AUGUST 8 - SEPTEMBER 11, 2008
THE FRENCH CRIME WAVE - FILM NOIR & THRILLERS, 1937-2000
FILM FORUM

ALAIN DELON in PURPLE NOON, 1969, Rene Clement

ROMY SCHNEIDER & ALAIN DELON in LA PISCINE, 1969, Rene Clement

TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, 1954, Jacques Becker

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES, 1960, Claude Sautet

COUP DE TORCHON, 1981, Bertrand Tavernier

JEANNE MOREAU in ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS, 1957, Louis Malle

PLUNGE INTO AN UNDERWORLD OF FLICS AND FLAMBEURS at FILM FORUM’S FRENCH CRIME WAVE SERIES

What with the dollar floating in the gutter, this wasn’t the ete to jete to gay Parie, but you will feel like you’ve been there and back if you pass the dog days of summer at The Film Forum. A series of double features to die for, THE FRENCH CRIME WAVE, will entertain you without stop from now until September 11th.

If you’ve never seen heist classics like Touchez Pas Au Grisbi or Bob Le Flambeur (a tour of card games and casinos with a Parisian high roller), pronounced by Jim Hoberman as “the birth of cinematic cool,” you can enjoy them as a “two for 1 price treat” this very weekend.

I, myself, am psyched to finally catch up with films whose very titles have thrilled me for years; Pepe le Moko, Goupi Mains Rouges, Quai de Orfevres, The Sicilian Clan, and Georges Franju’s horror/thriller, Eyes Without a Face, as well as taking in little gems I’ve never heard of: the violent end of bad, bad sex kitten, (Brigitte Bardot), in La Veritie, Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Doulous (The Squealer) with Jean Paul Belmondo, Un Flic avec Catherine Denueve, and Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows, 24-year-old director Louis Malle’s debut with a Miles Davis score!

These films will introduce you to a memorable bunch of pickpockets, burglars, mob molls, low lifes, and other lawbreakers, played by iconic French stars like Jean Gabin, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, former wrestler turned movie star, Lino Ventura, Jeanne Moreau, Louis Jouvet, and Sami Frey. Directors like Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville and Rene Clement may have found their inspiration in the work of American or British crime writers like Jim Thompson and Ruth Rendell, but this series of French films takes their dark little tales to heart and delivers the goods with a “what the hell” style and cynicism that American movies rarely capture. The Grifters (w/ Annette Bening, Angelica Huston, and John Cusack), directed by Stephen Frears, is a rare exception that got it right, but U.S. remakes of flicks like Mississippi Mermaid, Breathless, or Diabolique (all the originals are included in this festival) completely miss the boat. Humphrey Bogart is about the only American film star I can think of who approximates the fatalistic attitude the French embody so convincingly.

Take 1949’s rarely screened Riptide (Un si jolie petite plage), showing Monday, August 19th. The film follows a seriously sensitive murderer, played by Gerard Philipe (they had faces then!), back to the scene of his sad childhood, an atmospheric beachside bar that lets rooms to lonely travelers.

The almost constant rain that falls from the first frame is a backdrop to the heavy duty symbolism of shutters banging in the swinging light of a single bulb and a group of little girls (led by a nun!), saying the rosary as they pass our hero on the street. The closely observed routine of the bar, the appearance of a sinister stranger, the furtive weekly coupling of a teenage orphan and the aging wife of a regular customer, which reminds the doomed visitor of the famous actress who led him astray as a youth, all combine with the world weary dialogue; “you can’t change anything,” to touch the heart of this filmgoer, on the way to the inescapable conclusion that “life is really a mess.”

Riptide ends with an incongruous scrawl before the credits reminding us gullible viewers that this is just a story and that in real life most orphans and wards of the state go on to lead fine lives and contribute to French culture in an exemplary manner!

There are other don’t miss masterpieces like Wages of Fear, Casque D’or (with the stunning Simone Signoret), and Class Tous Risques, where tough guy, Lino Ventura, shows superb screen chemistry with a very young Jean Paul Belmondo (in only his 2nd film role).

Speaking of Jean Paul and Jean Luc: you can see two Goddard films for the price of one admission - Pierrot le Fou (no fewer than two of my former flames counted this as their all time favorite film) and Mississippi Mermaid on August 22-23rd, and Breathless is paired with Band of Outsiders, on August 31 and Sept 1st.

Other treasures include the late great Bertrand Tavernier’s moody film noir adaptations, Coup de Torchon (August 25th), and The Clockmaker, with the always marvelously rumpled Philippe Noiret (August 26th).

Even the misfires are amusing, (Gangster Lino Ventura in Les Tontons Flingeurs does not adapt to comedy quite as readily as Robert DeNiro did in Analyse This.) Essentially, if you like your crime with a French accent, you cannot go wrong.

There is a great website for THE FRENCH CRIME WAVE, filled with in-depth background articles on the films and their stars, film trailers to watch online, and entertaining curiosities like a podcast from fashion maven, Agnes B, on her film education via Breathless, all at:

FILM FORUM/THE FRENCH CRIME WAVE

Guest of Cindy Sherman
Directed by Paul H-O and Tom Donahue

This extremely entertaining film packs a damn good story into its swift paced 88 minutes. The behind-the-scenes art scene gossip will be like catnip for the “artlovers” aficionado, but it also frames a genuinely compelling modern love affair that will appeal even to those who are only mildly curious about who’s hot and who’s not in the art world.

When we first meet our “hero”, a shaggy, genial charmer named Paul H-O
(Hasegawa-Overacker), he is about to be divorced and has just fallen in love with his first video camera. The film follows his real life rise and fall as host (along with Walter Robinson of Artnet) of GALLERYBEAT, an irreverent public access TV show that covered Soho back in the day; interviewing new and occasionally famous faces at the gallery and museum openings. Most definitely, a spiritual ancestor of artloversnewyork.com, in the days before the wide world web, GALLERYBEAT provided a slapstick, but telling look at a multi-million dollar crap game that generally takes itself way too seriously.

H-O and his co-director, Tom Donahue, establish his character by drawing on absolutely great archival footage from the GALLERYBEAT era and we see him interacting with a virtual Who’s Who of the art world, from stars like Brice Marden and Julian Schnabel (who throws an enjoyable snit on camera about the stupidity of the GALLERYBEAT hosts) and a slew of up and comers who have since gone on to fame and fortune, like Tracey Emin and Spencer Tunick. Then, he meets Cindy Sherman.

I would warrant that even if you are not into art world doings, you have heard the name, Cindy Sherman. An artist with a singular vision, she is her own muse. Over the years, she has submerged her own persona and made herself anew hundreds of times, photographing herself heavily made up and costumed as iconic movie stars like Marilyn, suburban housewives, trailer trash, post punk waifs, clowns, even male characters. Her body of work is widely collected and individual prints have sold for millions.

We watch Paul H-O and Cindy meet cute at the opening of one of her shows in the early 90’s. The sweetest part of the picture is watching sparks between them ignite as the notoriously private artist allows him to visit her studio and he woos her over a series of interviews. Eventually, they move in together and for a while they have a groovy thing going. He teaches her how to surf; she gives him entry to the epicenter of the art world. Soon, they meet each other’s families and are flying off to London and L.A. for Cindy’s openings, with Paul H-O compulsively videotaping every step of the way.

In addition to this intimate footage, Paul H-O charts the course of their affair through interviews with an incredible parade of witnesses and friends of the couple, like actresses Molly Ringwald, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Carol Kane, and art world comrades such as Robert Longo, Eli Broad, Roberta Smith, Ingrid Sischy and Eric Fischl, to name just a few.

Cindy gets ever richer and more famous. Paul gets in a fight with his landlord and goes bankrupt. GALLERYBEAT comes to an end and he can’t get a new project off the ground. His full time job becomes escorting Cindy around the world and he starts to feel pretty sorry for himself. The breaking point for him comes when they attend a glitzy function and he is placed rooms away from his significant other at a table with a place card reading, “GUEST OF CINDY SHERMAN.”

To her credit, Sherman comes off as about the most supportive mate in the world. She even encourages him to make a film exploring his confusion, but eventually she has had enough and Paul is history.

To his credit, despite acting tiresome and pathetic for a while, Paul H-O regains his sense of humor and uses this film to try to search for the meaning of it all. In one wonderful sequence, he calls into his favorite radio talk show and earnestly discusses his failed relationship with the two female hosts. In the eyes of some, he hit the big time, “caught the biggest wave of his life”, as one observer puts it, but blew it.

And this to me is what really resonates about GUEST OF CINDY SHERMAN.
Beyond the phalanx of famous and near famous faces, beyond my unease about the exploitation of a person who has gone out of her way to conceal her identity, then let herself go to fall in love with a guy who lives on camera, beyond the ironic take on the reality show our lives have become, is it’s naked examination of that delicate balance of power between male and female.

I have a number of friends who are in couples where the woman is the main breadwinner. Many of them claim to feel just fine about it – no problem. And it should be fine, but judging by the comments in this fascinating film from the lesser-known halves of power couples like Elton John and David Furnish, and Molly Ringwald and Panio Gianopoulos, and from the tale of Paul H-O, himself, I’d say, we’ve come a long way, Baby, but we still have a long way to go.

check out: ‘Guest of Cindy Sherman’/official website

For show times - Sunday, April 27th - Saturday, May 7th 2008,
see:
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

Sometimes two films come your way at the same time, totally unrelated and yet drawn together by synchronicity, they inform and amplify each other in some way. Such is the case with FROZEN RIVER, which I saw as part of the NEW DIRECTORS, NEW FILMS series, and THE VISITOR.

Both stories revolve around the desperate plight of illegal immigrants in America, but there’s nothing didactic about either one. Both take place in New York, one - way upstate, the other - right here in the Big Apple. Both star character actors who have always stood out from the crowd, but have never gotten the chance to shine center stage. Melissa Leo and Richard Jenkins grab their moment with both hands and deliver exceptionally memorable performances.

FROZEN RIVER, written and directed by first time feature director Courtney Hunt won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. It is a tense slice of life from the tough day-to-day existence of trailer mom, Ray Eddy. Hunt often puts her confidence in a picture to tell the story, since the people in this world are not big gabbers. She starts in the stark bitter cold morning, panning slowly from Ray’s tattooed toe up to her ravaged face. The combination of her clothing, her hopeless expression and the resigned tears she wipes away, tell you a lot right off. Entering the dumpy trailer nearby and seeing her interact with her sweet little boy, then straining to communicate with the smart teenage son (a fine performance by Charley McDermott) from whom she can no longer hide how deeply messed up things are, you’ve got the whole picture. Ray is a mother she wolf trapped in a hole of abject poverty in one of the richest nations in the world.

When her husband, a compulsive gambler, takes their nest egg and splits for Atlantic City just before Christmas, Ray is left broke. She has a shit job that pays just enough to feed her sons Tang and popcorn around the clock and she is reduced to scrounging up quarters to buy gas. Some of the best moments are tiny ones: Ray with a bunch of coins in her hand requesting $2.74 in gas, then finding a $5 bill at the bottom of her purse and triumphantly announcing, Make that $7.74!”

It’s while searching for her husband at the Bingo game the Mohawk Indian tribe runs on the nearby rez, that she meets up with Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham’s impassive eyes and beautiful face make for some very compelling close ups), a young Native American who is trying to steal her car.

Hunt uses equally economical brushstrokes to establish that Lila is estranged from her own people and views the white citizens who share the town as an alien tribe. Turns out Lila is making money by smuggling illegal immigrants over the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canada to N.Y. Ray wants in on the money and these two desperados team up to carry even more desperate people to the U.S. in the trunk of Ray’s car, delivering them to a motel where they will perhaps work as slave labor.

Ray and Lila, who previously wouldn’t have given each other the time of day, begin to learn the details of each other’s lives while crossing again and again with Chinese and Pakistani refugees squeezed in the trunk. If they don’t get caught and jailed by the border police and the icy river doesn’t crack and swallow them up, this could be their ticket to financial freedom. After coming through one near disaster of epic proportions, they begin to trust each other. Then comes another moment of reckoning.

Courtney Hunt makes you care about the place and the people who inhabit it – both the citizens marginalized by their own country and the foreigners taking such desperate measures to start their lives over here. This small story, so specific and yet completely universal, has the power to move film lovers around the globe. It opens nation wide in August - keep your eyes peeled for it.

see: FROZEN RIVER/OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Haaz Sleiman in Overture Films’ THE VISITOR (2008)

Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman in Overture Films’ THE VISITOR (2008)

THE VISITOR, which opens this Friday, takes place right here in NYC but presents a parallel world that most of us barely notice. It’s the world of people from the four corners of the earth here illegally, living and raising families, selling handmade goods on the street, playing music, driving gypsy cabs, and making New York City their home.

Our window into this world comes from a depressive professor, attending a conference at NYU and planning to use the Manhattan apartment he has barely visited since his wife died a few years ago.

Walter Vale arrives to find flowers in a vase on the piano and a beautiful African woman in the bathtub. Her Syrian boyfriend flies through the door seconds later and begins to pound on Walter who he thinks is an intruder. After everyone takes a deep breath, it emerges that they have been rented the apartment by a swindler. They prepare to clear out when the professor (played by perennial supporting actor, Richard Jenkins, who you will recognize as the deceased dad in Six Feet Under and from dozens of movie roles ) takes a leap of faith and declares there is room enough for all of them to stay. Jenkins is perfect as a sad sack doing his best to disappear into the shadows until this chance encounter cracks open his world.

This is the 2nd film from Tom McCarthy, whose debut, The Station Agent, made a splash a few years ago. That film was filled with quirky little asides from the main story and so is this one — a charming scene where Walter collects his mail and meets a gay neighbor who was once the little boy who took piano lessons from his wife exists as a showy moment for Richard Kind, but also points up Walter’s extreme isolation and lack of engagement with other people. Another aside features Zainab, the African woman, selling her jewelry in Soho to a well meaning but clueless woman (Deborah Rush) who starts gabbing about her trip to South Africa (even though Zainab is from Senegal, hundreds of miles away) and reducing all Africans to vacation fodder.

Tarek, the charming young Syrian musician (played by Lebanese actor, Haaz Sleiman in a star-making performance), who along with Zainab has been residing in Walter’s apartment, plays the drum professionally. Through a series of wonderfully understated scenes, Walter responds first to Tarek’s music, then to his ebullient personality. Tarek insists on thanking Walter for his kindness by teaching him how to drum, then invites him to see him perform at a small club in the village. The three roommates fall into a regular pattern of shared meals and conversation, which culminates with Tarek giving Walter his own drum and introducing him to the spontaneous drum circle that gathers in Central Park.

McCarthy very cleverly plays on the mistrust and paranoia that exist as a fact of life these days. I kept expecting lovely Tarek to reveal himself as an international sleeper cell agent, but that’s not where this movie is going. In a stroke of rotten luck, Tarek is picked up in a random subway sweep by undercover cops and disappears into a hell hole of bureaucracy. He is indefinitely detained and held for deportation.

Walter launches himself into the mission of saving his new friend with a passion he didn’t know he had. He helps keep Zanaib (who cannot visit Tarek, or she too will be picked up by immigration authorities) together, gets Tarek an immigration lawyer, and meets Tarek’s beautiful mother, a widow he develops a circumspect crush on.

It’s a muted happy end when a sad guy whose just been marking the days starts looking forward to waking up again, while two vibrant young New Yorkers have their joy temporarily extinguished. In between, they have made an unlikely, but one would hope not impossible, connection with someone they might pass on the subway but under most circumstances never talk to.

see: THE VISITOR/trailer

Both THE VISITOR and FROZEN RIVER nudge us to consider the whole world of human beings out there that aren’t so very different than us and remind us to open our eyes to the people right under our noses.

FROZEN RIVER opens nation wide August 1 - put it on your calendar.
THE VISITOR opens Friday - enjoy.

CHICAGO 10 (Playing at the SUNSHINE THEATER)

It’s hard to distance myself from personal memories of the late 1960’s and early 70’s and judge the new film, CHICAGO 10, entirely on it’s own merits. The film revisits the demonstrations in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Party Presidential Convention in 1968. Dubbed a “Festival of Life” by Yippee Party leader, Abbie Hoffman, one of the main organizers of the event, the gathering was meant to expose the self-congratulatory, politics-as-usual “festival of death” being held inside the Convention Hall and protest the expansion of the Vietnam War. The protest turned into a violent confrontation with Chicago’s police force as the world watched on TV. In the aftermath, Hoffman and seven other counterculture leaders were put on trial for conspiring to cross state lines and incite a riot.

I have mixed feelings about the film itself, but before I get to that, here’s a brief disclaimer: I used to babysit for Abbie & Anita Hoffman’s baby son, America. I thought they were both bright spirits and admired Abbie’s great sense of humor; thumb your nose at “the system” attitude and theatrical approach to political consciousness-raising in the USA. It was a very sad day when Abbie went underground and changed his name after a well-orchestrated cocaine bust by the feds and an even sadder one when he was found dead of a prescription drug overdose in 1989 at the age of 52.

Back in 1969 and 70, I was also working at WBAI, New York City’s underground radio station and I remember Abbie calling in virtually every night and updating Bob Fass and his listeners about what had happened that day in court at the Chicago Conspiracy trial. (Bob Fass happily is still broadcasting his legendary show, Radio Unnameable, on WBAI [99.5FM] Thursday nights at midnight.) One call I remember like yesterday was when Abbie told Bob that he had received a letter that day addressed simply: Abbie Hoffman: Chicago, Illinois. Bob said, “Well, you’re famous now Abbie.”
He was a real star.

Anyway, it’s great to see Abbie and Bob back together again, this time on the big screen, thanks to Brett Morgen, who sprinkles their phone conversations throughout CHICAGO 10. Like the terrific THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, (about the life and times of film producer, Robert Evans) Morgen’s first film, this movie takes a different approach to telling a true story. It intersperses standard documentary footage of the 5-day protest with a cartoon version of the surreal trial that followed. (Morgen counts the two defense attorneys, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, who were cited for contempt of court, in with the eight defendants to make the CHICAGO 10). Since cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom, Morgen got great actors (like Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Wright, and the late Roy Scheider who plays Judge Julius Hoffman) to give voice to actual sections of the trial transcript. It’s a pretty ingenious solution that brings a lot of energy to the proceedings. I found the rotoscoped animation jarring and ugly, but then again, the actual event wasn’t exactly a pretty picture.

The best part of the film experience for me was watching it with young activists and college students brought together by the Generation Engage, Campus Progress and takepart.com. The audience was clearly engaged by the sheer number of Yippees and hippies and lefties – old people and young - who traveled to Chicago to stand up against the status quo. They were alternately amused and horrified by the outrageous travesty of justice at the trial, which truly plays like a piece of theatre of the absurd, with Abbie and Jerry Rubin wearing their own judicial robes, blowing kisses to the jury, while Judge Julius Hoffman regularly forgets the defendants’ names and generally acts like a crazy old coot.

Seeing how attentive the audience genuinely was shook me out of the slough of complacency I have sunk into during the Bush League. Gradually I settled in and found myself also admiring the spirit and insolence of the merry pranksters, at first having fun “fighting the establishment” with their presence, then courageously holding their ground as they were confronted with tanks and tear gas and Billy clubs.

Hearing activists say things to television cameras like, “we are not all going to be good niggers. Young people are not going to stay uninvolved”, made me proud of “muh muh my generation.” I remember Walter Cronkite (truly the great white father of TV News anchors) remarking in disgust that the Democratic Convention was taking place in what could only be described as “a police state.” Forty years later, it is still a very powerful moment.

There are also many genuinely funny moments in this horror show—A youth worker answering the defense headquarters phone with a blithe “Conspiracy!” Abbie Hoffman responding to a question from a reporter about what he thinks of the trial with, “well, I’ve got a good seat.” Watching Defense Attorney William Kunstler patiently explaining to Judge Hoffman that witness Allen Ginsberg is trying to calm the courtroom by chanting “Ohm”, then hearing a local news reporter analyze the day’s events by describing how “the poet, Ginsberg, kept humming, “ Ummmmm,” is priceless. Morgen effectively connects the moment to present day concerns by playing songs by Eminem and The Beastie Boys over the demonstrators, rather than wallpapering the vintage footage with period music.

The film’s momentum grows in fits and starts until no one is laughing anymore by the time the sole black defendant, Bobby Seale, (who was reportedly in Chicago during the convention for only 2 hours!) is actually bound and gagged in court to prevent him from speaking in his own defense. Morgen ends the film with Bobby Seale addressing a post trial demo by saying to the crowd, “You don’t need a leader telling you what to do - you know what to do. Power to the People.”

This is the kind of history lesson high school kids don’t get and I believe they are the ones for whom Morgen (born in 1968) made this film. Judging by the response from my 21-year-old daughter (“Why didn’t they let the demonstrators sleep in the park?” and “I knew the Vietnam War was a bad thing and that people were against it but I never realized it was anything like that!”), I’d say CHICAGO 10 succeeds. It underlines that moment 40 years ago to illuminate the situation we find ourselves in today and may inspire the current generation to come together and make their move.

A CODA to the review:

After the lights came on, Kevin Powell who is planning to run for Congress, interviewed Morgen. The first question came from a young man who said he loved the film but wondered, “Where were all the women leaders?” He was so used to the presence of female comrades, it took a moment for him to comprehend that 1968 was pre- feminist revolution and women were still deep background.
Maybe progress is incremental but things do change, occasionally for the better. That was the most hopeful sign I saw all night.

view: the TRAILER

see: the official website

JAN ALBERT’S 10 BEST LIST FOR 2007

Last year was a tough time to escape from the real world at the movies. It seemed like everyone was holding their breath to see what additional harm the Bush Administration would do to our country and around the world, how many more human lives would be destroyed by the war in Iraq, how low the dollar would fall, how fast the climate would change, and many of those feelings of fear and dread - and our increasing estrangement from each other - seeped right onto celluloid.

Take NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the hit film by Joel & Ethan Coen, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Set in the iconic desert that has graced so many American films, there are no heroes to be found in this postmodern western. It’s just one vast wasteland of evil where life or death is determined by a coin toss. There’s no reasoning with the villain played by Jarvier Bardem - he’s just a killing machine that can’t be stopped. The sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) packs it in and quits because no one observes the traditional boundaries anymore. It’s every fucker for him (or her) self, chasing a suitcase of drug money, and he can’t make heads or tails of what he can do to hold the line.

Now, I recognize that there were some admirable elements in this cinematic story—including an anti-hero (a terrific breakthrough performance by Josh Brolin) we care to root for, brilliant cinematography, and a handful of incredibly suspenseful scenes (the dog chase, the coin toss in the convenience store, hiding the suitcase in the motel vent!).
It’s undeniably skillful, but pretty bleak stuff. I don’t know what I can take away from a film like this, that I don’t already know - and, don’t want to be reminded of. It may well be a work of art for our times but it didn’t rock my world, so it ain’t on the list!

HERE’S WHAT IS:

1/ INTO THE WILD, another film about a guy on the run, was my favorite film of the year and it didn’t even get nominated for an Academy Award. At least Hal Holbrook’s performance was recognized. You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to be moved by his isolated old man trying to persuade a young one to reconsider his decision to cut himself off from the rest of the world. This is at once a rousing on-the-road adventure, which shows off some of America’s greatest scenery, and a compelling coming of age story. Chris McCandless’s true-life journey of discovery becomes unforgettable because it’s cut so heartbreakingly short. Sean Penn wrote, directed, and also pulls great performances from Catherine Keener, Marsha Gay Harden, Bill Hurt, and especially Emile Hirsch as the hard-headed seeker who finds out what makes life worth living.

check out: INTO THE WILD - the official website - it’s excellent !!

2/ THE DIVING BELL & THE BUTTERFLY is an astonishing experience. Julian Schnabel is an inspired filmmaker. I don’t know why he wanted to get into the head of Jean-Dominique Bauby, (a 43 year-old French magazine editor who had the unlucky fate to awaken from a stroke fully cognizant of the world around him, but unable to move any part of his body except for one eyelid) but that’s what he does. Working from the book Bauby wrote, blinking out one letter at a time, Schnabel creates a visual tour de force – flashes of the world Bauby experiences moored to his hospital bed, scenes from the life he remembers, and flights into his imagination, where he continues to enjoy making love, driving fast cars, tossing his children into the air, and eating oysters. A toast to grabbing life by any means necessary - and the human desire to leave one’s mark in the sands of time.

check out: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY - the official website

LUST, CAUTION IMAGE/COURTESY: rottentomatoes.com

LUST, CAUTION IMAGE/COURTESY: rottentomatoes.com

LUST, CAUTION IMAGE/COURTESY: rottentomatoes.com

3/ LUST, CAUTION - a dark erotic spy thriller set in Shanghai during WWII, sucked me into a fascinating world I’d have no excuse to spy on otherwise. It was too long (like There Will Be Blood and most other films these days), but my eyes ate up the sumptuous costumes and period decor. As the idealistic college student turned undercover agent, Tang Wei seems to bare her very soul to Ang Lee’s camera and to her suspicious prey. Ditto: Tony Leung, playing a Chinese collaborator during the Japanese occupation. Now, here is a villain (unlike Jarvier Bardem’s cartoon baddie in No Country) who is uncomfortably believable as a human being. The lengthy cat and mouse game between these two is unbelievably tense as duplicitous seduction turns to passionate sex, and then becomes a painful love story. The sex scenes are uncompromisingly bold and hot (I think I learned a couple of new positions from this film), but did not feel exploitative of the female star to me. This might have been how SUSPICION would have looked like if Alfred Hitchcock had made it in 2007.

see: LUST, CAUTION - the trailer !!

4/ JUNO: A wonderful script meets the perfect actress (Ellen Page) and is nimbly shepherded to the screen by Jason Reitman (whose THANK YOU FOR SMOKING made my list in 2006). Diablo Cody’s dialogue is so fresh; a combination of email and cellphone slang turned into verbal jazz riffs. Ellen Page delivers it so confidently and embraces her character so completely, you really can’t imagine anyone else as the feisty teenager who gets pregnant her first time at bat. The adult actors surrounding Juno are all perfectly cast and Reitman is judicious in giving each one their moments to shine. It was such a rush to hear people talk smart to each other in this slip of a film, which emulates the very best romantic comedies of the past but perfectly embodies this moment in time.

see: the JUNO trailer

see: the JUNO - official website

5/ THE DARJEELING LIMITED// I’M NOT THERE:
I place these two films together smack in the middle of the list because while neither one succeeds completely, I really admire the strong vision of Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes. Much of what they got up on the screen is inspired and uncompromising, full of life, and unlike anything else out there. They deserve a shout out!

Wes Anderson has been continually criticized being too precious for his own good – “Mr. Style over Substance.”
Now, it’s true, a tight story is not his strongest point, but this saga of three estranged brothers trying to re-bond on a train trip through India works pretty well. It’s a road movie with style to spare (the Louis Vuitton suitcases the brothers haul across the globe even get a special credit!) but the film is about something more than production design. I came away thinking about the importance of trying to make peace and maintain family connections, for better or worse. There’s a divine short film (Hotel Chevalier) about one of the brothers and his difficult romance that precedes the big show but stands on its own as a marvelous divertissement.
Anderson’s stock company of players, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Angelica Huston, are all on board; joined this time by Adrien Brody and Bill Murray, who, in a great recurring bit, fails to make the train! There’s a tourist’s sense of wonder at the visual treats they discover, and a sense of humor that tips it’s hat to Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and the Beatles, as the brothers bicker their way across India. But then, there’s a moment when they set aside slapstick to stand together and support a small town through a tragedy that sticks with you in an entirely different way.

see: THE DARJEELING - official website & trailer

HEATH LEDGER as BOB DYLAN-PHOTO/COURTESY:ctvdigital.com

Todd Haynes has always been accused of being an inscrutable genius. This film meditation on the role Bob Dylan has played in public and in private is inscrutable but nothing short of epic. You get kind of lost in it but then tune back in. I do think his gimmick of having six different actors play Dylan is brilliant. You can tell Haynes has studied all of Dylan’s biographies, press conferences and concert films dozens of times searching for clues to the muse. All the touchstone moments are imagined in this film; Bob being booed for going electric, his refusal to be anointed as a prophet, mocking the press at work trying to discern “the meaning of it all”, Dylan in his “Lay Lady Lay” Woodstock days, and, as the man who finds his Lord.

Heath Ledger plays Dylan as a failed husband in some searing scenes from a marriage with the wonderful Charlotte Gainsbourg. The deep sense of sadness he communicates couldn’t be more affecting. In retrospect, one can’t help but wonder how Dylan was able to save his soul in the constant spotlight that burned out this beautiful young star way too soon.

check out the: I’M NOT THERE website !! - 2 trailers !!

6/ GONE BABY GONE: MICHAEL CLAYTON got all the attention, but I loved this melancholy little modern noir and the moral dilemma it dumps in the lap of the most believable private detective to grace film in ages. Casey Affleck holds the screen in the central role up against some real scenery chewers, like Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman. Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard did a very good job of adapting Dennis Lehane’s sordid case of a missing child. A real feeling for South Boston and the characters who live there (“the people who started out in the cracks and then fell through”) permeates the film. It’s a fine directorial debut for Ben Affleck; and Amy Ryan deserves to win the Oscar as the little girl’s druggie, careless mom. She’s a force of nature as a woman the audience disapproves of, but just cannot hate despite it all.

see: GONE BABY GONE official website with trailers !!

7/ THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Some of the best sections of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about the rise of a ruthless oil baron in early 20th century California are without dialogue altogether. Since there’s no chit chat, it forces you to slow down and examine the work at hand in a whole different way and the film pulls you in with the same kind of power that some of the greatest silent films (like Napoleon and Sunrise) exhibit. Watching the sheer determination it takes to violate the earth with manual tools, to drop deep down into a mine and set explosives, to risk the high probability of injury and the long odds of actually making a strike, tells us a lot about Daniel Day Lewis’s character before he ever speaks. Later, watching the expression on his face as he swims blissfully in the ocean, then gradually begins to glance at his trusted partner with the growing suspicion that he is being played for a fool, is a towering moment of acting that took my breath away.

Although Anderson pays direct homage to Citizen Kane in the cataclysmic final scenes, I think There Will be Blood is a work of art that will stand the test of time on it’s own merits. If you need any reminder of where the foundation of greed that supports our society sprang from, just watch as Daniel Plainview’s ambitious pioneer spirit twists into an avaricious grab for land that betrays the innocent and emasculates any competitor trying to succeed on the same playing field. Why, I guess he’s as much of a destroyer as Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men (just one that I can access slightly better). Man, it’s downright poetic when Plainview’s little son, the one person on earth he shows his soft side to and wants to share it all with, is deafened in a oil rig explosion and they can no longer communicate. Your heart almost goes out to this monster.

see: THERE WILL BE BLOOD - website & trailers !!

VIGGO MORTENSEN in DAVID CRONENBERG’S EASTERN PROMISES/A FOCUS FEATURES RELEASE/PHOTO: PETER MOUNTAIN/COURTESY: STARPULSE

8/ EASTERN PROMISES- was an immensely satisfying movie-going experience for me. Even though the divide between the good guys and bad guys is blurred, righteousness ultimately wins out after some heart-stopping action sequences. Now, this is the kind escape from reality I’m looking for! David Cronenberg’s body of work is way too bloody for many, but his films always make provocative points about our culture and he always gets great performances from his actors. This time is no exception. The uncommonly excellent script is about a doctor (a persuasive Naomi Watts) who tries and fails to save the life of a young Russian woman who gives birth in the E.R. The dead patient’s diary opens up a sordid world of illegal immigrants promised good jobs, then enslaved as sex workers in a foreign country where they can’t even speak the language. The great Armin Mueller Stahl is truly terrifying as the Russian mob boss masquerading as a “kindly” restaurant owner who offers Watts borsht while plotting her murder. Vincent Cassel is just terrific as his screwloose son, and then there’s Viggo Mortensen as the mysterious mob driver who marches to his own drummer. SIGH! From the hippie guy who gives Diane Lane a summer to remember in A Walk on the Moon to Aragon, the mythic hero in The Lord of The Rings, to the guy in A History of Violence, trying to rub out the past, Viggo just gets better and better. For me, the character he creates in Eastern Promises is the single greatest performance of the year. And the greatest thing about it is that you can’t even catch him acting. He is riveting as a smooth Russian criminal who isn’t fazed by cutting off a dead enemy’s fingertips and fights like a naked animal when he’s cornered with switchblades in a steam bath. He will be working again with Cronenberg in the screen adaptation of The Road and playing Edgar Allen Poe soon. I can’t wait.

check out: the EASTERN PROMISES official website with trailer

FROM LEFT: KAL PENN, IRRFAN KHAN, SAHIRA NAIR and TABU in THE NAMESAKE.
PHOTO CREDIT: MIRA NAIR/COURTESY:FOX SEARCHLIGHT

FROM LEFT: TABU, KAL PENN and JACINDA BARRETT in THE NAMESAKE.
PHOTO CREDIT:ABBOT GENSER/COURTESY: FOX SEARCHLIGHT

9/ THE NAMESAKE: Long novels that follow a family’s fortunes are the stock and trade of great literature. Movies: not so much. There are countless examples of Hollywood buying a beloved book (The Kite Runner comes to mind) and trying to condense and capture it’s magic in the most well-meaning manner.

Director Mira Nair’s elliptical film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s bestseller stands out because it succeeds so gracefully where so many have missed the boat. The film follows a young man who marries a girl his parents have chosen for him in Calcutta and brings her to Queens, New York. A son and a daughter are born to the Gangulis and grow up living the American dream in the suburbs. They become adults who disappoint their parents and reject their values by taking up with white lovers, getting divorced, etc. Grandparents, then parents die, and before you know it, 40 years have passed. The acting is as subtle as the storytelling (and the cinematography by the masterful Frederick Elmes). I felt almost privileged to look on as a slow regard and enduring love builds between Ashima (Tabu) and Ashoke (Irrfan Khan). Kal Penn (1/2 of the Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle team) does nice work as “the namesake” who doesn’t find out until almost the end why his father called him Gogol.

see: the trailer on the THE NAMESAKE website

JEAN-LOUIS COULLOC’H as OLIVER PARKIN in LADY CHATTERLEY/COURTESY: KINO

MARINA HANDS as LADY CHATTERLEY/COURTESY: KINO

JEAN-LOUIS COULLOC’H and MARINA HANDS in LADY CHATTERLEY/COURTESY: KINO

10/ LADY CHATTERLEY: It’s their love of nature that brings two lonely people from different classes together. Pascale Ferran’s adaptation of the second and lesser-known version of D.H. Lawrence’s once scandalous tale of sexual awakening is beautiful. An aristocratic lady whose husband has been paralyzed in the war seeks what stimulation and release she can find by taking long walks and collecting flowers. Passing through the gate that separates their estate from the forest beyond leads her to Parkin, the rough, almost monosyllabic gameskeeper, who becomes her soul mate. Almost three hours long (with subtitles!), you will either fall asleep or surrender to the experience! Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coullo’ch give such brave performances. As the seasons change, flowers bloom, snow blankets the ground, and they reveal themselves in the kind of relationship most men and women just dream about.

check out: the LADY CHATTERLEY website with trailer

THE BEST OF THE REST:

11/ The Bourne Ultimatum: Who doesn’t love a great chase scene? And, it’s quite an achievement to make the 3rd installment in a series as action-packed as the first two. Matt Damon is a seriously underrated actor who brings great intensity and a wounded humanity to this guy who doesn’t know who or what exactly he is.

12/ 3:10 to Yuma: an absolutely swell throwback to the classic western where the good guy triumphs after having his ass kicked. The whole cast looks like they are having a blast. It’s pure joy seeing two of the best, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, square off. Ben Foster was robbed of a best supporting actor nomination. That dude was one scary sidekick!

13/ Talk about cutting to the chase! Consider: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. This sad little robbery gone wrong proceeds at warp speed under the able direction of Sidney Lumet. The script by Kelly Masterson is a puzzle, which obscures the big picture by starting and stopping the action to consider each piece from a different character’s POV. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the most valuable player of 2007. He is brilliant here, in Charlie Wilson’s War, and The Savages. What a showoff!

14/ Two Days in Paris: She acts, she writes music and scripts, she directs: I for one, didn’t find the critical comparisons of Julie Delphy to early Woody Allen grandiose. I laughed and laughed at this weird little comedy about a woman who drags her boyfriend (played by the hysterically caustic Adam Goldberg, Delphy’s real life former B.F.) home to meet the parents in Paris, where they run into her numerous previous lovers wherever they go.

15. Persepolis: Another feisty female coming of age story - this one set in Iran after the Shah’s overthrow. Marjane Satrapi (with Vincent Paronnaud) turns her comic book memoir into a beautifully animated film journey. Do yourself a favor and don’t miss it

16/ Atonement: I am a complete sucker for historic British love stories set in sweeping cinemascope landscapes with impeccable production design. I loved the first section - Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are very well matched and that is one divalicious green gown. Found the second section very frustrating despite the brilliant “no cuts ma” camera move across the battlefront. I just didn’t like the woman that bad little girl became, and the lovers are separated for soooooo long. Admired the short and sweet 3rd part with Vanessa Redgrave.

17/ Away From Her: Impressive directorial debut and literary adaptation by actress Sarah Polley. Loved the visual metaphor of the cross-country ski tracks in the snow. Thought Gordon Pinsent was every bit as good as Julie Christie in the less showy role of a husband whose loved one is losing her mind but seems to remember all of his missteps perfectly! Olympia Dukakis was also superb as a woman who wants her share of the action before it’s too late.

18/ Blade Runner 25th Anniversary re-release: I know it seems like this 1982 cult film is re-released or recut by director Ridley Scott every two years, but this year’s model, seen on the big screen at the Ziegfield, was simply amazing. Every time you see it (and my husband has required me to see it about 11 times) you notice or understand something else about this terse, dense evocation of the near future. Shots have been fixed, wires digitally removed, and what has always been a film of uncommon beauty has been lovingly enhanced. To think this visual masterpiece was made before all these CG tricks existed is fantastic. The DVD package contains every version of the film ever made and features an incredible documentary, which contains deleted scenes, screen tests by the actors who got the roles, as well as those who didn’t, interviews with all the major players, the screenwriters, production designers, et al.
One detail I found fascinating was that the writer’s strike that was going on back then delayed the start of shooting and gave Scott and his team of visual futurists a few extra months to bring their iconic vision to life.
They didn’t know it at the time, but looking back it becomes obvious that everyone connected with Blade Runner was giving their very best. Their vision of what lies ahead has never been surpassed by the dozens and dozens of films it influenced and all the special effects that have come since.
But what also makes it such a timeless gem is the score by Vangelis (one of the all-time greatest), a perfect cast (yes, even Sean Young), and THE STORY, STUPID! What does it mean to be human? Hampton Fancher and David Peoples turned Philip K. Dick’s book, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” into a screenplay that still pricks the conscience and touches the heart.

19/ Tekonkinkreet: Like Blade Runner, Michael Arias’s absolutely mesmerizing animated feature (a stunning blend of computer graphics and hand drawn character and background work) imagines the immediate future. It’s about two Japanese street kids surviving harsh changes in their world with guts and imagination. It came and went in America without notice. Catch up with it soon.

20/ Forever: Heddy Honingmann’s documentary film set in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is about how the dead continue to inspire the living. It’s an inspiration.

GONE BABY GONE is a darkly entertaining ride into the bowels of the human psyche that will confound you to declare who the good guys and bad guys are at the finish line.

Been a while since a film made me feel like picking up a book, but GONE BABY GONE is a great adaptation of the terse crime thrillers I used to devour like candy. It is a hardboiled but poetic page-turner of a movie.

Ben Affleck’s directorial debut (he also co-wrote the script with Aaron Stockard based on Dennis Lehane’s novel) is set in his old stomping grounds - South Boston - and is an ode to “the people who started out in the cracks and then fell through.” The neighborhood and its residents run deep in his blood and Affleck revels in the faces and places where a little girl has gone missing and the press and the police are trying to outdo each other in a frenzy of self-righteous fury. Every location is crammed with detail and extras cast right off the streets and bar stools of Dorchester, which keeps your eyes wide open.

To make it even more personal, Affleck bet his whole hand and cast his little brother, Casey Affleck, in the lead as Patrick Kenzie, a private detective brought onto the case with his partner/lover Angie Gennaro by the child’s aunt. Slight of stature, but not of ability, Casey Affleck has quietly (the opposite of Ben’s acting career!) been making his name as a character actor in flicks like Oceans Eleven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. As the star of GONE BABY GONE, Casey Affleck makes you root for this baby-faced but smart, tough, sensitive, and stubborn PI, refusing to give up even when it becomes obvious that the truth is rotten to the core and threatens to tear his own life apart.

Affleck steps up to the front of the screen here against some real star power like Ed Harris (scarily great as a very tightly wound cop) and Morgan Freeman and doesn’t let them steal the scene.
He also holds his own with a score of brilliant character actors he comes across in the course of the investigation—most notably Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, and Edi Gathegi.

Amy Ryan (who had a recurring role on the TV series, THE WIRE and is also featured as Ethan Hawke’s former wife in Sidney Lumet’s BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD this season) does steal her share of scenes! She gives a star-making performance as the little girl’s druggie, careless mom. Ryan is a force of nature as a woman the audience may disapprove of but cannot just hate despite it all. She makes her a person of spunk and humor, as well as fear and guilt. So far for me, Amy Ryan and Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild) are the ones to beat for best supporting actress and actor of 2007.

Ben Affleck doesn’t yet have the fluid chops to slay the audience with the action sequences, but when he sticks to advancing the story through Kenzie and Gennaro’s (Michelle Monaghan) facing off against the many colorful characters, he’s on solid ground. I’ve seen a lot of fine films lately; Michael Clayton, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Darjeeling Express and I must say GONE BABY GONE is the one I cannot shake. Go see it so Hollywood brings more of Patrick and Angela’s series of adventures to the screen and Ben Affleck gets to direct another movie real soon.

P.S. Now that I am deep into Dennis Lehane’s novel, I can see what a great job Ben Affleck did of capturing its essence. Here’s one great passage that had me nodding my head in admiration:

“ When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people - relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print - create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce, shared dedication to a task.
But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising from the floorboards, shouting to you from the corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. It’s a silence that’s different from the ones at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.
The silence of the dead says goodbye. The silence of a missing child says, Find me.”
From GONE BABY GONE by Dennis Lehane. Copyright 1998, Harpers paperback, pg. 24.

CHECK !! OUT MORE STILL PHOTOS & THE TRAILER, AMONG OTHER GREAT OFFERINGS - ON THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
www.gonebabygone-themovie.com

INTO THE WILD/opens FRIDAY, SEPT 21/2007

Every once in a rare while you connect with a film in a profound way. INTO THE WILD, written and directed by Sean Penn, hit me right between the eyes.

It’s a highly compressed coming of age story - a true one, based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, about a kid who graduates college with honors, then out of the blue, completely rejects his family’s and society’s offerings, donates his life savings to charity, and leaves home without a word. He hits the road with the ultimate goal of disappearing into the wild to “try to get his soul free” (as Joni Mitchell put it).

Chris McCandless kept a journal of his experiences along the way - the books he read, the day jobs he held, the people he met, the plants he ate, and they provided the trail for Krakauer to retrace. Penn originally tried to make this film a decade ago, shortly after the book came out. He met with the family a number of times to seek permission to film their son’s story. The day of the final negotiation he got a call from Chris’s mother. She said she had had a dream that she interpreted as meaning her son did not want a film made about his life and death. Penn replied that if he didn’t believe in dreams he wouldn’t be making movies, but if they ever changed their minds - “In a week, 8 months, or even 10 years, to please call me because I will never stop wanting to make this movie.” Ten years later, they called.

The wait was worth it. This is the best film Sean Penn has ever made. I’m not quite sure why it hit me so hard – I was never interested enough in the story to read the book — but there were several times tears came to my eyes and to my utter amazement, I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop crying. (After all the movies I’ve seen over the past 30 years, I remain always hopeful but have become a fairly hard-hearted viewer!)

Penn draws piercing performances from everyone in his superb cast - Catherine Keener, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Vince Vaughan, Kristen Stewart, Hal Holbrook, and Emile Hirsch all bring their best game and Penn has given each one of them moments that stick in my mind. But I think his greatest achievement here is to involve you in a story with an end that so many people already know and to deliver a tension-filled experience that keeps you wondering what will happen next and even has moments of humor.
The storytelling, both visually and editorially, is riveting; going back and forth to Chris’s childhood at home and his adventures enroute to the end of the road in the Alaska wilderness. In addition to the stark beauty of the American landscape, Penn references the journal of Alexander Supertramp (as Chris renamed himself) and the post cards he sent new friends he made. Seeing his handwriting up on the screen is a very effective device for putting us right inside his head.

Penn is also to be commended for approaching human frailties and moments of kindness with drama, but also real subtlety. None of the characters are completely black or white. We feel for the McCandless parents Chris rejected so completely. While their physical fights and the war of words they carried on throughout his childhood probably propelled him to avoid and mistrust human relationships whenever possible, we see that they are only human, not bad people per se. William Hurt (playing Chris’s father) has a wordless scene towards the end, which is absolutely devastating.

Chris himself is no saint. In the beginning, he is portrayed as a kind of an arrogant kid, a zealot who listens to no one and believes he knows it all before he’s even experienced life. We see him gradually responding to the coworkers and fellow travelers he meets on the way to Alaska — a joyful big brother figure, a young girl who worships him, a hippie couple who adopt him for a time, and even a substitute grandfather (simply a beautiful performance by Hal Holbrook).

But the film rests squarely on the shoulders of Emile Hirsch who rises to the occasion, climbs the mountain and carries this film. He made me come to care for this foolhardy, wounded boy who put his faith and found his greatest joy in the beauty and harsh force of nature. As he tests himself against primal forces (ultimately more unforgiving and unpredictable than us human beings), experiencing the agony and ecstasy of the path he’s chosen, he grows and cracks open. Chris’s heartbreaking innocence and purity of character, his great quest, and the heartbreaking fact that he realized how much we need each other so late in the game moved me deeply.

That’s a revelation many of us live a lot longer without ever reaching. Bravo Sean Penn for turning a short but full life into a great film with not a minute wasted.

see: the official website

FOREVER at the Film Forum until Sept 25th 2007
ROUBEN MAMOULIAN FESTIVAL ends Sept 18th
JOHN TURTURRO’S ROMANCE & CIGARETTES - ongoing

FOREVER IS A FILM EVERY ARTIST SHOULD SEE.

As a 20-year old on my first trip to Paris, I made the pilgrimage to Pere Lachaise to place a rose on the grave of one of my heroes, the French author, Colette, so I was kind of interested in traveling down to the Film Forum to see FOREVER. It was a wonderful surprise.

Heddy Honigmann has turned what could have been a straightforward documentary about the score of celebrities buried at this famous cemetery (final resting place for everyone from Chopin to Jim Morrison) into a poetic testament to the power of art to reach out and inspire people centuries after its creation.

Honigmann keeps her distance; first watching the kinds of people who come from around the world to pay their respects to the likes of Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, screen pioneer Georges Meliies, Maria Callas, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. She lingers on a ladybug creeping up a beautifully carved mausoleum, a pen left on a novelist’s grave (“so he can carry on writing in the next world,” the caretaker figures), acclimating us to the rhythm of family members watering plants with Evian bottles and bon jouring the other regulars. Gradually, she begins to approach individuals who catch her eye and it becomes apparent that they share a passionate connection with those laid to rest here, whether they actually knew them personally or not.

We meet Yoshino Kimura, a young pianist about to make her debut who waits her turn for a moment alone with Chopin. By the end of the film we know surely that the great composer has touched her soul, as she delivers an exquisite performance of one of his Nocturnes. Another frequent visitor explains the influence Modigliani’s moody portraits have had on his own expression of the human spirit. Turns out he is an artist of a whole different sort; an embalmer. We observe him apply his artistry to the face of a beautiful young woman as he speaks eloquently about the relationship between the living and the dead.

An Iranian cab driver tries to stays in touch with his roots by spending time with his countryman, novelist, Sadgh Hedayat, who is buried at Pere Lachaise. He hesitantly quotes from the author’s book, ‘The Blind Owl’, and says he believes he would understand why he left home. Two blind film buffs visit the graves of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret (buried side by side), then go home to rewatch Diabolique with great relish.

Then, there’s the young Asian man struggling to convey in English all that ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ has meant to him. Honigmann says he should just tell her in his own language. He unleashes a torrent of words, which the filmmaker elects to leave untranslated, allowing the guy’s urgent expression to say it all. Another quirky but elegant choice the director makes is to never directly tour Jim Morrison’s gravesite. We do see the hoards troop by as a Frenchwoman visiting her husband’s grave comments that “we will never be lonely” with The Doors front man as a close neighbor. FOREVER contains the discovery of an unknown folksinger and the revelation of an epic love story ended by a bee sting. This beautiful film - as much about the living as it is about the dead - will be touching people long after we are gone.

see the trailer:http://www.filmforum.org/films/forevertrailer.html

FREDRIC MARCH & ANNA STEN in We Live Again, 1934, ROUBEN MAMOULIAN: THE GOLDEN AGE Of BROADWAY & HOLLYWOOD/FILM FORUM SEPT 7-18, 2007. (12 DAY FESTIVAL)

ROUBEN MAMOULIAN - 12 DAY FESTIVAL - SEPT 7-18, 2007 - FILM FORUM

You may just as well take up residence at the Film Forum and check out the ROUBEN MAMOULIAN FESTIVAL in Theater One and John Turturro’s baroque musical, ROMANCE & CIGARETTES in Theater Two. Mamoulian was an extremely stylish and elegant director. He made just 16 films, most of them pure movie ecstasy, so try to see them all! There were musicals with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald (Love Me Tonight), one of Greta Garbo’s most iconic dramas (Queen Christina), a horror classic (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), which won Frederic March his Oscar), and the very first Technicolor classic (Becky Sharp). He worked with Martha Graham, George Gershwin and Alfred Lunt in the theater before going Hollywood. He believed in achieving his vision as a director not by behaving as a tyrant but by “winning them over with love, so the work becomes a romance.” What actor could resist that?

ROUBEN MAMOULIAN FESTIVAL - SCHEDULE

image: POSTER/ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

JAMES GANDOLFINI in ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

JOHN TURTURRO’S: ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

John Turturro’s musical, ROMANCE & CIGARETTES, is kind of out there, but in a good way. Seems like the whole neighborhood’s in on the conquest wrecking Nick Murder’s marriage, with dancing firemen putting out the blaze in the heart of the Queens construction worker (played by a soulful James Gandolfini), as he lip synchs to “Lonely is the man without love.” There are about a dozen full scale production numbers done to classic songs, in virtually every genre from gospel to rock, bolstered by inventive and very amusing choreography by Tricia Brouk.

Bobby Carnavale, Christopher Walken, Aida Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Eddie Izzard all have molto buono moments, but no one is fouler-mouthed or more wild and wanton than the utterly fabulous Kate Winslett, who looks like she’s having a blast playing a slutty temptress in a red dress with an over the top Cockney accent. Her post coital dance is worth the price of admission alone. That girl may be British but she definitely knows how to shake her booty!

A complete success? No, but, quite a spectacle. Personally, I think this flick would definitely loosen things up on a first date.

see the trailer: ROMANCE & CIGARETTES

www.filmforum.org

It’s the end of summer and if you’re ready for something a little more challenging than TRANSFORMERS, here are two startling new films from Brazil that will take your mind off how f-ed up our nation is.

IMAGES: COURTESY MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET)

MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET) Jason Kohn’s first film won the Grand Jury documentary prize at Sundance this year. It takes you far from the beautiful beaches of Rio and exotic revelry of Carnival depicted in tourist ads and plunges you into the fear and horror that has come to define daily life in Brazil’s largest city. Sao Paulo is a city (the third largest in the world) where the least fortunate citizens regularly emerge from the slums to exact revenge on the corrupt politicians and wealthy industrialists who make their fortunes off the backs of the poor by kidnapping their wives and children and demanding enormous ransoms for their return. As the film’s tag line puts it: “When the rich steal from the poor the poor steal the rich.”
Kohn and his crew spent 5 years assembling an amazing cast of characters to depict Sao Paolo’s surreal food chain: the former head of the nation’s Senate who has been convicted of stealing millions from a government program meant to improve life in Brazil’s most remote Amazon villages but was nonetheless reelected by those districts. The wealthy manager of an industrial frog farm set up to launder the money stolen from the government program. A kidnapper who supports his family of 10 by abducting rich teenagers and cutting off their ears to urge their parents to pay ransom demands… a plastic surgeon that has become famous for inventing a cosmetic approach to replace the ears of kidnap victims…. A successful businessman who lives in constant fear of being kidnapped and so has spent vast sums to armor his bulletproof car and learn defensive driving techniques – a big business sparked into life to respond to the kidnap culture, along with the sale of private helicopters so the super rich can take off from the roofs of their penthouses and avoid street traffic, and microchipping, which enables tracking in the advent of a kidnapping.

Most unforgettable is the young woman nabbed outside a nightclub who describes how a young kidnapper practically passed out while cutting through the cartilage of her ear and how Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds, was playing on TV while they performed this butchery. That night, she dreamed that birds were picking at her ear. YIKES! I dare Wes Craven to equal that horror scene or the image of small kids playing in the slums, acting out kidnappings and stick-ups, instead of playing soccer.

Jason Kohn is a protégée of Errol Morris, whose imaginative touch has stretched the boundary of documentary filmmaking. Kohn has a gift for intrepid reporting, ambush tactics (like a sly young Mike Wallace!) when necessary, and vivid imagery. If the scenes of frog farm produce digesting each other to symbolize the revolting way human beings feed off each other are a trifle heavy handed, you won’t be forgetting them anytime soon either.

Manda Bala, which opens Friday, August 17th at The Angelica Theater, got me so interested in life in Brazil, that I went over to the Film Forum to check out LOVE FOR SALE, a haunting drama about a vibrant young woman who heads for Sao Paulo to seek her fortune, then slinks back to Iguatu, the desert wasteland that is her hometown.

HERMILDA GUEDES as Hermila (foreground) and GEORGINA CASTRO (background) as her friend Georgina, as seen in LOVE FOR SALE.
PHOTO CREDIT: STRAND RELEASING

I didn’t see Karim Ainouz’s first film, Madame Sata, which Film Forum premiered in 2003, but if there’s any justice in this world, this film will definitely launch the career of a major new director. With a complete economy of images and a minimum of dialogue, we get the whole picture within the first few frames. We meet Hermila in a home movie, carefree, radiantly happy, and in love. Then we cut to a close up of the still beautiful but somewhat drawn girl bumping along a dusty road on a crowded bus. The camera slides over to reveal a baby in her lap.

Hermila’s Aunt Maria and grandmother take her and her infant son in and a temporary situation becomes permanent after several weeks of public humiliation as the whole town watches her calling again and again from the only public phone and waiting in vain at the gas station for her 20-year-old husband to join her from Sao Paulo.

Using a combination of non professionals and theater actors in the main roles, Ainouz and his wonderful cinematographer, Walter Carvalho, capture the details of life in “nowheresville Northeastern Brazil” perfectly—Hermila leaning against the open fridge at her granny’s house to cool off, sucking on a piece of ice. The truck stop, the open air market, the sidewalk restaurant, the guys blowing up dust on the main drag with their scooters, and the disco. The camera loves Hermila Guedes, the beautiful lead actress, who is deeply affecting as she grimly washes cars, pumps gas, cleans motel rooms and goes back to the kind but passive loser she thought she had left behind as ancient history. We watch her growing more wan and bitterer everyday until she challenges her life sentence and plots her escape from Iguatu with an enterprising plan that shocks the whole town.

I loved LOVE FOR SALE. Go see it. You will too.

www.angelikafilmcenter.com

www.filmforum.org

TEKKONKINKREET :

More than 10 years ago, Michael Arias read Taiyo Matsumoto’s cult-classic graphic novel, ‘Tekkonkinkreet’. Ever since, he’s dreamed of bringing it to life on the screen. Tekkonkinkreet is a play on the Japanese words for concrete, iron & muscle and the title is meant to symbolize the destructive power those elements have on the world of the imagination. This time, the world of imagination definitely triumphs. After 40 months in production at Tokyo’s Studio 4˚C, Arias (who has lived in Japan for over 15 years), has created a beautiful story that combines cutting edge computer generated imagery with classic hand drawn character animation. It’s an intensely ambitious work of art that will feed your soul.

We are immediately plunged into a dizzying chase through “Treasure Town”, a futuristic city as densely imagined as (and deeply influenced by) anything in Blade Runner. We catch wonderful details on the smallest of street signs, even ashtrays, as two street kids, named Kuro (”Black”) and Shiro (”White”), lead a gang of boys trying to muscle in on their turf on a merry chase through underground tunnels and up into the air.

Kuro and Shiro live in an abandoned car and look out for each other as brothers. The only adults in their world are Yazuka gangsters who accept them as part of the firmament and a kind old street beggar who occasionally shares the public bathhouse. Making sure White, the smaller of the two, is properly dressed and fed, keeps Black focused and gives him a family to care about. For his part, White, a simple being, full of sunlight, keeps Black connected to the innocent child inside and tempers his anger at having to grow up way before his time.
Together, they’ve managed to adapt to this world that’s constantly shifting and changing around them in a resourceful and even, joyous manner. Then an evil real-estate developer (backed by extra terrestrial robots no less) starts to rip Treasure Town down around them.

Arias keeps the heart rending story that captured his imagination a decade ago at the center and surrounds it with a combination of CGI and beautifully hand drawn characters. Even the bad guys stand out; wonderfully quirky, world weary, hopeful, greedy, evil individuals with back stories and a growth curve. When some of these evildoers bite the dust, we are a little sorry to lose them. The lavish attention to detail will make viewers want to see the film again to catch all the goodies cramming every frame. Arias and his team took hundreds of photos of old world bathhouses, markets, abandoned amusement parks, and decaying street signs and sound designer Mitch Osias collected raw material in both New York and Tokyo to inspire the patina of Treasure Town. The icing on the cake is a great original score by the electronic music group, PLAID.

After Kuro and Shiro save each other’s lives countless times, they are finally, brutally separated and Shiro must battle the darkness within himself on a hellish black star in outer space. Curiously, this apocalyptic scene was the only section that fell a little flat for me — I think I may have been on sensory overload by the time we reached that point in the story– still, that’s a very small quibble about a film that I can’t wait to see again.

TEKKONKINKREET is the first film Arias has actually directed but he’s had a fascinating journey to this point. He taught himself programming and math and computer graphics for the most part; creating special effects for films like The Abyss, Total Recall and The Matrix, designing film titles and sequences for David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and the Coen Bros., helping visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull develop the Back to the Future ride at Universal Theme Park, inventing and patenting “Toon Shaders,” a software, which helped lend 3-D computer graphics the look of traditional 2-D animation in Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning Princess Mononoke and Dreamworks’ The Road to El Dorado, and collaborating with the Wachowski Bros. on Animatrix, an anime extension of the first great Matrix film.

And now, he has become the first foreign born director to helm a feature length anime film in Japan — a story as sweet and hopeful and dark and compelling as any Grimm’s fairy tale.

For more background on Tekkonkinkreet and Michael Arias, check out:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp - there’s a great photo of MICHAEL ARIAS here !

www.ozoux.com/eclectic/archive/2006/04/26/tekkon-kinkreet-trailer

www.tekkon.net/site.html

Michael Arias will introduce Tekkonkinkreet at The Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, April 25th at 8:30.
The film runs at MOMA through Monday, April 30th. For more information, call 212-708-9400
or www. moma.org

OTHER ARTLOVERS POSTS/TEKKONKINKREET:

~PHOTO: TAIYO MATSUMOTO, MICHAEL ARIAS, and ANTHONY WEINTRAUB

~PHOTO: MICHAEL ARIAS at MoMA SCREENING

~PHOTO: MICHAEL ARIAS ARRIVES AT MoMA SCREENING

~HOMEPAGE ARCHIVE/THE BOMB/ARTLOVERS

TRUTH, JUSTICE & THE AMERICAN WAY AT THE MOVIES:

THE HOAX is a pretty good film that has a couple of great things going for it - A/ a great story and B/ a great performance by Richard Gere - yes, Richard Gere.
It’s about, as Al Franken might put it, LIES and the LYING LIARS who tell them. As it turns out, in this case, they’re not really such bad people - just wannabes reaching for their slice of the American Dream. It’s 1971, the dawn of the Watergate era, and far worse manipulators of the truth—the ones running our country and our corporations - will soon emerge.

The story, a true one, is the stuff of legend. Clifford Irving, a journeyman writer, frustrated by his inability to get major publishers to take him seriously as an A-list novelist, concocts a fantastic story they can’t ignore, and almost pulls off one of the most audacious cons of the 20th century. Although Irving’s only major book up to this point was called, FAKE!, which chronicled the career of the notorious art forger, Elmyr de Hory, (which might have given some people pause for thought), he somehow convinced McGraw Hill, the same publishing company that wouldn’t give him the time of day before, that world famous billionaire recluse, Howard Hughes, has anointed him as his biographer and authorized Irving to sell his memoirs. Soon, he is cashing checks for a million dollars and has got Life Magazine panting for serialized rights.

The film follows Irving as he pulls his best friend, a brilliant researcher, and his own wife, into the scam. It’s exhilarating to watch as this handsome charmer makes stuff up out of thin air and people he has always longed to impress buy it, hook, line and sinker. It becomes increasingly harrowing as the high stakes game spins way out of control, the players betray each other, and Irving can no longer keep track of his lies. Director Lasse Halstrom and screenwriter William Wheeler hint at manipulation by players way larger than these three, such as President Richard Nixon, and Howard Hughes himself (who hasn’t been seen in public for decades), emerging for just long enough to pull strings that will put millions more into his own bank account and send Irving and company to prison.

Details of this paranoid period, which sowed the seeds for our current reality of fake news, made up memoirs, and lies upon lies upon lies from our leaders — are skillfully layered throughout. Gere gets tremendous support from Alfred Molina and Marcia Gay Harden, but it’s really his show and he’s tremendously convincing. Gere goes deep within and way beyond the cocky sex appeal that’s been his stock in trade in the movies since he personified the “American Gigolo”. He brings real pathos to this entertaining guy who believes he “couldda been a contender” - a man simultaneously full of himself and hating himself. Richard Gere has always been a pleasure to spend an hour and a half with in the dark - if you catch my drift — but this time the complex man he caught on celluloid isn’t so easy to shake.

BREACH is another true story of deceit, hidden lives and thwarted glory. Chris Cooper (Oscar winner for his supporting performance as an orchid thief in Adaptation and totally deserving of more awards for his performance here) is absolutely chilling as Robert Hanssen, the master spy who sold American secrets to the Soviets for 30 years and engineered the greatest security breach in US history before the Feds finally managed to out him in 2001.

Hanssen is no easy charmer like the Clifford Irving character in The Hoax. He is a middle of the road civil servant, a holier than thou, church going dude with a crucifix in his office and a dagger in his heart from having been passed over for promotion for so many years. He’ll teach them to pass over a genius. And so he becomes the worm burrowed deep in the shiny apple, eating away at the FBI’s computer networks, giving up American agents, and somehow justifying his choice as a necessary tough love lesson for a system that has become so blind to its own failings.

The film begins as a small team (led by the always stellar Laura Linney) gathers evidence to try to bring Hanssen down. Eric O’Neill, an FBI rookie from a deeply religious family is sent in to gain Hanssen’s confidence, posing as his new office clerk. Portrayed by a really solid Ryan Phillippe, the neophyte is alternately appalled and admiring as Hanssen intones the pillars that his FBI career should rest upon; “Faith, Family and Country.”

Most of the action in BREACH is small. There are no mind-blowing car chases but director Billy Ray has crafted a truly nail biting thriller (Ray’s first film, SHATTERED GLASS, was another great tale of escalating deceit set in a newsroom. RENT IT!).
In fact, I’ll pay him the ultimate compliment: There were moments where the tension in BREACH was reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock classic. I genuinely feared for Ryan Phillippe’s well being at several points!

Two fascinating side bars: Socialite Nina Van Pallandt, Clifford Irving’s mistress and one of the people who betrayed his Howard Hughes scam to the authorities, ended up as a minor movie star in the after glare of the scandal, appearing with young Richard Gere in American Gigolo in 1980, and Eric ONeill, the real life character Ryan Phillippe portrays in BREACH, resigned his promising FBI career shortly after Hanssen’s arrest. He had seen enough!

check out the trailer:
www.breachmovie.net

JAN ALBERT’S BEST OF 2006

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE - for breaking the long movie draught of 2006. This was the first beginning-to-end GOOD movie I saw all last year - quirky, beautifully cast, and laugh out loud funny. Not to oversell this small joy but it’s a great ride. I loved Alan Arkin as grandpa and the rest of the family is pretty great too.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING - satire is a hard form to pull off. This one flicks off the ashes and strikes it just right. It’s politically sharp, well-observed and extremely witty. Aaron Eckhart has to be one of the handsomest guys ever to grace celluloid and makes the perfect villain/hero out of an all too plausible cigarette lobbyist. Rob Lowe is hysterical as a Hollywood dealmaker and a pre-Tom Cruise Katie Holmes is wicked as what passes for a working journalist these days.

DREAMGIRLS - The first movies I ever saw on the BIG SCREEN were when my father brought me into Manhattan for a double feature of Brigadoon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, an introduction to the movie musical that had me from “the mist of May is in the gloaming.” I am a sucker for great movie musicals and director/writer Bill Condon has created one just as magical in its way as Carousel and West Side Story. There are kickass costumes, dynamic editing, and a great story - a thinly veiled look at the birth and heyday of the Supremes and Motown. The first rate cast makes the most of a pretty good score and superstars Beyonce Knowles and Jamie Foxx take a graceful backseat to simply outstanding supporting performances from Eddie Murphy (in a perfectly-timed tip of the hat to the Godfather of Soul) and Jennifer Hudson.

HALF NELSON - Hey, it can’t all be sunshine and lollipops! So far as I’m concerned, this small film contained the performance of the year - Ryan Gosling as a crack addict who somehow still manages to function as an inspiring high school teacher. Absolutely mesmerizing to watch, I could not catch Gosling acting-I just believed and felt for the person he created so completely. The film overall struck me as a little naïve but first-time director Ryan Fleck and screenwriter Anna Boden are to be commended for getting such a complex human being up on the screen - a self destructive man who nonetheless is a good guy with valuable stuff to offer.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA - We should all take inspiration from the ambitious work Clint Eastwood is turning out in his 70’s! In 2006, he gave us two films exploring the horrific WWII battle of Iwo Jima - one from the American POV and one from the Japanese side. I found Flags of Our Fathers a great idea (following the soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima back home for an orchestrated PR tour through the States to raise $ for the war machine) executed with a sledgehammer. It slams you over the head with its relentless bloodshed and brutal message, but I haven’t been able to get the way subtler LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA out of my mind. Despite the fact that the film is in Japanese and requires reading sub titles, I connected with all four main characters and their moments of truth. The stunning cinematography gives the film an otherworldly look of a washed out Hell on Earth, and the script structure, with flashbacks taking us back to the world these guys inhabited before fate brought them together on this God forsaken rock, scuttling like rats in a maze of underground tunnels, adds a depth and humanity that was missing in FOOF.
Maybe, it’s because the American story portrays the men literally as interchangeable cogs in the machine, (although Adam Beach stands out as a Native American GI trotted out for the big show) whereas Ken Watanabe and a few in his company emerge as noble individuals fighting a futile battle in the name of their government. Whatever the reason, I believe this film about man’s greatest folly will ultimately join LE GRANDE ILLUSION in the annals of classic anti-war films.

HOLLYWOODLAND - Catch up with this one on video. It came and went pretty quickly, but I thought it was a great little noir mystery that casts a spell and pulls you into the shady circumstances surrounding a childhood TV hero’s death. Rooted in the real life reporting of actor George Reeves death in 1959, it is nonetheless an act of imagination that keeps you wondering whether SUPERMAN jumped or was pushed. Adrien Brody has fun as a slimy low rent gumshoe and Ben Affleck’s own experience getting ground up in the glare of Hollywood’s star making machinery undoubtedly informs his extremely moving performance as a celebrity stranded by his own success.

BORAT - Horrible, vulgar, stupid/ hysterical, terrifying, brilliant. The idiot alter ego of Sacha Baron Cohen takes a road trip through the U.S. and exposes way, way more than you want to know about your fellow Americans. Not “very nice” but REALLY, you don’t want to miss it.

THE QUEEN - We all want to know how the other half lives and this film provides a really provocative look behind the palace doors during the stressful days following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash. Peter Morgan based his political and poetic screenplay on copious research and interviews, then took a leap of the imagination that transforms this film into something beyond documentary. His take on how Queen Elizabeth painfully transcends a lifetime of privilege and protocol to come to terms with a new prime minister, Tony Blair, and the public rage of her previously loving royal subjects is really eye opening. Helen Mirren inhabits Her Majesty in the same way Ryan Gosling takes on his character in Half Nelson (see above) and rightfully deserves to be crowned Best Actress at the Oscars this year.

THE DEPARTED - My all around most satisfying movie going experience of the year. A Shakespearean face off between good and evil and the twisted grey areas that lurk around both, set in Boston’s criminal underworld. Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio are well matched adversaries; both great to watch, and all the supporting players, including Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Vera Farmiga, and especially Mark Wahlberg, have a blast with screenwriter William Monahan’s take no prisoners dialogue. The fact that the usually awesome Jack Nicholson is way over the top was annoying but not fatal. This is the kind of drama and great repartee I go to the movies for and Martin Scorsese, without a doubt one of the greatest film directors of the last century (I guess you can guess who my “best director” vote is going to), really knows how to serve it up.

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION - I am not a fan of the gentle, folksy radio show this film is based on, but I adored the movie. It has all the hallmarks director Robert Altman was known for; overlapping dialogue from a huge cast of characters, fabulous long takes and fluid camera movement, and multiple points of view that create a unique chance for the audience to spy on a singular environment, in this case the behind the scenes and onstage doings involved in the very last live broadcast of a beloved institution, The Prairie Home Companion radio show. There is little to no dramatic tension, but somehow that doesn’t matter. Altman’s direction is so confident, so relaxed and loosey goosey, you just settle in and enjoy the sights and sounds. All the actors, including a radiant Meryl Streep, the divine Lilly Tomlin, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Virginia Madsen, Kevin Kline, Maya Rudolf, et al, look like they are having fun and their bonhomie is contagious. Altman even makes a movie star out of PHC host, Garrison Keillor, who is charmingly bemused by it all. The intimations of mortality that hang around the edges of this going away party are doubly touching in light of Altman’s recent passing. Whether an angel in a white trench coat appeared to guide the great director to a heaven where he can kibitz with the likes of George Cukor, John Cassavetes, Billy Wilder and Akira Kurosawa we will never know, but he certainly went out on a high note.

HERE are some other movies I really liked in 2006:

LITTLE CHILDREN: This very literary, yet impressively cinematic adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel focuses on the special insanity induced by living in suburbia, where folks move “for the good of their children.”
While her husband is away at work during the day and pursuing his new passion for internet pornography at night, a bored mom with a Masters degree (Kate Winslet - absolutely wonderful as always) and a confused former High School football hero, (Patrick Wilson) left behind to take care of his son as his wife’s career in the big city takes off, drift into an affair. Meanwhile their community becomes obsessed by the presence of a pedophile (a searing performance by former child star, Jackie Earle Hayley, that feels so real it is actually painful to watch) who has been released into the custody of his long suffering but loving mother. The ties that bind parent and child and the profound ambiguity many women feel about being “good mothers” are frankly explored in this challenging film that will reward repeated viewings. In fact, I can’t wait to see it again. Todd Field is definitely a director to watch.

CHILDREN OF MEN & INSIDE MAN: a futuristic paranoid thriller full of atmosphere and an ingenious bank heist, both anchored by the terrific CLIVE OWEN.

BLOOD DIAMOND: A rousing, old fashioned, action-adventure story with a new age conscience. Set in contemporary Africa, Leonardo DiCaprio gives his all as a hardened player with a heart of gold, dodging machetes on the trail of the big diamond that will transform his life. Leo really comes into his own as a great romantic leading man in the grand tradition here and delivers a wonderfully satisfying performance that breaks your heart a little.

CASINO ROYALE: Bond is blonde and Daniel Craig does the series proud. Director Martin Campbell throws in everything but the kitchen sink — there are 2 or 3 action sequences too many and you can see some of the plot turns coming from a mile off, but there are lots of fun moments and the opening chase scene is a doozy - worth the price of admission alone.

MARIE ANTOINETTE: I thought Kirsten Dunst was endearing as the teenage queen bored out of her gourd and that Sofia Coppola really got her dilemma - a husband who didn’t want to have sex, a kingdom full of hateful gossips, and scads of money to burn on clothes and cake. She was clueless about the troubles in Paris and just trying to keep her head above water at Versailles. The storytelling was kind of clunky, but you really can’t fault the eye-popping visual treatment. I loved the Monolo Blahnik music video right in the middle!

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA: A well done Hollywood comedy with an audacious star performance by Meryl Streep as a tough dame running a NYC Fashion bible like Vogue. Emily Blunt also makes a splash as her bitchy assistant.

INFAMOUS: Timing is everything and Douglas McGrath’s Truman Capote film came second - just a year after Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance, so it has been unjustly ignored. It is stylish, very smart, sobering, and a triumph in its own right. Toby Jones also does great things with the incomparable Tru and it’s fun to compare the telling of the same story in the two films. McGrath’s emphasis on how this artist sold his soul to the devil is haunting.

BOBBY: I wasn’t looking forward to seeing a film about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination but that isn’t what this film is about and so, it took me by surprise. Emilio Estevez has made a movie full of heart about a day in the life of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. - the day when Kennedy won the 1968 California primary. Estevez has a great touch with actors and there are many wonderful cameos from Sharon Stone as the hotel hairdresser, Helen Hunt as an insecure trophy wife, Laurence Fishburne and Freddy Rodriguez as chef and busboy, Lindsay Lohan as a teen marrying a classmate against her parent’s wishes to help keep him out of Vietnam, and Ashton Kutcher as a dealer turning two young campaign workers on to their first LSD trip. Estevez is clearly fascinated by the palpable feeling of hope for the future Kennedy awoke in this wide variety of Americans and the film left me hoping for a return of that kind of feeling for the future of our nation.

VENUS &
MISS POTTER: Two lovely small surprises came at the very end of 2006. VENUS is the sentimental tale of an old ladies man and his last love, a crude, working class lass. Peter O’Toole is now in his 70’s, but looks at least 10 years older, due, one would hope, to a life of enjoying himself 24/7. He still holds the screen with the same one of a kind charisma he exuded as a dazzlingly handsome young star on the rise. He has a bunch of fine scenes with an old chum, played by Leslie Philipps and some good moments with Vanessa Redgrave, as his ex wife. O’Toole has an amazing voice but as with all great screen actors, he never needs to talk to get your attention, his face says it all and no one has ever had a face like this old pro.

MISS POTTER is also a very sentimental but rathuh special film done with impeccable taste. This one is about Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit and many other enchanting children’s books. It performs the great balancing act of hovering just above treacly, but never quite touching it. It is a small story (like Potter’s beautiful little books) but it sneaks up on you. Renee Zellweger has the wonderful talent of believing and trusting in her characters and truly investing herself in them. Her rapport with Ewan McGregor is what screen chemistry between co-stars is supposed to be all about.

And last but not least, that brings us to BABEL. Many moments from this very ambitious film stick in my head like still photographs — two young brothers playing with a gun on a desolate mountaintop in Morocco, an anguished American (Brad Pitt) alpha male trying to keep his temper and save his wife’s life via long distance telephone, a Mexican nanny (outstanding performance by Adrianna Barraza!) playing substitute mamma to two blonde children, wandering desparately through the desert separating Mexico and the U.S. with one of them in her arms, a deaf Japanese teenager searching for love and recognition, wandering through a disco with blaring music she cannot hear — they are all trying to make a connection.
I really admired Alejandro Gonzallez Inarritu’s first film, Amores Perros, detested 21 Grams and am on the fence about this one. Inarritu and his screenwriter, Guillermo Arriga, are also struggling to make a connection between all these disparate human beings and it felt a little forced. I got it, I got it — we are not so different from each other as we may believe.
The camerawork is absolutely unforgettable and this film deserves your time. Let me know what you think.

I look forward to catching up with the ones I missed, like L’Enfant, The Fountain, Sherrybaby & The Death of Monsieur Levascou and letting you know about the ones to come in 2007 - next up: LOOK OUT FOR PHILIP HAAS’S THE SITUATION.

(Contact JAN ALBERT at ophelia@angel.net)

JOSEPH CROSS and ANNETTE BENNING in RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

IT’S A MADMADMADMAD WORLD:
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a cinematic ode to childhood that falls somewhere
between I Remember Mama and Mommie Dearest.

This is the perfect film for anyone who thinks they come from the most dysfunctional family
in the world. It will make you laugh a lot and realize that you don’t even come close.
Augusten Burroughs, whose crazy mother gave him away to her even crazier psychotherapist
to raise, holds that title. He survived his completely wacked out childhood to write a
best selling memoir that has now been turned into a movie.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a first film for director Ryan Murphy, who
created the TV series, Nip/Tuck, which certainly sees the blend of humor and
pathos in the frenzied way we edit our lives and bodies and present them to the world.
Murphy and his set and costume designers (Richard Sherman and Lou Eyrich) have a blast
recreating the 1970’s fashions, rooms and scenes that surround young Augusten. It is pure
eye candy, beautifully rendered, from the platform shoes to the consciousness raising
sessions Augusten’s mother leads in their living room. Annette Benning really rises to
the occasion as a woman whose delusions of grandeur are at first hysterically funny,
then gradually become seriously disturbing and scary. If only the movie had followed
her extremely brave performance, it would have been a classic. As it is, it skims
the surface for the humor in the situation.

The supporting characters, brought to life by a perfect cast, all have their moments,
including Brian Cox as the quack doctor who offers to take Augusten off his mom’s hands
(so she can devote her complete energy to her analysis), Jill Clayburgh as his distracted
wife, and Evan Rachel Wood as Augusten’s closest friend, despite the fact that she tries
to use him as an electro-shock therapy experiment. Still, Joseph Fiennes is my personal
favorite. He’s come along way from Shakespeare in Love (in which he played
the besotted bard) to play the leather-wearing, 35-year-old “adopted” son of this strange
family who steals Augusten’s virginity at the age of 14. Fiennes somehow manages to
make the viewer care about this crazy cad and he delivers a poetry reading that I assure
you is worth the price of admission alone.

Joseph Cross portrays Augusten as a wry observer to the sideshow that
is his life rather than a participant, and maybe in fact that’s how he survived, by distancing
himself and pretending this was all happening to a character who merely shared his name.
Many kids in crazy families grow up fast because they must become parent to their own
parents, if you know what I mean. But as a movie viewer, after giggling with disbelief
at the series of unbelievable disasters Augusten endures, I wanted to dig in and pull
with him to escape and thrive, rather than experiencing it second hand. The film doesn’t
ultimately provide that kind of catharsis, but there’s a happy ending and it does send
you home smiling at the stangeness and resilience of human beings.

GENE HACKMAN and AL PACINO (!!) in the 1973 film classic: SCARECROW

Movie Night with JONATHAN LETHEM

Thursday, November 9 at 7:30 pm

Award-winning author Jonathan Lethem will appear in person at the IFC Center Thursday,
November 9 at 7:30 to present a rare screening of SCARECROW, joined by
his special guest, the film’s editor, Jerry Schatzberg.

A 70s road-movie classic shot by the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, SCARECROW
(1973) stars Gene Hackman and Al Pacino as two drifters, Max and Lion, who warily form a
friendship as they hitchhike across the country. The film won the Palme d’Or for Best Film
at the Cannes Film Festival.

Jonathan Lethem published his first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, in 1994.
He first garnered major critical and audience attention with Motherless Brooklyn (1999),
a tale of a private detective with Tourette syndrome, which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award. Among his recent works are The Fortress of Solitude
(2003), a semi-autobiographical novel set in late-970’s Brooklyn, and a collection of
essays, The Disappointment Artist (2005). In 2005, Lethem was named
recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship grant. He lives in Brooklyn.

Jerry Schatzberg was an established professional photographer, with work published in
Vogue and McCalls, before he turned to filmmaking. Among
his credits as a director are The Panic in Needle Park
(1971), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) and Street Smart
(1987).

In the Movie Nights Program, the IFC Center turns over a theater to special guests
and lets them call the shots. Audiences can discover what some of their
favorite authors, musicians, artists and filmmakers would pick if it were Movie Night
at their house. Participants appear in person to share why they made their selections:
to acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, spotlight an unsung gem, or defend
a guilty pleasure. Past guests include the filmmaker David Gordon Green, Slovenian theorist
and philosopher Slavoj Zizek, singer-songwriter-actor Will Oldham, director and
Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam, and French auteur Gaspar Noz.

Tickets for the evening are $12 general admission/$10 seniors.

Proceeds from the Movie Night benefit 826NYC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
supporting students’ writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students
to write.
www.826nyc.org

IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at West 3rd Street, box office: 212-924-7771.

For showtimes, advance tickets, and more information, visit ifcenter.com

Film Lovers rejoice! The great movie drought of 2006 is finally over!
Now, there are so many good films flooding the theatres it’s hard to keep up.
Here are some pick hits in no particular order:

MATT DAMON and LEONARDO DiCAPRIO in THE DEPARTED

THE DEPARTED: A pure blast of testosterone! This is what you go to
the movies for - a cracking good story which picks you up and doesn’t let you go - the
big screen filled with nail biting tension and handsome guys behaving badly and nobly.
You’ve got Matt Damon playing a bad cop posing as a good guy and Leo DiCaprio,
(wound so tight he looks like he’ll shatter) playing a good cop burrowed deep in the
dastardly gang of a Boston mob boss, played by Jack Nicholson.

The three leads are surrounded by a truly awesome cast of supporting players who make
the most of William Monaghan’s blistering bravura dialogue, including Alec Baldwin,
Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, and Mark Wahlberg (yes, Marky Mark!), who all but
steals the picture from under the noses of all these pros in just a handful of scenes, as
a grandstanding bully boy, who nonetheless is on the side of the angels in this
Shakespearean tale that illuminates the large grey area that life really is.

Martin Scorcese masterfully orchestrates the action and keeps you at the edge of
your seat, waiting to see which of these good/bad boys will win the day. One
quibble: for a film that so masterfully observes the shades of good and evil in every
man, how come this excellent director and screenwriter settled for giving the female
police shrink torn between the two main characters, such a one note role to play?
This terrific film would have been even better if the woman’s part had been
as subtle and complex as the male characters! Still, all in all, let’s hear it for the BOYS!
Can’t wait to see it again.

HELEN MIRREN and JAMES CROMWELL in THE QUEEN

HELEN MIRREN RULES AS THE QUEEN: Well, here’s a movie with a
great part for a woman, and actress Helen Mirren exceeds even this devoted fan’s
expectations. She gives a restrained and truly riveting performance as Queen Elizabeth
during the tumultuous week following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997.

I saw this flick a few weeks ago and still haven’t been able to get it completely out of my mind,
which is always a good sign in an age where movie plots vanish from your brain cells
before you even leave the movie theater.

Screenwriter/playwright Peter Morgan has made a bit of a parlor trick of filling in
the imagined scenes and conversations behind the real world news we see in sound bites
on TV. Previously, he crafted a teleplay called THE DEAL, based on
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s relationship with his political mentor-turned bitter rival,
Gordon Brown. He is also the brain behind another current film,
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, (now playing in theaters - review to follow),
which takes us behind the palace walls of dictator, Idi Amin, as seen through the eyes of the
young Scottish doctor who became his private physician. FROST-NIXON, the
forthcoming 2007 film, (written by Morgan & directed by Ron Howard) builds on the
famous series of interviews David Frost conducted with the American President.

In THE QUEEN, Morgan weaves in much of the real news footage we saw
again and again and again of Diana bemoaning “the 3 people” in her show marriage to
Prince Charles and the scenes of the British people arriving at the palace with tons of flowers
following Di’s untimely death, waiting with increasing fury for the royal family to appear
and show some emotion! Then the writer makes a great leap away from the facts as we know
them, to present a fully imagined portrait of the royal family under seige; a ruler who has
been carefully groomed to keep her feelings to herself since she ascended the throne as a
teenager and the modern young Prime Minister who helps bring her up to speed with
some 20th century spin control.

I have always admired Helen Mirren’s fearlessness as an actress, tackling everything from
Tennessee Williams to tough cop, Inspector Jane Tennyson, but this is an especially fine
moment. Somehow, she abandons all vanity and becoms the matronly, bad hat-wearing,
big black pocket-book-carrying queen. Without letting down the stiff upper lip altogether,
she conveys the confusion, stubborn pride, humility and pain, Elizabeth must have felt
at not being the crowd favorite at this strange turning point. She makes the Queen a
human being.

One of my all-time favorite actors, James Cromwell (Babe’s farmer dad, as well as the evil
bad guy in LA Confidential), is infuriatingly convincing as Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s
prig of a husband and Michael Gleason is fine as Tony Blair, shaking his head at the
complete cluelessness of the royals in the face of the public’s grief and scoring his first big
political points when he steps into the breach to hail Diana as “the people’s princess.”
Director Stephen Frears’ attention to visual detail and subtle ‘fly on the wall’ camera eye
keeps the viewer locked into this intriguing glimpse behind the throne, but the show rests
squarely on the shoulders of The Queen and Helen Mirren more than earns her crown
(and maybe the Oscar?? at award time).

GWYNETH PALTROW in INFAMOUS

TOBY JONES and ISABELLA ROSSELLINI in INFAMOUS

HAVE A MARTINI AND DON’T MISS INFAMOUS, even if you think you’ve
seen it all before: There’s a saying in the wonderful world of journalism from whence I come,
‘Give 5 writers (or producers or directors) the same story to tell and you’ll end up with five
completely different stories’. That’s what makes INFAMOUS, aka “the other
Truman Capote movie”, especially fascinating in my view. It comes just a year after CAPOTE
won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar for his extraordinary performance in the title role.
Both films (which cover the exact same period in Truman Capote’s life - when he researched
and wrote his masterpiece, In Cold Blood were actually in production at the
same time. One can only imagine the groans and gasps this strange timing must have induced
in both camps and yet, after seeing INFAMOUS, I can report: there’s definitely
room in this world for two different takes on this incomparable character.

The two films are completely different in tone, CAPOTE was more explicit about
the way the nakedly ambitious Truman sold his soul for success - a deal with the Devil
he never stopped paying for. It touches on how a journalist manipulates the truth in order
to tell ‘his’ story, and how Truman came face to face with his “evil twin/dark brother”
when he met murderer Perry Smith in Kansas.

INFAMOUS is more taken with Truman’s legendary charm - how a
flamboyant Southern gay man with a strange and unforgettable voice used his formidable
wit and sensitivity to become the pet of Manhattan’s upper crust. He remarks to Babe or
Slim or another one of his “swans” (as he called the society ladies who took him to lunch),
- “I can alchemize my pain into art, but at what cost?” (and it cost him plenty when he later
betrayed their trust by using their life stories to propel his fiction.)
This is the Truman I remember seeing during my childhood on the Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson and thinking how great it was that there was room on this planet for such
kooky, unusual people who stood out from the crowd.

Both films spend a lot of time at the scene of the crime and it is fun to compare the
actors’ and directors’ choices. First of all, British actor Toby Jones, (he’s the voice of
Dobby in the Harry Potter films) is tiny, like Truman was. Personality-wise, I have no
idea if the role required the kind of stretch we saw Philip Seymour Hoffman make,
but Jones is quite wonderful in his own right. I thought Sandra Bullock was a
revelation as Harper Lee, (Truman’s childhood friend, who used his persona for the
character of Scout’s neighbor boy in To Kill A Mocking Bird) lovely and grave.
Likewise, Jeff Daniels (as the Kansas prosecutor Truman must woo to get access to his
story) and Daniel Craig as Perry Smith play their parts all together differently than their
counterparts in CAPOTE. INFAMOUS stresses the romance that
developed between the writer and the prisoner.

The way CAPOTE’s director, Bennet Miller, painted the stark, lonely landscape
got under your skin. INFAMOUS director/writer Douglas McGrath captures
the social scene of Christmastime in small town Kansas; the living rooms of the residents
who finally invite Truman into their homes to hear him tell how he beat Humphrey Bogart
at arm wrestling. McGrath and his production designer, Judy Becker, and costume designer,
Ruth Meyers, revel in Diane Vreeland’s famous red room, Manhattan’s chichi dining spots
and Truman’s satin sheets and velvet dressing gown.

Much of the characters’ dialogue is taken from their own mouths - as quoted in
George Plimpton’s 1998 oral history: Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends,
Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall his Turbulent Career. It would be
hard to improve on this stuff and Doug McGrath includes some of the best of it here.

Lastly, (really firstly!) INFAMOUS has one of the most stunning opening scenes
of any film in recent memory. Truman and Babe are at El Morocco, cocktails in hand,
enjoying a swinging number by a beautiful chanteuse (played to perfection by Gwyneth Paltrow,
who never reppears in the film after this scene!). She has the crowd in the palm of her hand,
then suddenly seems to lose her place in the song and stops for the longest moment, as the
audience holds its breath, wondering if the star has crashed to earth or will shine again.
That is the tightrope walk Truman Capote took and it is something to behold while it
lasts.

thoughts on: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and RUNNING WITH SCISSORS to follow shortly.

Photograph by GLEN WILSON - Courtesy of UNIVERSAL

AMERICAN DREAMZ
Opens April 21, 2006

I laughed alot at American Dreamz. Maybe I am relaxing my standards, but I think most critics were a little too tough on this genial little film, penalizing director/writer Paul Weitz (American Pie) for not going far enough.
I applaud him for even coming up with the idea of combining an American Idol-like talent show, the threat of terrorism, and the White House of George W. Bush into a comedy.

Briefly, the story centers around production of American Dreamz, the nation’s #1 TV show, and what happens when an Arab terrorist infiltrates as a contestant and the President of the U.S. appears as a guest judge to boost his plummeting popularity in the polls.

After an acid-tongued, sharp start, things get a little softer, but if the film doesn’t soar
throughout, there are still several priceless moments. I loved it when a terrorist watching American Dreamz in a desert tent via satellite, exclaims rapturously after watching their sleeper cell contestant warble “My Way”, - “he nailed it!”

Mandy Moore as a wanna be Idol with a heart of brass and Hugh Grant as the swarmy Simon Cowellesque-impresario of the show - 2 utterly self involved people who briefly need each other - more than acquit themselves, and the rest of the players (including Dennis Quaid as the President, dumber than a board but with the stirrings of a conscience and William Dafoe as the Karl Rove power behind the throne) look like they are having such a good time, it’s infectious.

For the film historians among you, compare this to Bye Bye Birdy, rather than The Americanization of Emily.

True, it doesn’t sink its teeth into this rich material the way a great satire like THANK YOU FOR SMOKING does, but it wins my vote for at least nibbling around the edges. I give American Dreamz a solid middle of the road B (an A to Universal’s promotion team for the film’s tag line — “IMAGINE A COUNTRY WHERE MORE PEOPLE VOTE FOR A POP IDOL THAN THEIR NEXT PRESIDENT.”)

Relax and enjoy it, then go home and read a newspaper like the President in the film does.

… entertaining, with lots of really interesting archival footage.

who gets to call it art?, a film by Peter Rosen

PLAYING AT THE FILM FORUM - LAST 2 DAYS !!! - ENDS FEB 14th - TAKE YOUR SWEETHEART !!

FILM FORUM

Edward G. Robinson (as ‘Wolf’ Larsen) in The Sea Wolf (1941), directed by Michael Curtiz
(Photo credit: Warner Bros./Photofest) (Copyright: Warner Bros.)

Ralph Eggleston, Pre-production sketch, For the Birds, 11 x 17″, Pastel
(Copyright: Disney/Pixar)

Pete Docter, Sullivan and Mike, Monsters, Inc., 11 x 8 1/2″, Marker
(Copyright: Disney/Pixar)

Teddy Newton, Edna Mode (aka “E”), The Incredibles, 11 x 8 1/2″, Pastel
(Copyright: Pixar)

MOMA FILM SERIES
PIXAR – 20 YEARS OF ANIMATION
12/14/05 - 2/6/ 2006

ARTIST’S CHOICE: STEPHEN SONDHEIM
12/19/05 - 1/8/06

MOMA deserves kudos for presenting two stellar film series this season. The Pixar Animation retrospective should pull in the crowds
with the first overview of the trail blazing film studio that introduced the first completely computer generated animated feature film
a mere 10 years ago. As John Lasseter (director of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and the forthcoming CARS) reminded himself
at the press preview, the company’s name comes from Pixel, (the smallest visual component that makes up the picture on your
computer screen) and Art, and the art of Pixar has always been inspired by the technology.

Many of Pixar’s top animators were on hand at the opening and it was kind of touching to see how jazzed the best and brightest
of today’s computer artists seemed to be about receiving their first full retrospective at the museum. It was fun watching them
check out their animated bios (which the public will be able to access via computers in the galleries) and trying to explain
the fine points of digital animation to us journalists – who manage to manipulate a few words on a good day! The way the
preparatory sketches and video monitors are arranged on the floor it becomes apparent how much drawing and sculpting and
painting still goes into creating computer animation. That’s heartening news in a year when Disney made the bittersweet
announcement that it had reached the end of an era — the studio which pioneered the animated feature (Snow White-1937)
will no longer produce hand drawn films.

In addition to screening all the major Pixar features, this is a great opportunity to see the short cartoons Lasseter and his
colleagues have produced since the mid 1980s, including One Man Band, a cute riff on dueling street musicians,
which is having its debut at MOMA in conjunction with the exhibition.
KIDS UNDER 16 ADMITTED FREE.

But, I must admit I am personally more excited about MOMA’s masterstroke in asking Stephen Sondheim to curate
one of the museum’s periodic “Artist’s Choice” shows. Sondheim, the preeminent artist of the American musical theater
over the past 40 years, was there at the birth of West Side Story, contributing lyrics. He cut his creative teeth on Gypsy
and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, deconstructed the medium in works like Company, reconstructed
every genre of theater song that had preceded him in Follies, and tackled American politics in Assassins. One of his most
brilliant shows, Sweeney Todd, is now on Broadway, born again in a bare bones, musically thrilling revival from Britain.

Sondheim has always been a big film fan and he has devoted all of his choices to the museum’s film collection, which for me
is like receiving a big box of chocolates. All of the choices look delicious – in fact, I’ve tasted many of them before and
know how good they are. For those of you who prefer the savory to the sweet, just consider this a wonderful
smorgasbord–a tasting menu of the cinematic treats that stimulate the pictures Stephen Sondheim creates
with words and music.

And he’s picked some great flicks, judging by the ones I’ve seen already:

My all time favorite scary movie — Dead of Night (1945) a fantastically atmospheric and “creepy,” as Sondheim puts it - collection
of 5 supernatural short film stories within a 6th dreamscape. By the end, you won’t be sure if that feeling of deja vu has been
induced by the film or whether you’ve been there in another life. Whatever - it’s not an easy film to shake.

The Sea Wolf (1941) directed by Michael Curtiz. Sondheim selects this as “my favorite of the Warner Brothers stock
company melodramas.” EG Robinson and John Garfield square off on shipboard, surrounded by a crew that
seems pretty intent on killing themselves before they reach shore. A heck of a story with great big scenes for
grandstanding actors. Screenplay by Robert Rossen (from Jack London’s novel), who would go on to direct
Garfield in Body & Soul before being blacklisted in the 50s.

Pygmalion (1938) directed by Anthony Asquith. “For the performances,” says Sondheim, and I second that emotion.
The divine squaring off of the elusive, elegant Leslie Howard and the emotional guttersnipe with the poise of a princess,
played by the wonderful Wendy Hiller. I remember what a great discovery this film was for me when I saw it at MOMA
20 years ago and realized how Bernard Shaw’s play had kindled the flame of one of the greatest musicals ever - MY FAIR LADY.

The Thief of Baghdad (1940) Boy this is a different vision of Bagdad than the one we are all carrying around today.
This luminous 1940s color film which won the Oscar for cinematography, is full of kitchy dialogue and fantastical sights.
The blind prince recalls his lover’s eyebrows as resembling, “two crescent moons.” There are flying carpets, jolly genies,
and an evil vizier who observes as he turns Sabu (the title character who saves the day) into a dog, “it’s amazing how an
annoying kid can make an extremely pleasant dog.” A true flight of fantasy by one of the cinema’s most joyful genies,
co-director Michael Powell. Take your little kids to this one - they’ll love it and so will you.

Lest you think, Sondheim’s picks all predate the modern age, there’s :

The Barbarian Invasions (2003) directed by Denys Arcand.
As Sondheim says, “a truly literate movie-full of ideas, as well as emotion and a portrait of an era which includes
everything from its politics to its sexual morality.”—If you enjoy this, go home and rent Arcand’s 1986 talkfest,
The Decline of the American Empire, which introduced many of the same characters and actors seen in “Barbarian Invasions.”
They are fascinating bookends to a generation.

Barry Lyndon (1975) directed by Stanley Kubrick.
I always felt this was a vastly underrated picture with Ryan O’Neal & Marisa Berenson. Sondheim admires it
for its control and sumptuous presentation; “the use of extravagantly beautiful photography to depict
bloodlessness and violence.”

L’Histoire d’Adele H. (1975) directed by Francois Trauffaut.
This horrifying and heartbreaking film about Victor Hugo’s daughter, Adele, and her obsession with a soldier still
packs a wallop. Sondheim notes that it is virtually the same scenario as the Italian film, Passione d’Amore, which
planted the seed for his own musical, Passion. Sondheim says both films move him, “but in opposite ways, which makes
for an interesting comparison.”

Anyway - this all gives me a tremendous desire to see the Sondheim picks I haven’t caught up with yet, including:
Gus Vant Sant’s Elephant (2003). Sondheim praises its minimalist style as “even creepier than Dead of Night!”
Karacter (Dir. Mike Von Tieh) He describes this 1997 Dutch foreign film Oscar winner as “a Dickensian tale
with rich and strange characters, many established in just a few strokes.”

Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool (1997) with Parker Posey and James Urbaniak :“completely original in tone and story
but not just a private whim like a lot of independent movies. It’s genuinely mysterious.”
Akira Kurasawas High and Low, Kon Ichikawas Nobi - Fires on the Plain - “good and shocking”, Louis Malle’s Le Voleur (The Thief)
with Jean Paul Belmondo & Genievieve Bujold, and The Organizer, directed by Mario Monicelli, whom Sondheim cites
as “one of my favorite directors and this is my favorite film of his.”

Finally, a shout out for The Last of Sheila - the 1973 film Stephen Sondheim wrote himself with actor,
Tony Perkins of Psycho fame!
An Agatha Christie - like mystery involving Hollywood actors, directors, producers, and assorted hangers-on,
trying to bed or kill each other during a “truth or dare” kind of cruise arranged by their host, James Coburn, played
with that fine, devilish smile of his. Wonderful fun performances from the whole company - Joan Hackett, Richard Benjamin,
Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, James Mason and Ian McShane (after a full career in secondary roles now enjoying
his BIG moment in the sun as the super sinister bad guy in DEADWOOD on HBO). It’s a blast—a campy, clever, suspenseful
and nasty mystery to solve.

After you’ve absorbed some of Sondheim’s movie picks at MOMA, rent The Last of Shelia, then pay the $ to see his
masterpiece (and I do not say that lightly), Sweeney Todd on Broadway. In my humble opinion, sitting in the dark
with a bunch of like-minded individuals, letting beautiful images, sound and ideas wash over you,
is the perfect way to pass the holidays.

For the schedule & more Information: www.moma.org.

Don’t let this little film noir gem slip through the cracks again !

Originally released in 1960, just as the New Wave rushed in, Classe Tous Risques
(which is a play on a kind of French insurance policy and also slang for “tourist class”)
got lost in the shuffle. It hasn’t been shown in America in more than 40 years, but
it feels very fresh.

A couple of lines of pulp fiction narration introduce world weary tough guy Abel Davos
(Lino Ventura) and his partner seconds before they pull an audacious payroll heist on
a crowded Milano street. Then comes the exhilarating chase; cross borders by car,
motorcycle, boat, ambulance, and finally on foot. On the lam with 2 kids, the cops
are closing in and Davos calls in some favors. The former partners in crime he sprang
from the joint back in the day are now sitting pretty in Paris and not eager to get
involved. Still, it’s payback time and they send a very young Jean Paul Belmondo
(his next film, Breathless, would make him a star) to bring the old gang boss back
home with the help of (pre-Fellini) vavavoom Sandra Milo.

The gangsters and the good guys all have great faces, and the film is full of beautiful
touches throughout; a muddied high heel, a surreptitious meet in the Nice post office.
Director Claude Sautet includes a lovely first kiss in a great old Parisian elevator
and a pass the time of day exchange between our desparate criminal and a house maid
fetching water in the building where he’s hiding out —- moments that may add
nothing to the arc of the screenplay but are the stuff that make movies live in your heart.

Our anti-hero follows his code of ethics to the very end, taking care of his kids’ future,
making peace with his friends and fixing his enemies, before meeting his destiny
like a man.

Make it a film noir night to remember — rent Rififi and Touchez-pas au Grisbi, two
other fabulous French underworld flicks rescued from unjust obscurity by Film Forum
programmer Bruce Goldstein and Rialto Pictures.
Regrettably, they really don’t make them like this anymore.