Theater 1, Film 0

Okay, so I'm officially back in Hartford after a month away. There is nothing in my fridge or pantry, there is next-to-nothing in my checking account, and there are only five days before the next semester gallops apace. How is any of this possible?

I did get to spend a good long weekend in New York City on my way back up here, during which I saw five movies, but none of them were as good as the production of Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro that Derek and I saw at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, up on St. Nicholas Ave and 141st. Admittedly, Funnyhouse of a Negro is probably my favorite American play, top five easy, and yet it's so rarely staged that I probably would have been tickled by any production. But director Billie Allen, the star of the original 1964 off-Broadway production, has done exquisite justice to the rich figures, the starkly beautiful language, the brutal historical kaleidoscopes, and the frightening Artaudian cruelties of the piece. How many American plays are this rich in narrative and character but also invite, even require, such stunning attention to movement, voice, sound, masking, and makeup? The full cast of actors—not just the brave lead actress Suzette Azariah Gunn but, even more so, the exemplary artists who embody her historically-derived alter egos—are in stunning control of the text and its ritualistic choreographies. The piece is perfectly suited to the small, dark space of the Harlem School for the Arts, and the play's heavy demands on the lighting and tech crews are fully met across the board. New Yorkers and nearby outliers, you have until Feb. 12 to buy a ticket and better your life.

In the wake of this event, the movies I caught were bound to be also-rans, although Michael Haneke's Caché (which I was lucky to catch with Nathaniel) works very proficiently as a paranoid thriller and a probing character study. Eventually, the thematic implications become a bit cut-and-dry, not as textured as what Haneke achieved in The Piano Teacher or as chilling as his underrated Time of the Wolf. Still, Haneke's images retain their formidable obstinacy, somehow implying that they are staring you down much more forcefully than you are staring at them. Watching the movie at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas is sort of a kick, because the social caste that Caché critiques is basically the same one plunked down in front of it; I was fascinated to sense the moments when the audience's enervated glee paled into a kind of nervous disavowal of the film.

In other news, I found Duncan Tucker's Transamerica to be a rather winning experience, without too much of the mushy sentiment that adheres to adjectives like "winning." The actors are good, even when creaky story-motivations require some surmounting, and the pressure to affirm the heroism of the protagonist or to simplify the perspectives of the people who surround her is much less than this kind of movie often demands. Moving down the ladder of value, Merchant-Ivory's The White Countess boasts a very strong performance by Ralph Fiennes, a bewitching sound mix, a typically good score by Richard Robbins, and a preposterous screenplay that keeps threatening to sink the whole thing. If Ivory had directed the verbal repetitions, stock figures, and clunky social collage so that they felt more purposefully irreal—as in some of screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro's more dreamlike novels, like The Unconsoled—then things might have hung together. Unhappily, The White Countess starts as a polished film with quaintly banal notions of history, before lowering itself into the truly unpardonable dialogues and contrivances of its finish.

It gets worse from there. Mrs. Henderson Presents sells out its virtues to its inanities in an even more galling way than The White Countess does, because at least what works in The White Countess is unexpected, idiosyncratic. Mrs. Henderson Presents is much more conventionally dispiriting: a period comedy with luscious costumes and make-up and an agreeable song score, all vainly recruited into the kind of movie that espouses nude vaudeville as a soulful protest to the indignities of global war. Judi Dench's protagonist isn't a character so much as a machine for prodding guffaws at her faux-outrageous quips. Jennifer Aniston puts much more effort into her lead turn in Rumor Has It, but without the slightest wisp of anything to play, she can only sell individual lines and moments. There isn't a single thing tying this movie together except its uniform garishness of tone, look, and scenario, all of them bordering on the lewd. You know the kind of "romantic comedy" where you wish the beleaguered boyfriend would file a restraining order against the protagonist instead of reconciling with her? This is that sort of gig.

Tim R. has correctly diagnosed me as an "Oscar completist," which is the only reason I would pay to see a movie like Mrs. Henderson Presents, and why I'll almost certainly squeeze in Memoirs of a Geisha, Casanova, and, God help me, The Producers before the nomination announcements January 31. (Note: "Oscar completism" transcends the high-profile categories and requires seeing anything short of The Polar Express or Bicentennial Man that might swipe even an Art Direction or Original Song nod.) The only major milestone of 2005 still to arrive to my eyes is Terrence Malick's The New World, which finally opens in Hartford this Friday—quite possibly in a re-edited version, given that the film was yanked from all of its metropolitan screens early this month and that rumors have run rampant about Malick and/or the studio tinkering with the tepidly-received epic. As a dyed-in-the-wool Malick devoté, I'm hoping for the best. In any event, my Top 10 list for 2005 will be posted once I've seen it, with the Nick's Flick Picks honorees in all categories soon to follow.

Where I'm Blogging From

With apologies to Raymond Carver, and to any of you reading, my wee but loyal party of chums. I am neither a) dead, b) near-dead, c) undead, nor d) trapped under something heavy. I am just finishing my last night of a three-week stay at my mother's house, helping her convalesce from a recent illness. Happily, all signs are looking good for her at present. Meanwhile, through diaphanous spiritual algorithms possibly unique to middle-class suburbia, it seems that a woman's health improves in direct proportion to how many household chores you can do in her stead and how much yard work you can perform at her behest. Helping to prepare meals and outfits, encouraging her through physical therapy workouts, etc., were helpful at the time, but appeared positively minuscule compared to the moment on New Year's Day when two fellows appeared unsolicited at our doorstep and volunteered their services to clean and flush the gutters surrounding the roof. This event was greeted as something akin to a cracking open of the heavens. And nothing apparently says I love you like raking a backyard that has, of necessity, gone untouched throughout a heavily deciduous autumn. Having spent an entire two days filling 68 of those 30-gallon Glaad bags—the ones with the plastic yellow drawstrings that look like police-emergency tape—I finally attained something of The Zone described to me by certain marathon-running acquaintances. Call it a raker's high.

All of this plus a last-minute job interview that went deliciously well (Chicagoans: prepare for a long-in-coming visit!), a bout with a nasty bronchial cough, an 81-year-old grandfather undergoing sudden surgery (he's fine), the delicate choreographies of post-divorce Quality Family Time, a worrisome addiction to my older brother Nathan's PlayStation version of Galaga, and a household where dial-up is the only internet option but the phone-line has to stay clear all day for doctors, well-wishers, and pinch-hitters from the office.... all this and no broadband makes Nick a dull blogger.

You can see on the sidebar that I did at least squeeze in some movies, mostly with Nathan. Syriana, a film which I felt I had no need to re-visit, actually got much more legible and more interesting on a second viewing, and I'm wondering about the degree to which I might have undersold it. I'm considering an upgrade to B+. Werner Herzog's indifferent documentary The White Diamond only throws into further relief the superior qualities of Grizzly Man; Graham Dorrington's tetchy inner conflicts aren't a patch on Timothy Treadwell's flamboyantly embodied contradictions, and The White Diamond is diverting without raising any great questions. Most recently, Woody Allen's Match Point proved to be a weirdly anaesthetized experience, creepily absent of ambient noise, and marred by bovine lead performers who repeat lines and looks quite frequently. Altogether, the film tends to steep almost everything that works or almost works in a thin tea of everything that doesn't. I'm doing my best to extend benefit of the doubt, but I still think Tim R. has nailed it here.

I've also been reading. Ed Bullins' We Righteous Bombers, a pseudonymously written adaptation of Camus' The Just Assassins into the militant idioms and cultural contexts of late-60s Black Power politics, is a sprawling and complicated play, fertile with a kind of theatrical imagination that excites even on the page, though its multiple characters, layered realities, projected images, and Genetian betrayals would be most absorbing in performance. Look for it in Bullins' own anthology New Plays from the Black Theatre. I'd love to say the same for August Wilson's Radio Golf, the last play in his famed 10-part cycle devoted to the 20th-century social history of African-Americans, especially in Pittsburgh. Read it for yourself in the November '05 issue of American Theatre magazine, but—as much as one hates to speak ill of the recently deceased—it's a sadly disappointing piece, limned within very proscribed arguments about ownership, political viability, and preservation of traditions within an upwardly mobile segment of the black middle class. The characters, unfortunately, just don't convince, the scenario pales beside the messier but more confident yarns of the other plays (Jitney is the only other clunker), and one can't help feeling, or at least I couldn't, that the ailing Wilson had to finish this play too fast if he was to finish it at all. If the play gets you down, hop back into Ma Rainey's Black Bottom or Joe Turner's Come and Gone or Seven Guitars and feel better.

Finally, I'm a little over 100 pages into Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and on balance, I'm really enjoying it. I am not much buying the dialogue that issues forth from any of the younger characters, and the Howards End parallels often feel too forced; the transliteration of Leonard Bast's unintentionally nicked umbrella into a brief wrangle over swapped Discmans creaks like a poor transmission. But there's wonderful and quite funny narration throughout, the unfolding of extra- and intra-marital intrigue is succulently paced, and as much as it irks me that novels about academia are almost inevitably satires (does no one really believe in it anymore?), Smith's comic observations are trenchant and specific instead of just twee. She's particularly good at the absurd frictions between intellectual solipsism and the worlds outside that tower: "The flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century, none of it had surprised Howard as it had surprised others, but each new example he came across—on the television, in the street, and now in this young man—weakened him somehow. His desire to be involved in the argument, in the culture, fell off. The energy to fight the philistines, this is what fades."

I admit, though, that these later sentences froze my blood a little: "Christian, under [the wine's] influence, looked properly young for once. You could see him permitting himself some partial release from the brittle persona that a visiting lecturer of only twenty-eight must assume if he has ambitions of becoming an assistant professor." Now, technically, I am a visiting assistant professor of only twenty-eight, but still, I am now going to be so on-guard against brittle party behavior that I am probably doomed to exhibit it. Thanks, Zadie.

More to come from that book on the train tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, in a few days' time, I'll be back at my normal station, ensconced in Hartford and glued to my laptop. More to follow then—just in time for this blog's one-year anniversary on Wednesday. À bientot!

A Quick Diagnosis

The hits just keep on coming with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a Thai drama strung somewhere between awkward romance, Borgesian meta-narrative, Jungian parable, and erotic dream. Yes, it's as strange as you've heard, and yes, like most movies that are as strange as you've heard, I really liked it, though Blissfully Yours remains my pick of Apichatpong's triad so far. Very quick thoughts here, at the bottom of my 2005 New Year's Resolutions...

...which, surely I'll be getting around to all 36 of those unseen movies in the next two weeks? I am nothing if not goal-oriented, with a sparkling gift for follow-through.

Poking Around the Middle East

Can you tell that classes have ended? Any guesses as to why I suddenly have the time and energy to reflect fully on the movies I'm seeing?

Catching an early matinée of Paradise Now this afternoon was not only provocative in itself, both in the film's strengths and in its disappointments, but it helped to clarify the reactions I've been puzzling through with regard to Syriana, another film that didn't fully work for me, but which has convinced me over the last week to take it semi-gladly for what it's worth. I've posted a joint review of both films here.

I'm Not a Sister, But I'm Back in the Habit

When you have the fortune to see two great movies in a row, and you're trying to recover your review-writing mojo, why not write them both up? This latest review has been brought to you by Theo Angelopoulos' Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, and as you'll read, if you haven't heard of that one, it's not your fault. But do seek it out. (It will help of course, when a DVD release is ever announced for this two-year-old film, which only hit metropolitan American screens in September.)

Don't Call It a Comeback...

...I've been here for years! But I haven't much been on my main site these last couple of months, for any number of reasons. But if King Kong can return, rather majestically, 72 years after he first rumbled out of the jungle, I figure I can at least show up to write a real review of this big, long, emotionally and intellectually complex entertainment. Enjoy, and post your own reactions below.

(By the way, re: my refusal to take the Golden Globes category of Best Song at all seriously, is this the kind of thing you expect to hear about timeless, award-winning art? Check that last sentence, for chrissakes.)

On the Road Again

First I let all the water out of my own website by getting uncontrollably addicted to the blog format. Now I'm giving away all my inspirations to other blogs while mine sits under dust, like Miss Havisham's cake. Don't worry, I'm too selfish to let his continue, but for now, you can catch my review of Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood over at The Film Experience. And when the semester finally ends and the oceans of grading have parted (not unlike the Red Sea), I will be hummin' comin' at'cha like Xscape, spitting chaw at Walk the Line, trying to make some room at the inn for the interesting, ambitious Bee Season, and letting y'all know that, whatever its flaws, I cried at Rent, like, five separate times, and I was so overjoyed to see an ensemble so committed to the story they were telling. What's with the flagging box-office? $10 is the cheapest Rent y'all will ever pay. Cough it up, now!

(Ed.: I have a hard time thawing to actresses I don't like, so imagine it happening three times in one day. Even if there are clear limitations to the performances of Reese Witherspoon, Juliette Binoche, and Idina Menzel in the aforementioned trio of movies, they all laid a heavier lien on my respect than they have before. Binoche was particularly interesting, even in a muted performance of an underwritten character that no one is talking about.)

The Seven Weeks of Christmas

There's been no time to comment on the upcoming holiday releases, or even much inclination, since I'm excited by roughly half of them, and obsessively preoccupied by only one. In lieu of any such post—and again, I'm only talking about personal anticipation, not Oscar prognostication, box-office prediction, or whatever—the following pyramid pretty much sums it up.

You can keep your partridge and your pear tree. (Although, I'd easily take a pear tree over Cheaper by the Dozen 2, The Ice Harvest, and the other non-starters that aren't even listed here.)



So what are you looking forward to?

Three Strikes

After a solid September and October, things just weren't going right at the movies this first weekend in November...



Saw II D
In this case, I had no one but myself to blame, and I doubt there is much need for commentary. The shocks on sale in Saw II are mostly of the "What is the world coming to?" variety, both because the grisliness of the scenario and the images is so unremitting and because it turns out that somehow, someway, cowriter-director Darren Lynn Bousman and Saw impresario Leigh Whannell watched Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and, alone among the world's citizens, thought it a great flick. Saw II, proudly opting for Roman numerals, similarly throws a bunch of disposable people into a dank and creepy house and mostly disposes of them. Except for a truly stomach-turning interlude inside a vat full of hypodermics and a gleeful auto-homage to the risible "chase" scene in Saw the Elder, Saw II's putridity takes utter leave of all standing definitions of taste and coherence. The strenuous feints at moralizing—both films' conceit is that the killer is trying to make his victims kick their addictions and value their lives—is unmistakably thin and opportunistic, designed for those audiences who like to relish in sin, voyeurism, and depravity while pretending their own moral elevation. Or for viewers like me who quite insensibly toss money at ventures like this, suspecting full well what I'm asking for and getting exactly that, two- or threefold.



Jarhead C–
Jarhead, meanwhile, appropriates a perfectly viable premise and humiliates audience expectations by staunchly refusing all available avenues. Neither a film of ideas nor a howling screed nor a populist entertainment nor a beefcake calendar nor an oil-black comedy nor a coming-of-age drama nor an action thriller nor a grounded character study, Jarhead emerges only as a pure study in avoidance, bubble-wrapping the themes and emotions at its core in multiple layers of plastic vacuity. For almost an hour, the context of war is a sagging pretext for an irksomely endless series of riffs on alpha-male infantilism. As in Sam Mendes' other films, Jarhead shares the obsessions of its characters—in this case, with masturbation, with women as distant and probably faithless objects, with young men's jockish unease around each other's jockish bodies—and yet stands away from them, making stained-glass images about its themes instead of more fully credible or even audible artistic statements, to say nothing of cogent political statements.

Since American Beauty was itself about a spiritual and intellectual emptiness at the heart of cosmetic pretense, Mendes' slicksterisms worked just fine; in context, they even fascinated. Jarhead, though, verges much closer to Road to Perdition levels of total irrelevance, ultimately afraid of the last theme standing, which is the possibility that the Gulf War amounted to nothing, a stalled engine both in the global-political domain and in the minds of the soldiers who fought there. This strikes me as a uselessly glib way of conceiving world events or human character, and the film isn't serious about it anyway: Jamie Foxx, giving the most charismatic performance in a terminally underwritten part, has a late-breaking monologue about loving his job that comes from absolutely nowhere in the script except a compulsory instinct to "deepen" itself, and Jake Gyllenhaal has to mumble some last-minute tautologies about being in the desert even when he isn't, and not being there even when he was, and about being the desert, and how we are all still in the desert.

In the literal senses that this is true, Jarhead offers nothing by way of insight. In the historical sense, speaking as the son of a U.S. Army colonel who earned a master's in Middle Eastern history before commanding an artillery batallion in the first Gulf War, this is just as much an inanity. One of the earliest passages in Jarhead the book, reproduced at length here, holds that even the most artistically complex war movies, whatever their ingrained politics, are re-gristed as jingoistic, hormonal fuel for Army recruits, who watch something as jagged as Apocalypse Now and get off on the explosions and ammunitions. Mendes' response to Swofford's anecdote has been to evacuate meaning, message, and care, presuming that they will be lost or peripheral to this audience, and probably to all the audiences who stand to fill Jarhead's coffers. The film is technically proficient, at least in its cinematography, but the cynical and cowardly disservice it does to its own genre and themes eat away at everything passable in it.



Shopgirl F
I would love to report that the old adage about "three times lucky" reversed my moviegoing fortunes, but in fact things came screeching to a truly dispiriting halt with this limp noodle of a film, in which every single thing either goes wrong on its own terms or else is wholly undermined by a framework of truly idiotic page-one decisions. The biggest challenge to making a great movie of Shopgirl would be navigating the tension between the mercenary cynicism of Ray Porter (Steve Martin), who essentially rents a sales girl at Saks Fifth Avenue as a convenient accessory-receptacle whenever he's in LA, and the plangent romanticism with which Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) misconstrues her effect on Ray, and which causes even Ray to wonder whether he's selling this relationship short. Both characters seem to have internally divided views about what they're up to, but they opt for the paths of least resistance—in his case deception, in hers self-deception, with a thick mortar of sex and materialist reward sealing it all together.

Again, not a bad premise, but director Anand Tucker and over-proud papa Steve Martin, who also wrote the book and adapted the script, deface the script's potential in truly moronic ways. Martin narrates, though the narrating voice doesn't seem to quite be Ray's, since it not only describes itself as "objective" but comments attentively on scenes and entire plotlines that Ray knows nothing about. This structural conceit therefore warps our sense both of Ray and of the narration beyond any recognition: the twee and paternalistic attitude it assumes toward Mirabelle don't match Ray's conduct at all, but nor does it seem like a credible vantage for the film itself to adopt toward her, since it never probes her life or her mind in anything like the promised depth. An elementary ingredient of Shopgirl is a scalpel-sharp demystification of Ray Porter, but the film can't commit to it, implying in such precious, fluffy ways that his is the guiding point-of-view. The ending of the movie, a veritable coloratura of these God's-eye pronouncements from Ray/Martin, is as woefully over-extended as the beginning, where Mirabelle is awkwardly courted by a dull and desperate Jason Schwartzman—stuck in the Giovanni Ribisi role of making the old guy look debonair by comparison. Meanwhile, the camera coddles, flatters, and leers at Claire Danes just as Ray does, positioning her as yet another exquisite delicacy on offer at Saks, and the movie invites all manner of projection onto her wide smiles without really putting anything behind them. Who is this girl? For one scene exactly, this lonelyheart singleton goes to lunch with a pair of inquisitive friends, and you ask, she has friends? Where on earth did they come from? Doesn't the movie kind of belabor the implication that her only companion in life is her cat? Why can't the movie make a decision about how small or not small her social circle really is?

Shots of the Space Needle, of the façade of Danes' apartment, of Martin on his private plane, and of the Los Angeles skyline repeat themselves ad nauseum, "establishing" locations and transitions that are perfectly evident and, perhaps, straining for a kind of environmental poetry that the flat, ill-lit images and the outrageously thick musical score shoot dead at every turn. Words like "Vietnam" stand in for entire, wasted characters like that of Mirabelle's father. Basic matte shots of characters dining against an evening backdrop are jaw-droppingly artificial. Martin proves time and again in close-up that he isn't the kind of actor who survives well outside of dialogue or carefully framed scenarios. Unlike, say, Bill Murray—Lost in Translation really is the imagined Holy Grail for this film's failed efforts—Martin's face gives almost nothing, and for all his handsomeness at 60, the contours of his face aren't inherently interesting at all. He can't act in silence, which this film repeatedly asks him to do. The bouts of sex that account for the lion's share of Ray's interest in Mirabelle and at least some fraction of her involvement with him are coyly elided, cementing the impression that we are never really watching the story that the film insists we are watching, and despite spending two hours with three people, we never really meet anybody. Shopgirl is a story by a man in late middle-age about a twentysomething girl that the film can't understand or even portray without the gauzy, invasive prisms of orchidaceous male fantasy. The end result can only imply more about the creators and their own dreams about this girl-figure than about the girl-figure herself, making the film both embarrassing and frustrating to behold.

Two Halloween Tricks

Despite the bad luck associated with Halloween, I thought I'd be in for at least one treat in today's double feature. But, no. Both films have their merits, but in recompense, they expect you to put up with quite a lot—too much, I think.



North Country C
Niki Caro's Whale Rider was an involving tale with an affecting central performance, and it refreshingly abstained from cutesying up its young protagonist or overtly repackaging its regional idiom and cultural values for purposes of export. The big exception to that rule, however, was the over-insistence on sexism as a social axiom. As the immediate debate over Pai's eligibility for cultural leadership slides into a broad-based indictment of male chauvinism, you would never know that Maori culture is one of the most matrilineal and woman-positive in the world, and that most modern Maori women need not imagine that their best chances for self-expression lie in waiting for Grandpa to leave the kitchen so you can take the piss out of him in private.

North Country, Caro's follow-up film, at least admits its class-action interest in gender inequality as a categorical social ill, and in the wintry hinterlands of Minnesota, the charge sticks pretty persuasively—persuasively enough, in fact, that you wonder why Caro won't let social and narrative structures speak for themselves. Instead, she milks far, far too many scenes for a much more obvious and superficial quotient of sexual blamecasting. The film's allegiance to a cause trumps its allegiance to itself at countless turns, and while the human drama crackles in some compelling moments—a public accusation of adultery at a hockey game, a supervisor's meeting where union representative Frances McDormand finagles what she wants, a nightmarish incident involving a portable toilet—much of the rest feels sternly and unconfidently schematic. Richard Jenkins, a bonus in anything, gets a powerful scene at a microphone that can't help remind us how much Caro likes to make her characters cry in front of assemblies. Theron, McDormand, and cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission) do the best work to keep North Country within reasonably textured parameters of human experience, but the movie is scored all wrong, and the thematic trajectory from sexual harassment to sexual assault is so awkwardly structured that it dulls both arguments instead of fortifying the linkage between them. Meanwhile, Caro shoots and edits her coverage shots of the mines like she did the whales in her first film, as a massive and inveterate fact, implying a strangely ambivalent worldview in which some things can (and must!) be fixed, while others simply Are.



Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit C+
I thought North Country might misstep, and so I purposely planned to see Wallace & Gromit afterward, sure as I was that Aardman Studios had delivered the goods. Unfortunately, this is one party at which I'm the appointed churl, since I got barely a moment's real enjoyment out of Wallace & Gromit, which seemed just as cluttered but also as listless as Aardman's earlier feature-length disappointment, Chicken Run. My respect for the movie is just that—respect—but I was amazed at how soon I was wishing it would end, and I actually had a better time at North Country. As in so many animated features, and perhaps this is becoming a prejudice of my own, the punctilious detail and overfilled images in Wallace & Gromit quickly seemed like ends in themselves, hung around a story with no urgency, even as short-form suspense. I love how expressive Gromit can be, and Lady Tottington gets some memorably daft lines like, "In my view, the killing of fluffy animals is never justified!" But I'm terminally bored by all of Wallace's hodgepodge gizmos and inventions, and—in total contrast to the entrancing shorts, especially The Wrong Trousers—I feel much the same about the two Aardman features: sure, this is what you made, and it must not have been easy, but then why did you bother? Corpse Bride's wittier character designs and stripped-down narrative brought a whimsical quality to that movie that the manic and plotty Were-Rabbit really needs in order to seem like more than the fetish of talented puppet-masters having a grand day in at the studio.

Goodies

Here in late October, the temperatures are dropping but the movies are hopping...



Capote B+
Yes, it takes a while to get used to Philip Seymour Hoffman's rococo affectations as the epochally affected Truman Capote, just as it takes a while to clear the dust off the Period Biography genre and clear the hurdle of solemn reenactment. But Capote, more than almost any movie I've seen this year, improves as it unfolds, revealing its interrogative agenda just as guardedly but expertly as Capote reveals his own. Dan Futterman's confident and literate screenplay poses the question of how much was lost and how much gained when In Cold Blood was born. The film is interested in Capote's own ambiguous motives and the gathering storm of ethical and psychic burdens he confronted as he wrote. While ever retaining this stern and lucid point of focus, the script's shrewdest means of chronicling Capote's loss of control is to slowly cede the movie to other characters and performers: to Catherine Keener, whose wariness and disappointment as Harper Lee only grow more palpable as he recedes from the kind of dignity she immortalized on the page; to the impeccable Bob Balaban as New Yorker editor William Shawn, whose chillingly amoral support of In Cold Blood and its author is likewise sorely tested; and to Clifton Collins Jr., whose poignant neediness as Perry Smith is the engine for both his sadistic physical violence and his intricate, almost telepathic undoing of Capote's inner tranquility.

If Hoffman's performance, capable as it is, ultimately struck me as the least rewarding in the movie—excepting Bruce Greenwood's vain effort with the underwritten part of Capote's lover, Jack Dunphy—I don't think it's a discredit to the actor so much as to the man. Capote's inordinate self-consciousness and all of his ornate barriers against candor and two-way communication almost doom him to being implausible and unsatisfying as a dramatic presence. Still, the story of murder he both recorded and perpetuated in the form of In Cold Blood is so rich in Faustian compromise and social import that, especially in the hands of such proficient filmmakers, it achieves the herculean feat of upstaging the title character. The deep blacks and cold, breathy whites of the cinematography, mediated by a sallow palette of yellows and grays, had me thinking frequently of The Pianist, another true-life tale of a hollowed-out man whose claim to fame is a life that, whatever the rewards of celebrity and improbable survival, no one could ever want to live. In Capote's case, of course, his mercenary narcissism and his lapses into ethical flippancy are a self-imposed sort of crucible, even as the film rightly and brightly attests to his resilience as a person and to the beauty, rigor, and lasting value of what he wrote. A moral parable of enviable layers, Capote truly gets under your skin.



The Squid and the Whale A–
Here's a movie that's so very good that it clarifies what's wrong in other movies of its kind, even as it gloriously pursues its own eccentric, unpredictable, and sublimely successful agenda. From one vantage, The Squid and the Whale replays last year's The Door in the Floor with three enormous improvements: the movie's funny bone is given much freer rein, the female lead is allowed to be as interesting and fully dimensional as her titanically self-absorbed spouse, and the adolescent epiphany actually happens within the family unit, broken as it is, rather than relying on the dramatically dubious mechanism of the son-for-hire. Meanwhile, regarding these films' primary point of intersection, Jeff Daniels is an even more falsely avuncular and mundanely monstrous father-mentor than Jeff Bridges was, silly though it may be to split hairs among such fine achievements. Telegraphing his moods, impulses, and simmering instincts in a robustly physical performance, Daniels is just as articulate in his line-readings and his seriocomic timing, while Laura Linney excels herself as the flawed but increasingly self-righteous Georgia Brown surrogate, and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline are aces as the estranged couple's duo of wavering sons.

Written and directed with a stunningly secure hand by Noah Baumbach, and edited with a split-second precision that puts even Junebug to shame—one of the year's most gratifying belly-laughs comes from a perfectly judged cut to a scene from Blue Velvet—The Squid and the Whale is taut and rhythmically sound where the films of its lead producer, Wes Anderson, tend to go slack and hermetic. Compare a climactic sequence of The Royal Tenenbaums, where a wedding we barely care about is almost arbitrarily interrupted by a car-accident and a streetside brouhaha that, in narrative terms, we do not quite believe, with a similarly structured episode in Squid where Jeff Daniels collapses in the street in front of his old Brooklyn brownstone, barely avoiding getting hit by a car and finally aware that the family he ignored for too long is never going to reabsorb him. Little works in the Tenenbaums sequence, even as residual good will from the film's earlier, richer passages tide us over, but The Squid and the Whale never lets up for a second of its 81 minutes, eliciting giggles and anger and questions and surprise as it wends its way toward a finale that feels much less conventional than it probably deserves to. There's too much music in the soundtrack, and Anna Paquin gets stuck again as the brazen object of age-inappropriate fascination, but these are minor errors in a beautifully calibrated picture, full of recognizable people leading remarkably illuminating lives.

My Own Time-Out Film Guide

With all the family complications and struggles of late, I can't say it was the most vacation-like vacation or birthday-like birthday I ever experienced, though I'm still glad I got to spend the time at home. In order to seize a little pure-bred R&R out of my four-day weekend, y'all know what I did. After all, my bus trip did have a layover in NYC. Sorry to all NYC buddies I didn't call, but this was sort of a spur-of-the-moment, moment-of-solitude kind of thing.

Thanks to everyone who left messages, by the way... and if you sent flowers, not only to me but to my mother, and you know who you are, you are not only an immortal god-type person, but you'll be hearing from me soon!

Forty Shades of Blue B+
The first and easily the best of the three movies I saw, Forty Shades makes good enough on its Sundance victory even though it's got nothing that Junebug doesn't do better, and a bit more humbly. Still, this is moody, evocative work, and it's one of those European-feeling American indies like Birth or The Yards that work well throughout but really congeal at a few key sequences, more than earning the film's keep in those electric moments. One of these is the outdoor party for legendary music producer Alan (Rip Torn) that precipitates the whole film, carrying back to town his distant son Michael (Darren Burrows, once of Northern Exposure) and introducing Michael for the first time to Alan's beautiful, much-younger, and Russian bride, Laura (Dina Korzun). No, Laura is not a mail-order bride per se. Yes, Rip Torn boozes and objectifies her, but there are many more unexpected notes to his character. Yes, the film rather overdoes the chromatic conceit of its title, coming across as overly schematized whenever we, say, duck into a swimming pool for no narrative or even atmospheric reason. But there's some real charge to the acting, the sound-mixing, and many of the images, and the vibrantly miscegenated Memphis music scene—blending country, hip-hop, R&B, gospel, and orchestral influences—is as unexpected and piquant as the movie it undergirds.

Good Night, and Good Luck. C+
Speaking of overly schematized, George Clooney's glassy and handsome but disappointingly thin Good Night, and Good Luck. lapses into many of the sins that it purports to indict. Its view of human character is harshly one-dimensional: you'll have no trouble divvying out the good folks from the baddies, a chasm which the film further broadens by denying the villains an opportunity for real, flesh-and-blood characterization—i.e., it's even easier to hate Joe McCarthy when he's a flickering projection on a screen instead of a palpably present human being. The interpolated footage from Murrow's broadcasts and McCarthy's rebuttals are a valuable cultural repository, but they perform a lion's share of the film's argument on its own behalf, with amazingly little in the way of editorial embellishment, historical context, or psychological revelation. Production values like the shining black & white photography and the silken jazz numbers by Dianne Reeves can't be disputed from a technical standpoint, but their pertinence to the film's message is pretty arbitrary, and the whole thing looks like a souped-up memorial ad for Edward R. Murrow, burnished and tailored for knowing, self-congratulatory consumption by ticket-buyers who may not realize that we're not thinking any harder than Joe McCarthy did, that we're omitting human as well as political complexity. The alternative, compelling but quite dangerous, is that we simply don't care about the film's one-dimensionality, since it unabashedly provides images and liberal talking-points that recent cinema has sorely lacked. But, aside from its impressive aesthetic surface and some good moments from those actors who can handle period (pretty much everyone except Clooney and Downey), it's dismayingly dismissable.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio D+
And now, speaking of overly schematized and an uneven grasp of period, Prize Winner is guaranteed to outlive the affections of even those audiences who go in rooting for it. Who are basically fans of star Julianne Moore (duh) or writer-director Jane Anderson, whose ambiguously "feminist" work as a screenwriter and filmmaker I have often enjoyed for its casual irreverence (Normal, If These Walls Could Talk 2) or for its outright blinding and jubilant irreverence (The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom). This film, however, requires mere minutes to set up basic dichotomies from which it never strays or builds—Evelyn Ryan, a chipper mother of ten, was inventive and resilient, though you still wouldn't wish her life on anyone; Kelly Ryan, her alcoholic spendthrift of a husband, isn't a 100% villain, just a 120-proof sadsack and a 1-man pity-party. After 10 or 15 minutes of this, the film stalls amid a litany of commercial jingles which, I must say, seldom make the case for Evelyn's genius, and the interchangeable children and paper-thin production design do nothing to sustain or expand our interest. You can see what Julianne is doing—proving that she can smile and chuckle through almost an entire picture, though she seems most comfortable with her best and darkest lines, like "There isn't enough gas in the world to get me all the places I want to go," or "I don't need you to make me happy, Kelly, I just need you to leave me alone when I am." Brava, Julianne: anyone who's paying attention knew you could do it. And anyone who's alleging that Evelyn Ryan, Cathy Whitaker, or Laura Brown have all that much in common is not to be trusted. Still, like the movie, the performance exists to make a larger and fairly detachable point, not to compel our belief on its own terms. 'Tis pity she's mediocre. And I'm sad to say that mere toleration for what you're watching and hearing becomes an issue after a while.

P.S. I've gotta take my laptop to the shop to get the battery replaced and the CD/DVD drive repaired. Don't think I've forgotten about you if you don't see more posts right away. (I've no idea how long this will take.)

Notes from Underground, Pt. IV

And now, for the final round of catch-up capsule reviews for the month of September...

Proof C+
...or, as it happens, September and early October, since I just saw Proof this afternoon and am cheating a little bit in the spirit of carpe'ing the diem. Having found the play diverting but unremarkable, and in some ways seriously flawed—over-proud of its one-liners, its narrative too compressed, its relationship to higher learning a little fuzzy—I've been dreading the film adaptation. The stingy opening credit sequence didn't help, acknowledging only the four main actors, the playwright and screenwriters, and the director, and no one else. This is particularly appalling since the genius cinematographer Alwin Küchler, albeit working on thinner material than Lynne Ramsay and Michael Winterbottom have given him, finds a frosty, scraped-ice look for the movie and its colors that redeems several scenes, bracing the film within its mood even as the actors (Davis and Gyllenhaal in particular) skate on the thin edge of lazy interpretation. The changes to the play, for better and for worse, square us much more confidently in support of Catherine's abilities, which is quite freeing for Paltrow, who is allowed to focalize her anger, worry, and indignation without having to tow the line of an intellectual potboiler. She's quite impressive, actually, proving again that the pinched and furious bystander in Ripley, not the luminous reciter of Shakespeare in Love, is the touchstone performance still guiding her career.

Rize B
Like Proof, the diametrically different film Rize also begins with its least convincing sequence, as director David LaChapelle invokes the Watts riots, the Rodney King conflagration, and other historical tableaux of racial protest in L.A. as some kind of historicist "explanation" for the hip-hop dance style known as krumping. It's not that the parallels don't resonate, but they're much too clean given the fascinating cacophony of commentary that fills the film: krumping has nothing to do with violence, but might be an expression of violence; it is an escape from street life even as the scene gets more and more bogged down in feuds and retributional rivalries; anyone can krump, even though the film clearly has to reach to find non-African American krump-dancers with even a shred of credibility. The more "explaining" is going on in Rize, the less compelling it is, and LaChapelle can't be accused of organizing his document all that well. But an invigorating document it is, replete with fabulously shot dance footage, well-chosen musical tracks, and a restless willingness to free associate on the meanings of krumping (a much more rewarding approach than the genealogical breakdown). Just by watching the dancers, you get a real sense of what the art and finer points of the dancing are, as evidenced by this East Coast white boy's surprising success at distinguishing the wheat from the chaff during the climactic battles. Imperfect, but impressive.

Serenity B
Appropriating Star Wars and Aliens as both tantamount inspirations and points of clear departure, Joss Whedon's exegesis of his own TV cult hit Firefly plays like a charm even to a viewer who hasn't seen a frame of the show. We're very close to B+ territory here: the interplanetary backstory is established crisply and with healthy lathers of interesting irony (rather than easy cynicism). The interdependence and camaraderie among the crew—both the characters and the ensemble of Hollywood unknowns—is lively and convincing. Best of all, the film generates those sensations you look for in good sci-fi and dearly miss in the bad stuff: layered concepts, real-world resonance, humor, bravery, internecine squabbles that are actually about something, and powerful knocks of genuine terror. I would happily venture again wherever this crew was voyaging, and the franchise leaves itself plenty of room to improve, just like its antecedents did. The down sides? The beginning and ending aren't nearly as compelling as the gripping middle. Nathan Fillion and Sean Maher, the shakiest actors in the ship's crew, dominate a lot of the early scenes with their pallid shouting matches, and the discrete mythologies of the River character are never clear or resolved enough to justify her centrality to the narrative. Still, a real kick in the pants, with casual pleasures and head-scratching complications well-stocked along the way.

Transporter 2 D+
No need to dwell here, except to say that Transporter 2 goes just about as wrong as a follow-up film can go. Gone is the sidelong, feather-light touch of the admittedly ludicrous and hyper-edited original; the new film groans beneath that deep, saturated, 21 Grams-style photography that lets you know from the first frame that everyone's taking themselves much too seriously. Gone is the funky soundtrack of American hip-hop, swingingly appropriated into European locations, which are also gone. Gone is Jason Statham's central note as a character, his stone-faced solitude. Here, he's saddled with a kid, a supermodel co-star, Matthew Modine in a key role, and a pair of truly dismal adversaries: Kate Nauta, who looks like a walking fang, and Alessandro Gassman, who skankily peels off his shirt as often here as Statham did last time, but no longer does—and this, too, dear reader, is a shame.

2046 (second go-round) B+
About five times a year, I see a movie twice or more in theaters because I just love the film. Another handful of times, I see a movie twice because I'm skeptical of my own reaction, usually because I can't summon the enthusiasm that I keep tracing in other reviews. And so I had another go at Wong Kar-wai's 2046, a fluorescently chilly film that I admired on first pass but which also, dare I admit it, bored me silly through the second hour. I'm glad I ventured back—which, according to Tony Leung's character, is what everyone eventually does in 2046—because the film did improve appreciably. I still doubt that Wong is going to mine any new gold from those repeated song elements and endlessly recycled motifs. Few of these are as effective in 2046 as they have been on past occasions, and there are so many Asian women crying in close-up, Amy Tan must be throwing a jealous fit somewhere. Still, on second viewing, the Faye Wong character moved much closer to the center of the film's concerns: unavailable while Leung is dating Zhang Ziyi, and the closest proxy for his memory of Maggie Cheung's Su Lizhen in In the Mood for Love, Faye is also the muse, emblem, and sometime progenitor of all of the film's storytelling, and her scenes with Leung really click. I still want more from Leung's own performance, and even though the movie is properly overt about the seedier glamour and tightening desperation of this world—as compared to the more eye-opening prospects in In the Mood for Love—my nostalgia for the earlier film shouldn't have blocked me from seeing how much this newer, colder, but worthy addendum has to offer.

Winter Soldier B+
Not so much a documentary as an actual document, Winter Soldier is an assembly of footage from the Winter Soldier Conference that unfolded in a Detroit hotel over three midwinter days in 1971. Scores of Vietnam veterans gathered to attest to the atrocities they had witnessed and in some cases committed while on their tours of duty, speaking with passion about the utterly false consciousness that war imposes on otherwise reasonable people, and implicitly pleading for an end to the conflict. Had the film been broadcast on television in 1972, as per the producers' initial plans, Winter Soldier might well have hastened the withdrawal of our forces, but every major network as well as PBS refused to air it. Seeing the film now is revelatory and harrowing in all the expected ways, and in some unexpected ways, but at this point, I'm not sure the material is best served by this bare-bones approach. After three and a half decades of interceding history, and with the film already peppered with smart questions about the inherent power of testimony—what does truth-telling accomplish on its own, if it isn't accompanied by some systemic project or context?—you leave Winter Soldier, or at least I did, eager to see some shape, reflection, or expansion applied to this stand-alone audiovisual transcript. At least with the film finally circulating, if only in one American city at a time, some of those larger questions and moral demands can now be posed.

Notes from Underground, Pt. III

Junebug A
Grizzly Man's only rival as the year's best movie is this pitch-perfect dramedy from first-time director Phil Morrison, helming a cast full of accomplished professionals who each deserve better name-recognition. Driving another nail into the idea that movies are about plot, Junebug unfolds from a basically hoary premise—randy, urbane newlyweds Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola pay a very awkward visit to his family in small-town North Carolina—but what Morrison and the actors elicit from the generous, well-written script is a sustained, humble, spirited, and exquisitely quotidian meditation on the idea that all of us might shut up every now and then and stop pretending that we've got anyone or anything fully figured out. Scenes that boil with the potential for big punchlines simmer into piquant observations. Stereotypes melt before our eyes, but in a way that allows the film to further and deepen the characters, rather than just congratulate itself for defying our expectations. Strongly affective shots of landscapes, interiors, and spaces of domestic refuge round out the story just as fully as the big story climaxes and the expertly played dialogues. Embeth Davidtz's watchful, headstrong, but copiously compassionate art dealer steals top acting honors in a film that simply lacks a false note or a compromised ethic. Theatrical bookings might be hard to come by at this point, but when the DVD drops this winter, look alive, people.

Just Like Heaven C
In which Reese Witherspoon's perky but lonely doctor has the good sense or else the blind luck to be wearing the most flattering outfit of Reese's screen career just at the moment that she gets stuck in spiritual limbo. Obvious and over-conceived, Just Like Heaven drops the ball on the kind of gossamer wish-fulfillment fantasy that 13 Going on 30 so nicely supplied last year, also with Mark Ruffalo as the appealingly woolly love interest. Major mistakes, everywhere from plotting to sound cues to glaringly botched edits, impress themselves all over a movie that should feel lighter than air, not fingerprinted by producers. Still, Witherspoon is leagues and miles more appealing than she was in the shrill Sweet Home Alabama, and the movie has its moments. It's at least much better than its candy-assed poster, and the leads commendably try their best. Needless, but inoffensive.

Keane C
Damian Lewis was featured in a recent New York Times article for giving one of five performances that audiences should be sure to catch. I must say, I wasn't nearly so taken with his work, mostly because Keane seems entirely and tautologically to exist as a vessel for delivering this rather fussy characterization. Worse, Lewis' role, as a probably demented man looking for a long-lost or else imaginary daughter, isn't equipped with any kind of psychological or metaphorical resonance that compels us to stick around with his bristly, unstable persona. The second hour is stronger than the first, either because Amy Ryan contributes such a flinty and unselfish supporting turn as a neighbor with her own problems, or else because it's simply a relief to have someone besides Keane to look at, and someone for Damian Lewis to connect with and respond to. Still, Keane is, in some senses, like a failed version of Mike Leigh's Naked: a committed portrait of an unsympathetic and improbable person that needs a stellar actor or a genius director to give it a life, or a reason. Keane lacks a reason.

March of the Penguins C+
Waddle waddle waddle waddle waddle. There's nothing for the viewer to do in March of the Penguins but sit back, enjoy the Antarctic photography, marvel at the plush cuteness of baby penguins and the outlandish oddness of the adult Emperors, and take every single thing that Morgan Freeman tells us about this species as God's truth. Focus even a second too long on the fact that the film is pathologically unwilling to say words like "die" ("This penguin will simply fade away..."), or that the underwater sequences in particular flaunt the telltale signs of digital intervention, and the movie's single selling-point as an objective photolog starts to fight for its own life. Plus, it's a little dismal to watch a movie about animals where the whole point is that they all behave in exactly the same way; I'm more of a Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill guy, where the birds demonstrate individuality and unique histories, rather than this not-so-subtle paean to the sublime majesty of sticking in the herd. A few sequences really do score—the inchoate grief of two penguin parents who watch their egg freeze and roll away—but it's all, quite literally, pedestrian. Informative without being all that enlightening.

Me and You and Everyone We Know B+
Composed as a sort of mosaic and designed for maximum contact between the whimsical and the deadpan, Miranda July's debut feature is admirably fearless in selling an aesthetic and a worldview that many will dismiss as arrested adolescence, especially as the film leaves the warm waters of its festival successes and tries to court a paying audience. Happily, I was thoroughly charmed by the gaggle of unlikely characters. In fact, the more unlikely the better—those disaffected teenage girls, passable but a bit overfamiliar, would get my first vote for expulsion, if anyone were to ask. Otherwise, the film swings along with fanciful flourishes, erotic awkwardness, adults who fight for the respect of children, and a redoubtable ability to animate even the oldest stereotypes with fresh, witty spirit. ("E-mail wouldn't exist if it weren't for AIDS!" growls a self-serious art curator to her startled assistant.) The film's best quality is the fully level playing field implied by its title, for despite how well John Hawkes and July herself hold the screen as the central protagonists, punchlines and epiphanies and moments of brave self-disclosure are meted out equally to almost everyone in the film. The governing aesthetic metaphors are collage and found-object transformations, and Me and You... itself is a strange, colorful object simply waiting to be found by people for whom it will unlock something: a titter, a curiosity, a glimmering reflection of the weirder sides of ourselves.

Notes from Underground, Pt. II

Further musings on big-screen entertainments I caught in September.

Flightplan C
Despite her widespread reptutation for making "smart choices," Jodie Foster's resumé gets spottier and spottier, with only the loopy but seriously ambitious Contact and small parts in A Very Long Engagement and the under-appreciated Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys to show for herself after a decade of mostly misfires. Here, as Jodie and her daughter board a massive, two-tiered airplane, all double entendres about the baggage they are carrying fully apply. After the daughter disappears, Jodie becomes her own form of turbulence, assaulting passengers, pilot, and crew alike in her single-minded quest for a girl who may never have existed. The stuff that works best is all in the margins, like a spine-chilling wide shot of a cabin full of passengers staring down two Arabs with an almost tranquil, bovine suspicion. Still, the film goes into a wicked tailspin as the plot pitches forward, and newbie director Robert Schwentke—doubtless having worshipped at the temple of Clarice Starling—has precious few ideas what to do besides try to let Foster's distressed face carry the movie. Which it can't.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin B+
Here's a movie I was planning on skipping until so many friends of so many stripes kept insisting that I shouldn't. Thank goodness they said so, and thank goodness I listened, because The 40-Year-Old Virgin is such an arrestingly sweet-tempered comedy, recovering the lost art of finding the absurdity in almost any personality without just holding people up to ridicule or stringing together gags as a rote series of humiliations. Steve Carell, star and also co-writer of the film, anchors an entire cast who uniformly elect to play characters instead of selling jokes, most of which are good enough to sell themselves anyway. And then there's Catherine Keener, nicely vaulting back from her awkward whingeing in The Ballad of Jack and Rose with an open, chuckle-filled performance that blasts her out of typecasting and accomplishes the film's neatest irony: when They finally make a movie about a likable goof who isn't a hero, They don't have to cast an Amazon or a teenager as his love interest but can go instead with a likable, believable, honest-to-God woman. Crass as it is, and subject to some hiccups, this is still a marvelously humane comedy with more laughs per sequence than Hitch or Fever Pitch managed altogether.

Grizzly Man A
And now we're really talking, with the uninventable and inexhaustibly layered case history of Timothy Treadwell, self-styled naturalist, failed actor, recovering alcoholic, winsome educator, earnest philanthropist, and jaw-dropping narcissist. Lots of people, it seems, know about Grizzly Man as the movie about the guy who got eaten by the bear, and it's true that most documentarians would find a hard time keeping Treadwell's horrific but weirdly parodic death from upstaging his entire life. Werner Herzog, however, almost preternaturally in tune with the overreachers and the morbid fantasists of the world, blends Treadwell's own footage of his life among the grizzly bears with some piquant conversations with friends, acquaintances, and nature experts, as well as his own ruminations on the peculiar mania that is filmmaking. Is Herzog's preoccupation with Treadwell any more credible or any less "crazy" than Treadwell's embrace of the ursine? Is a death really senseless when all the evidence points to how happy Timothy must have been to go that way? How does one take the measure of such an eccentric life, caught up as it so fully was in its own self-conscious performance? Grizzly Man plumbs all of these questions with focus, discipline, and surprising dollops of humor, and Treadwell emerges as a compelling prism through which key aspects of our culture are eerily illuminated, even as other faces of Timothy and of ourselves remain frustratingly opaque. Dazzling. Indeed, the year's best.

A History of Violence B+
After the ne plus ultra of taboo-busting in Crash and the jocular, Moebius-style meditation on his own career in eXistenZ, where else was David Cronenberg supposed to venture except the unfamiliar frontier of arthouse populism? First Spider and now A History of Violence are quite maddening to me, in that their surgically specific shots, edits, and sonic underlinings could only arise from that trusty, immaculate coterie of professionals that Cronenberg has been spearheading for almost two decades...and yet, for all their technical precision, these recent films dissolve into overly neat revelations and auto-commentaries just at the point when earlier pictures like The Brood or The Fly or Dead Ringers boldly leapt into new planes of implication. Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello give very strong performances and the imagery is chilling and uncanny so long as the film is still unfolding its central dilemmas and essential textures. Then, rather suddenly, History follows its biggest tonal gamble into farcical violence with an ending gambit straight out of In the Bedroom—which is to say, one that is much too epigrammatically "provocative" to suit the real nit and grit of what Cronenberg initially set up. He's still a master like few others, but I'm not on the Amy Taubin train—his movies aren't getting better, just broader.

Notes from Underground

So, while Nick's Flick Picks has been in another two-week hibernation, plenty has been going on above ground. In the Glass Half Full category, Tom DeLay finally got indicted, Lynndie England got sent to prison, Rita din't wreak what Katrina wrought, and residents of New Orleans started making their way back home. As for the Glass Half Empty, many of those same New Orleanians got sent back out again, Rita was bad enough for what it was (and only augurs the gloomy future of global weather), Cindy Sheehan got arrested outside the White House, John Roberts was confirmed as Chief Justice, and reports are running wild that Bush's top contender for the open Rehnquist slot is Lord Voldemort.

In local Trinity news, two weekends ago, as Wesleyan started pulling ahead of us at a home-field soccer match, a loud clutch of Trinity undergrads began taunting Wesleyan athletes, fans, and fellow Trinity students as "fags" and "homos." So, no, that chill you're feeling in the air isn't just the autumn weather. Thankfully, in the Newtonian universe of Equal and Opposite Reactions, this truly disgraceful incident has sparked campus conversation about homophobia, public letters and Campus Conduct indictments from both the Dean's and President's offices, and a rally tonight called "Don't Commit It, Don't Permit It." In an extremely mature and impressive move, one of the targeted Trinity students published an open letter to the campus citing not the homophobic taunters but the silent majority of deniers and tongue-cluckers as the real problem.... Real change happens when compassionate people act on their outrage rather than commiserate about it in private, so tonight's rally and the very public, very concerted response to this flare-up marks a huge change in Trinity's social life, and I'll be thrilled to go.

Meanwhile, at the movies—you knew I was getting there!—September combined still more extremes, including the two best movies I've seen in 2004 as well as the absolute worst (paging Mr. Gilliam). Here's a September recap, in partial compensation for the recent paucity of reviews. Keep checking back over the course of the weekend for updates!

And yes, if you do the math, 18 movies in 30 days means I was in a movie theater 3 out of every 5 days in September. Welcome, all over again, to my world.

The Brothers Grimm F
Ever heard of saving the best for last? Now let's try dispensing with the worst first. It's not that absolutely everything fails in The Brothers Grimm: Heath Ledger saves many of his own scenes with a kooky, Depp-in-Pirates delivery, and occasionally the film coughs up a decent if slightly mean-spirited image, like Monica Bellucci's glassy face shattering into shards. Still, the vortex of suckage is enormous, and it swallows the whole enterprise, even the stuff that works. The hiring and firing of key technical talent during production is plainly visible in the schizophrenic switches in light and palette, which are nothing to write home about even in the individual set-ups. Costume changes seem to happen mid-scene, Lena Headey seems stuffed with sawdust as the Amazonian pseudo-love-interest, and the overall narrative lacks any kind of clarity or motivation. Dozens of millions of dollars down the toilet, ten of which were mine.

The Constant Gardener C
A rather stentorian exercise in stating the obvious, Fernando Meirelles' political epic is also rather less than the sum of its schizoid parts. For a while, it's easy to resent the pasty romance between Fiennes and Weisz while the gears of corporate machination start (read: keep) grinding away at the developing world. At some point, largely due to Weisz's thistly and exciting demystification of her somewhat preciously conceived character, the romantic strain gets a helluva lot more interesting. But around the same time, the multinational plot boils down to the usual suspects of isolated baddies, both believable (Nighy) and intolerable (Huston). Frenetic editing and slick direction dissolve the ligaments of the film's political as well as its emotional arguments. The finale still works pretty well, but it's the film, not just the protagonist, that finds itself feeling a little weary and overspent.

Corpse Bride B
A macabre little delight that manages the durably difficult task of squatting its hero between two romantic options and making them both quite appealing. Deft voice work from Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Watson helps make the worm-ridden Corpse Bride and the moon-faced Victoria such endearing creatures, but the film is already plenty endearing with its cheerfully Guignol mood, its terrific verbal zingers ("Little Miss Living," grouses the Corpse Bride, "with her rosy cheeks and her beating heart!"), and its hilariously elongated character designs—Victoria's mother with her towering, knobby upsweep is a stand-out in all senses. The songs feel a little wispy, and the film eventually feels the same, nailing the coffin shut after only 77 minutes, but it's a merry dose of early-autumn fun so long as it lasts.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose B–
A film that I enjoyed probably more than I had reason to. As I try to articulate in my full-length review, Emily Rose's variable quality in narrative and technical terms has a weird and surely inadvertent way of clearing space for its thematic centerpiece, which is a surprisingly involving standoff between faith and doubt, explored in legal as well as theological contexts that harmonize in darkly fascinating ways. Sure the plot is full of holes, but spiffy actors like Laura Linney and Campbell Scott help to plug a lot of them, and the B-grade thrills of arbitrary auto-crashes and diabolical body-contortions carry their own weight. Both a guilty pleasure and an anatomy of guilt, The Exorcism of Emily Rose has dry runs of pure, risible silliness until it snaps awake at more than reasonable intervals with some real frights and honest questions.

The Best of 2005...So Far

Since Tim Robey has got his favorites of 2005 posted, I figured I may as well take the bet and post my own choices of the best that this paltry movie year has had on offer up through the summer. The fall and holiday seasons should juggle these lists a good bit (hell, they'd better!), and since things have lately been on a relative upswing, quality-wise, I'm hopeful that the final laps toward Dec. 31 will be worth taking the time for. As of the moment, though:

Best Picture
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
The Holy Girl
Land of the Dead
Murderball
Palindromes

Best Director
Jacques Audiard, The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Lucrecia Martel, The Holy Girl
George Romero, Land of the Dead
Todd Solondz, Palindromes
Gus Van Sant, Last Days

Best Actress
Joan Allen, Off the Map and The Upside of Anger
Jennifer Connelly, Dark Water
Radha Mitchell, Melinda and Melinda
Connie Nielsen, Brothers
Natalie Press, My Summer of Love

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Romain Duris, The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Bruno Ganz, Downfall
Terrence Dashon Howard, Hustle & Flow
Birol Ünel, Head-On

Best Supporting Actress
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Happy Endings
Taraji P. Henson, Hustle & Flow
Debra Monk, Palindromes
Mercedes Morán, The Holy Girl
Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener

Best Supporting Actor
Tom Arnold, Happy Endings
Terrence Dashon Howard, Crash
Michael Peña, Crash
Mickey Rourke, Sin City
Jim True-Frost, Off the Map

Best Original Screenplay
The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Rebecca Miller
Crash, Paul Haggis
Happy Endings, Don Roos
The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel
Palindromes, Todd Solondz

Best Adapted Screenplay
The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Jacques Audiard & Tonino Benacquista
Dark Water, Rafael Yglesias
Downfall, Bernd Eichinger
Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki
Off the Map, Joan Ackermann

Best Cinematography
The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Stéphane Fontaine
Head-On, Rainer Klausmann
The Holy Girl, Félix Monti
My Summer of Love, Ryszard Lenczewski
Nobody Knows, Yutaka Yamasaki

Best Sound
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Head-On
The Holy Girl
Last Days
War of the Worlds

Winners would probably be Beat, Audiard, Allen, Howard, Monk, True-Frost, Holy Girl, Downfall, Holy Girl, and a five-way tie for Best Sound, one of this year's few consistent pleasures even amid inconsistent pictures. If I had my arm twisted, I'd probably go for Last Days, though truly, all five are hard to vote against.

Nick Comes Knocking on 'Broken Flowers'

It's a bird... it's a plane... no! It's an actual full-length movie review on Nick's Flick Picks! Will wonders never cease?

Too bad the film in question is Jim Jarmusch's promising but dismayingly fallow Broken Flowers. During the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Broken Flowers won the Grand Prix (i.e., the runner-up prize for Best Picture), all the hubbub was that this film was poignant and layered, and much better than Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking, which also centers around a father seeking out a son he didn't know he had (and, not to be discounted, the mother of the son, too.) Based on how much I disliked Broken Flowers, I'm perversely expecting that Don't Come Knocking might be more my cup of tea. Since I can't seem to get with the critical or popular consensus at all this year—I didn't like Mysterious Skin but enjoyed 9 Songs, I much prefered The Interpreter to Walk on Water, I found Hitch utterly charmless, and I'm positive that Johnny Depp was the worst thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—it'll just go to show if I wind up championing all the movies that everyone else hates. Wouldn't be the first time.

Now, I just need to dig up those notes I took during The Beat That My Heart Skipped, since that's a winner everyone seems to agree on...

Meanwhile, in attending to my Cinemarati duties, I've also posted a capsule review of George Stevens' Giant, which I just screened for the first time in the gorgeous Cinestudio theater on the campus of my new stomping grounds, Trinity College. The movie theaters of Hartford—I visited four of them in my first eight days of living here—deserve a blog entry of their own, but for now, it's all about Giant, one of those mid-century Oscar darlings that you expect will be awful until you give the thing a chance and come to find that, dang it, that's one thoroughbred of a mainstream American movie. It's the kind of film you expect will go to shit once Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor have got their hair painted silver so they can act more than twice their age, but even against the formidable odds of old-age makeup, they, and the movie, hold their own.

The Doctor... Is Back In

A lot can happen in four weeks: I officially filed my dissertation, got my certificate, packed my house (with a little... okay, a lot of help from good friends), moved to Connecticut, unpacked, took a weekend trip to New York City, checked in with my family in Virginia, came back to New York to read some beautiful Walt Whitman poems at my friend's absolutely delicious wedding, arrived back in Hartford, and finally got my phone and internet turned on, two and a half weeks after I arrived. The e-mail DTs have been shaking and quaking me, and I know half the people in my life think I've met the fate of the Grizzly Man, but lo, I am alive, and this blog will be back up and running in no time.

After all, there is plenty to say, including:

• A modified version of Cinemarati is back up, and it's more nutritious, better-looking, and more fun than ever!
  
  
• The New York Film Festival looms on the autumn horizon, with a newly-announced lineup that includes Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and the much-hyped Romanian breakthrough The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.
  
  
• Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, the last movie I saw in Ithaca, is not quite up to the level of Spirited Away but is still enough to raise the bar on 2005 at the movies.
  
  
• Can I just say again how sensational that wedding was? This probably won't be the last time I mention it. Props to same-sex couples expressing their devotion and commitment and love in public, and beautifully, too.
  
  
• The year's best film so far, at least on my watch, is the tantalizing French character study-cum-thriller The Beat That My Heart Skipped, featuring some master-class editing by Juliette Welfling, and a stunning sound design that features another terrific score from Alexandre Desplat. (Yep, and the acting and the writing are top-notch, too.)
  
  
• Michael Winterbottom's sex-filled and endlessly maligned 9 Songs is actually one of the year's more compelling films, if you ask me...
  
  
• ...and if you keep asking me, and I hope you will, since you're reading this site, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, fresh from its Cannes prize and reveling in a warm batch of rhapsodic reviews, is actually a jaw-dropping piece of crap. Though the essayists at the interesting on-line film journal Reverse Shot mostly take Jarmusch's side.

More on all of this and more in the coming days, but finally, while it's still in the gloaming hours of August 17, don't let me forget to mention that today is the birthday of America's greatest working actor (Male Division—don't worry, Julianne and Joan), not to mention the official husband of this blog. You can catch My Sean acting exceptionally in almost every role he assumes. I first started paying attention during 1995's Dead Man Walking, but I really fell in love during 1998's one-two punch of his implosive, reptilian, and cracked lead performance in Hurlyburly (rent it!) and his complicated, muted character work in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Among his recent performances, the pick of the litter is in one of his least hyped films, last winter's peculiar true-crime snapshot The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

All right, you few, you patient. Hang in there with me as I get back to work! (And say a little prayer for Sean—namely, that the upcoming remake of All the King's Men does justice to the magnificent novel, and to the contemporary world that this 60-year-old story still has much to say to. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, Sean! Now blow out your candles!)