how Swinton's character is an "Eve" is hard to pin down. A rising star on the legal circuit with a prestigious judgeship all but guaranteed to come her way, she embodies a mix of professional competence and self-alienation that isn't exactly unfamiliar—don't all professional women in American movies eventually realize that they don't know who they are?—and yet, because she's played by Swinton, Eve's unraveling doesn't feel conventional. Instead, it's a strangely out-of-body experience, navigated by the only Brechtian actress working in modern film, whose masklike and yet disarmingly lucid face always works in ironic tandem with her stiffly elegant body. Surrounding Swinton are a clutch of other women who were case studies and paragons in Dr. Louise J. Kaplan's original book (full title: Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary), and whom the screenplay by director Streitfeld and co-writer Julie Hébert determinedly maroon somewhere between being characters and ciphers. Amy Madigan, a coiled and arrestingly spiteful actress, has her finest hour here as Madeleine, the black-sheep sister of Swinton's powerful up-and-comer. Madigan shoplifts a silk scarf with a memorable glower, she all but deliberately sabotages her sister's professional coronation, and she manages the neat trick of constantly messing everything up for everyone in the movie (including for herself) without sacrificing the audience's interest. Frances Fisher blowzes around as a good-time girl, Laila Robins is tearful as a dressmaker in a trailer, Paulina Porizkova strides through her scenes as an immaculately tailored rival of Swinton's, and Karen Sillas—an underrated and little-remembered presence from Tom Noonan's What Happened Was... and some Hal Hartley films—stands toe-to-toe with Swinton as one of two lovers whom the bisexual Eve keeps stringing along. Marcia Cross puts in a mysterious cameo, basically the same shot repeated several times, as Swinton and Madigan's abused mother, and an unknown, almost androgynous waif named Dale Shuger slides even more slivers of unease beneath your skin as Edwina, a teenaged girl who flees from all the parodic female visions around her, retreating into an intensely private life of scarring her flesh and burying the pads and tissues stained with her ovulated blood.

The plot uniting all of this is never Female Perversions' strongest hook, and neither the final act of the picture nor the embedded flashbacks and dream-visions have the strange, arresting depth of the scenes where the characters just orbit and strut around each other, like Caryl Churchill characters transported to the American Southwest: indolent, almost, yet full of curiosity-sparking contradictions. The production design, particularly in Eve's coldly modernist office and in the most Kubrickian lingerie boutique you'll ever see, amplifies our confusion about where the movie is really happening: is this story all on the surface, nothing more than the sum of its aggressively allegorical symbols, or does some threshold of revelation await us beneath all the layers of intentional affectation? Female Perversions plays like some mathematical proof you keep wracking your brain against, trying to derive the absolute value of Woman, or maybe even of Gender. (The movie's tagline read, "It's all about power," and fans of Butler or Foucault will eat it up like double-chocolate mousse.) Happily, the cul-de-sacs and errant stabs at solution are actually more rewarding than the half-hearted "explanations" behind all of this theatre. Meanwhile, any drama that can boast three or four truly interesting women, and cast such peculiar and palpably brainy actresses in the roles, is not a gift to question. In fact, the film radiates an almost totemic mystique, no less so because it has become rather hard to find, and tends to pop up in unexpected places: like, say, the "Special Interest" Shelf at BestBuy, better known for stocking the onanistic oeuvres of Traci Lords. Porizkova, a presence for only two short scenes, lounges around in bedsheets on the box art, from which Swinton is entirely erased, and you don't have to look hard to find Zalman King's name among the co-producers. But as they say, good things come in smutty packages. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #62: Best in Show

Sometimes you see a movie in the theater and you like it okay, but you wouldn't consider seeing it twice, except that your friend hasn't seen it yet and you're happy to go along. For whatever reason, you like it better and laugh much harder than you did the first time. Then you actively anticipate the video or DVD release, more avidly than you are awaiting movies that you enjoyed or admired much more. Then you watch the movie repeatedly, incessantly—why does it keep getting funnier? In ten years, I've had this experience twice, the first time with Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, and then with Christopher Guest's Best in Show. How do you account for humor, even your own taste in it, your own laughter? I have no idea how I sat through my first screening of Mars Attacks! and only laughed once—and that because Sarah Jessica Parker's chihuahua wouldn't stop barking at Michael J. Fox over breakfast. I am, apparently, a groundling. Nor can I say anything illuminating or precise about why I roar through that movie now, why the simple, never-changing "ack ack" of the aliens is enough to set me off.

The case of Best in Show is even odder to me, because it doesn't, like Burton's film, require any stylistic acclimation, and its comedy emerges much more through conventional means like one-liners and parodic personalities than, as in the Burton, through camp reenactment and sustained eccentricity. I read my original review of Best in Show now and, though I still wonder about the film's allegiance to mockumentary and am well aware of the jokes that don't score, I can't figure out what the hell I was being so stingy about. I probably quote Best in Show more often than any other movie I've seen, save three or four, but you wouldn't know it from my frugal little write-up. But I don't think I was just being a stick-in-the-mud. I am not a flip-flopper, though I might occasionally be blind and deaf. I can't believe how many of my favorite moments I didn't fully appreciate or even notice until the third or fourth go-round, like when John Michael Higgins' Scott looks at Jane Lynch's desperately primped dog handler Christy Cummings and expertly sizes her up as looking "like a cocktail waitress on an oil rig," or Higgins and Michael McKean having the world's most politely submerged argument about over-packing a suitcase, or Catherine O'Hara's perplexed look at husband Eugene Levy when he tries to avert a credit-card disaster by paying with traveler's checks, even though they don't have any.

But most of what I love about the movie are the jokes I liked to begin with, which have proven uncannily memorable, and bizarrely applicable in more situations than you'd think, and wonderfully convivial, too, because everyone seems to love this movie. Jennifer Coolidge's ditzy deadpan is just as funny when she says something demented ("So I'm just waiting, until I get another message...from myself" or "Those act as flippers") as when she runs rough-shod over the feelings of her eventual lover, Christy, of whose privately owned, proudly assembled kennel she sharply reminisces, "It was a shitbox." On repeat viewings, you learn how to live with the extreme stress inducements of Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock, and you can simply enjoy their brilliance at ratcheting up the neurotic hysteria. The two words "Busy Bee" can make me lose it in public places, thinking about Posey's fearsome dressing-down of Ed Begley Jr.'s head concierge as well as the toy store employee, and of the wild swoops of her caftans when she erupts into one of her fits, and of how she alternates being pressure-cooked inside a mean helmet of hair and tying it back with a head scarf because even her hair drives her crazy. Fred Willard is more than inspired as the fatuous commentator at the dog show, but the more you watch, you further appreciate Jim Piddock's comparable knack at playing the slow burn of the affronted expert. Levy and O'Hara's couplehood isn't quite as rich as in A Mighty Wind, burdened as they are with that laborious business of her multiple ex-boyfriends, but I'll still watch O'Hara do anything, and her costume designs are terrific, and the sweetness in their rapport serves the movie eautifully. Improv comedians could learn quite a bit from this movie, including how not to flee from feeling.

Oh, and the best dog wins. Isn't that a peach? (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #63: Magnolia

One of my favorite moments at the movies happens when the lights go down and, whether through electronics or pulleys or some other device, the margins of the screen are adjusted to suit the aspect ratio of the film. This instant, disappointingly pre-empted whenever the screen is sized before our arrival, is most titillating when the panels or curtains keep moving, moving, moving past the point of expectation, exhilarating the still-blank screen with the pure, implied scope of what is about to come. Like it was yesterday, I remember the side-panels at Magnolia parting so widely they almost didn't quit, as though making room for a locomotive or a stampede or a Biblical exodus.

Hurl a stone in a contemporary movieplex and you're bound to hit some screen where a passel or fleet of Los Angelenos fumble their way toward self-consciousness, corraled by the freeways into smaller and smaller circles until we realize that they all already know each other. But Magnolia, in contrast to most of these movies, barely bothers to fix its locale as a worldly place, a place of real, waking lives. Magnolia, as wide and colorful as someone's bursting imagination, knocks its fluorescent scenes of kilowatted personal crises against one another, lighting faces so brightly that they pool with black shadows even bigger than personality, listing and tracking through hallways and suites and offices and conference rooms until the movie feels like a series of aftershocks. But they aren't tectonic aftershocks. They are psychic reverberations, prodigious ones, even in a movie whose off-kilter score, outsized characters, and rudimentary plot conflicts abolish any sense of realism. Is it too much to say the film derealizes psychology, even as it spelunks straight downward into its grottiest crevices—fathers who menace their daughters, sons who abjure their fathers, women trying to scale some terrible epiphanies just as they are dawning? Somehow, Anderson's baton-twirling virtuosity with his camera evaporates even more irony than it introduces, since the characters are, almost universally, experiencing their lives just as floridly as the film portrays them. Jason Robards' canker of angry loneliness, Julianne Moore's centrifugal self-dispersal, April Grace's surgical defrocking of Tom Cruise's panther pride (where is she now, when we most need her?), Jeremy Blackman's suffocation within his absorbent genius, Melinda Dillon's bitter medicine—these are all delectably reckless acting turns, a fine vintage of supporting performances packed into one robust buffet. But there's an idea inside all of this rococo reaching, because at least as I experience the movie, its tragic aspirations only work because of how, in the film's relentlessly forward and sideways velocity, all of the most extreme emotional states get windshield-wipered by all the other ones. No one's breakdown stands in much relief from anyone else's, and California, America, the now, they all become a pop-art collage of interchangeable secrets and miseries—the source, too, of all the vividness and life in the movie, so we're never less than thankful for them. Anderson doesn't add these figures into any polemical sum, just one film's picture of the way things are, possessed of rather less variety than the sprawling cast and shifting style imply. Amidst all of this, the song (you know) and the frogs (you know) feel much less incongruous than the movie's two hints of connection: a stammering policeman's date with an addict and, even more miraculously, a relay of awkward telephone calls that succeeds against all odds at locating the person it seeks. Amazingly, John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two congenital over-actors, have finally found this least likely of movies in which to rein it all in and offer compelling, affecting snapshots of the normal. Threshold of revelation!

It's the nature of the beast that Magnolia teeters too far in some directions: young Stanley's soliloquy of protest is one too many, and a bit much for the mouth of a babe; Reilly's procedural mishap with his gun just sits inert on the screen, haphazardly slung together; and William H. Macy's scenes are aggravatingly garish in text and image. But who cares, compared to all the goodies tucked around the movie in unexpected cracks and corners: Cleo King's insolence and Felicity Huffman's observant invisibility, a great performance from some invisible actress who convinces Frank T.J. Mackey to contact his father, the hilarious production design of the What Do Kids Know? quiz show, the comic-book blue of Tom Cruise's black hair, Macy being dogged by the same truncated pop song, the epidemic rash of dissolves into Robards' poisoned lungs, the sound of toads hitting pavement, the wry question "Do you still want the peanut butter, cigarettes, and bread?", and every single cut that joins a symmetrical shot with some violence against balance, often a chiaroscuro close-up pushing against the edge of that wide, wide frame. I liked Anderson's Boogie Nights but have been blithely indifferent to any impulse to re-see it; I savored the sound and technique of Punch-Drunk Love, but I admit to having craved a more populated party; I have owned Hard Eight on second-hand VHS for almost five years and still haven't popped it in. But Magnolia seduces, pulls, lures me in, time and again, as though it has some gravitational pull. Flamboyant characters make their way through a world that is and isn't ours, and I can't stop watching. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #64: Bullets Over Broadway

"I'm an artist!" John Cusack bellows in the first line of Bullets Over Broadway, the last Woody Allen movie that needn't be embarrassed of such an opening. What is truly, wonderfully disarming about the movie is that Cusack's David Shayne, for all of his obviously Woody-ish mannerisms, doesn't sap the air out of the movie like most of Allen's recent alter egos have, especially when Allen has played them himself. Sure, it's probably a flaw that the scenes in which David bellyaches to his girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker), agent (Jack Warner), and best friend (Rob Reiner) about the proper role of the artist make so little impression. Still, the formulaic punchlines and underserved characters don't weigh against the movie because Allen, for the first time since The Purple Rose of Cairo, aspires as much to entertain his audience as to sell his ambitions or gnaw away at his philosophical obsessions. Don't get me wrong: I don't necessarily favor Woody's comedies over his dramas, as higher entries on this list will verify. But Allen's humor can be so vivid and his direction so encouraging to comic actors that it seems a shame he has become so parsimonious with those gifts. That co-scripter Douglas McGrath's own subsequent movies felt so weightless, in absolute contrast to Allen's crushing self-consciousness in Deconstructing Harry and Match Point, implies that their partnership on this screenplay was an especially inspired and well-timed stroke of luck. The movie also has a reasonably credible beginning, middle, and end, even if the plot grows overly obedient to rather inane moral arguments. Finally, I think it's Allen's best-looking movie since Manhattan, achieving the kind of playful zest in its Damon Runyon interiors and pop-colored palette that his other Depression-set movies have often nodded toward but never fully attained. Jeffrey Kurland's costumes are especially marvelous, as giddy and plush with outrageous comic abandon as are the movie's dialogue and its performances.

But let's not bury the lead: Bullets Over Broadway lives, sparkles, even jubilates because of its dialogue and its performances. Why does it feel a little embarrassing to say so? Perhaps mainstream film criticism places such exclusive emphasis on words, story, acting, and character that it feels almost regressive to praise a movie so roundly in those terms. But there it is, and happily so. The narrative conceit of David Shayne's turgidly sub-O'Neill script, God of Our Fathers, is brilliantly borne out by such believably lumpen lines as "The days blend together like melted celluloid, like a film whose images become distorted and meaningless"—a line, in fact, that wouldn't feel at all out of place amid the strenuous solipsisms of Interiors (though, at least in that film's case, I take the solipsisms to be purposeful). As the plot requires, not just Shayne's writing but his way of speaking is utterly shown up by the perfect, vulgar concision of Chazz Palminteri's Cheech, who screams of David's play, "It stinks on fuckin' hot ice!" Dianne Wiest's Oscar-winning turn as the boozy, stentorian Helen Sinclair remains the movie's most famous calling-card. Like the movie itself, Wiest's broad overplaying yields so many dozens of delightful moments that you don't care how often the seams show in what she's doing, how Helen is so obviously more of a joke machine than a character. Even the justly celebrated running gag around the line "Don't speak!" is regularly excelled by Wiest's camp modulations and leopard growls at other moments, snaring David's ego through well-calculated praise in a bar, parading him around the roof of her Manhattan apartment, huffing out her love for the dark, empty theater where they rehearse with a perfectly pronounced, Hepburnian "Look! would you look!" When David enters her apartment and praises her exquisite taste, her purring retort—"My taste is superb, my eyes are exquisite!"—is almost literally killer. Indeed, her floridly self-conscious style of seduction, previously unknown outside of those species of insects that eat their young, is a gift that keeps giving, full of glorious, histrionic silences in which Helen mentally assembles her next audition for the Baby Jane-ish role of herself.

But you know, as I've belly-laughed my way through sixth and seventh and eighth viewings of the movie, the frizzed, helium-filled performance of Jennifer Tilly has come to rival Wiest's, revealing real creative ingenuity; look how many of her best scenes are delivered with her back to the camera, as when she lobbies in vain with David to protect the one speech she has managed to memorize ("But I like to say it..."), or when, also on-stage, her fabulously flubbed exclamation "The heart is labynthinine!" is somehow made even more uproarious by the perfect timing and ostrichy posture of her walk. But wait! The single funniest bit of physical acting in the movie isn't Wiest's or Tilly's but Tracey Ullman's. Just watch as Eden Brent, Ullman's own accelerated riff on actressy eccentricity, becomes the first among David's cast to publicly endorse one of Cheech's dramaturgical tips. It's a one-second tour-de-force in a film that just brims with instants like this. You can watch Bullets Over Broadway with the sound off and have a thrilling time. You can listen to it from the next room and achieve total bliss. The fullness and variety of its pleasures still don't amount to Allen's best movie, not even one of his best five (and bully for him for setting such a high bar), but of all of his pictures, I do think Bullets is his most easily, frothily, and durably enjoyable. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #65: Claudine

Praising American movies of the 1970s is like praising British literature of the 1920s. Who but the sourest contrarian could possibly dissent? What would be the point? And yet, the most familiar versions of that decade's litany of crown jewels—Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, the Godfathers, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Taxi Driver, Network, All the President's Men, The Deer Hunter, Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now—surely are a white and boy-clubby lot. (Surprise!) All the more reason why I wish that John Berry's funny and lusty and pertly political Claudine were more widely celebrated. Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, both of them instantly addictive, are cast as a sort of Loren and Mastroianni of the Harlem walk-ups. She's a housemaid and he's a trash-collector, but unlike the steaming heaps of movies where these roles would go utterly unquestioned for African-American actors, even major stars like Carroll and Jones, Claudine is all about how poverty, even where it's pervasive, denaturalizes life—though I rush to add, this is not some kind of abstruse thesis or clinician's pronouncement. Claudine is bawdily, turbulently down in the trenches, palpably at home in closet-sized kitchens and shit jobs and impossible day-to-day predicaments, against which the film and the characters push with spitfire aplomb.

The first shot of the film finds Claudine and her bumptious brood crossing a street, an image that will repeat at the film's conclusion with only one major change, which is either momentous or negligible depending on whether you favor a personal or a structural view of the film—an impossible choice, everywhere precluded. Claudine and Roop meet at work, though he works for the city and she for a family, and so nothing happening between them is happening on their own turf. Work keeps her from arriving on time to their first date, which begins in her own home, where she has to hide appliances and amenities from the surveilling eye of the Welfare Office case worker, who hears about Roop from Claudine's neighbors, whom we never meet because she never has any time to interact with them, because she's off working the job that the case worker also mustn't discover, in order to feed the kids who phone her incessantly on her first night in Roop's bedroom, which is no less permeable to espionage and intrusion than Claudine's bustling pad. Claudine doesn't keep this all in balance so much as she bends and flexes impressively to hit back as many of the balls as she can, and just as impressively throws her racket and stomps her foot when she knows she's losing a set. Meanwhile, she can't get away from her kids when she wants to but also can't find them when she wants to. Her eldest son Charles is absorbing himself in militant youth politics that the film ribs without dismissing. He swears that if Claudine really loved him, she would have killed him, in the manner of murderously protective slave mothers about whom he has heard, and yet his garbled, comically judgmental anger stems from evident and ubiquitous sources. Her eldest daughter Charlene all but draws knives on Roop when he comes a'courting, but later finds herself tearfully defending the achievements and battered honor of black men, when her unplanned pregnancy riles Claudine to majestic, literally violent fury ("I guess it's a shame you didn't get knocked up by Frederick Douglass!"). The film switches tones and registers on a dime, over and over and over again. Its candor in matters social, sexual, and political, just like its expressively bright color palette, is like an icy splash of river water, even though the film is as inveterately urban as a Spike Lee joint, and defiantly proud of its own dirt.

James Earl Jones upends his typical typecasting with his cheeky, sexy turn, and the juvenile cast is one of the best I've ever seen, especially Tamu Blackwell as Charlene. But of course it's Carroll who reigns over this movie, cocking her brows and lashing her tongue against a world of statutory double-standards and black comedy (pun intended). She's a tornado of sweetness and ire, craving romance and reliable help in equal doses, aghast that her own children view her 36 years as the thick of senior-citizenry. The magic of her performance, and of the film, is that with each new scene, as a new and specific hurdle tosses itself into Claudine's path, we see some new facet of this woman's resilience, sometimes ornery and sometimes humorous, and none of them bear the face of cliché. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #66: Dream of Light (El Sol del Membrillo)

My friend and comrade in cinephilia Tim Robey treasures the film Vanya on 42nd Street, naming it as a personal favorite though he has only seen it once—in part, it seems, because he has only seen it once, or even more specifically, because it imbues its viewers with an impulse to see it only once, to savor it as a memory rather than as a living-place or a possession. I can easily see how the empyrean theatricality of Vanya, ranked at #74 on this very list, could engender this kind of self-imposed and almost sacralizing distance, which I take to be a kind of loyalty, and a recognition of those precious instants when cinema shines its light on the magic essence of some other art form. A different film, Victor Erice's Dream of Light, is my own touchstone for this kind of closely harbored adoration. Like Vanya it offers an awe-inspiring marriage between two arts, and does so with such absolute humility and such expert, inviting simplicity that you trust and absorb it immediately. The corroboration of further viewings feels unnecessary, perhaps even undesirable.

Dream of Light is a Spanish film. Its original title, El Sol del Membrillo, translates more directly as "The Sun of the Quince Tree," and several prints name the film as The Quince Tree Sun. Only in America, as far as I know, was the film released as Dream of Light, and this confusion over titles both augments and reflects how elusive and ephemeral the movie is. Tracking it down, looking it up, even invoking it in conversation is a serpentine process, a series of choices that circle the film instead of leading right to it. The subject of the film, also deceptively simple, is the languid, patient process by which the painter Antonio López Garcia commits the image of a quince tree to his canvas. The process of painting, the interplay it requires between eye and mind, its status as a dynamic rather than a static art, was never really clear to me before I saw this movie. That López Garcia labors over a still-life of a tree, not a Pollock eruption or a Bacon abjection or a series of Van Gogh swirls, only enhances the revelation. His eye measures the tree and its bounty of leaves and fruit each hour of each day, so attentively that the viewer gradually shares in this observant acuity, if only for 135 minutes, and with greater and greater admiration for how López Garcia, aided by mundane tools and scrupulous geometrics, translates such seeing into a new, existing object. At least cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, who achieved international fame a decade later with The Others and Talk to Her, has got the jump on us here, judging and rendering López Garcia's world with a comparable grace and luminescence.

Happily, and credibly, López Garcia's painstaking devotions to both his subject and his art are not conveyed as something that excludes him from the group. His days percolate with dialogues—with his wife, with visiting friends, with fellow artists, with workers helping to renovate the house behind which he paints. Dream of Light explodes the romantic myth of the solitary artist with zero fuss or fireworks, even as it makes transparent how inward, idiosyncratic, and unlinguistic the work of the painter is. Positioned as one among many kinds of laborer, as one amid a slightly ragtag but genial and hospitable community of talkers, watchers, and creators, López Garcia emerges more fully as a character than do the protagonists of almost any fiction films or documentaries. The fact that Dream of Light blurs that distinction, too, evaporating its relevance almost from the first scene, is another of the major coups of this peerlessly modest but truly singular movie. When I reminisce about Dream of Light, I get so enamored of what I remember (perhaps even wrongly so!) that I feel briefly compelled to seek it out, to watch it immediately and regularly, and to learn how much more it surely contains and reveals. But something keeps me from doing this, and for now, I'll keep listening to that something. But I hope you won't. At least once. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #67: Mask

Mask makes me cry, extravagantly, every time I watch it. If you've ever seen a photograph of Iguazu Falls or beheld a tropical monsoon, you have some idea what my face looks like by the end of Mask, and the funny thing about this is that I always expect that this time, the movie won't work, that I won't be so affected. I first saw Mask in 1986, when it debuted on HBO, and perhaps the fact that I so associate the movie with my being young and first discovering my attraction to the movies is the reason why I always underestimate it, why I always expect its power to diminish over time. Plenty of films became personal touchstones and guilty pleasures in the intervening years, but whereas Steel Magnolias and Dances with Wolves and Ghost feel so antique to me now—enjoyable, but emblematic mostly of their time and place in my life—Mask doesn't subside.

Nothing about Mask is ostentatious, which is particularly remarkable given that it draws on so many tropes that typically embroil Hollywood productions in a tar-pit of tonal trouble: a socially ostracized protagonist, a lower-working-class milieu, a female lead who is "brassy" and "no-nonsense," explorations of teen romance and adult alcoholism, necessarily conspicuous prosthetic make-up, and a foretold trajectory into early death. Somehow, despite the boneyard of palpably phony movies that ventured into these same territories—several of them major Oscar winners—Mask feels true and naturalistic, give or take the bathetic accents of a mute acquaintance who achieves language at a climactic moment. Eric Stoltz and Cher, as the cranially disfigured Rocky Dennis and the mother who both champions him and cuts him zero slack, are such confident and open performers that they forbid the film from drifting into histrionics. Their house is believable. Their quarrels are believable. One of Mask's quiet but marvelous scenes follows Stoltz's Rocky as he follows his mom around the house, reciting to her a poem he has written in school, and for which he has been praised. It sure doesn't hurt that the poem, written by the real Rocky Dennis, is, like much of the movie, a marvelously minimalist piece of work—unforgettable, I suspect, to anyone who's seen the movie. What's most memorable about the scene, though, is how Cher seems so casually indifferent to the poem and to her son, and how Stoltz keeps reciting as though her evident preoccupation doesn't bother him. A simple scenario, played out in daily lives all the time, but seldom realized on-screen, particularly given the usual Hollywood stranglehold that characters must at all times be either 100% appealing or, temporarily, 100% unappealing, at which point the film's job is to strenuously redeem them. Here, too, Mask is modestly exceptional: when Rusty and Rocky fight, their reconciliations are not perfect; Cher's embodiment of brave, protective motherhood stays in the same general temperature range as her scenes of negligent and cruel motherhood; and as the film progresses and martyrdom approaches, Rocky actually becomes less easily "likable," his disappointments and frustrations souring his personality in a wholly plausible way.

Laszlo Kovacs' widescreen photography ensures that Mask never feels less than cinematic, but its intimacy and recognizability as an almost mundane human story, limned and cruelly truncated by one extraordinary obstacle, make it feel like something happening in your own neighbor's house, or in your own. Rocky Dennis' cranial deformity is never incidental to Mask, but rather than treating his condition as a relentless and limiting point of focus, the filmmakers commit to characterizing his life with an empathy and humility that wondrously embrace everything else in the movie, too. And what a terrific final tribute to Rocky: to have his life depicted in such a way that his clever, moody, compassionate ordinariness, and not his otherness, is the essence of his story. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #68: Chronicle of the Smoldering Years

I write this capsule, so many of 2005's movies have attempted to delve into the ongoing crises and entrenched corruptions of the developing world, with especially strong epicenters in the Middle East (Paradise Now, Syriana) and central Africa (The Constant Gardener, Darwin's Nightmare). To recognize that Syriana was written and directed by an American, Darwin's Nightmare by an Austrian, and The Constant Gardener by a Brazilian does not deprive their films of any claim on authenticity, but it remains noticeably rare that the filmmakers of the so-called Third World acquire the license and resources necessary to make films about their own national histories and struggles, and even rarer that these films "play" on the world market. The three-hour Algerian epic Chronicle of the Smoldering Years, aka Chronicle of the Years of Embers, was something of an exception, garnering the Cannes prize in 1975, but clearly its exceptional status has only gotten so far. The film is all but impossible to see outside university archives and screenings. Even in the hour of its victory, amid a field that included Antonioni's The Passenger, Herzog's Mystery of Kasper Hauser, and Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the film didn't make as much headway as you might hope among the Western critical mandarinate; in the Film Comment writeup of that year's Cannes, the writer blithely confesses to having skipped "the three-hour Algerian movie" to dally around the Croisette, and describes how many of her cohorts were stunned, but not quite shamed, when it claimed the top prize.

Like Within Our Gates, my #69 Flick, Chronicle of the Smoldering Years is a film that I like in no small part because I am rooting so hard for its point-of-view and its projects, including its own unlikely and prodigious existence on film. But also like the Micheaux picture, the film commands awe and respect for what it shows and does, not just for what it represents. Director Mohammad Lakhdar-Hamina works powerfully with extreme long shots of crowds; he loosely strings his story around the tale of a serially displaced worker and sometime convict played by Yorgo Voyagis but remains clearly more invested in the massive, tidal clashes among the Algerian people and between Algeria as a whole and its imperial foes. The very first shots follow various rural Algerians already grown furious with the penury and difficulty of their lives, barging off to the city and its mirage of promises. Even these brisk and muscular shots, however, focalize the crowds of fellow citizens trying hard to keep their communities together at least as much as the outraged emigrés. Quickly following is one of the movie's most impressive sequences, a fierce skirmish between two colossal clans over a listless, shallow, and muddy river that lies in the desert like something half-dead and flung down. Then, mid-brawl, a rain falls, and the fantasy of a truce with each other and with the world is temporarily realized. The stakes and sources of these people's misery are not hard to discern, and Lakhdar-Hamina's filmmaking neither employs nor requires much subtlety in revealing them, but his steady refusal to individualize his tale is fresh and revelatory to audiences accustomed to tales of the noble outsider or isolated freedom-fighter. They also pose a challenge to the editing of the film, since the standard grammar of alternating crowd shots with close-ups on heroes or favored personalities is so clearly out the window much of the time. Beyond the Voyagis character, a couple of key relatives, and Lakhdar-Hamina's own admittedly romantic role as a mad prophet of colonial-Marxist rebellion, precious few faces hold themselves aside in this movie, but the progress of the movie never feels clunky or sluggish or ungrounded in human experience. You actually experience history in a different way, watching it happen to groups of bodies rather than unique victors or sufferers, and even more than the geography and perimeter of the film's concerns, hardly over-exploited in world film, the very approach is illuminating.

At the end of Gillo Pontecorvo's infinitely more famous The Battle of Algiers, the chorus of wailing women and rising armadas in the far-off hills of Algeria imply that while the European colonials have won the most recent round of combat, Algeria's self-liberation is still imminent. Pontecorvo's film has become such a cultural shorthand for the Algerian experience of their own struggle that the hinted-at but mostly withheld tale of village-level agitation can lapse into abstraction or invisibility—unless, of course, we do something truly revolutionary, like take our history from books and testimonies instead of just the movies. Don't worry, Kettles, I'm the pot in this equation the vast majority of the time, but Chronicle of the Smoldering Years, in itself and in its solidarity with the Third Cinema movement, helps to keep our eyes re-opened, our memories challenged, our vistas expanded. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #69: Within Our Gates

The most famously racist movie in American cinema is D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, a film whose boundary-pushing visual grammar and sophisticated devices for managing parallel narratives are deservedly celebrated, and yet whose white-supremacist mythomania is so overt and passionate that actually watching the film is invariably worse than anything you might hear about it in advance. Until you have beheld the Ku Klux Klan riding valiantly to the rescue of an imperiled white lily of Southern womanhood, you have not experienced the full, gobsmacking force of the racist musculature behind early American visual culture. (Wasn't it kind of me to say "early"?)

Enraged by what he saw in The Birth of a Nation, African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux rode to his own rescue and filmed Within Our Gates—one of his two most famous films (the other is 1925's Body and Soul), but nonetheless obscure to most moviegoers, even those who retrospectively recognize the fundamental disgraces in Griffith's movie. This circumstance actually speaks to another American problem, wherein we have better memories for Faustian masterpieces than for exemplary acts of redress. Indeed, Within Our Gates was deemed lost for many years before it resurfaced just over a decade ago, in mislabeled film canisters in a vault somewhere in Spain. Knowing the severe obstacles this film has faced for decades just trying to get itself seen—not to mention the obstacles you'll encounter trying to see it, unless you live near a university library, or unless TCM is having an especially emancipated day—only adds to its blunt force once unveiled. Rather than a white actor in blackface chasing a histrionic Mae Marsh, Within Our Gates sports a harrowing sequence in which Sylvia Landry, its African-American protagonist, is not only beaten and sexually aggressed by a white man, but by one who comes to realize amidst this very encounter that he is her father—speaking not just to his brutishness in the present moment but to an entire history of disavowed sexual violence and natal alienation. Just as thunderous, both in its anger and in its bold execution, is a long flashback sequence that details the lynching of Sylvia's family, a passage which was customarily excised by craven projectionist even when Gates played to American audiences in 1920. The desperate physicality of the actors in these sequences, as well as their comportment in the more serene but equally interesting passages of the movie, are a succinct rebuttal not just to American memories of its racial past but to the dominating aesthetic of American silent features, which usually opted for a gentility and a stylized theatricality that Micheaux frequently eschews. Lead actress Evelyn Preer, a bright light of the African-American stage, has a soft but womanly poise that offers key counterpoint to the willowy fragility with which Griffith tended to shoot Lillian Gish. Furthermore, Micheaux, who worked without a credited cinematographer, is a cunning visualist, alternating abstract and realist backgrounds behind characters in seemingly straightforward dialogue scenes, so as to comment subtly on the varying moral depth of their points of view, their relation to or else their avoidance of the world they mutually inhabit.

Within Our Gates is full of surprises, following a multitude of characters and plotlines without settling into predictable allegiances. Micheaux's critiques of bad habits within the African-American community are as lucid as his indictments of white-supremacist ideology. The film wholly avoids a Manichean division between black saints and white predators, and the introductions of romance and religion among the film's active concerns do interesting things to our views of several characters. The closing scenes are unforeseeably optimistic, and Gates has taken its licks over the years for making this turn, though it seems to me that the thinly motivated dissolve amidst the final shot squares it quite self-consciously in the realm of fairy tale. Of course, the most delicious surprise in Within Our Gates is that it exists at all, against the odds of America's post-WWI self-deification and despite Micheaux's omission from too many debates and film texts where he rightfully belongs. One particularly succulent reward came in 1992, the fourth year in the cycle of National Film Registry inductees, when Within Our Gates entered the Library of Congress' most esteemed collection of American films right alongside The Birth of a Nation. In the national archives at least, but hopefully in other places too, Micheaux can call Griffith's bluff in perpetuity. There is more than one way to write history in lightning. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #70: Night of the Living Dead

The opening shot of the lonely gravel road, circuitously joining two unknown points, is held several beats longer than is strictly comfortable, and right from that single choice, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead sets itself apart as both a smart formal exercise and a new kind of horror film. Minutes pass as a frankly annoying thirtysomething called Johnny taunts his sister Barbara, a piece of gleaming ivory who'd look endangered and overchallenged in almost any circumstance. Johnny's petulance and Barbara's shrill anxieties, both of them shallow reactions to mortality, virtually incite the vengeance of the dead—inviting the zombies to stand up for themselves, as it were, and sock these two into a more genuine confrontation with the terror but also the slow, lumbering fact of death. It hardly matters that these two will never receive any lifetime achievement awards from SAG, though it's also quite easy to underestimate the skill of the film's performances. From a standpoint of technique, the opening of Night of the Living Dead is a tour-de-force in hobo's clothing, splicing its cheap-looking footage into brilliant orchestrated sequence, using severe montage to lend credence to the hysterical, teetering camera angles. What best depicts the barrier between life and death—the stark and horrifying way the film dives from simple, straight-on full shots to canted, quaking, handheld panic? Or the nagging likeness between the glassy, one-dimensional humans and the lockstep, frozen-faced undead? Or the inexorable, ungainly momentum with which these hobbling bugaboos skulk toward their prey, who will all die later if they don't die now?

Romero, using Zapruder-grade black & white film, founds a hellblazing film and in fact a stout, hardy franchise out of these basic yet wittily debatable oppositions. Having whipped together such a tense scenario in his opening scenes, Romero bunkers Barbara into an old, lonely house, as undermined in its pastoral, self-protective isolation as the Clutter estate in In Cold Blood. Barbara's only companion there, at least at first, is the lucid and capable Ben (Duane Jones), a black man who knows that Barbara's almost pathological inertia and inward-turning fright in his presence may only be proximately rooted in their ghoulish state of siege. In his combination of competence and impatience, generosity and ire—all the more easily stirred when he meets the jittery bigot hiding in this American basement—Ben is the most fully dimensional character in the movie, not to mention a more believable person than almost anyone Sidney Poitier played at any point in the 1960s. That this is the case says less about Poitier than about Stanley Kramer, Norman Jewison, Ralph Nelson, and other big-studio directors who honorably assayed racial themes in their films, though they were at best inconsistent at realizing that the Hollywood mainstream was hardly the place to achieve or even expect the kinds of stories or ideas adequate to the issues. It's incredible to observe the sharp, cutting brushstrokes with which Romero draws attention to the racism, chauvinism, cronyism, naïve romanticism, and other diseased attitudes that torque this ragtag outpost's ability to properly forestall the slow zombie onslaught. The nuclear family intrudes meanly on the wider social unit, as the distraught Coopers demand both privileges and privacy as the birthright of their domestic bubble, lesioned though it already is with an ailing, probably monstrous daughter. Even the Red Scare starts to infiltrate the Dead Scare, as newscasters pontificate about nuclear radiation as a possible explanation for this clearly inexplicable phenomenon.

Night of the Living Dead, still my favorite from among Romero's excellent series, is a brilliant allegory of how people and especially strangers act in a crisis, rather than how we might prefer to act or how we remember ourselves as acting—and yet, as any viewer can attest, Romero's obvious conviction in mounting this critique does nothing to slake the force of the tooth-gnashing, clobbering, apocalyptic plot. Quite to the contrary, Night of the Living Dead's basis in genre only amplifies its thematic parries, since the palpable, lethal urgency of the crisis underlines both the tragic, angry rendings of the social canvas and the hopeful glimmers of alliance and entente in a way that In the Heat of the Night's more peremptory and self-enclosed plot—much less the dinner with Mr. Guess Who—can't really equal. Every dimension of the movie culminates in the incomparably brave final shots, and rarely has "shot" seemed like such an apt name for what can be stirring, powerful, complicated, dangerous, and almost exhaustingly entertaining in this popular medium. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #71: Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

The cold, obdurate symmetry of Chantal Akerman's shots in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, less protracted but just as deliberate as those of her most famous film, Jeanne Dielman..., made an indelible impression on me from literally the first frame. In this prologue, which soon reveals itself as pure in medias res, the titular Anna Silver debarks from a train but lingers on the platform, even as the rest of the passengers clamber down the stairs. As Anna pauses on the quay, she is both overwhelmed and made more interesting by its bland but looming structures: the overhang, the pillars, the signs. Just as much as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Haynes' Safe, Akerman's Rendez-vous spins an involving and specific story out of seemingly arid spaces, photographed in precise, frequently mirrored compositions that somehow make the world seem airless, anonymous: in this case, an endless series of boxes, concourses, and doorways to nowhere. Uniting all of these nonplaces is a sprawling grid of railway lines, conveying featureless passenger-cars full of nearly featureless passengers to veritable approximations of wherever they've just been. Cologne, in this film, looks remarkably like Brussels, like Paris. Relationships between people are as vague as those between places, and even the human body, often enough revealed in states of non-erotic undress, looks worrisomely like a portable property, a valise for cloudy agendas and memories that are rarely evoked or acted upon in any appreciable way. But the bodies aren't cold, exactly. Real people live there, though it's a mystery how this taciturn film is drawing them out, continually stoking our faith in something warm still underlying it all.

What comes through is a vision of Europe that feels remarkably prescient for a film from the late 1970s, a stretching plane of points and horizons from which nationalities, languages, and other cornerstones of unique culture have eroded, or else merged with those of their neighbors. Anna, ostensibly promoting a film she has just directed, peddles her art in a world that not only seems to lack any artistic manifestations (we see not one frame of Anna's movie, nor do we even come close), but from which the very artistic impulse has been superseded by economy, impersonality, and basic accommodation. Not for nothing is Anna's tour wending its way toward Lausanne, Geneva, and Zurich; neutrality all but defines her character, as well as all the milieux among which she travels. That neutrality can feel so infertile is one of the layers that make Les Rendez-vous d'Anna interesting from a political standpoint, though the film works harder to prompt contemplation from the vantages of desire, human relationships, and contemporary hiccups in old, generational models of how the present becomes the future. Anna is dogged from pitstop to pitstop by phone messages from her mother, handed to her by an array of indistinguishable concierges, and when she finally does catch up with Mom, she climbs naked into her bed and tells her, in the film's foggy-intimate fashion, about a woman she once slept with on a press tour. Other lovers are implied, but children are not—and not only because Anna is so defined by her career. "Defined" may not be a word that Anna remotely invites, so wispy and reserved is she, but her various dates, temporary lovers, old friends, and conversation partners are hardly more vivacious or transparent than she.

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, for all its formalist and intellectual engagements, is also weirdly moving, either despite or because of the purposefully stolid photography, the general forsaking of music in favor of droning ambience, the peripheral characters who remain utterly peripheral, even as they trade their detailed monologues with Anna that do not quite amount to conversation. What it means to reveal oneself in words or to confide in another are active questions posed by the film, but it's reassuring that Akerman has opted not for a bilious tract about modern isolation but for a low, slow symphony of encounters that never extinguish the humane potential or the search for connection that imbue almost all of them. The film also has a healthy sense of humor that eases as well as complicates the tone whenever it pokes through. In a similar vein, Anna's remoteness from her paramours, even as they loll or murmur or evade or press into each other in bed, does not deprive the film of a wise, believably adult sexuality. The modern age is not the death of sex or friendship, and perhaps art and love will also survive, but they need to be recognized in new ways, hustled up from often unpromising elements. Also, the more one sees of the world, touring in the most anodyne and unintensive ways, the less one seems inclined or even able to absorb much of it. But watching Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, guided and anchored by the smartly restrained performance of Aurore Clément (Paris, Texas; Apocalypse Now Redux), you do feel like you've been somewhere, as though you've seen something worth considering, worth deconstructing, worth telling someone about. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #72: Eraserhead

I conjectured further down on this list that Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man would be the hardest entry to write about, but having now arrived at Eraserhead, David Lynch's roomy and surreal yet utterly cohesive debut feature, I realize that I was wrong. How many times has a David Lynch movie proved somebody wrong? He proved beyond question, and to the chagrin of many more timid artists, that you can hop from a first feature this singularly bizarre to the basically conventional Elephant Man, a film that remains distinctive and troublingly irreal even as it parlays so comfortably into narrative paradigms and popular favor. That you can reframe comfy, Eisenhower-era iconography within the savage, huffing, sadomasochistic framework of Blue Velvet and still galvanize a core of fans who will journey to the outer, saturnine limits of your own obsessive images. That you can suavely oscillate between film and TV projects, even before such a thing was fashionable for our auteurs, and without the protective auspice of a paid-cable channel. That you can court incoherence in Fire Walk with Me and honor the simplest classical traditions in The Straight Story all in the same decade. That you can alchemize a rejected television pilot into the ranking apotheosis of your own feature-film career, and maybe of postmodernism more generally in the American cinema.

Lynch keeps daring us and daring himself, and the film world tenses with anticipation at each new step he takes—which, more than four years after the trip down Mulholland Drive, could hardly appear a moment too soon. There is no question in my mind that Mulholland is Lynch's best and richest movie, but if that masterwork is missing anything, it's the daft, piquant riskiness of a film like Eraserhead, which reflects not the trained professionalism that comes with decades in the business and a cohort of frequent collaborators, but from a pure will to test the on-screen viability of an almost id-level sensibility. Lynch is the credited director, writer, editor, composer, production designer, special effects technician, and sound-effects editor on Eraserhead, and I suppose I feel, with no particular justification, that assigning any more chefs to this dada dish could only have diluted the flavor. Though quite evidently a workshop for sonic concepts, experiments in framing, and poker-faced acting styles that would later be redrawn in finer detail, Eraserhead works marvelously on its own terms. A dreamscape to equal Un chien andalou, the film also traces a clear narrative line through nervous courtship, an excruciatingly anxious paternity, and a kind of fantasy life that isn't so much stifled as it is genetically rearranged by an oppressive, penurious existence in a post-industrial no man's land.

I'm sure all of Eraserhead's fans have their own favorite moments. Unquestionably, one of mine is the non-diegetic soundtrack of whines and slurping sounds beneath Jack Nance's first painful meeting with his girlfriend's parents, belatedly linked to a dog suckling her litter in the same room. Close behind that is the Tod Browning shot of Charlotte Stewart's strained expressions as her head rests on the foot of a mattress, only tangentially indicating that below the sightline of the frame, she is reaching for a suitcase beneath the bed. All of the scenes of the titular and pustulent dino-baby are unforgettable, as is that famous shot of Nance's startled grimace and his backlit pile of wiry curls while the spores released from his baby's abdomen fill the air around him. What does any of it mean? Please don't make me guess. I haven't even tried to delve into the connotations and integrated resonances of Eraserhead because the pleasures it imparts as pure collage are so profound, so inexpressibly funny, and so relatably sad. And I cop to finding enjoyment in the fact that Eraserhead is, for all its notoriety and the prestige of its director, so totemistically difficult to locate, making the movie rare in every sense—uncommon, exquisite, and served up all but raw. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #73: Pennies from Heaven

Musicals are even more of a rarity on this list than on my Top 100, not because I dislike the form but because the ones that engage me tend to engage me at about the same level and in much the same way. Meanwhile, those few that I truly love tend to involve an overt and self-reflexive consideration of the form, often at a significant ironic distance—I'll take Singin' in the Rain, New York, New York, or Dancer in the Dark any day over Swing Time, On the Town, or My Fair Lady. Same holds for theatrical musicals, where the handful that truly excite me include Floyd Collins and Caroline, or Change. With the exception, then, of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's masterpiece, one of the great consensus favorites of the American cinema, you can see how my appetites often land me in square support of exactly those musicals that more fervent fans tend to dislike, and which can even imply a certain rebuke to the genre's most famous pleasures, which I dare not call "simple."

Such is again the case with Herbert Ross' Pennies from Heaven, his opulent but abrasive adaptation of Dennis Potter's BBC miniseries, which I have never seen. A major money loser for MGM, once so synonymous with tuneful crowd-pleasers, the film possesses a royal flush of attributes almost certain to alienate popular audiences. Steve Martin cast as a basically unsympathetic character. An entire cast that lip-synchs instead of singing, and to scratchy standards and thrift-store arcana to boot. Trajectories into squalor and unhappiness instead of out of it. Fiddle-dee-dee! Little in the movie even implies that it will formally stray from a miserabilist Depression-era drama with wry, almost mocking undertows until Martin suddenly opens his mouth and moves his lips in semi-tandem with a 1930s radio hit that comes from nowhere. Not long after, these incongruous moments of song flower into fully-blown, toe-tapping, Art Deco extravaganzas, like the gleaming sequence where a colonnade of tuxedoed chaps rain money and romance on a debonair Martin and his floating, platinum goddess—even as, in the forlornly designated "real world," he's being turned down for a bank loan. The pixie dust keeps sifting and the songs keep coming as a sad schoolmistress (Bernadette Peters) is impregnated out of wedlock or even lovelock, as the local pimp softshoes and splitses his way into coercive ownership of this broken dame, as our dissatisfied and disloyal protagonist extends his record of abandonments and assaults, and as the whole glittering kaboodle builds to a climactic execution.

The unexpected alignments of the movie's core elements and their dissonant cultural connotations were, I suppose, doomed to win the film a reputation as an act of vandalism—either by undermining the nostalgic appeal of the music and the choreography, all of which is utterly stellar, or by trivializing the incidents of the narrative, which speaks with real earnestness to problems of restlessness, misogyny, and the plexiglas ceiling of social class. What interests me in the movie is the idea that neither of its faces, the sweet or the sour, necessarily comes at the expense of the other. In fact, at a level so far above Ross' other movies that you can't even see them from here, Pennies from Heaven presents a dazzling and thought-provoking worldview where pop dreams and common predicaments are interfused every day, often to deleterious effect, but would we have it any other way? Even in our starkest moments, do we ever wish to go without our dreams or romantic fancies, any more than we would wish this film to go without its sleek art direction, its marvelously controlled performances (especially from a remarkable Jessica Harper as Martin's wife), its exciting range of dance styles and tones, its charming, attic-scented hopechest of songs, its breathtaking and allusive images shot by the legendary D.P. of Manhattan and The Godfather? You often cannot know where Pennies from Heaven is going, unless perhaps you've seen Dancer in the Dark and are starting to ask how Lars von Trier got away with quite so much pilfering. Stretched between these two poles, a story of inexorable decline and a bouquet of formal surprises, Pennies from Heaven is as taut and cutting as piano wire, but it's also a dream on a cloud. Who's to say these things can't go together? (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #74: Vanya on 42nd Street

As though synthesizing my last two choices, here is another filmed play that filters the antiquarian through the lens of the contemporary, or else vice versa, and it stars the modern American cinema's pre-eminent Woman Who Lies to Herself in one of her most exquisite performances.

Nonetheless, even a Julianne Moore disciple can't start a write-up of Vanya on 42nd Street with a nod to Julianne, or even to Louis Malle, whose movie this is, or even to André Gregory, whose minimalist workshop production of Uncle Vanya is the subject of this loving, sublimely attentive film. If you're talking Vanya on 42nd Street you have to start with Chekhov, a playwright so very resistant to screen treatment and so very easy to misconstrue in areas of tone, delivery, and intent. The infamous question of how Chekhov could possibly have considered plays like Uncle Vanya to be comedies is the task of a talented troupe to unravel, a rare feat to which this film makes us so thrillingly privy. Translated by David Mamet with economic brilliance, Chekhov's play achieves such concise pscyhological insight with so sure and light a hand that it can almost make you blush, and yet for all of the characters' many endowments—Dr. Astrov's charisma and his ethical grasp of nature, Sonya's work ethic and sad-eyed resilience, Yelena's exquisite beauty and stunning indolence, Vanya's sour wit and impatience with pretense—they are none of them much armed with a capacity for change. As the script transcribes an arc from one domestic arrangement to a different and notably smaller one, nearly all of the characters' hopes and plans continue to exceed their grasp, almost by definition. "Comedy" thus appears to name their steady commitment to ideals they can't well afford or attain, and their rueful awareness of this very dilemma, to which, in private moments and with the right ears to bend, almost all of them confess.

Capturing such a delicate lacework of feeling and compromise is difficult enough, but Malle does more than document a stirring production. He subtly tailors a form of Chekhovian direction that alights just as softly but lucidly on its subjects. From the piquant prologue of the actors' arrivals and chitchats, Vanya gorgeously idles into its own opening lines with a simple cut and a gliding camera move; the effect is similar to how Bergman introduces his Magic Flute, and the emotional rewards that follow are comparably rich. Cinematographer Declan Quinn, refining his own techniques in line with the scrupulous actors, adduces the angles and auras of each face with total perfection, carrying Astrov from hardy to dissipated or Sonya from plain to luminous in no time at all. The seeds of his smart, observational cinematography in Leaving Las Vegas, Monsoon Wedding, and In America are already flourishing here, not least in how he incorporates the darkened theater itself into his compositions, choosing exactly when and to what extent each character emerges from absolute shadow. These camera regimens indicate just how cinematic this Vanya is despite its unfussy, unfurnished groundedness in theatrical art. Close-ups, gingerly inserts, and other privileged views of the actors do as much to convey the characters as their trained vocal precision and consummate faith in their material. "No, one would not describe this family as happy," confesses Moore's Yelena, but has this actress ever laughed so much and with such fine degrees of implication in any other film? Her chuckling, abrupt admission that she would have enjoyed marrying a younger man is a sublime Chekhovian moment, as is Larry Pine's garrulous, principled, but self-absorbed defense of the Russian forest. Another glory is Wallace Shawn's deft application of his unique, adenoidal delivery to a killjoy character who nonetheless requires our sympathy, even though he has no obvious claim on it. Shawn finds and defends those claims, working as seamlessly as everything else in the film—except, of course, when Malle or Gregory wants us to notice and consider the seams, the determinate environment, the historical and cultural distance that suddenly feels so much less distant. In a year whose other breakout movies (Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Natural Born Killers) were such virtuosic plunges into wild aesthetic surfaces, Vanya on 42nd Street is, in the words of Pablo Neruda, as bright as a lamp, as simple as a ring, remote and candid. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #75: Birth

A breathless, typical, and totally verbatim excerpt of a recent conversation I had with Nathaniel when he was my houseguest for a weekend: "Let's stay in, make some food, and watch movies where women lie to themselves!" Were Blockbuster or Hollywood Video ever under our jurisdiction, to say nothing of Hollywood itself, this is the kind of genre that would get major play. Maybe even the most play. Those under-employed actresses over 40 you keep hearing about? No more worries. Safes and Vera Drakes and Under the Sands and Autumn Sonatas for everyone!

Nicole Kidman isn't even 40 yet but she has already offered a peculiarly fascinating entry in this delicious tradition. One of many astonishing passages in Birth, preceding a coda as fragile and clear as a bell jar, involves her pleading monologue to a spurned lover, a thrumming fugue of stuttering self-delusion of a breed seldom heard since Safe's Carol White soliloquized about diseases and reading labels and going into buildings. Still, Kidman's Anna Morgan is a mess well before this. When we meet her, she is standing at the graveside of a husband already dead ten years, her breath visible as she stands shivering in a minidress, winter coat, and heavy boots. With her short, Rosemary's Baby haircut, Jonathan Glazer's procession of intimate close-ups, and Harris Savides' opalescent cinematography, there is no visual or cosmetic barrier between us and Kidman's tremulousness. Where so many of the actress' recent roles have disclosed her surprising steeliness—as Virginia Woolf, as Isabel Archer, as the mother in The Others and the sometime martyr in Dogville—Birth draws near to her cool lladro skin, her darting eyes, her trademark tic of blowing air through her nose in smiling agitation. Even as Anna makes heavy choices and adopts iron stances, daring to believe that a spooky 10-year-old interloper is the reincarnation of her immortal beloved, the probing camerawork won't corroborate her resolve. In an ice-cream parlor, under a bridge in Central Park, amid the sickly lime of the living-room wallpaper, in that exquisite, tumultuous, minute-long close-up at the Metropolitan Opera, we hover so close to Kidman that we're practically in her pores. From this vantage, the movie reverberates with foreshocks of her heart's collapse.

So how does a movie like Birth still get made? The auteurist formal control of the movie, awash with directorial signatures at every level and in every nook, feels anachronistic in itself, redolent of an emotional drift that hasn't much been felt much in American movies since Five Easy Pieces or The King of Marvin Gardens. The film's absorption in Anna recalls Mabel Longhetti slipping under the influence, Evelyn Mulwray battening down the demons of patriarchy, both of them listing away inside the diametrically different styles of their films. (In the Mood for Love plumbs and lingers on Maggie Cheung in a very similar way, which goes far in explaining Kidman's recent, passionate courtship of Wong Kar-wai.) Alexandre Desplat's roiling, sonorous score, the most beautiful thing heard in years of movies, ebbs and rolls with a confidence to match its beauty, as if movies have been scored this way forever. Anne Heche, slicing through the imposture and helplessness of the other characters, is as sharp and forceful as Kathleen Byron in Black Narcissus. And the script, which came to such grief among so many critics, resembles nothing so much as those gorgeously stuck, impacted stories of Henry James, like "The Beast in the Jungle" or "The Altar of the Dead." Does the film take itself too seriously? Does it admit too little about too much? Maybe, but such bold and gorgeous reticence is a rare gift. Birth is the most recent movie on this list, but it has already staked a fierce claim on my imagination, and it doesn't feel like the kind of movie that lets go very easily. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #76: The Lion in Winter

I am tempted to say that The Lion in Winter works better than it should. Its dual lineage in royal history and soap operatics doesn't seem like the recipe for anything but a feathered fish, remote to popular audiences and unrecognizable to more studious ones. The apoplectic performance style of Peter O'Toole whenever he's sprung from the Arabian desert seems like an odd match with Katharine Hepburn's Connecticut vowels and her dry-gin flirts with the camera. For purposes of drama, but also for those of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine themsleves, there are too many sons running about. As in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, released the same year, the sets and costumes are pretty but also too...clean. The palace is aspoil with mongrels, hens, and fugitive vegetables, but not a thing has streaked Hepburn's ivory caftan or O'Toole's clabber-colored face, still as white as empire beneath that well-tended beard. Past the edge of every frame, around every palatial corner, you can sense the playhouse audience so clearly intended by these barbs and bon mots.

The Lion in Winter shouldn't work, but then, adding up all of its giddy affronts to seriousness and proper concert, the movie shouldn't do anything but work, and that's exactly my experience of the movie: it works and keeps on working, so succulent that it's no longer absurd, pumping so much pure voltage into its bickery version of history made at night that there's no means of resisting, and no reason to. The Lion in Winter practically reels with its own sense of fun, even as John Barry's timpani and trumpets keep fastening the movie to some form of gravitas, even as Douglas Slocombe's photography, much more interesting than I remembered, casts a fine, sooty dust over these transparently modern personalities. James Goldman's adaptation of his own play is a robust and roustabout chronicle, Holinshed in the age of Peyton Place. Better, having devised this unique blend of annal and sitcom, dotted here and there with unsheathed daggers, he keeps it going ingeniously. I've never been much sold on the work of his more famous brothers. Oldest brother Bo farmed thin conceits in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Melvin and Howard, winning Oscars for both that were more rightly due the directors who placed so much trust in them. Superstar screenwriter and raconteur William, well-seasoned with experience but annoyingly arch all the same, has even more overrated titles to his credit, like the thin wisp of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the preening whimsy of The Princess Bride. The Lion in Winter has what none of these films have—though, giving credit where it's due, William's ace distillation of All the President's Men has it, too: a braced and solid structure, a gallery of finely etched characters, a huckster's gift for streamlining and popularizing the arcane, a beating heart of popcorn appeal that still allows the film to go about its business, aggressively selling its strengths but never just shilling them.

Certainly I've never liked O'Toole nearly so much in his other films as I do here. His Henry is livelier as well as more serious than his counterpart performance in Becket, though it helps that Anthony Harvey is a much better judge of camera distance and emotional beats than Becket's Peter Glenville was. Katharine Hepburn bursts forth with by far the best performance of her life after Spence. The standard meme in biographies, including her own, is that she tore into the role with the admittedly displaced energy of massive grief, but it's worth noting that it's as sexy a turn as the one in The Philadelphia Story. Hepburn writhes on her bed, tinders an incestuous spark in the eyes of all her boys, contemplates her own image in a mirror shaped like a dragon's tear, and lures a leading man 25 years her junior into a vivacious, erotic battle of wills that goes off like a charm. Maybe she was just turned on by all those great lines she gets to recite and react to. "She smiled to excess but she chewed with real distinction," Eleanor offers in perfect dismissal of a rival who, let's not forget, is already long dead.

"I marvel at you after all these years," mutters her nonplussed husband, "still like a democratic drawbridge going down for everybody."

Shooting back at Henry's autumnal dreams of having more and different children, Eleanor asks, "What kind of spindly, rickety, milky, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limpy line of things will you beget? And when you die, which is regrettable but necessary, what will happen to fair Alais and her pruny prince?" Give Katharine Hepburn that many consonants to bite down on, sit back, and luxuriate. That Eleanor of Aquitaine can hardly be entertained to have said any such thing hardly matters; that Pauline Kael spat vituperatively on the whole ship matters just as little. A slim skiff, maybe. Its last act is utterly at sixes and sevens, and the actual finale slips right off the screen. But it's a proud pageant up to that point, punchy and uproarious, a royal flag unfurled for the cause of popular delight. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #77: The Brood

David Cronenberg's The Brood debuted in 1979, the same year as Robert Benton's box-office smash and Oscar darling Kramer vs. Kramer. Though his film beat Benton's into theaters by several months, Cronenberg has often cited The Brood as his own horrified rebuke at the domesticated middle-class gauziness of Kramer, having himself recently emerged from a caustic divorce and custody battle. The Brood/Kramer showdown, forever rooted in their own irreconcilable differences, offers as stark a dichotomy as the more infamous Do the Right Thing/Driving Miss Daisy square-off at the end of the following decade: same issue, same medium, different galaxies. And though such is not always the way, the indie films sure come out smelling like roses in these comparisons.

The throbbing knot of angry frustration that so thrillingly crystallizes The Brood—it is by several degrees the most focused and accomplished entry in Cronenberg's pre-Videodrome filmography—is also the explicit subject of the movie, where it is nonetheless aligned with monstrosity and the will to murder. On the one hand, divorced dad Frank Carveth is comfily outfitted with a placid demeanor as well as primary custody of his young daughter Candace. Frank tells Candy's teacher that his wife Nola "married me for my sanity, hoping it would rub off on her," and everything about the film implicitly defends his claim, from Art Hindle's collected performance to the preponderance of screen time afforded him by Cronenberg's script. By contrast, Samantha Eggar's Nola is a raving harpy, an absent mama, and a slave to psycho-clinical trends, having given herself over to the experimental regimen of "Psychoplasmics" founded by Dr. Hal Raglan, an unsettling figure who impersonates his own clients' most bitter antagonists in long role-playing sessions, until the patient's unleashed fury is literalized as nodes, rashes, or pustules on the surface of his or her skin. The Brood doesn't delve deeply into the internal operations or even the grounding logic of the Psychoplasmics enterprise; like the Cathode Ray Mission or the Black Meat factory in later Cronenberg films, this posthuman phenomenon titillates with the idea rather than the mechanics of somatic transformation. It is, however, the conceptual heart of the picture, however shrouded in mystery—a state of affairs that is underlined by The Brood's taut, pervasive emphasis on oblique framings and offscreen space. Cronenberg's contempt for Nola is as clear as his fellow-feeling with her cooler, calmer husband, and yet her operatic rage and her willingness to push her body and mind to new limits of being are what animate the picture, literally yielding its prime agents of horror, and conferring narrative possibility onto the static canvas of the director's own palpable anger. You can't watch The Brood without sensing its exorcising function in the life of its maker. The emotional strata of the film, no less than its tense images and grisly set-pieces, no less than Dr. Raglan's dissertation or Nola Carveth's otherworldly and abject progeny, embody "The Shape of Rage."

So I love The Brood for flaunting its metaphorical referents, yet still complicating the presumed roles of hero and villain with its undisguisable awe at the potency and intricacy of what Nola's ferocity brings into being. Guaranteeing that the movie isn't just Cronenberg's triumph, The Brood is also his first important collaboration with deft cinematographer Mark Irwin, who subtended his career throughout the formative period leading up to and including The Fly. Composer Howard Shore and art director Carol Spier, each holding those jobs for only the second time in their careers, also begin their auspicious and still-evolving teamwork with Cronenberg on this picture. The work of these artists, together with Samantha Eggar's ferocious conviction as Nola and the generally capable performances all around, impart unto The Brood that singular air of a terrific genre exercise that also foreshadows stranger, deeper, and more complicated triumphs lying over the horizon—several of them further up on this list, in fact. It's an exciting film, as regards both aesthetic merit and entertainment value, and it holds up beautifully even in retrospect. Three years after The Brood, Alan Parker's white-hot and perfectly judged drama Shoot the Moon did at least prove that a commercial film with a prestige cast (Albert Finney, Diane Keaton) could peel the skin off the question of divorce, but Cronenberg's foray into the terrain remains seminal. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #78: Babe

The Daily Telegraph recently published a list of the 20 best films for children, and it's an interesting list, culling surprising titles from the Disney catalogue and encompassing both well-known and underseen titles—even if, in this reader's opinion, its belief in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit runs prematurely excessive. Conspicuously missing from the list, if I may pose only one corrective, is Babe, the box-office sleeper of 1995, unexpected Academy favorite, and apparently unreproducible miracle, since the sequel struck precious few, give or take Gene Siskel, as rivaling the original.

Babe is magic. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, blessing the film with early, colorful hints of the Antipodean fantasy world of The Lord of the Rings, works within a stable and pitch-perfect palette that nonetheless glides easily among the emerald pastures of Hoggett farm, the calico colors inside the house, the sepia frights and silhouettes of a killing shed, and the blue-filtered nightmare flashback to the drowning sheep. Whatever wizardry allowed the animals not just to "speak" but do so in a way that is terrifically un-creepy has yet to be revealed, at least to me, but these and other special effects in Babe are perennial joys, even after six or seven viewings spread over ten years. The voicework, headed by Christine Cavanaugh's dear articulation of Babe's lines, is just impeccable, and then there's the physical acting by the animals: the uproarious bobs and weaves of Ferdinand the Duck's long neck, the malicious envy of Duchess the Cat, the nervous energy of the dogs Rex and Fly as they attempt to extract key information from a flock of seen-it-all sheep. Why is it that most popular films can't cobble together a decent pen of human actors but Babe can wrest a menagerie of real and animatronic animals into a taut, funny, even witty ensemble? The answer to that question probably lies somewhere in the province of why most child-targeted movies are so clogged with puerile, dizzying set-pieces while Babe exemplifies the virtues of coherent action, picture-perfect art direction, a gentle and melodic score, and a gallery of bonafide characters—both the creatures and their keepers—who negotiate issues of aspiration, prejudice, politeness, jealousy, non-conformity, belonging, and surprise that, in their basic topography, are just as keen for children as for adults.

At the center of Babe, though, is a love affair between farmer and animal that for me handily eclipses its analogue in Wallace and Gromit. Lesnie, as we know from the Rings films, is a whiz at camera movement, and one of the supplest and sweetest in Babe is the high-angle POV shot when Farmer Hoggett first spies Babe in his little plywood box at the county fair. Seguing into a ridiculously affecting shot/reverse shot between Hoggett and hog, this poignant moment finds its obvious, perfect complement in the final shots of the same duo, which end the movie on the same introspective note of deep, intimate, friendly togetherness that we appreciate when Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh, at the finis of The House at Pooh Corner, "Come to an Enchanted Place and We Leave Them There." That Babe's central human character is not a winsome child but a laconic adult, moved and stirred even to spontaneous dancing by this able and good-hearted animal, is another of its lovely, unexpected departures from formula. Embellished in a gleaming white light that we somehow don't resent, Farmer Hoggett and Babe are one of the best and soundest teams in recent movies. Point me to even ten other movies in the last decade that combine unbashful sentiment, top-of-the-line visual effects, rounded-out characters, fully functional subplots for almost all of them, piquant mise-en-scène conceived in this much doting detail, and one-liners as good as "I suppose the life of an anorexic duck doesn't amount to much in the scheme of things, but Pig, I'm all I've got!" That'll do, indeed. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #79: Executive Suite

Among the great, semi-forgotten American films of the 1950s is Robert Wise's Executive Suite, my favorite among his many directorial outings and still an incisive, attentive character drama about the high, hallowed halls of corporate intrigue. "Because it is high in the sky," an anonymous narrator intones over the opening shots of then-modern skyscrapers, "you may think those who work there are somehow above the tensions and temptations of those who work on the lower floors. This is to say, it isn't so." And how. The names of the film's dynamite lead cast are heralded onto the screen by the low chimes of a public clock, and with a lineup this sterling—William Holden, Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, a surprisingly tough and never-better June Allyson—the gesture hardly feels grandiose. As the movie begins, it demonstrates an affinity for formal stunts like the stark absence of any musical score and the long, tracking POV sequence shot in which the unseen Avery Bullard, president and redeemer of the Treadway Furniture Company, concludes a business meeting in Calhern's office, sends a telegram to his home office, and dies of a sudden stroke on the sidewalk while hailing a cab. From this point forward, however, the movie coils its springs and employs much more modest means in achieving its magnificence: the actors, equipped with great roles and fellows and a drastically under-explored American theme, light into their parts with heroic, muscular conviction. Ingeniously plotted, the film delays each character's awareness of Bullard's death in clever ways, digging into their reactions in some cases—Pidgeon's sorrow, Calhern's duplicity—and cleverly excising these reactions in others, so that we are all the more surprised by their battle strategies for filling the vacuum at the top of the ladder.

Wise, famously, was an editor before he was a director, and as with all of his films, the cutting expertly serves the tone and theme of the film, hastening the ends of key scenes by beats and half-beats, just enough to aggravate the tension. In concert with Ernest Lehman's typically shrewd script, Wise also makes time for unexpected accents and cul-de-sacs in the narrative. When Holden's earnest factory supervisor, now a coalition candidate to take over the company, is called away from a backyard game of catch to keep up with the latest machinations, wife Allyson dons his mitt and takes their son back out to the yard. Throwing and catching some mean fastballs in deep, unedited shots, Allyson keeps up a smart dialogue scene at the same time, which not only constitutes a small and unexpected moment but prudently keeps us guessing about what Holden and his cronies are up to. We know the basic idea; he's collaborating with Calhern, at least, to ensure that crafty, officious fussbudget March doesn't become the top banana, even if March himself capably and unshowily takes top honors in a cast of expert rivals. His prime competition, if we allow the film to teach us that everything is a competition, comes from the unexpected quarter of Nina Foch, Gene Kelly's haughty patron in An American in Paris. Cast here as the late CEO's loyal, proficient, and keenly alert secretary, Foch has one of those roles like Kelly MacDonald's in Gosford Park, watchfully slinking among more obviously dramatic characters, but all the while managing the tough double-trick of clearly delineating a specific character while also serving as the audience's general window into what's happening.

The climax of Executive Suite's script preserves all the slippery power and impressive dexterity of the earlier chapters, and continues to stoke our sense that all of the characters must be closely watched. The closing soliloquy is perhaps the one truly predictable element of the film, but its lucid optimism and core values are still quite rousing. Its grasp of corporate psychology, much less human psychology, seem much richer than in Billy Wilder's glib and opportunistic The Apartment, and the tough, simple confidence of its formal choices register much better with me than the more elaborate noir stylistics of Alexander Mackendrick's celebrated Sweet Smell of Success, which Lehman helped to write. Too, it's one of those movies that you're most likely to see if you pop onto cable TV and find that it happens to be playing, so for most of us, the film is brightly tinged with a genuine sense of discovery. 'Tis pity, though, that this is so.Why we hardly recognize a film this relevant and top-drawer, replete with such famous names ticking off some of their best work, is beyond me, but unlike capitalist profiteering and white-collar backstabbing, it's an easy enough habit to kick. Rent it. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #80: Blow-Up

A tempting but terrible habit for film critics is to pronounce with presumed authority on things we know nothing about, except via the movies we watch. Whether Blow-Up, then, offers an apt characterization of the swinging London '60s, either in literal or purposefully exaggerated terms, or whether the "swinging London '60s" are anything but a cultural mirage, cultivated at the time and cited and spoofed ever since... none of this is for me to say, though Blow-Up sure makes it all feel true. The concerts, the floating parties, the licentious verve of the fashion photo-shoots, the sexual exhibitionism and its surrounding cocoon of scopophiliac looking. Whether or not this strain of youth culture ever existed, it exists quite convincingly and entertainingly within the terms of the movie. The construction of this atmosphere is the connective tissue that binds the movie together, even as so many of its scenes feel loose, offhand, breathing easily.

Whether or not Antonioni's protagonist unwittingly takes a snapshot of a dead body in a public park is only one of the questions at the nucleus of the film. Another is what it would mean if this body, this stranger's body, this body that doesn't look sufficiently like a body and doesn't have the habit of staying put, really did turn out to be a body. What would change? What would it mean? But there is yet a further question, equally central, and it virtually neutralizes all the others: what if these narrative riddles and cryptic implications are shadows of some greater enigma, some secret life of objects that keeps emerging, deliciously but somehow troublingly, in all of Antonioni's shots and scenes? Unlike, say, L'Avventura or L'Éclisse, Blow-Up is not about spaces but about forms and hard surfaces: the photographic equipment, the images themselves, the parti-colored fashion ensembles over which Carlo Di Palma's camera pans and glides so silkily, the rustling backdrop paper in the photo studio, the mottled floor on which Sarah Miles and her husband make love, the plane propeller purchased from the antique store, the Yardbirds' hilariously absconded guitar. Even the objects that go missing from the frame—the body, the tennis ball—continue to define their surrounding spaces rather than the other way around, except perhaps in the final shot, where the photographer himself evaporates into the grass. The seductive aesthetics of the movie, Antonioni's way of photographing everything so that all of it looks fascinating as well as concealing, mark a direct prelude to movies like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, which prompt a constant stream of questions quite apart from the putative concerns of the plot. And yet the movie also feels remarkably self-contained, an exceptional case within Antonioni's own filmography, and within the mid-'60s "swinger" cinema that I have otherwise found so enervating (Lester, Schlesinger). As in the movie's entrancing, impeccably shot and edited sequence tracing the photographic enlargements, the images in Blow-Up itself keep suggesting larger scales, darker ramifications, and its sublimity of beauty and terror is of course the greater for leaving these questions unresolved. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #81: A Streetcar Named Desire

Is there a more poignant character arc in American drama, in American literature, than the disintegration of Blanche DuBois? Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, her wounds and anxieties, even her dreams, are those of Gothic fiction: frittered estates, fabled suicides, eleventh-hour suitors, secret histories. Meanwhile, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, her sister and brother-in-law, united by consonance, alliteration, and carnality, have more tangible concerns, like a pregnancy Stella doesn't mention, a ritual poker night Stanley means to safeguard, and, bien sur, the Napoleonic Code. Tennessee Williams' play, among its multiple and ingenious geometries, positions Blanche and Stanley as nearly parallel vectors, moving nonetheless in opposite directions. It is somehow heroic that Blanche, with Williams' help, sustains her romanticism, her "enchantment," as long as she does—even with a paramour as stolid as Karl Malden's Mitch, a walking sack of flour. It is similarly heroic, for quite a long time, that Stanley manages to insist on the proud vulgarity of his petty fiefdom, even as his cohorts offer to stand for the ladies and dance to their radio, as the sisters DuBois share a laugh and later a derogatory confidence at his expense, as prospective parenthood dares to soften him into a stabler companion-provider. Williams is brave to venture these two as complementary egos, each creating worlds within worlds, as Blanche's steamy baths and Stanley's stinking shirt carve a two-room apartment into separate universes.

But A Streetcar Named Desire is not, finally, a relativist play. It stands fully behind Blanche when she names deliberate cruelty as the one truly unforgivable thing, and as her inventions and self-insulations grow more threadbare—who but a desperate woman could even imagine a figure like Shep Huntleigh?—her cold fate is sealed. Elia Kazan films her lowest moment so that we hover over Blanche, her face and body upside down in the shot, rolling back her eyes in high-angle so as to acquire some sense of whom she's talking to. Blanche, as she herself might put it, is utterly boulversée, her blazing imagination finally bereft of all billows. With more severe lighting, it would be a Bergman shot, but it is better for being a Harry Stradling shot: as in the rest of the movie, the low-contrast grayscale here is the color of cobwebs while still assessing incredible visual detail in every frame.

Streetcar is to me what The Wizard of Oz or The Ten Commandments or It's a Wonderful Life or Top Gun are to others: a movie and a story that have always been there, past which it's difficult to remember. I read the play in 7th grade and simply never stopped, and Kazan's version has become such an iconic counterpart to the play that it's hard to separate the two, despite their overt differences. In fact, these disparities are interesting: something as simple as following Blanche immediately to the bowling alley to find Stella, instead of letting her nip her liquor and calm her nerves alone for a few beats in the Kowalskis' tenement, changes the whole energy of the character. She doesn't even have her little spat with the upstairs neighbor Eunice, which is especially surprising because Kazan is noticeably preoccupied with Eunice and her husband Sam as an implied parallel narrative. We even cut upstairs to their apartment a few times, once when Eunice is alone, and she is the last character we see in the movie. That I had forgotten these and other variations entirely speaks, I'm sure, to the memory-filling power of the headline performances and the uncanny perfection of the play. Vivien Leigh gives probably the best performance to ever win the Best Actress Oscar, somehow making Blanche "work" even within Kazan's aggressively realist screen poetics. It doesn't hurt her work at all, and in fact it probably helps, that we do have a sense of watching Leigh construct the performance as she goes—the odd accent, the stiff turns of the neck, the ingenious acting she does with all of her outfits and props. Watching Blanche create herself for such a long span is an ideal lead-in to watching Stanley, Mitch, New Orleans, modernity, the world take her apart. Brando only improves as I get older, reacting no longer to the notoriety of the performance but to its exorbitantly confident, lived-in quality, the hyperfamiliarity with the part that allows him to muffle key lines with no loss to Stanley or to the piece. Hunter and Malden never entirely win me, but the production is so grounded in its superior qualities that what's merely good in it becomes elevated by extension. There's nothing rattle-trap about this Streetcar. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #82: Swept Away

Having endorsed the Psycho remake earlier in this bracket, I'm not going to push the envelope. In this case, I do mean the Wertmüller original, not the Guy & Madge update from 2002, even if, truth be told, I didn't think that version was so bad. Doesn't matter anyway, since defending Wertmüller's own reputation takes enough energy these days. My, but world film culture can turn against its rising female auteurs! After the hat trick of Love and Anarchy, Swept Away, and Seven Beauties in the mid-1970s, Wertmüller made a string of flops, at least as regards their performance outside of Italy. These days, you barely hear a kind word even about her career-makers. (Jesus, it's like she and Jane Campion really are soul sisters—and Sofia Coppola, you'd best watch your back from here on out.)

Swept Away, for all the jewel-toned lusciousness of its cinematography, is not designed to go easy on any scenery-seekers who wander in. The sparkling blue water, gleaming boats, and paradisical isle of Swept Away are among the first mirages of the "natural" that get slyly absorbed into the demagogic rattle-bag of the script, which appropriates as many capitalized Concepts as it can before giving them all an earthy, vigorous shake. Even better and more boldly, Wertmüller conceives characters who are as directly and constantly aware of these concepts as she is, and who invoke them with a shrill obnoxiousness that the film is willing, even proud, to assume as its own. "How sad to imagine this paradise full of shit, the sea a big, open sewer," pronounces Mariangela Melato's spoiled aristocrat, reaching new acmes of braying superciliousness. Here is a woman who looks at the ocean and the horizon and can't not think of them as hers, can't not think of them as somehow encroached upon by some unwashed someone somewhere. Even as the film strokes her with buttery light it slaps her around with sharp, arhythmic edits that only emphasize the way she herself brings up everyone and everything short. "You ludicrous, vain black midget!" she screams at a ship's crewman (Giancarlo Giannini, inevitably), who counters back with his own stampeding herd of epithets, of which "You dirty, social-democratic prickteaser!" is a roundly typical example. The collision of warring social vocabularies is never louder in Swept Away than when someone's insulting someone, which is often. Beyond the film's pugnacity in keeping up this bruising war of words, consider the achievements of Giannini and especially Melato, who have to preserve but also modulate this pitch of invective for more than an hour, well into their joint marooning on an uncharted island. This is the point when the script really shows what audacious stuff it's made of, countering her social Darwinism with his brutish misogyny, and then turning them both on to each other.

As the movie barrels forward, Raffaella and Gennarino change their view of the island from a simple haven to some kind of prelapsarian utopia, but go ahead and laugh at them—as long as we don't only laugh at them. The muscular systems of class and gender, no matter how socially constructed, nonetheless abide in such a way that wherever humans go, so go they. The inexplicable presence on this island of some kind of bunkered chapel is a sign that no terrain is untouched, but unlike Raffaella, Wertmüller doesn't recoil from this notion. Exploring ideas in such a way that they are never abstracts, provoking her own sense of their limits and their linkages, Wertmüller almost takes a perverse pleasure in the world's ugly power plays, since they sure give her a lot to say and plenty of buttons to push, in formally controlled and gorgeous images that she underlines and italicizes without making them into polemics. Precious few directors hand their films over so openly to ideologies when they aren't billboarding for one of them. In Wertmüller's case, I'm not sure if she is committed to none or to all of the positions that get espoused in this film, but certainly not to just one. Meanwhile, I'm not the only person with questions, for I think Wertmüller has some, too. At its heart, Swept Away is a melodrama, at moments even a tender one, asking whether people have outlasted landscapes as the last sites for romantic possibility, whether people can break out of conditions and into genuine novelties. "We're not on the yacht anymore," Gennario reminds Raffaella, but in truth we probably always are on the yacht, just like we're always actually in Kansas, Toto. Still, the movie tests the fantasy, in brilliant Technicolor, even when we privately know or at least suspect what's real. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flicks #83: Monster & Boys Don't Cry

Let's talk a little about audiences. I saw Boys Don't Cry twice in the theater, first with my friend Irene at the Landmark Embarcadero in downtown San Francisco, with a solemnly respectful and, by the looks of things, an overwhelmingly gay-male audience. That theater was so quiet, not just moved but able to be moved by what we were watching, that the full textures of the movie really announced themselves: the droning hum of the convenience mart where Brandon meets a blitzed Lana and steals her a ring; the poignant halts and barely-quelled vibrato in Hilary Swank's voice whenever Brandon tastes a second of happiness; the portentous rushes of air beneath the abstract cut-aways to the neon, accelerated skylines of the Nebraska night. The emotional arc of the movie relies on a series of nocturnal rendezvous between Brandon and Lana, where the film encases both characters within their own coronas of light, a centimeter or so of human vibrance that looks as though it would be warm to any touch. But these are also Orpheic patinas, the gleam of someone remembered, evanescent. Brandon will die, and the Lana who lives will never again be the Lana who was. For this to resonate, the audience must have empathy, a willingness to cradle not just the romance but the precarious, even reckless adolescence of Brandon and indeed of all the characters, even those who violate our hope and our trust, along with everything else they violate.

Sadly, but revealingly, the film was tested on just these grounds when I saw it again, five months later, in a campus theater filled with high-school students taking summer courses. I expected nervous energy and even tittering as the novel concept of transgender identity came calling for their attention, but I did not expect outright laughter, even when Brandon was accosted and denuded, even when he was raped, even when he and his friendly protector were shot. I came home with my partner and cried for an hour in his apartment, feeling Brandon's tragedy in a new way: not just as a cold-blooded killing, but as a reflection of a frightened, juvenile, and titanically self-indulgent refusal of difference by millions of people who would rather be anything—chortlers, debasers, murderers—than be questioners, carers, students of life. (You are old enough, when a summer-school student, to be a mature witness to violence, to arbitrate the right and wrong, at the very least, in a scene of slaughter.) Brandon's story is obviously both of these stories. The different ways in which both screenings were painful speak to the complexes of pain, the different kinds of moorlessness, rejection, and endangerment that he encountered within himself but also from the outside, from others. A major strength of Boys Don't Cry is that it draws as much righteous authority from a skeptical audience as from a compassionate one. My belief in lots of things shook that night, but not my belief in the movie.

There's a lot of Boys Don't Cry in Monster: an actress undergoing extreme cosmetic rearrangement, a jukeboxy color palette, a first date in a roller-skating rink that cuts to a passionate first kiss, a young life of petty crime that hits a ghastly apotheosis in murder, though this time, the same character walks every side of the moral line. I saw Monster three times in the theater, the second and third time scrunched into a single day; its content, both visually and psychologically, is so gruesome that this shouldn't be possible, but beyond the practical reasons for seeing the movie this way, I was both relieved and frankly fascinated, maybe even a little troubled, at how Monster arrested the skittish impulses in its audience. The teenagers at the AMC Empire who peeled the foil from their Manhattan hot-dogs during the opening scenes, who answered their cell-phones and cat-called at Selby's advances toward Aileen, were literally caught with their mouths open when Aileen is first abducted, then brutalized, then released into a split-second chance at revenge that yawns ever after into a furious career of one-on-one terrorism. I swear I heard a pin drop that didn't even drop in our theater, even during the boldly purple love scene. (Tommy James and the Shondells cut right to the heart of Aileen's cataclysmically misplaced romanticism.)

Swank and Theron will always have careers because of these two movies, but there was a nasty, credulous undertone to the contemporary reception of Theron's work, and even more to reviews of her movie. Probably for that reason, while I am deeply admiring of both films, I am actively protective of Monster. Easily among the best biopics in over a decade, to the extent that they illumiante the lives of real people, they each ask us to see in their protagonists some image of ourselves, and this is a much tougher request to honor in Monster. Brandon Teena is a rebel-hero with illicit habits and terrible luck; Aileen Wuornos is a catastrophe with a phone number and an address, though even these change from day to day. Her will is equally consuming in its benign and its lethal actions. Theron, in her robust embodiment, barely preserves her balance while striding through her unimaginable life—just watch how Aileen rides a bicycle or runs from a car-wreck. Here, as in Nick Broomfield's haunting documentaries, looking into Aileen's eyes and trying to find the person behind them is like looking into a faucet in hopes of seeing the water. That Monster can tell a reasonable facsimile of her story, revealing her dilemmas while keeping her so frighteningly opaque, and that we still can see the value and the relevance of her profoundly shameful case...what could be a taller order? (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #84: Orlando

1993 marked the first year I penetrated the suburban county line with the explicit purpose of seeing an art movie. I was a sophomore in high school, and with the intrepid Blosser sisters, Susan and Carol, I went to the Cineplex Odeon Shirlington 7 in Northern Virginia to see first Much Ado About Nothing and then Orlando. We all loved the first movie, drunk as we were on Shakespeare and on our ripe imaginations of Ken and Em as companionate perfection. Remember those days?

I, though, was secretly much more taken with Orlando, a movie I had virtually made up my mind to love anyway. Another anecdote: the first issue of Entertainment Weekly I ever bought and obsessed over was the Summer Movie Preview in 1993, warmly remembered for the moment at which I finished reading about Cliffhanger and Jurassic Park and Sleepless in Seattle and suddenly flipped to a picture of a red-headed androgyne and a withered old man cast as Queen Elizabeth, both of them bedecked in the most outlandishly plush theatrical finery while escorting a pack of grey, almost aqueline hunting dogs down the proverbial garden path. Aside from its sheer beauty, I couldn't believe that this picture was afforded a full half-page, or that the plot explored a literal, magical switching of a person's gender, or that it was written by this "Virginia Woolf" about whom I was just learning. (Albee's pun escaped me entirely; frankly, it kind of still does.) It was hard for me to imagine that Orlando could possibly measure up to the promise of this photostill, so imagine my awe when that shot came and went a mere 10 or 15 minutes into the film. Imagine my elation at actually loving the film, rather than just posing as one who loved it. The minute I reached the end of The Vampire Lestat, which I was then reading, I lept into Woolf's novel, was stunned by how different it was in tone as well as incident, but I loved it just as much, and couldn't stop gazing at Tilda Swinton's arch but somehow sly, Holbein-type portrait on the cover of the Harcourt Brace reprint. We could sum all of this up as a sort of Queen's Throat moment in a wee, proto-queer cinephile's young life, and for all of these reasons, Orlando will always remain a favorite.

There are other reasons, Swinton's gorgeous and utterly impossible face being one. Watching Young Adam last year with a friend, I leaned into his ear and said, "Her face is like a brain." You can literally read her thoughts, in an almost disconcertingly subtle and complete way, and the thoughts are always interesting—sometimes much more so than the movies she's in, though that isn't the case with Orlando. Released as Derek Jarman lay dying, though of course I had no sense of this at the time, Orlando confirmed that both Swinton and costume designer/archangel Sandy Powell would have thriving careers even without their patron and discoverer. I like to think of the frankly wobbly coda of Orlando, when Sally Potter uses rough, handheld Super 8 to render the modern Orlando's return to the field where we first met him/her, as at least in part a gentle elegy for Jarman, who so brilliantly pioneered the interpolation of celluloid and video as a uniquely expressive collage-form for the cinema. I like how many of Orlando's technical ventures pay off, like David Motion's defiantly modern score, as brazenly instrumented as those of Jon Brion but with techno undercurrents and, still yet, some classical melodic lines. I like the use of Russian and Uzbek locations to sub in for, respectively, the dowager Elizabeth's icebound Winter Court and the blistering palace-resort of Lothaire Bluteau's Turkish pasha, and I like wondering how they possibly made this movie for $5 million. I like that cinematographer Alexei Rodionov's mannerist motif of panning back and forth between dialogue speakers, bending if not quite breaking ye olde 180° rule, somehow resonates as clever rather than just as a sterile conceit in this story all about cryptic transitions and spaces between. The later epochs in the narrative get something of a bum's rush after all the visual, musical, and narrative lavishments on the early passages, but Orlando is a hoot, a hit, and a surprisingly boisterous comedy for most of its running time. You'd expect it to smell like scholarly folios, but it doesn't. It's as warm as those morning rays of sun that discover before anyone else does, with no Crying Game anxieties whatsoever, that he isn't a he anymore. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

The Silence of the Polls

As the handful of votes straggled in for the Picked Flicks Poll for #91-100, I inititally suspected nefarious intervention, tossing out all votes that didn't support The Passion of the Christ as a write-in candidate. But then it turned out, no, the vote format t'aint working with so many movies in the mix that not everyone had seen. So I'm going to drop this little mechanism until the countdown is good and done, at which point y'all can tell me about your favorites from the whole list, and what you woulda liked to see up there that wasn't.

Of course, the saddest reason to stop culling votes is that one particularly industrious reader—seriously, not me!—went to all this unsolicited trouble:



AK, you're a hero among men, not to mention among former students! But I'm not going to short-change any of the responses that did flow in, mostly orbiting around two expected targets, but not at first:

Vote 1 is for Cemetery Man, because, in the reader's words, I have watched it more than five times, and parts of it still mystify me. And because the romance between Gnaghi and Valentina's head is so sweet. And because Rupert Everett's performance sums up everything there is to say about 1990s ennui. (And then there's Rupert in that flowing white shirt...)

Vote 2 is for The Breakfast Club, because it shows all of the teen angst and frustration that most of us (I'd gather about 99.9% of us) felt at some point (or most of the time) during our high school years. The use of stereotypes is fabulous, and as the layers of these stereotypes peel away throughout the movie, we figure out that the 5 of them are pretty much the same.

Vote 3, loopily, is for I ♥ Huckabees, because 'Huckabees' could be the key to the entire existence of movies #99, #100, the only other ones I've seen and considered voting. Everything is connected. #92 and #94, I really want to see --the cinema is so infinite. It most definitely is.

Vote 4 is also for I ♥ Huckabees, this time because I heart it too—particularly because of the music. Jon Brion’s score is as playful, irreverent and haunting as his scores in 'Eternal Sunshine' and 'Punch Drunk Love.' It has a comically overly styled feel to it, but it is every bit as complicated, beautiful and absurd as the story. Plus, my sister Leah played on the movie soundtrack. That helps win it a place on my list.

So we almost had a winner, but then Vote 5 came in for The Breakfast Club, because it spoke to and defined an entire generation... For better or for worse.

Picked Flick #85: High Art

Here we embark on a quite fortuitous string of five consecutive movies that were all directed by women. Though none of them truly departs the basic perimeters of realist narrative, each is self-consciously shot in such a way that we can't help ruminating on what we see, on how we see, and specifically on how gender—considered alongside a range of other social variables—arrives to the eye and to the mind. Beyond this particular commonality, the tones, topics, and themes of the movies vary so widely, excepting the two films paired at #83, that I didn't realize until now what a compelling repertory program they constitute.

Extending the happy coincidences, we begin with Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, which itself commences in a literal meditation on how women look—a double-entendre that, like "high art" itself, is fully and richly intentional. During the opening credits sequence, dotted with the names of female actors, editors, cinematographers, costume designers, producers and executive producers, and writer-director Cholodenko, Radha Mithcell's Syd pores over a handful of photographic slides at her light-table. The camera is entranced by her searching, intelligent eyes, starkly framed in thick black glasses, rather than by her body or by the objects at which she gazes. Within the same sequence, though, this isolated woman makes her way home through an empty office building and an uninhabited subway station, all shot from the kinds of oblique angles and the dusky, doomy shadows that tend to signal female victimization in all ranges of popular cinema. The movie prowls somewhere in the spectrum between Screen, the journal, and Scream, the girls-in-peril franchise, and that's hardly the last spectrum whose measure High Art will take. Between still photos and the moving image, between gay and straight, ambition and love, addiction and lucidity, there is sometimes a wide and nervy chasm in this movie, and at other moments nothing more than a pause, a comma, a slide over to the next seat on the couch. As the plot unfolds, High Art's debts to All About Eve become clearer, duplicating the essential scenarios of cunning, camaraderie, idol-slaying, and creative power even as it lures into the light the earlier film's lesbian undertows.

Like All About Eve, if nowhere near its depth, the script of High Art is good enough that it would survive even a mediocre cast, but thank God it hasn't got one. Ally Sheedy's watchful, forceful game of brinksmanship with her own reckless tendencies never ceases to fascinate, while Patricia Clarkson turns all the burners on high with her soused, semi-waking, gloriously catty, but intimidatingly naked portrait of Greta, an actress whose image is fading away on her. There's a harsh scene, though not a cruel one, where Greta almost drowns in a bathtub, and the rhymes to both the ubiquitous photos of Greta underwater and the elementary process of emulsifying a negative instantly capture how far past her happiness—how overexposed—Greta has become.

High Art errs, more than once. The film makes feints toward two characters, Lucy's mother and Syd's boyfriend, that barely even congeal, and the climax, for all that it captures an emotional inevitability, still feels wayward and abrupt. These are the kinds of limitations you find in a movie that still exists halfway in the filmmaker's head; it hasn't yet molted its basic layers of structure and concept, hasn't yet cooled and matured into full-fledged drama. But as opposed to other good films with similar liabilities—Darren Aronofsky's Pi, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's The Deep End, even to an extent Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven—High Art keeps looping you back into its mysteries. The collective dissolution of the characters, even the dourness of the film's trajectory don't deflate what is enigmatic and interesting about it. When women this fascinating come this close to a camera, no matter what side of it they're standing on, it's always an event. Cholodenko's follow-up, Laurel Canyon, works only sporadically; Cavedweller barely works at all. What's best in those pictures are but paler reflections of the same issues that drive High Art—broadly, what rebellious female artisanship looks like as its embers are dying down. But High Art doesn't snuff itself out. You remember it. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #86: Where Is the Friend's Home?

Ahmed Ahmadpoor, the eight-year-old protagonist of Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home?, sits by sympathetically but helplessly as the schoolboy who sits beside him, Mohamad Reza Nematzadeh, is harshly scolded by their teacher. Mohamad Reza has failed, for a third time, to write out his homework in a notebook, as he has so often been reminded to do. The stakes of his forgetfulness are that he will be expelled from school if he repeats the error a fourth time. So, wouldn't you know, in the shuffling speed with which all students, including my own undergraduates, hasten out of class, and in the unbearable unfairness of early childhood, Mohamad Reza's most well-meaning friend accidentally swipes his neighbor's notebook in place of his own. Realizing his mistake only after returning home, Ahmed is heartbroken at the prospect of his friend's certain punishment, and despite the ornery warnings of his parents and the biddings of his grandfather ("Fetch my cigarettes!") he alights from his own village of Koker into the neighboring warren of Poshteh, looking for a friend whose whereabouts he can only dimly guess.

The sweet-temperedness of Where Is the Friend's Home? is a main reason why the film appeals so profoundly, and why it helped to jumpstart the international zeitgeist of enthusiasm for Iranian cinema. Especially by comparison to the rigid conceptions of Kiarostami's recent work, the film is unabashedly rooted in human sympathy, an affecting but never cloying scenario, and a neorealist filming style to make Bazin cheer from the grave. Kiarostami carefully but unobtrusively manages the frame even while tracking young Ahmed through the sidewinding paths and chutes of Poshteh, so that our own visual sense unites permanent dislocation with the constant unfolding of discovery. (10 is a fine movie, but mere moments into Where Is the Friend's Home?, you'll wish Kiarostami would unbolt the camera from the dashboard already.) The repetition of key shots, paticularly that Zorro-swath of an unpaved incline that reaches to the peak of a tree-topped hill, communicates a kind of hermetic life in and around Koker, even as Ahmed intrepidly tests those boundaries, and even as the same gaggle of gossiping men you find in any decent-sized town the world over reminisce about how much more disciplined they were in childhood, and debate the hot topic of how iron doors are fazing out the old wooden ones. Meanwhile, Kiarostami's simple but supple screenplay weaves in threads of local humor and wisps of dramatic irony—his mother, verging on disbelief of his story, thinks Ahmed simply wishes to avoid his own homework—that only deepen the integrity of the young boy's conviction.

For some reason I always think of Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? as a sort of Iranian 400 Blows, perhaps because both films pay such animated, concerted, and respectful attention to the quotidian but nonetheless deeply felt quandaries of being a young boy. But it's a bad analogy. Ahmed Ahmadpoor evinces none of the incipient sass or broodish alienation of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel, and certainly the aesthetics of the two films couldn't be more different. If the Kiarostami film has any European counterpart, it's Bicycle Thieves, except this is a saga of trying to return rather than recover something, and the malleable mind of the young boy in this story has direct access to his own vision of the city, unfiltered by a father's shadow. Furthermore, the rural Iranian landscape is not, as in Bicycle Thieves, riven with the signs of martial devastation. It's just, plainly, a tough place to get by, especially if you're small—one of those lean but precious premises of which movies can always use more. Sparer, less pushy, and more resonant than later Iranian exports like Children of Heaven, Where Is the Friend's Home is a perfect tonic to your worst suspicions of kiddie-centered cinema. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #87: Network

The MGM lion has hardly stopped roaring when Paddy Chayefsky starts, in the chattery, clenched opening of Network—quite well directed by Sidney Lumet, but still Chayefsky's movie through and through. The first character whose acquaintance we make is Peter Finch's Howard Beale, a fantastically depressed anchorman who will hardly go softly into that good night, and who in fact teeters with drunken abandon on the lip of a total breakdown. Apropos Howard, our unknown narrator confides that in 1970, "His wife died and he became a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share." We haven't even hit the opening titles yet when an offhand comment from Howard's friend and producer Max Schumacher gives him the idea that, were he to blow his brains out on air, seated right at this newsdesk, the network would score at least a 50 share. The next night, Howard pledges to do just this: "Since this show was the only thing I had going for me in my life, I have decided to kill myself." Peter Finch, as Howard, delivers the lines with almost jocular aplomb. No one in the sound booth or at the editing console even notices, at least not right away.

Network wastes no time barreling right into its scabrous satire of an abscessed national media, of middle-age panic and youthful zealotry, of sensational diversions that conceal the corporate racket, of how a graduated mid-life apoplexy, perhaps outright insanity, nonetheless passes for messianic enlightenment in a world that's this far gone. Network remains prescient, urgent, hilarious, and relevant today, almost 30 years after its debut, and it's of course profoundly sad that this is the case. It's easy to lament the fact that post-Y2K television has promulgated so many programs that would have slid quite nicely into the deranged rubric of The Howard Beale Show. Bill O'Reilly is scantily less crazy than Howard Beale, speaking only of his contempt for corroborated fact and his perpetual state of spoiled-child ire, not about his politics. The endless procession of Survivors and Idols and Models and Millionaires are even more vapid than Sybil the Soothsayer, the rumored but never-heard Vox Populi, and other Guignol series and spinoffs that Chayefsky devises for his fictional UBS. More harrowing is the fact that Network actually strikes much closer to the angry red iron of what's really going wrong—the transnational corporations duping their own senior staffs and worshipping the dollar in a quite literal way—than do the endless contemporary editorials about the atrophied content of today's TV. Content is just a symptom. As Faye Dunaway's brazenly cloven-hoofed Diana Christensen yells at a Marxist, terrorist-affiliated demagogue-for-hire, "I don't give a damn about the political content of the show!" So little damns are given in this movie, I feel sure I'd have spotted one, had the occasion ever arisen.

What Network does give a damn about is the entire plane of mid-1970s wrongdoing and woe, one that explains and forever exceeds the ideological malfeasance we're seeing in the network offices and on their screens. Depression, recession, civil wars, White House corruption, balkanized liberal dissent, skyrocketing oil prices, racial ghettoization, white-collar auction blocks, conveniently blurred lines between bureaucratic divisions like "News" and "Programming." In synthesizing these trends, if only by angrily, commodiously tatting them together in furious unison, the movie far exceeds the kind of simple "Will TV tell the truth or won't it?" provenance of a sleeker, shallower film like this fall's Good Night, and Good Luck. Meanwhile, Owen Roizman's camerawork, careening into Weimar-era, M-style canted angles in the establishing shots on the network offices—and again during the immortal, mid-film "Mad as Hell" interlude—draws its own implicit analogies about where the country is heading.

Having said all that, Network is not a perfect movie, and is in fact consistently overrated. Chayefsky's fascination with his own highbrow vocabulary declaws as many scenes as it assists. The film's worst judgment has always to do with the William Holden's Max, whose banal and moony marital transgressions never feel like more than an excuse to give Dunaway something else to act besides her possession by the Nielsen demons. The root network of Holden's scenes mostly subsist of the chauvinist and youth-phobic moral favor Chayefsky quite arbitrarily cedes to him over Dunaway, and also the script's quavering unwillingness to recognize that Howard is actually right about individual lives and personal qualms being utterly, almost comically irrelevant to the kind of world Network so sagely describes. At some point in my viewing history, Network has passed from a movie I admired without liking to a movie I enjoy tremendously without quite admiring it so much as I used to. Over-the-top, out and proud, even when it could stand to hold back or trim down a little, Network does what Dunaway tells us Sybil the Soothsayer does: the film oraculates. Still, the fierceness with which it both demands and holds our attention, all these decades later, makes it always worth another re-run. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #88: Hands on a Hardbody

Longview, Texas, due north of Houston and due east of Dallas, is the home of the original "Hands on a Hardbody" contest, a deceptively grueling annual rite where randomly selected entrants attempt to win a brand new Nissan Hardbody pickup by outlasting all comers in the ability to stay awake with at least one hand on the truck at all times. No sleeping. No breaks, except a group siesta for five minutes every hour and 15 minutes every six hours. No leaning on the truck to support your weight. No squatting. For the final three contestants, a drug test. Benny Perkins, who won the contest in 1992 after palming the pickup for 87 hours, resented the way that the contest became a local tourist attraction, with people forgetting that "we're suffering, we're hurting." The runner-up from the previous year describes the ordeal as "the best experience of my life," to which the woman who beat him instantly echoes, "Oh, yeah!" A medical professional whom this cheap, simple, do-it-yourself documentary bills only as "Dr. Jereb, Psychologist," describes the 3-4 day Hardbody tournament as "A mystical experience...that transcends this truck that we're all holding onto, transcends our lives." The visual impression of yellow-shirted buzzards caressing their blue metal carrion recedes beneath the gobsmacking emotion that the men and women of the contest have already poured into and onto this apparently protean vehicle.

Even more than the justly famous Spellbound, Hands on a Hardbody poses a ritual competition as a ready-made cross section of American personae, ethics, and needs. Among the rivals in the 1994 contest, which this film records, Greg has entered in a plaintive attempt to recapture the kind of discipline he feels he's lost since his Marine Corps days; middle-aged Russell has put 250,000 miles on his old truck and can't easily afford to replace it; Kelly, should she win, might parlay the truck's resale value into tuition money or orthodontia; Janis Curtis, who has no front teeth whatsoever, thinks this trial will be a good way to prove to herself that she can finish anything she has the will to begin; returning champ Benny, stunned by the serendipity of being chosen twice as a finalist, clearly relishes the aura of the conquering hero; Norma Valverde, a dead ringer for Lupe Ontiveros, confides that "my husband and I have been praying for a truck, and this is what I believe God wants us to do." The Valverdes sold their own truck the day they learned of Norma's invitation to join the contest, and her congregation of 500 neighbors are conducting group prayers on her behalf, with some smaller, singing circles on-site at the contest. Hovering over all of these pathos-laden backstories is the fact that, unlike the spelling bee, the Hardbody contest doesn't become more or less winnable in any evident way as a result of these personal histories. Almost embarrassingly intimate confessions run up against brute physical endurance. A concentric ring of longtime contest-watchers espouse their guesses and critiques—Kelly is taking "smart breaks" eating bananas and fish, while Russell, stupidly outfitted in heavy boots, "has got the attitude, but he's ill-advised." Norma, listening to gospel hymns and recorded sermons on her Walkman, regularly bursts into wild, joyous peals of laughter, which she credits to the Holy Ghost. Antagonisms form. Judges are called into question. In the 48th hour of the contest, 10 of the 23 aspirants are still standing there, bleary, their personalities gradually evacuated, still with their hands slapped on the chassis. They still have a long way to go.

So, fearless renter, presuming you can find this elusive movie—the non-dubbed copies on eBay have run as much as $85—what kind of experience would you like this film to be? Slice-of-life travelogue with sharp regional accents? Genuinely surprising suspense thriller with truly unexpected developments—which, we realize in hindsight, have been carefully insulated by the editing and the character introductions? Cooked-to-order parable of slavish capitalist commodity-worship, tempered by compassionate appeals to each entrant's reason for perpetuating the system? Or how about a rollicking human comedy, soundtracked by Norma's contagious laughter, or country-boy Ronald's improbable fear of thunder, or the contest supervisor's Southern-fried defenses of an impugned judge: "These people are giving their time, and sure, they didn't graduate from the Academy of Hardbody Hands of America, or what have you!" Watch Angie, Texan blossom, carefully using one hand to apply the makeup products she has spread out across her Jackie Collins hardcover. Hear the delirious tales of petting invisible dogs, obeying mysterious voices. Puzzle at why Matthew McConaughey and Benicio Del Toro are both thanked in the credits. "You basically learn the values of humanity, because you see other people fighting, struggling, who want the same thing you want," opines sage-philosopher Benny, who in a less grandiose moment contends, "It's a human drama thing." (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #89: Psycho

Seriously. That Psycho. I remind the reader that this list prioritizes pleasure and personal association over "pure" aesthetic credentials, though even on that grounds, Gus Van Sant's floridly punctilious remake of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous movie has nothing to be embarrassed about. The whole exercise, a quite brilliant gambit, speaks as no other movie I can think of to the paradox of how exactitude and imitation invariably call attention to deviance and asymmetry. That's a Hitchcockian idea in itself—a sort of formal apotheosis of what Jimmy Stewart's character learns in Vertigo—but it also places the movie expertly into a landscape of queer camp and performativity that includes Andy Warhol's star portraits and soup cans, Judith Butler's queer explications of gender as ideological theater, the entire history of drag, and queer cinema's own abiding interest in the citation and subversive reinhabiting of classic texts. The same questions that Velvet Goldmine poses to Citizen Kane, that All About My Mother and another upcoming Picked Flick pose to All About Eve, that Derek Jarman posed to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and that Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho posed to the Henry plays are succinctly crystallized in this pop-art diorama of Psycho's once revolutionary and now ubiquitous twists and turns.

With the possible exception of Last Days, this is also my favorite Van Sant movie, capitalizing on his own frigid detachment and his hyperinvestment in self-conscious form. It's a fond time capsule of American movies circa 1998, when Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Anne Heche, William H. Macy, Viggo Mortensen, Robert Forster, and Philip Baker Hall were either hot new names or recently, happily returned to our attentions. In Christopher Doyle's fluorescent, go-for-broke lighting and Beatrix Aruña Pasztor's equally daring costume choices, it's one of the best and least expected transplants of Hong Kong style into a credible American idiom. Heche, shopping for used cars in a green/orange print dress, color-matched sunglasses, a tangerine parasol, and a punky platinum dye-job, is not far from, say, Carina Lau's killer look in Days of Being Wild—and this is but one of the multiple, unimprovable accents in and around her stunningly inspired riff on Marion Crane. With one of the hardest acting tasks—Vaughn's adequate but thankless work is in its own league as far as that goes—Heche is best in show by a highway mile, reminding us of how much she deserves to have a career like Cate Blanchett's got. Moore, oddly uncomfortable in her shoes (is she having one of her "funny feet" problems?), is still a sharp and merciful switch-in for Vera Miles. Mortensen, Heche, and Van Sant conspire to make the adulterous foundation of the story all the more tawdry and plausibly scofflaw, and Danny Elfman has a superb time sharpening the blades on what might be the cinema's most durable, age-proof score. Inserts of rolling clouds and lounging nudes are just stupid, frankly, but the real secret is that Van Sant's Psycho is its own movie, through and through. Sure it lives inside a formidable shadow, but it casts one of its own, too: eccentric, intellectual, invigorating. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #90: I'm the One That I Want

Her name is MARGARET, and she is here to WASH your vagina! Well, actually, she isn't; "Gwen" has got that covered. But Margaret Cho is here to fire off completely unexpected lines like that, to bellow them out, to belly-laugh them, to naughtily gift-wrap them, to reprise them in different voices, to make sure you never forget them. Same with, "I wasn't like any Korean role-model that they"—read: anyone—"had ever seen. I mean, I didn't play violin. I didn't fuck Woody Allen." Or, "Fag hags are the backbone of the gay community! We led you through the Underground Railroad! We went to the prom with you!" Or her priceless answering-machine messages from her mother, or her in-store conversations with same ("Oh, Mommy wasn't ready for that!!"). One of my absolute favorite bits is her gendered comparison between last-call behavior at bars. I'm paraphrasing (why don't I own this movie??), but basically it goes, "When you go out with your girlfriends, and one of them meets somebody, women are all, 'Oh my GOD, I feel so BAD, I can't leave with YOU, I'm here with my FRIEND!' Gay men, however, will LEAVE YOU. They're like, 'You can take a bus! You can take a cab! You a big girl, you go, girl! No, I said YOU. GO.' At last call, the only people in a gay bar are women."

Another of the funniest bits, though heartbreaking in context, is "I - was so - hungry! I was starving!!" Margaret lets fly with that curveball at the point in her live, one-woman show when she has stopped (well, mostly stopped) explicitly catering to her hometown and way-gay San Francisco audience and is chronicling her own short, unhappy life as a corporate-fabricated Asian-American poster child in the mid-1990s. Cast in an "Asian family" sitcom whose cast of characters were all, to anyone paying attention, of completely different Asian ethnicities. Coercively shadowed by an "Asian advisor" who would dog her around the set and teach her to be "more" Asian. ("Here, use these chopsticks!" Cho ventriloquizes in wicked but pained memory, "and then, you can put them in your hair!") All the while, Cho was fighting dietary dictates from the network and the eating disorders they inevitably provoked, as well as various addictions, sexual recklessness and eventual victimization, crushed expectations, vicious "fanmail," industry racism, and everything else under the Angelino sun. As she tells the story, with no matter how much foul-mouthed and knee-slapping wit, you can see that she's beating back every ghost in the book. Maybe this time, she'll win.

I'm the One That I Want, richer, more personal, and a good deal funnier than Cho's follow-up concert docs, is like "Rose's Turn" sung out by Richard Pryor. Except, you know, "more Asian." The structural arrangement of her show, testifying to her struggles against sexist and racist G-forces by playfully stoking her largely white male audience's presumed familiarity with homophobia, comprises a thesis in itself about the dialogic possibilities between different cadres of American outcasts. Cho raises all kinds of questions in her routine, and consciously or not, the routine raises questions of its own. What is it, after all, about gay male fandom and train-wrecked female celebrities? What are the stakes of such brazen self-stereotyping as Cho's personally patented pidgin-Korean? And what do you do with a comic who's willing and able to say, "I went through this whole thing—am I gay? Am I straight? And then I realized—I'm just slutty. Where's my parade??" My answer so far: you watch her movie. A lot. And you think a lot about what you're watching, and why. And you laugh so much you almost vomit. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flicks: Polls, Alternates, and a Parallel Universe

With that out of my system.... except, wait, I forgot to add: when did national affairs start being run by people named, on Team A, Scooter Libby, and on Team B, Sheldon Snook? Have they officially replaced "Oh say, can you see" with Oh, Say Can You Say? Because it is getting pretty Seussical up in this joint.

Anyway.

Having already announced the opening decalogue of the Picked Flicks, it's time for my first-ever Poll! What you're doing is voting for your favorite film among those listed between #91-#100...and for gosh sakes, don't be skeered to include a sentence or two about why you love it. I sure didn't balk at talking your ear off about why I loved all of them! And I'd love to know who's reading these entries and which of the films excite you. The e-mail addy for this poll is poll@nicksflickpicks.com. You can submit your answer and your reasons any time between now and midnight on Sunday, and I'll post the winner shortly afterward, along with your passionate prose. (So don't post your response in my Comments—that would be like leaving the gifts unwrapped under the tree.) Remember, you are choosing amongst #91 Hyenas, #92 Alice Adams, #93 I ♥ Huckabees, #94 Cemetery Man, #95 Possessed, #96 Masked and Anonymous, #97 George Washington, #98 Brother's Keeper, #99a The Breakfast Club, #99b Pretty in Pink, and #100 The Piano Teacher.


Meanwhile, I thought it would be fun (hey, it's fun for me!) to give a quick decade-by-decade rundown of the films that almost made the list but didn't quite, all of which you should absolutely rent, and all of which were anguishing to leave off:

1910s The Immigrant (1917), dir. Charlie Chaplin

1920s The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), dir. Arnold Fanck & G.W. Pabst
1920s The Wind (1928), dir. Victor Sjöström

1930s Freaks (1932), dir. Tod Browning
1930s Honor Among Lovers (1931), dir. Dorothy Arzner
1930s The Thin Man (1934), dir. W.S. Van Dyke – swiped from my Top 100

1940s Rebecca (1940), dir. Alfred Hitchcock

1950s The Night of the Hunter (1955), dir. Charles Laughton
1950s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), dir. Douglas Sirk
1950s Written on the Wind (1956), dir. Douglas Sirk – blown off the Top 100

1960s Last Summer (1969), dir. Frank Perry
1960s Reptilicus (1962), dir. Sidney Pink
1960s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), dir. Robert Aldrich

1970s The Devils (1971), dir. Ken Russell
1970s The Exorcist (1973), dir. William Friedkin
1970s Gates of Heaven (1978), dir. Errol Morris
1990s Jaws (1975), dir. Steven Spielberg – sunk from the Top 100
1970s Pink Flamingos (1972), dir. John Waters

1980s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1984), dir. Jack Hofsiss
1980s The Elephant Man (1980), dir. David Lynch
1980s L'Homme blessé (1985), dir. Patrice Chéreau

1990s Alien³ (1992), dir. David Fincher
1990s Bound (1996), dirs. the Wachowski Brothers
1990s Face/Off (1997), dir. John Woo
1990s Gummo (1997), dir. Harmony Korine
1990s L.A. Confidential (1997), dir. Curtis Hanson - fired off the Top 100
1990s Six Degrees of Separation (1993), dir. Fred Schepisi
1990s Threesome (1994), dir. Andrew Fleming
1990s What's Love Got To Do With It (1993), dir. Brian Gibson

2000s Donnie Darko (2001), dir. Richard Kelly
2000s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), dir. John Cameron Mitchell
2000s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), dir. Peter Jackson
2000s Love & Diane (2002), dir. Jennifer Dworkin
2000s Searching for Debra Winger (2002), dir. Rosanna Arquette
2000s The Yards (2000), dir. James Gray

So, let's see: that's 35 more titles that almost almost made it, plus the Top 100 I actually wound up with, which includes 15 "tie" entries. Adds up nicely to 150 rental suggestions, a sort of buy-2-get-1-free deal as these Top 100 countdowns go!

Finally, before you all lose total patience with this entry, this obsession, this blog, this person, I really have to encourage you to pore over Tim R's own Top 100 list, unfolding simultaneously with this one over at his enormously addictive blog. His pictures are prettier than mine, his tastes are incredibly provocative, he's lighting a fire under my butt to see things I've missed like The Iron Giant and The Draughtsman's Contract and the original Gaslight—and, bless his heart, The Piano clocked in at #89.

Picked Flick #91: Hyenas

African cinema has always ranked down in the absolute dredges on the list of American appetites, somewhere in the vicinity of Brussels sprouts, socialism, and the learning of foreign languages. Not that I imagine that these films are lighting big fires on the European or Asian markets, either. Even last year's critical phenomenon Moolaadé, directed by the renowned Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène and centered around the outrageous and topical problem of female circumcision, couldn't penetrate the competition lineup at Cannes, which ceded valuable space to such cubic zirconia as The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and the Coen Brothers' D.O.A. remake of The Ladykillers. Almost 18 months later, its American DVD release is nowhere in sight. Maybe the issues so often addressed in African cinema—economic plights, political breakdowns, male bragging rights, women's subjugation, paralysis in "tradition," perils of "progress"—are just too discomfiting to observe from the outside, perhaps because none of us can pretend that we are truly outside the complex circuits of both complicity and victimhood. Maybe it's the tonal sophistication, so easily dismissable as tonal simplicity, that disconcerts: from what I hear, and again, I'd like to find out for myself, Moolaadé is, like so much politically charged cinema from West Africa, is really rather droll. Still, what accounts for all the cool kids rushing to, say, the spare but so often precocious Iranian cinema of the late '90s, when you still can't dragoon a halfway decent audience to an African anything? </Rant>

Djibril Diop Mambéty's funny, harrowing, colorful, and terrifically astute Hyenas is an emblematic case of a masterpiece—and a good time at the movies, to boot—that these cultural trends wholly short-change. Heroically, it did participate in the Cannes competition lineup in 1992 and in that year's New York Film Festival, it was micro-mini released in commercial venues that fall, and it's available for rent on DVD or VHS. So, hop on it, and observe how piquantly Mambéty adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, one of the twentieth century's great plays, and infuses the material with exciting, entertaining, and shrewd new meanings within the West African context. The plot concerns how Linguère Ramatou, an acerbic, broken-bodied, and vengeful old woman, returns to her small-town hamlet after decades of amassing a shadowy fortune. She now indulges the citizens with improbable luxuries and other, decadent incentives so long as they agree to execute the town's most popular citizen—in this version, an avuncular barkeep and shopowner named Draman Drameh, who long ago denied having fathered the illegitimate child that occasioned Linguère's banishment in the first place. The bankrupt village, whose town hall is impounded in a very early sequence, has a peculiarly African (but also not peculiarly African) susceptibility to superficial remedies and cults of personality, and they are sure that the woman's promised fortune shall be their redemption, even as they profess outrage at the demand for Draman Drameh's head... and even as Linguère and Draman volley back and forth between nostalgic recollections of their ancient affair and bitter disputes over her grudge and its consequences.

So, yes, we have here another plotline that seems inhospitable to the kind of witty, almost tongue-in-cheek tone that governs several scenes, even as the lurid heart of Linguère's scheme and the tragic cooptability of the town of Colobane are never far from our minds. "These people have no ideals," Draman murmurs with contempt about his neighbors, having been picked, of all people, to escort Linguère on her homecoming tour. "They will soon enough," she responds, ominously but humorously foreshadowing the blackmail plot she's yet to reveal. The mayor of Colobane, his lectern festooned with a French flag, regales his subjects with proud, ringing endorsements of both the town and its suddenly favorite daughter; she icily thanks them all for their "unselfish joy" in so receiving her. Draman's wry and thoroughly disillusioned wife hunkers behind the bar, uncertain of which side of this spat she properly belongs on. The theatrical blocking of actors testifies to the stage roots of the material, even as the flat vocal affect applies an African trademark, and the emotionally rich closeups, smart framings, and eye-flattering colors refit the story seamlessly as cinema. The trickling build-up of imported and largely useless commodities is a good joke with a terrible and rather aggressively flaunted secret; this is a universe, our universe, where the farming of brand-name clothes, the provision of Pepsi (where once there was only Coke!), can we twisted both to sanction and disguise the deepest crimes. Hyenas, in a way, is like a Gold Coast forebear to Dogville, a homology you hear even in their titles, but where Von Trier's tract is bullyish with its theses and ostentatious in its formal conceits, Hyenas crouches in laughter and quiet, marshaling its armies at every increment of the tonal spectrum before suckering you, as real life often does, with the absurdity, the dailiness, the familiar face of tragedy. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #92: Alice Adams

Among Katharine Hepburn's most famous and auspicious screen collaborators—including, in my own order of preference, George Cukor, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy—director George Stevens is the least fêted member, but his achievements with Hepburn should not be undervalued. Once an established star, she never looked more radiant than she did in 1942's Woman of the Year, where Stevens' generous showcasing of her look and her performance beautifully counteracts the script's rather mean imbalance against her. (Well, maybe until that cooking scene, anyway.) Earlier than that, Stevens gamely ushered her through a spritely and underseen J.M. Barrie adaptation called Quality Street (1937), where Hepburn's comic dual-performance paves the way as none of her previous roles had done for the screwball delights of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and the aristocratic wit of Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940). But moving back still earlier, it's not clear that any of Hepburn's once and future heights would have been reached without the pretext of her first truly great performance in Alice Adams, which finds her amidst a glorious, once-in-a-lifetime metamorphosis from the queer, coltish ingénue of 1933 (Little Women, Morning Glory, Christopher Strong) into the rounded sophistication of her later work, somehow softer and more confident all at the same time. Alice Adams is the moment where Hepburn becomes a star, and also the moment where she becomes truly lovable.

Adapted from a novel by Booth Tarkington—the writer, too, of The Magnificent Ambersons—Alice Adams tells the story of a lower-middle-class girl, not far past her schooling years, who positively quivers with longing to join the coterie of her more fashionable peers and to find the kind of domestic bliss that presumably once united her parents (the excellent Fred Stone and Ann Shoemaker), whose tacit bond of affection is now sorely tested by illness, monetary need, and other trials of late middle-age. Alice Adams is the kind of girl who would adore Pride and Prejudice, even though in real life she might well have settled for Mr. Collins. One of the major ambitions of the screenplay and, I'm guessing, the novel is to keep Alice so dotingly loyal to her family even as she dreams of something bigger or other than what they have, which often compels a shame of her circumstances and a coy dishonesty about who she is and who they are. That the emblematically patrician Hepburn is so convincing within both this cast and this caste is a complete revelation, even more so in hindsight than it must have been in 1935, but her empathetic connection to this girl's gossamer aspirations couldn't be clearer. Her body and voice are much more relaxed than we're used to seeing and hearing them, and even though she takes center stage in a way she wouldn't truly do again until David Lean's Summertime in 1955, she holds the movie, as she does the character, with graceful, unpugnacious care, as though cupping her hand around the spores of a dandelion, keeping them from blowing away.

Stevens, so intuitive and judicious in realizing his best films, cuts to Hepburn at unexpected moments, lingering on her face longer than other directors would—possibly because, as in Woman of the Year, he's found the right angles and lighting concepts to make Hepburn's proudly intellectual face stay remarkably open and emotive. But more than that, his gift falls in knowing when to cut to Alice, when to understand the debates and dramatic actions surrounding her as essentially her story, rather than that of the bumptious family unit or the town at large. The two centerpiece sequences of the movie, when the guileless and ill-dressed but optimistic Alice takes her Cagneyish brother Walter to a local-society ball, and later when suitor Fred MacMurray arrives chez Adams for an uncomfortably hot and subtly humiliating evening of dinner and conversation, rank among the greatest passages of narrative filmmaking in the American cinema of that decade. The style is elegant and holistic, even as it magically embraces such different elements—MacMurray's somewhat lumpen appeal, the adroit conveyance of stifling temperature, the wholly unexpected elegance of Walter's dancing, a tart cameo from Hattie McDaniel, a romantic proclivity for fades and dissolves on Alice when her spirits flag, and the almost neo-realist shot where she kicks her wilting, homemade bouquet of hand-picked violets under a chair. There is also, of course, the justly famous and encapsulating shot of Hepburn weeping in her bedroom after the ball, filmed through the rivulets of rain running down her window. Moment by moment by moment, Alice Adams reverberates with humble but sure-handed technique and a credible reverence for modesty as a virtue. The last line of the movie is "Gee whiz!", and as dramatically precipitous as it is—the one major miscalculation in the script, I think—the sentiment is fully shared by the audience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #93: I ♥ Huckabees

You got all that, right?

I know, I know, this movie came out, like, five minutes ago, but I ♥ Huckabees was the only movie of 2004 that I paid to see three times in a theater, and every time, I laughed like I was screaming. Every time, the triple-threat of Wahlberg, Hoffman, and Law proved that they deserved an Oscar category all their own for Flawless Comic Support Without Scenery-Hogging. Every time, the movie's sharp harpoons into the absurd fractiousness of the American "liberal" left hit all of their marks, even as the movie tipped all the sacred cows of big business, "Christian" hypocrisy, and star-studded realpolitik with equal aplomb. The movie is crazily deep with subtle touches, golden scenes, and brilliant sidebar performances. That dinner scene with Jean Smart and Richard Jenkins? The priceless walk-on from Talia Shire? Lily Tomlin, her desk strewn with notebooks titled "Coincidences" and "Galaxies" and "Fathers," refocusing her eyes every few seconds? Jon Brion's miraculous score, with the drunken calliope and the galloping rhythm? I ♥ed the whole thing, and I'm not seeing the love dissipating any time soon. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #94: Cemetery Man

Talk about starting out ahead: tell me again why all movies don't begin with Rupert Everett, dripping wet with a towel around his waist, shooting a zombie in the head at point-blank range? Cemetery Man, known to its hometown Italian fans as Dellamorte Dellamore, thusly gets off on the right foot indeed, though it's a stop 'n' go affair ever after. Of all the movies on this list, I think it's the hardest for me to get a bead on, and the one that I'm the most surprised to feel such affection for. It also might be the hardest one to write about, as is further attested by my lame review, written in the preemie infancy of this website.

Maybe I love Cemetery Man because it's one of the few cult films in existence whose cult I blithely stumbled into, without even knowing it existed. Somehow, people everywhere seem to have seen this movie, which I caught on late-night Cinemax, O whorish bride of cable TV, one time when I was house-sitting. Everything that happens early in Cemetery Man happens again at least a dozen more times. Zombies, for the entertainment gods are good, can't stop rising out of the ground, seven days after their initial burial. Rupert, for every other kind of god is good, can't stop taking showers. That killer musical score, all sawing cellos and violins and deep-thrumming basses, never wears out its considerable welcome. The indecently buxom Italian sexpot who turns Rupert's eye, played by an actress called Anna Falchi, keeps dying and resurrecting herself, eventually returning in the guises of wholly different women, all with the same smutty expression. The mayor's daughter gets her head lopped off in a road accident, but when it comes back to life on its own, Rupert's porcine assistant has the politesse to perch it in the skeleton of a burned-out TV. Haven't you ever wanted to look out from the boob-tube instead of in? And did I mention this is played for laughs?

Well, laughs of a sort. Cemetery Man is like Shaun of the Dead as rewritten by Eugène Ionesco. Promiscuously genre-hopping among horror, comedy, Italian national satire, and highfalutin existentialism, Cemetery Man has the surface qualities of a spoof—including its absurdly matter-of-fact nods to Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Psycho—but none of its comfy core. Its bones are not really funny bones. There's something perversely poignant about its hero's unholy predicament: in trying to flee his thankless job as watchdog, caretaker, and tireless re-exterminator at the local graveyard, he drives out of town until he almost tips over the literal edge of the world... which means that all those zombies aren't a sign of The End at all, but are rather the tottering embodiments of a bloodless status quo. You can laugh or weep, or, like Callum Keith Rennie in Last Night, you can just get horny. Cemetery Man encourages all three, with a mad brio and a frank lack of interest in playing by any rules. I'm still not certain that the picture really works. Recent re-viewings have been distressingly joyless, but isn't that very trajectory from hilarity to nausea the plot and theme of this sucker to begin with? I think I'm gonna be sick, or maybe this is what enlightenment feels like. Either way, I'm sure I'll watch it again. Like the most indefatigable zombie in the cool, cool crust of the Earth, I just can't stop trying again. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #95: Possessed

This slot could have gone to The Bad Seed, with its delectable camp excesses and deliciously maladroit psychologizing, or to Mildred Pierce, which devotes considerable technical talent and a terrific Crawford performance to an impressively absurd premise. But, in the interest of economy as well as honesty, why not go with Possessed, the film that synthesized all of those films' bad-good qualities and added some more of its own to boot? Crawford, a recent Oscar winner for Mildred, scored a second nomination here as Louise Graham, who shuffles unsteadily into the early sequences, mumbling about someone called "David" on the sidewalks of LA before suddenly collapsing into a coma. Worse, her scrubbed and denuded face looks like ten miles of hard road in Hell. It's kind of amazing that Crawford of all people agreed to look this bad, though it's no less amazing that she agreed to say things like, "'I love you' is such an inadequate way of saying 'I love you.' It doesn't quite describe how much it hurts sometimes. Sometimes I get the sniffles and then my nose gets runny because I'm happy because I'm in love." Hard to explain, too, what Van Heflin and Raymond Massey are doing lumbering around with their impossible characters, though Heflin at least has a good time getting soused and shrinking uncomfortably from Crawford's fierce but addled affections—or is it from her fierce but addled performance, which itself is some kind of apex in the eternal almanac of Bad-Good?

There is much that is fascinating about Possessed, including the way it refuses to be written off as a crappy movie, even when the plot takes its serial nose-dives into purple implausibility, even when Franz Waxman indulges the most apoplectic arpeggios and electric-organ decrescendoes in the certifiably insane score. However ancient its notions of science—the title comes from Dr. Harvey Willard's expert opinion that Louise's schizoid persecution complex is one of many mental-health states that amounts to being "possessed by devils"—there's a feral, almost involuntary conviction to the film's interest in psychic unease that you don't really find in The Snake Pit or The Three Faces of Eve or other, comparable voyages into the classical Hollywood booby-hatch. The form of the film convulses amidst its own insensible agonies, alternating amongst elegant lakeside establishing shots, harshly expressionist chiaroscuro effects, uneasy dissolves, and at least one handheld tracking shot from the point of view of a dead woman who may or may not be haunting Louise (who, in turn, may or may not have killed this woman). It's easy to cackle and shrug at Warner Bros. potboilers like this, and Possessed repeatedly earns the cackliest cackle you can manage: it's that crazy, and that much fun. But it also feels symptomatic of...something, and harshly sincere: the sour force of spurned passion and the suffocating pressure of obsessive lovers who won't go away have rarely been given such free rein. The violence they exact on the movie's formal discipline is a major part of why you remember the picture.

Well, that and the ecstatic wrongness of Crawford's pleas that the alcoholic musician-engineer-mathematician played by Heflin (!!) stop dodging her with his lovingly traced parabolas and his attempts to interest her in the complex calculus of steel girders. "Why don't you love me like that?" she barks. "I'm much nicer than the girder, and a lot more interesting." Joan, never a truer word was said. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #96: Masked and Anonymous

Everybody and his brother seems to have a Bob Dylan project in the works these days, yet nonetheless, rarely do you hear a kind word (or, indeed, any word at all) about this freewheeling, epigrammatic, and carnivalesque project that Dylan himself brought to the screen a couple of years ago. Since I have reviewed Masked and Anonymous in full, readers already have a stronger sense than usual of what I like so much about the movie. And this is probably just as good a time as any to acknowledge that, especially by comparison to my Top 100, this list of Picked Flicks skews heavily contemporary—an honest reflection of where my enthusiasms lie these days, even if it turns out that the ardor cools in the next couple of years. I'm as fickle as they come, I suppose, but then, so is Masked and Anonymous, which only fully commits to a small handful of its characters (Dylan's, Bridges', Goodman's, Lange's, and maybe Luke Wilson's) while mostly preferring to pinwheel among first impressions, quick interludes, musical bridges, and defiantly self-contained episodes that obscure as many of Dylan's creative intentions as they reveal.

It's no wonder that Masked and Anonymous—whose title proudly proclaims its refusal to be known—isn't everyone's cup of tea. For what it's worth, I personally can't get enough of the way it plays such a mean game of three-card monte with our expectations and even our recognition of what we're watching: is Dylan "playing himself" or playing some alternative jam-meditation on the theme of himself? Is it okay to take seriously the movie's ramshackle vision of a tumbledown, Third World America, even as the major characters appear to joke and smirk about it? What do we make of the way that the screenplay's wry, aphoristic dialogue and allegorical figures hail straight from the lexicon of Dylan's own songwriting, and yet, minus the reassurances of melody and reputation, these same aesthetics feel even more inscrutable than usual? And does that make it easy not to respond to the roustabout humor that is all over Masked and Anonymous, fighting a worthy duel with the heartbroken sadness and the confessions of failure that infuse so many of its scenes? Are the actors in the movie simply flailing about without a flight manual, or is the free-verse, improvisatory style of these performances—beyond the immediate pleasures in turns as witty as Lange's or as crafty as Bridges'—germane to the message the movie is trying to convey? And what is that message, or is there no message? On the largest scale, I'd stick my neck out to say that Masked and Anonymous is a bright but scathing future-vision of the United States after only a few more years of the entertainment industry's profit-mongering and empty self-congratulations, not to mention of the impotence of modern liberalism and the factionalizing effects of a hubristic, hawkish, but increasingly shaky government. (In its tacit way, it's also one of the few American movies to presage a future of the country where Latino and Hispanic cultures come to permeate all levels of society, culture, and public provenance.) On the narrowest level, Dylan offers a kind of perversely private apologia for his own lapses as an artist and a man—which, the film seems well aware, is not fundamentally distinct from the other narcissistic enterprises that are suffocating the power of art even as, in many cases, they provide its steadiest fuel. No coward from paradox, this film.

On every scale, I admit that Masked and Anonymous keeps me perpetually grasping at straws, and perpetually eager to keep on grasping. Abstruse as it can get, the movie is also hugely entertaining, engagingly shot, and, at least in its early and middle stretches, very cleverly edited. The music can't be beat. And I'd sure rather take this kind of dense, cryptic, and wholly personal missive from one of our most challenging popular artists than the kinds of anodyne and awkward biographies that any outside-observer in the book can throw together. Here in late 2005, I'm still perplexed about what I'm supposed to make of Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, J.M. Barrie, Che Guevara, Alfred Kinsey, John Kerry, and Ramón Sampedro. Even Mario Van Peebles' Baadassss!, which by all rights should have felt as radical and self-determined as this film does, has precious little of its idiosyncratic spark. If Masked and Anonymous has any close parallels among recent biographical pictures, it's probably Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, except that Dylan's back pages of shock, self-performance, and secret complicities have more complex harmonies than Caouette's, and they are also more persuasively our own. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #97: George Washington

David Gordon Green's George Washington, a rather awkward synthesis of stratified social realism and the lyrical sublime, is a movie I cherish even as it frustrates me profoundly. Its erratic slides between plausibility and affectation, between gentle rumination and self-indulgence, between some things borrowed and some things new, are somehow unified by a stylistic tranquility that often misserves the movie—though it also occasions some magnificent and touching sequences, and moreover, it's a powerful enticement to repeated viewings. On none of the four occasions when I have seen George Washington has it quite congealed into the movie that I wish it were, nor, more importantly, into the movie that its own most coherent passages suggest it wants to be. But then, who knows what George Washington wants to be? Its diverse allegiances and its unformed, almost fetal quality of fragile metamorphosis wouldn't feel the same if the movie felt more consistent, more bounded. What is special about the movie is its fluctuating ratio of breakthroughs and breakdowns. It's like a stumbling, amateur athlete who compels the sort of loyalty and encouragement that champions, veterans, and perfectionists can't attain, and whose flashes of brilliance are more precious for what they imply than for what they actually unite to produce.

Perhaps the film's supreme accomplishment is one of its simplest: the faith and good sense that have directed Green and his collaborators to film characters, scenes, relationships, and locations that simply never arise in American films, even, for the most part, movies as off the beaten path as this one. The commencing scene, in which the emotionally precocious 12-year-old Nasia breaks up with her 13-year-old, bespectacled boyfriend Buddy (Curtis Cotton III) is both jarring and heartwarming in its lack of irony. Beyond the fact that George Washington affords such generous time and space to pre-teen emotions, and beyond the extreme rarity of seeing African-American characters of any age depicted so warmly and lit so well in an American movie, the film really hits its stride when the young characters start criss-crossing with their elders, when the white kids and black kids reveal cliques and alliances that are just as mundane to them as they are surprising within our gentrified and color-lined national cinema. The only attributes that George Washington's characters share in common are the rural, weedy county they inhabit and their unenviable class position, which seems to account for why workplaces and domestic spaces blur into each other so imperceptibly, and why everyone seems to know each other so well (kids and adults, even relative strangers, all address each other easily by first name).

If it weren't so melancholy in tone and incident—the latter is Green's real stumbling block as a writer—George Washington would feel like a sort of Fanfare for the Common Kid, utterly non-judgmental in its embrace of unremarkable youngsters and shrewd in the way it highlights their various drab environments as, at least in their minds, emotionally specific spaces. So what if George Richardson, the central character, still ends the movie as a sort of symbol without a referent, and if the kids' conspiratorial, paralyzed response to an accidental death is less confidently handled than the same plotline is in Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher. George Washington never quite achieves what Nasia, its narrator, promises—the prospect of seeing all the way into the characters' hearts and skeletons. Still, very much to its credit, the film's idiosyncratic surface already feels more revealing than the excavated cores of many other films, and it does train its audiences to see new people, to watch and listen in a new way. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #98: Brother's Keeper

Counting upwards on the list, my next three entries are all American independent movies, each of them restoring some meaning and marrow to the idea of truly independent film; whatever their evident compromises or flaws, they all encourage my belief that unexpected stories can still be told about improbable people in untested and illuminating ways. The first of these films, Brother's Keeper, was made by documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who later found greater fame for their two Paradise Lost movies (1996 and 2000). Those films chronicled how three Arkansan teenagers were accused of diabolical murder and were subsequently run through a scattershot judicial system that has all three imprisoned to this day. I prefer Brother's Keeper, however, for telling the less didactically driven and altogether more peculiar tale of the Ward brothers of Munnsville, NY, ranging in age from 59 to 70, all of them reclusive to the point of ghostliness, barely literate if at all, and subject to a real whopper of a media circus when the second-oldest brother dies in his sleep. When the coroner determines that he seems to have been suffocated, big questions arise. When "youngest" brother Delbert signs a confession of murder, despite outside claims that he couldn't possibly understand what he was signing, the plot thickens. When semen is found in the stomach of the deceased, things really fly off the handle.

Brother's Keeper is not a perfect documentary by any means. Berlinger and Sinofsky, as in Paradise Lost, are perhaps artificial in streamlining their complex scenario into gothic-thriller dimensions, after which they follow the reverse instinct of playing all too obviously into the side of the case they prefer. Nonetheless, Brother's Keeper is a pretty extraordinary document, not least because the surviving Ward brothers are such craggy, enigmatic, and fascinating subjects for the cameramen, who at least have the grace not to leer at them outright. Shuffling about at the pace of Galapagos turtles, and marked by the same habit of palpably retreating into their private shells, the Wards do not quite seem to fit the visions of the prosecution, but nor do they seem well-suited to the "local hero" status they acquire from a roused local populace who smell a legal feeding frenzy and are determined to safeguard this trio of virtual hermits. An extremely strange social dynamic emerges, one that confers poetic justification on the name "Ward," though the film's intimate tracing of their existence cannot disguise the fact that nobody, filmmakers included, seems to know quite what to make of them. Too, the possibility subsists throughout that the Wards know more than they ever tell, and despite sensationalist undertows, the film never succumbs to romanticizing their silence. While watching other documentaries, not to mention while living as their regional neighbors in upstate New York, I have often thought of the Wards and their appalling poverty, their almost total privacy, and afterward their vulnerability to legal and finally artistic forms of surveillance which they must never have envisioned. Formally steadier than Capturing the Friedmans and less grandiose in the scope of what it imagines, Brother's Keeper won a slew of prizes from critics' groups when it was released, but it deserves a bigger following. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flicks #99: The Breakfast Club & Pretty in Pink

Restoring a little balance of power to the universe, and knocking me right off of The Piano Teacher's high-art pedestal, here are the two films from the John Hughes factory that double-double my refreshment every time I pull them off the shelf. I find it impossible to choose between The Breakfast Club, which Hughes directed from his own script, and Pretty in Pink, helmed by the otherwise dubious Howard Deutch. I saw The Breakfast Club when you're really supposed to, i.e., when you are roughly the same age or, better, just barely younger than the characters in the movie—from which vantage Hughes' empathetic grasp of high-school anhedonia is all the more rewarding and exciting, and also nicely tempered by a fair grasp of each character's naïveté and inadequacy. Gorgeously, and infectiously, the movie finds all of its adolescent leads in a gently embellished free-zone between the mess that real people are in high school and the stabler, frankly nicer people that Andy and Claire and Bender and the rest will palpably become later in their lives, given just a little bit of breathing-room to grow up and get over themselves. That said, I sure hope that Ally Sheedy's Allison, by far my favorite character, will forever continue to make her dandruff-derived objets and her all-carbs all-the-time sandwiches. Also priceless: Anthony Michael Hall's shambling diffidence, so hard-fought but so hilariously ill-concealed, and Judd Nelson's marvleous line reading of the single word "Claire," turning the name into some sort of insolent question.

The Breakfast Club is snappily written, crisply defined, and cleverly art-directed, and in terms of pacing, it couldn't work better. Even the precipitous couplings at the end, some of them real head-scratchers, actually help the movie: we don't leave with any false sense that anything has been fixed or made permanent, and the excitement of making right and wrong choices at the same time is preserved. Pretty in Pink, a much more sober film however poppy it also is, gets a similar boost from what seem like errors. Andie's romantic trajectory just isn't what we expect, and the widely circulated reports of last-minute script changes augment the climactic sense of compromise. But Andie's compromises were always what was most interesting about her, right alongside her winning and utterly believable rapport with her kindly burned-out dad and the limpid, hugely gratifying accessibility of Molly Ringwald across her whole performance. Pretty in Pink starts and ends in imperfection—nicely if unintentionally underlined by the fact that Andie's "do it yourself" prom dress, which occasions her happy ending, is actually, let's be real, quite unflattering. The movie is poignant even when it's funny, funny even when it's angry ("WHAT about PROM, BLANE??!"), and enormously embraceable. It lacks, mercifully, any Long Duck Dong instance of mean and boring stereotype, and in the hands of D.P. Tak Fujimoto—later a godsend to The Silence of the Lambs and The Sixth Sense—the movie doesn't look bad, either. The Psychedelic Furs sound almost as techno-thrilling on the Pink soundtrack as the Simple Minds do on The Breakfast Club's. So riddle me this: why can't these movies get any respect? (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Let's Start Picking Some Flicks

Halloween is still eleven days away, but already October has been plenty haunted for my tastes. The personal dramas, ranging from the annoying to the genuinely scary, are too much to get into—most recently, my brother, a former Army lieutenant, received a summons to duty in Iraq by "mistake," though it sure required some frightening phone calls to clear it up. After being repeatedly spooked all month, I'm needing some pleasant and private distraction to get my days off to a calming start. Plus, it wouldn't hurt to reinvigorate this blog and my languishing website a little. Double plus, Nathaniel's recent countdown of the Top 100 Actresses of the '00s was such a kick in the pants—but is now so sadly but sweetly concluded—that I need to fill up the hole it left, and I'm inspired to do something similar.

So, in the wee hours, when work is finally "done" hahahaha and it's already too late to call anyone—or else while I'm waking up, like now—I've drawn up a list of Nick's Picked Flicks, a ranked list of 100 movies, give or take some joint entries, that inspire and energize and delight and provoke me for reasons beyond standard artistic criteria. (Not that anyone knows what those really are.) The idea was actually born as I got ready to do my every-two-years revision to my website's list of the 100 best movies I feel I have seen...which is always a blast to compile and haggle over, and which reliably generates some fascinating e-mail, but which inevitably leaves out movies that I madly love even if they don't quite make the cut as "greats." Setting those 100 aside (though some titles hereby hop from one list to the other), these Picked Flicks are 100 movies that it just make