In Which I Throw My Opinion into the Ring of Prometheus Chatter

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Neither fish nor fowl, Prometheus—the latest installment in the Alien franchise, and director Ridley Scott's return to the science-fiction genre since, well, Blade Runner 30 years ago—turns out to be more an intriguing mess than an outright failure: a film with visionary and intellectual pretensions that never really adds up to more than the sum of its sometimes amazing parts, but which nevertheless offers a surprising amount of food for thought to go along with its thrills, spills and chills.

Each film in the Alien series so far has offered something different thematically and stylistically from the film(s) coming before it; true to wide-ranging form, Prometheus announces itself right from the beginning as a film in a rather different mold than Scott's 1979 original (this new film is something of a prequel, if you hadn't heard by now). Unlike the ominous horror-movie atmospherics of Jerry Goldsmith's score setting the tone over the opening titles and dark, starry background, composer Marc Streitenfeld's opening-title cue for Prometheus emphasizes wonder and awe over Dariusz Wolski's images of a seemingly Earthly environment—a landscape in which a mysterious humanoid-looking being will ingest something that will somehow cause him to self-destruct, leading his disembodied parts to flow into the adjacent waterfall, creating a slew of molecular structures in a brief sequence that suggests Scott perhaps trying to beat Terrence Malick at his own Tree of Life game.

Wonder and awe turn out to be the essence of Prometheus, visually and thematically. This particular cast of characters is led by a scientist, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), who, along with her boyfriend Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), recruit a bunch of Prometheus crew members—including, among many others, an android named David (Michael Fassbender) and a Weyland Corp. representative named Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron)—to take them to LV-223, a moon that Shaw and Holloway believe may house secrets to uncovering the origin of life. Shaw wears a necklace in the shape of a Catholic cross, indicating a religious faith that underlies this quest; this is validated in the many heavy-handed lines of dialogue to that effect that Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof's screenplay include. She is, in essence, looking for God—and finds her faith severely tested when, basically, all Hell breaks looks on LV-223 and on Prometheus.

This attempt at a religious allegory is admirably ambitious on the face of it, especially in the context of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster that is also a continuation of a lucrative studio franchise. Alas, the film ends up burying most of its interesting ideas under the weight of trying to also cater to audience expectations, both for summer-movie audiences and for Alien fans. Tantalizing spiritual and philosophical ideas wrestle with the expected special-effects fireworks; the frequent whiplash that results ends up frustrating more than illuminating. (Rarely has a sequel-setting final scene as the one that closes out Prometheus felt so forced and hollow.)

With Ridley Scott commandeering this ungainly jumble, Prometheus at least offers consistently impressive visual spectacle, and this film has at least two truly great sequences worth writing home about. There's a delirious suspense setpiece centered around a Caesarean-section abortion that recalls the icky "pleasure" of that famous chest-bursting showstopper in Alien; there's also one particularly memorable merging of genuine awe and splendid special effects surrounding a crucial discovery David makes—with the contents of an important star map literally whirling around him in the air, suggesting speculative thought in motion in a truly original way.

I'm tempted to fault Scott for once again proving himself to be more of slick, sometimes brilliant visualizer of a screenplay rather than a true visionary on the order of, say, Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky—but then, the screenplay is so much of a mess of underdeveloped notions and divided intentions that maybe it might have even defeated those two cinematic titans. A film that expends so much energy announcing that it's about the search of the origin of man and the existence of God demands a more focused, introspective treatment than what it gets here. (If this film had had no ties to the Alien series at all, this may well have been close to a genre masterpiece.) Prometheus, in the end, feels more like a missed opportunity than anything else; still, much like the Greek mythological figure with whom the film shares its title, it's impressive in its reach—intermittently, at least—even if that reach ultimately exceeds its grasp big-time.

Short Take: Tabloid (2010)

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

In tackling the notorious "case of the manacled Mormon" in his new film, veteran documentary filmmaker Errol Morris puts Joyce McKinney—the woman who made all the headlines in the British press when she, as they reported it, kidnapped a Mormon named Kirk Anderson, chained him to a bed and proceeded to rape him—in the front and center of his Interrotron to tell her side of the story. On the surface, this sounds like a strategy that should yield revelations about the human being behind the sensational headlines...and I suppose the gambit works, if only to reveal the woman at the center of this nutty sex scandal to herself be locked into some of her own illusions (delusions?) about Kirk, about love, about celebrity.

But man, what a force of personality McKinney is! She so thoroughly believes in her own take on events—that, for instance, Kirk Anderson fully consented to the sex they had during those three days—that she can't help but hypnotize us, perhaps in spite of our better judgment. (Perhaps her magnetism pulverized Morris, too, in a sense: Tabloid is notably free of his usual reenactments. Who needs 'em, with McKinney as vivid a storyteller as she is?) This is not to say that Morris is completely taken in by her story, as evidenced not only in the handful of other voices offered (two British tabloid reporters, a Mormon, a Korean doctor) but in Morris's visual approach, which not only embodies a tabloid-like aesthetic, but also uses that similarly sensationalistic style to occasionally undermine and contradict McKinney's story, going so far as to suggest underlying societal causes for the illusions she still harbors. (Did 1950s media present that idealized an image of romance, family life? It, at the very least, seems to be one that McKinney bought hook, line and sinker.) And yet, for this viewer at least, Morris generally stays on the right side of the empathy/condescension fence; he's too fascinated by this creature to make her a target for easy mockery (though that's not to say he doesn't sometimes find her funny).

So this is not a film in which one should expect the truth of what really happened in the so-called "Mormon sex in chains" affair to come out; after all, we do get only one side of the story, ultimately. And yet that inherently limited perspective is perhaps the point of Tabloid. If Morris intrepidly seeks the truth of a muddy situation in a film like The Thin Blue Line (1988), in Tabloid he is content to simply muddy the waters of what we think we know about a given situation and the parties involved. In the end, the truth, such as it is, remains stubbornly outside of Morris's grasp—and for such a lurid and outrageous story, that may be the most unsettling thing of all.

Short Take: Breakdown (1997)

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

For the most part—in its first half, especially—Jonathan Mostow's thriller has the lean, brutal efficiency of a B-movie thriller from the 1930s and '40s, crossed with the elegant widescreen framing and attention to landscapes of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. The characters aren't developed much beyond standard archetypes—with Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan playing all-American yuppies (with the distinctly unremarkable names of Jeff and Amy Taylor) who, while on a cross-country trip moving to San Francisco, eventually cross paths with a band of ruthless redneck villains led by the genuinely menacing Red Barr (J.T. Walsh)—but they're sketched in with some welcome detail by the actors embodying them, so that you find yourself as drawn into the human drama, so to speak, as much as you are thrilled by the action, which includes all sorts of beautifully orchestrated cat-and-mouse mayhem with cars, trucks and even a child wielding a rifle.

It's all wrought so skillfully and paced so breathlessly that I suppose it'd be churlish to lament the much richer film that Breakdown occasionally (very occasionally) suggests it might become but never delivers on. When Earl (M.C. Gainey), playing one of Walsh's henchmen, taunts Jeff at one point about his yuppie-ness, there is, briefly, the suggestion of class resentment fueling the behavior of these baddies—a promising hint of social commentary that's entirely dropped once Jeff turns the tables on his tormentors, as Hollywood formula dictates he must. And what at first looks to be a subversive attempt to humanize Red when Jeff follows him to his family home ends up basically going for nought once Jeff wreaks his expected havoc in trying to rescue his wife from near death. Maybe it's only fitting, then, that the film ends with a curlicue of nastiness involving a truck dropping from a bridge without so much as a comment on whether such a gruesome gesture was ever necessary in the first place. The audience is prepared for the villain's comeuppance, and Mostow goes the extra mile to oblige.

As action craftsmanship, however, Breakdown is a breathtaking achievement—literally. It's been a while since I felt like I was actually on the edge of my seat from start to finish, and this film accomplished that feat brilliantly, the cumulative visceral effect akin to a coil ready to snap at any moment. If nothing else, if you want to know what Roger Ebert means by a Bruised Forearm movie, see this immediately. Just, you know, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Screened at 92YTribeca in New York on Monday, Aug. 15

Eric Rohmer's Rayon of Light

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Delphine gets a phone call one day early in July while she's at work. It's her friend Caroline calling her up to break some bad news to her: She has decided not to accompany her on vacation to Greece after all. So who's going to go with her now? Is she doomed to go on vacation by herself? Is it even worth going on vacation by herself?

For Delphine, this has all the force of a seismic shift; at least, she seems to treat it as such around friends who try to comfort her. But Eric Rohmer knows better. In his 1986 "Comedies & Proverbs" film Le Rayon Vert—released in the U.S. as Summer—the late, great French filmmaker  exposes her worries as overblown in the grand scheme of things, yet refuses to look down upon her plight.

Or it could just be that I so thoroughly understood her desperation on an intimately personal level that I couldn't help but empathize. In October of 2009, I visited Hong Kong for about a week, much of that time spent exploring the area on my own. I had a lovely time there, don't get me wrong, and there's something to be said for the freedom you have in exploring an unfamiliar area by yourself without the arguable burden of being tied down to other traveling companions' desires and expectations. For all the pleasures afforded by solo traveling, however, there were about as many instances when I found myself taking in a beautiful sight—say, walking along the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade overlooking Victoria Harbour (the source of the photo above)—or walking amidst a bevy of natives and fellow tourists, and feeling the full weight of loneliness, wishing I could share my excitement with someone else—or, at least, someone in the flesh rather than just online.

It's not the most pleasant of sensations, to say the least. So when Delphine responds in the negative to a friend's suggestion that she simply go to Greece by herself, I completely got where she was coming from. Not everyone can be Rainer Maria Rilke and treasure their solitude—at least, not all the time.

Rohmer, with the invaluable assistance of lead actress Marie Rivière (they are both credited with coming up with the script), gradually reveals, however, that Delphine's desperation as a result of Caroline's bombshell announcement suggests a far deeper malaise, one seemingly borne out of a broken-off engagement two years ago that she apparently still hasn't gotten over. The film doesn't get much into the particulars of this aborted engagement; it's simply a fact of her past, and it is still having an effect on her in the present, manifesting itself in occasional crying jags, denial, anti-social streaks and so on.

Clearly, whatever happened to her to get her to this point, she isn't as happy as she claims, especially when it comes to her love life. Throughout the film, though, Rohmer shows us situations in which Delphine has a chance to try to curb some of that unhappiness, but—through an elusive combination of pride, overintellectualizing and self-pity—is unable or unwilling to cross that bridge. Her more outgoing friend Françoise (Rosette) invites her to stay with her family in Cherbourg, but instead of venturing out and socializing with people, she mostly sticks around the house, playing with the kids and occasionally going off to the nearby woods to quietly mope. Back in the Left Bank, where she lives, a random guy eyes her while she's sitting on a bench; he follows her and tries to engage her, but she turns to him and flat-out refuses his overtures.

Perhaps, most tellingly, while she vacations in Biarritz—a town near the Bay of Biscay in France—she gets into a conversation with a Swedish woman named Lena (Carita) who is much more gregarious than she is (hell, when they meet, she's sunbathing while fully topless); while they both share a drink, Lena calls over a couple of guys and starts flirting with them. What does Delphine do while all this goes down? She just sits there, looking more uncomfortable by the minute, not even bothering to jump into the conversation even when Lena tries to give her cues to join in. Finally, she can't take it anymore, gets up and flees back to her hotel room, already thinking of leaving the next day.

I know what I was thinking when I witnessed this agonizingly prolonged scene: Come on, Delphine, just say something! Don't just sit there and wallow in your own misery! Take some action and do something to fix it! And yet...I understand the impulse to wallow all too well.

Change can be hard sometimes. You get locked into certain ways of thinking, however damaging or destructive they may be, and you become comfortable with them; they become almost a crutch, an excuse to stay complacent. Believe it or not, this can be the case with misery as well—especially that of the self-pitying kind. To actually have to change your whole outlook regarding a certain situation, to step outside of your comfort zone in order to try to effect that positive outcome you so desperately desire: For some, the prospect of doing so can be so immediately daunting that it's much easier to retreat to the idea that you can't change who you are, that there isn't much you can do to change the way things are going in your life in the moment. Retreating to such an arguably defeatist attitude can become perversely pleasurable in a way: It temporarily takes the load off of you actually having to do anything—at least, until the next situation comes along, as it inevitably will, and you're once again faced with the same choice.

Of course, then you may feel the need to come up with elaborate intellectual defenses of your defeatism, to reconcile it in your mind. Often you might say that you're just being "realistic." Someone tells you that it's all just a matter of "changing your attitude," and your immediate response might be to say, "People just don't change their attitude about things on the flick of a switch. That's not how one's mind works." But really, how true is that? Have you actually made an honest attempt at changing your attitude about something? I mean, on the face of it, it doesn't seem like such a hard thing to do, does it? And yet, as the well-known saying goes, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak...

I'm no psychologist, obviously, but it's this kind of tentativeness that I see in Delphine. Not only do I see it in those many private flights of sustained moping, or in those long sequences in which she wanders around by herself; I hear it not only in her denials whenever friends suggest she's deeply unhappy, but in that aforementioned painfully revealing sequence in Biarritz, when she expresses to Lena her belief that if she really did have something special to offer romantically, guys would see it and act upon it. Does she truly believe this, or has she swallowed this bit of self-hatred so completely that, when pressed, she'll desperately repeat this as a way to excuse her stagnant love life? Maybe more to the point: Is she such a hopeless romantic that she believes that love really does just happen at first sight, like that? (If I remember correctly, there are hints in the film that this might have been one reason why she broke off her engagement two years ago.)

The title of Rohmer's film translates to The Green Ray in English, and it's a reference to Jules Verne's novel by the same name. At one point while wandering around in Biarritz, Delphine overhears a few elderly people discussing the work in detail. According to them, the Green Ray of Verne's novel is a super-rare meteorological phenomenon: a green ray of light that can only be glimpsed either after sunset or before sunrise. The characters in the novel are obsessed with finding it, believing that getting a glimpse of it will heighten their own perceptions of the thoughts and feelings of themselves and those around them. In that sense, the title could almost be interpreted as a kind of statement of purpose on Rohmer's part: Here is a film that will heighten the audience's perceptions of the thoughts and feelings of this one character, and maybe even do the same for your own. And while Le Rayon Vert is grounded in the specific details of this particular character, Rohmer leaves out just enough of her backstory, and maintains just enough detachment, for us to possibly see bits of ourselves in Delphine. Not everyone will attach the same intense personal identification that I found myself doing early and often in this film, of course; and it's quite possible that one's psychological profile of Delphine might differ from another's. I think that's just part and parcel, though, of an immensely rich and humane piece of cinema, one that I haven't stopped thinking about since seeing it for the first time ever early last week.

The more I think about Delphine, the more I realize that in many ways, I am Delphine. I leave it to you all, dear readers, to determine whether this post functions as an in-depth dissection of Delphine or merely a projection of my own neuroses onto her's.

For those in New York who missed the new 35mm print of Le Rayon Vert during its recent brief run at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Film Forum is screening that print from July 1-5. I highly recommend seeing it, obviously.

On Character Motivations in Movies

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—The line between opaque character motivations and merely underimagined characters can be a fine one indeed.

Sometimes in a drama, you might come across an action that a given character undertakes that strikes you as either inconsistent with that character's previous behavior, or simply unclear as to his/her motivation behind said action. Do you immediately chalk up such confusion on the viewer's part to bad screenwriting—a possible failure on the screenwriter's part to fully imagine these characters? Or are you, like me, more often than not inclined to give that particular screenplay the benefit of the doubt?

I've been thinking about this issue a bit more than usual recently, inspired by two films I've seen: Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (1994) and Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas (2010). As far as subject matter goes, these two films are worlds apart; stylistically, however, they are startlingly similar, with both directors committed to extremely long takes and a starkly realistic (if not downright depressive, at least in Tarr's case) atmosphere in dissecting the physical and emotional environments they inhabit. In aiming for this fly-on-the-wall approach, however, they also both end up taking a more detached perspective on the human behavior they portray, not always bothering to make clear the motivations behind the behavior.

One of the most infamous sequences in Sátántangó involves a young girl (Erika Bók) who, finding herself bored while waiting around for her brother, hides in an empty space away from the rain, picks up a pet cat and proceeds to torture and eventually kill it. (This turns out, believe it or not, to be not the worst thing she does in her section of the film.) Why does she commit this appalling act, which Tarr, of course, shoots in unnervingly prolonged takes without any cutaways to spare us the worst? Is it just an indication of how bored she is? Does she truly believe she's just playing around with it? Is she that determined to exercise her power over something—a power that she perhaps is otherwise unable to exercise in her regular life? Or is her attitude toward this poor creature a product of the loveless environment in which she lives: an isolated, failed farm collective in Hungary in which most of the inhabitants exhibit variations of boredom, selfishness and general spiritual bankruptcy? Tarr doesn't bother to give us any clear indications of the reasons behind her actions; he—with the invaluable assistance of cinematographer Gábor Medvigy—simply looks on impassively.

Or take the pivotal moment in Tuesday, After Christmas when Paul (Mimi Branescu) finally decides, a couple days before Christmas, to fess up to his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) about the affair he's been carrying on with their daughter's dentist, Raluca (Maria Popistasu). Following in Tarr's footsteps, Muntean shoots both the build-up to this bombshell moment and the resulting emotional fall-out in one single take; just as there is now nowhere for Paul to hide from Adriana's knife-edged glare, Muntean and cinematographer Tudor Lucaciu don't give us the relief of edits or changes in camera angles to shortchange the emotional brutality of the moment. And yet, there may still be lingering questions regarding that moment in your mind: Why does he choose that day, of all days, to let out his secret? What makes him decide to let that secret out in the first place? (He never vocalizes his thoughts, and Muntean never lets us in on them through any sort of voiceover.) Other than that one tension-filled scene at the dentist's office—in which, by happenstance, his wife and his mistress find themselves in the same room, his wife knowing nothing about his relationship with Raluca in the moment—he seems to have his double life under reasonable control. It almost comes off as an implicit bit of self-awareness on Muntean's part that, throughout Adriana's meltdown in that scene, the one question she never bothers to ask her philandering husband is "Why?"

Why, indeed. Neither director seems all that interested in providing explanations for behavior so much as just showing us that behavior and leaving it to audience members to come up with his/her own explanations, based on the evidence presented onscreen. Some might find this a frustrating approach and conclude that a screenplay simply hasn't been fully imagined enough by all parties involved. But is it quite that simple?

A lot of the mainstream films and television dramas I've seen over the years seem to have a marked preference for tidy explanations for the ways characters behave; legal dramas and police procedurals like the many Law and Order and CSI series, especially, probably wouldn't be so popular if they didn't satisfy an audience's desire for closure, psychological or otherwise, in their mysteries. But are motivations ever that easy to parse in real life? Even after New York Representative Anthony Weiner finally admitted that he sent those explicit photos to other women through Twitter that accidentally found their way into the public eye, people are still discussing the whys of this situation, such as: Why do people in positions of power like Weiner—or like Bill Clinton as president of the United States in the 1990s—feel this compulsion to risk wrecking their reputations and home lives? There may be lots of speculation among "experts" in the media, but usually that's all they amount to: lots of speculation, rarely a consensus explanation.

Of course, the Anthony Weiner story (which seems to get both more catastrophic and less interesting as it wears on) is a real-life event; Sátántangó and Tuesday, After Christmas are wholly fictional constructs—both imbued with the patina of cold, hard reality, but fictional nevertheless. It's probably natural for all of us to approach works of fiction with different expectations than we do works of non-fiction.

I guess, as is often the case with a complex issue like this, one's stance on this matter will depend on a given film. For the most part, I'm willing to go along with the elliptical characterizations in Sátántangó and Tuesday, After Christmas because I do feel that each filmmaker sketches in just enough detail, whether character-based, plot-based or environment-based, for us to solidly draw our own conclusions as to, say, why the girl tortures the cat, or why Paul cheats on his wife for the younger female dentist.

Sometimes, though...well, I suppose my ability to suspend disbelief can go only so far in some cases. For instance, personally (and I seem to be in a minority on this), I've always had trouble reconciling the decision Maggie, the boxer played by Hilary Swank in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004), makes by asking her beloved mentor Frankie (Eastwood) to let her die after an accident during a crucial match leaves her paralyzed. This woman, full of life and pluck, so driven that she's willing to cast off her extravagantly ungrateful family to realize her dreams, suddenly decides she would rather give up on life than do what we've seen her do throughout the rest of the film: fight to live like she fought to become a boxing champion? Yes yes, I know what screenwriter Paul Haggis has her say in the film to justify this twist: that she feels she has accomplished all that she has set out to do in this world, and would prefer to depart on top, now that she's physically unable to box anymore. Nevertheless, for me anyway, the decision doesn't jibe with the way the character's been written and acted up to that point—and if you don't buy Maggie's decision, then that finale can't have the same devastating emotional impact that Eastwood and Haggis surely intend, however much one is willing to accept that decision at face value. (But then, I've always found Maggie to be a rather thinly written role, however beautifully performed by Swank. I don't really buy her motivation because I don't really buy her as a fully fleshed-out character; to me, she's a mere archetypal vehicle to justify Frankie's own casting off of his emotional demons throughout the film.)

Of course, should such matters of character motivations make a big difference in the long run? Often, one will hear people poke such psychological holes at, say, your standard Hollywood action extravaganza, but such niggles will usually be dismissed with, "If he/she didn't act this way, there wouldn't be a movie." Are dramas somehow more worthy of such scrutiny? Should we necessarily hold a drama such as Million Dollar Baby to a different standard of dramatic logic?

Jean Renoir famously played a character in his own film The Rules of the Game (1939) that uttered, "The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has his reasons." Some of cinema's greatest artists—Renoir himself, Robert Altman, Eric Rohmer (whose marvelous 1986 film Le Rayon Vert I've just seen, by the way, and which I hope to write about at length eventually), Yasujiro Ozu, among other examples—have used that dictum not as an excuse to try to connect the psychological dots, so to speak, but to, in their own distinct ways, present characters' behavior and the circumstances surrounding their actions, and trust us to be able to intuit the motivations driving that behavior.

When it comes to the mysteries of human nature, maybe ultimately the most honest approach for an artist is to merely stand back and observe people in all their messy complexities. Whether it all adds up depends on the individual viewer, I suppose. But to try to explain it all would risk reducing our multifaceted human species into a series of easy-to-package psychological profiles. The best art ought to aspire to something more than that.

The Rest of Ebertfest, Part I

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Here is some of the rest of my foreshortened Ebertfest recap—basically a bunch of capsules with a few odds & ends to finish it off.

DAY TWO

Umberto D. What's left to say about Vittorio De Sica's late-neorealist 1952 masterpiece that hasn't already been said? Only that the key word to understanding the film's everlasting power is "dignity," and that while newer filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, Lance Hammer, Lee Daniels and Courtney Hunt prefer, to varying degrees, to stage undignified horror shows out of poverty, De Sica humanely focuses on the title character's quest to remain dignified even as he finds himself in increasingly dire living conditions. The result isn't exactly uplifting—Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) does eventually lose his home by the end and contemplates suicide with his dog in tow. And yet, with that emphasis on a man trying to hold onto his personal dignity, the film is somehow life-affirming in its own way.

My Dog Tulip. Here's another film featuring a dog as a human's closest companion. The human in this case is writer J.R. Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer), who has gone through a lifetime of disappointments with female companions and decides to turn his affections to the titular German shepherd he adopts. Even when Tulip turns out to be a handful, though, Ackerley recounts his experiences with a nostalgic wistfulness in his omnipresent voiceover narration. Meanwhile, husband-and-wife directing team Paul & Sandra Fierlinger illustrate Ackerley's tales with lustrous watercolor animation that actually does suggest paintings come to life. My Dog Tulip—based on Ackerley's own memoir—is especially admirable, in the midst of all these Disney nature documentaries that shamelessly anthropomorphize the animals they present onscreen, for its general refusal to assign Tulip human characteristics to explain her behavior. Ackerley is too thoughtful to fall into such a trap; his voiceover narration occasionally detours into ruminations on the nature of human attraction to dogs and other such broader topics. Tulip, in Ackerley's memoir and in this film adaptation, remains an eating, pissing and shitting animal to the very end—and he loves her more than he's ever really loved anyone else. That's a funny thing, when you think hard about it.

Tiny Furniture. No dogs in this movie, but this does feature its writer/director/lead actress Lena Dunham telling seemingly everyone around her that she's in a "post-graduate delirium"—but doing it in a way that makes us—or maybe it's just me, judging by the very vocal response from this film's detractors that I've encountered on Twitter—wonder whether she's merely using that as an excuse to indulge in self-pity, aimlessness, etc. It's that kind of willingness to lay bare her own faults that suggests to me that mere "narcissism"—the common knock against the film—is far from Dunham's mind. I suppose one person's self-examination equals another's narcissism—but if self-examination equals "narcissism," then what of Federico Fellini's 8½? Dunham's film isn't that one's equal, obviously...but frankly, I find I can relate to Dunham's personal issues more than I can Fellini's, who gets so tied up in his own private obsessions that he threatens to push the audience away.

Anyway, this was my second time seeing Tiny Furniture, and for the most part, my enthusiasm for it remains undimmed, especially seeing it at the Virginia Theatre's large screen. (Who knew Jody Lee Lipes's impeccably framed widescreen compositions could look so gorgeous?) For me, its depiction of a young adult who, after graduating from college, is struggling to find her way, remains poignant—doubly so in the case of main character Aura, who has all this privilege at her disposal and yet has no idea what to do with it, especially on the heels of a fairly useless film-studies degree. But who says this is merely an issue of privilege (examined or not)? Surely this is a crisis most of us have faced at one time or another in our own lives. Hell, I may still be in my own post-graduate delirium...but I'd like to think I'm doing a better job combating it than Aura is.

DAY THREE

45365. Actually, I skipped Bill & Turner Ross's documentary in favor of writing my never-to-be-published Ebertfest dispatch for The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog...but I had seen it previously in preparation for an interview with the two brothers that actually did get published. So I'll let that interview and this extra commentary stand for a review here. Great movie.

Me and Orson Welles. I did come back to the Virginia Theatre for Richard Linklater's 2008 drama, which I had not seen before Ebertfest. I had heard a lot about the film, though, particularly about Christian McKay's performance as Orson Welles...and folks, when I first heard Welles's familiar, beautifully confident baritone coming out of McKay's mouth, I was immediately stunned into submission at just how uncannily he is able to channel this larger-than-life character—or, more accurately, someone who wasn't afraid to act larger than life, to ruthless extremes.

The rest of the film isn't too bad, either. Based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, Me and Orson Welles looks at this great artist through the eyes of a brashly confident (and fictional, I assume) up-and-comer named Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who randomly catches Welles's eye and is immediately hired to play a small role in a new production of Julius Caesar with his Mercury Theatre players, including Joseph Cotten (James Tupper), Norman Lloyd (Leo Bill) and George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin). Richard has dreams of theatrical stardom himself, and he sees this as a road to his big break. Predictably, it doesn't work out that way; Welles's ego-driven manipulations turns out to be more than he can handle. But even as this coming-of-age drama hits its familiar marks, Linklater offers us the pleasures of a lovingly detailed depiction of life in the theater: the hard work that goes into putting on a production and the joys that lie at the end of it all. You could call it an American equivalent of Mike Leigh's equally loving Topsy-Turvy (1999). And seeing some of the reenactments of the production make me think I must have missed out on one hell of a production. As Robert Schumann once said about Frédéric Chopin, "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"

Only You. Yes, this is Norman Jewison's 1994 romantic comedy with Marisa Tomei in full cutey-pie mode and a disarmingly young Robert Downey, Jr. Who the hell remembers this movie? Apparently, as Chaz Ebert said in her introduction to the film, she and Roger wanted to program a good love story in the festival, and so they decided on this one, an out-of-left-field choice that reminded me that Ebertfest used to be called "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival." It is what it is: a sunny, fluffy throwback to 1950s Hollywood entertainments of the Roman Holiday vein, with charming leads, witty dialogue, quirky supporting characters (Bonnie Hunt does most of the scene-stealing honors here), beautiful Italy locations (shot like picture postcards by the great Sven Nykvist) and a complete lack of cynicism or condescension. As such, it's diverting...and Downey once again proves that he can do just about anything, including imbuing fresh, jittery life into formulaic rom-com shenanigans with his own distinctive vocal cadences. Does anyone else, though, find the lengths Downey goes to win Tomei over to be a bit, um, problematic—creepy, even?

More Ebertfest summarizing to come...soon...

The Beauties of Burnett

NEW YORK—I was originally going to devote all of last weekend to immersing myself in some of the films of African-American independent filmmaker Charles Burnett, thanks to the complete retrospective of his work currently going on at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It didn't entirely work out that way; on Saturday, instead of seeing Burnett's 2007 film Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation as I had initially planned, I ended up (thanks to Foursquare—see, location-based social media does have its valuable uses!) meeting up with a couple of old friends from college and crawling around the East Village all afternoon and late into the night. Hey, it's New York; that kind of thing happens! And it was such a lovely day out that I felt no guilt about it whatsoever.

Namibia—which, to be perfectly honest, has an unappealingly academic-sounding title—is supposed to be screening again at MoMA a couple weekends from now. One quick look at my calendar suggests that that next screening may conflict with a Satyajit Ray film at Walter Reade Theater that I'm dying to see (his 1973 film Distant Thunder, for those who are curious; Film Society of Lincoln Center has programmed a series of late Ray films after its series of his earlier work in 2009). This weekend, then, may well be the only one in which Burnett's films figure into it. For that reason, I might as well go ahead and discuss the by-and-large excellent films I saw this weekend.

***

Burnett, for those who aren't aware of him, is an African-American filmmaker who has been working on-and-off for about four decades now, making many films about the black American experience that have often found favor from critics but have never found their way into more popular acclaim. The fact that Burnett's aforementioned three-hour epic about Namibia's struggle for independence from South Africa—featuring a big name in Danny Glover, no less—has still only played at film festivals more than three years after its completion gives you an indication of how marginalized a figure Burnett has been over the course of his career, despite the heroic efforts of intrepid film critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum to bring him into the public eye.

But the tide may finally be turning in his favor. It took 30 years, but his 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep was finally restored and given a proper theatrical release by Milestone Films in 2007; a two-DVD set of that film, his 1983 follow-up, My Brother's Wedding, and some of his short films followed. And now he has this big museum retrospective in his honor.

Before this series began, I had only seen Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, so I was looking forward to seeing his later, more difficult-to-see work. Here's some of what I wrote about Killer of Sheep for the Daily Targum—Rutgers University's daily newspaper—upon its belated theatrical release in 2007:

From its deliberately unassuming—and, in this 35mm blow-up, noticeably grainy—black and white cinematography (Burnett shot the film himself) to its authentic location settings, and from the fairly amateurish performances of its mostly nonprofessional cast to its episodic plot—all of these elements serve to give us the feeling of real life taking place right in front of our eyes.
The real life of this film isn’t particularly glamorous, either: its main character, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), works at a slaughterhouse for a living—thus the film’s title—and goes through much of the film palpably disillusioned by the depressing reality of his lower-class existence in his Watts, Calif. community. In its interest in capturing the harsh realities of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, Killer of Sheep works in the great tradition of neorealism, the famous post-World War II artistic movement that attempted to render real life on film as authentically as possible with documentary-style techniques—handheld camerawork, outdoor location shooting, etc.

But Italian neorealist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves or Roberto Rossellini’s Open City aren’t great just because of its documentary-like realism. Like De Sica and Rossellini, Charles Burnett has both compassion and a poetic—yet fiercely unsentimental—sensibility to go along with his sharply observant sense of lived-in realism.

Thus, no one is made out to be exaggerated caricatures in Killer of Sheep—not even the two show-offy “rich” guys who are first seen stealing a television set, and then are shown asking Stan to participate in a murder for money. Even scenes like those, Burnett suggests, are an unmistakable part of life in an African-American ghetto; you do what you feel you have to do in order to get by in such dire surroundings.

And even in the midst of Stan’s sense of despair, Burnett is still able to find, and poetically convey, moments of indelible beauty and joy. Perhaps its most touching moment comes in long sequence in which Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) share a silent slow dance in their apartment to the tune of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” It’s all in one unbroken shot, and Burnett’s camera simply sits there, observing the wife’s attempt to try to reach out to her emotionally distant husband. When the song is over and the dance ends, everything seems to be back to (dreary) normal. Within Killer of Sheep, however, those small gestures—and there are many of them at unexpected, isolated moments—have the power of giant deliverances.

The Burnett films I saw this weekend generally build on the more enthralling qualities of both Killer of Sheep and his worthy second feature My Brother's Wedding. All of them, though, are quite different from either of his two early features, suggesting a stylistic adventurousness on his part that supplements his sociological and humanistic concerns.

His rarely screened 1990 film To Sleep With Anger is an intimate family drama that, as a result of its spiritual elements, becomes the stuff of folklore. Danny Glover, probably the most high-profile actor in this cast, gives a beautifully insinuating performance as Harry, an old acquaintance of Gideon (Paul Butler), the patriach of the film's central clan. Gideon kindly lets Harry stay over his house...but Harry turns out to have a malicious streak, as he slowly but surely begins to wreak havoc on the family's relations, threatening to tear the unit apart in subtly insidious ways. His malice manifests itself in its most physical form when Gideon himself suddenly falls into a coma one morning—surely not unrelated to Harry's continued presence in the household.

The character of Harry, however, doesn't represent anything quite so simplistic as the "evil" to the family's "good." As others have commented, Harry is a modern incarnation of the Trickster, a being who acts in a dangerous manner but whose actions often have unexpectedly positive outcomes. In this case...well, as Burnett depicts in the opening scenes of the film, this family was already swimming in buried tensions and generational divides; they only needed someone like Harry to push those tensions to a boiling point—to the point of bloodshed, in one instance—and apparently they only needed someone like Harry to at least help pave a way toward a promising resolution. In the world Burnett creates in To Sleep With Anger—realistic yet full of magical possibilities, a kind of supernatural variation on the milieu he explored in his first two films—even that mediocre kid trumpet player who annoys everyone in town manages to get at least one tune right by the end; tellingly, the kid gets this strange and oddly heartwarming film's final image, as his cacophonously tuneless trumpet playing transforms into a beautiful improvisation that plays over the end credits.

There's more beauty in Burnett's 1994 police drama The Glass Shield—to date his only film to get released by a major studio, in this case Miramax—though it's a stark kind of beauty, one that highlights the film's angry substance. Instead of the kind of harsh, gritty realism of other urban crime dramas made during that time—films like Boyz N the Hood (1991), for instance, or Menace II Society (1993)—Burnett, with the aid of cinematographer Elliot Davis, bathes much his based-on-true-events tale in neon-blue colors and dark shadows, turning the Los Angeles county precinct headquarters into some kind of Hell on earth. He also  encourages composer Stephen James Taylor—who wrote the folksy score for To Sleep With Anger—to turn up the heat in his music for the film, imparting an operatic grandeur to the story. It's still quite harsh and gritty—its sprung editing rhythms (Curtiss Clayton did the editing) keep us on our toes as the story unfolds—but there's a visual radiance to it that, surprisingly, doesn't detract from the power of this tale of police corruption, racism, compromised morals and idealism punctured.

The Glass Shield is a more story-driven film than any of his previous feature work, and Burnett's economical approach to storytelling here sometimes makes the film seem choppier and neater than his previous work. It's still a gripping and brilliantly told story, though, and its underlying themes and emotions still pack a punch, especially the bitter irony of its concluding twist (which apparently Burnett had to fight to keep in, as Miramax demanded a softer ending). It's as socially conscious as Burnett's previous films, except done in a more urgent and electric style than any of them.

Social consciousness is not the first thing one might think of when encountering The Annihilation of Fish, Burnett's as-yet-unreleased 1999 comedy-drama with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave both playing endearing elderly nutcases who fall in love when they both move into an apartment building owned by Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder, barely recognizable here in her aged makeup). Actually, "nutcase" is a bit too strong of a term to describe them—though they certainly seem like little more than crazy people during the film's set-up, which comes so perilously close to drowning in its "look-at-me" quirks that it nearly tried my patience. But even with the titular Fish (Jones) claiming to be literally wrestling a demon named Hank, and with Poinsettia (Redgrave) experiencing heartbreak after being forced to split for good from her invisible friend Giacomo Puccini—yes, that's right, the famous Italian opera composer—Burnett somehow manages to look past the relentless whimsy and locate the emotional heart within Anthony C. Winkler's oddball screenplay.

It's not so much that Fish and Poinsettia are "crazy," as in mentally insane. In Jones's and Redgrave's performances, there are underlying hints of deep personal pain—perhaps from tragic pasts that the film only slightly hints at—that these idiosyncracies mask; their quirks are their defense mechanisms from worldly hurt. In that sense, their madness is metaphorical in nature rather than literal; at least, that's the way Burnett seems to treat the material. (In a few moments of outright stylization, when Fish wrestles Hank the demon, Burnett's camera sometimes playfully adopts the demon's point-of-view; when he throws the demon out into the trees just outside his apartment window, there's a rustling sound heard in the leaves every time.) Much of the drama of their relationship, then, comes from whether these two characters will eventually break through those defense mechanisms, confront their pain directly and move past the (for lack of a better word) demons unsettling them both.

The Annihilation of Fish isn't quite an overlooked masterpiece; it's less visually distinguished than some of Burnett's previous features (someone at the Q&A session after the film's screening on Friday night suggested that this film might work as a Hallmark Hall of Fame-type movie, which gives you an indication of its visual ambition), and, as I suggested earlier, it's so aggressively whimsical early on that it may drive some viewers nuts in the beginning. And yet, once you ease yourself into the film's zany world, one senses traces of Burnett's usual sensitivity and humanity. He refuses to condescend to this zany material; the film never becomes the cutesy-poo "two-old-codgers" comedy one expects. The result is a film that, against all odds, becomes strangely moving without becoming overly saccharine. (Maybe Burnett would have been a better choice to direct The Beaver than Jodie Foster.)

MoMA's Burnett series runs through April 25, with these aforementioned films receiving second screenings. Again, I'm not sure if I will be able to see any more films in the series (which is exhaustive enough to include a lot of his television work, including his Disney Channel film Nightjohn (1996) and a 2003 PBS documentary about Nat Turner), but if any of you live in New York and don't know much about Burnett, his films are worth taking a chance on. On the basis of what I've seen—all of them brimming with beauty, warmth and insight—I think he's not only one of the finest filmmakers we have in America, but certainly one that deserves to be better known that he is.

[Of these three films, only The Glass Shield is easily available on DVD here in the United States. To Sleep With Anger was released on DVD in England by the British Film Institute, but it looks to be technically out of print now...though, if you're willing to spare the greater expense, you might be able to find used copies somewhere online.]

The Fighter: The Ties That Bind

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Though I mostly rested this weekend to recover from the nasty cold that hit me last week, I did end up seeing one film in a movie theater this weekend.

I finally got around to seeing David O. Russell's Oscar-nominated drama The Fighter over the weekend. First things first: Reports of a Melissa Leo scenery-chewing massacre have been greatly exaggerated. Seriously, folks? That's it??? Honestly, nothing she does as Alice Ward, the imposing matriarch of the troubled Ward clan, seemed to jump out at me as particularly excessive or mannered; in fact, I had no trouble responding to her as the misguided if well-intentioned mother she was, rather than as the egotistical Melissa Leo showcase I kept being warned about from friends. People, I've seen far worse in the hamminess department. Has anyone actually seen Jon Voight and/or Eric Roberts in Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train (1985) recently, as I have? Now, there's a couple of distractingly mannered lead performances that threaten to get in the way of the film's cumulative effect; Leo is a miracle of nuance and subtlety compared to those two.

But enough about Leo, who looks to be on her way to an Oscar anyway. The movie surrounding her, Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams, believe it or not, does have some thematic and emotional interest beyond the particulars of its standard sports-movie plot—enough, at least, that I actually found myself genuinely involved in the film rather than merely counting down to its inevitable final triumph.

The Fighter, it turns out, is not so much a "boxing drama" as it is a family drama. But while the Ward clan is dysfunctional for sure, the film's focus isn't just on the dysfunction, but on Micky Ward's (Wahlberg) complicated attempts to try to break free from his familial roots and assert his own independence. That's not easy for him to do, even with the help of his assertive but caring girlfriend Charlene (Adams); his family has provided so much for him up to the point the film's story begins that he still feels a sense of loyalty to the clan even when, in the back of his mind, he knows that they're steering him wrong more than they're steering him right. Even when Micky does take his tentative first steps at establishing a presence outside of the family—training with someone other than his older brother Dicky (Bale), for instance—he still finds himself relying on strategies taught by his increasingly crack-addled brother to help him in certain tough spots. Surely, Micky desperately wonders, there is a happy medium possible between pleasing his family and being his own man; The Fighter is as much about his attempts at finding that balance as it is about, say, Dicky trying to overcome his drug problems.

In that sense, Russell's film is about something everyone surely has to go through in becoming a full-fledged adult: negotiating that smooth transition from relying on your family for support to becoming self-reliant. And I have to admit, I found myself relating to this angle of the film quite strongly—me being someone who, just a few months ago, was casting off the shackles of living at home with my parents and trying to figure out how to live on my own in New York. I know what it feels like to have such a strong sense of loyalty to your family—to my mother, especially, in my case—that it sometimes feels constricting: as if, if you don't have their approval or their support, you can't go on. (This, remember, is why I agonized as much as I did about changing my major from accounting, my mother's preference, to journalism, my own.) These ties that bind, sometimes to the point of irrationality, are something Russell and Wahlberg seem to understand deeply, and it's that depth of feeling that animates The Fighter past its sports-movie clichés and turns it into something genuinely suspenseful and even affecting.

Playtime: Does It Get Any Better Than This?

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Every so often, people ask me what film I consider my favorite of all time. In the past, I've usually responded that I have a handful of titles in mind that I really love above most others, but that it was too difficult for me to narrow it down to one single favorite.

But folks, I went to see Jacques Tati's Playtime in 70mm on Saturday afternoon at the reopening of the Museum of the Moving Image up in Queens. Having finally seen this 1967 masterpiece projected in a theater, I think it's probably safe for me to go ahead and declare this to be officially my favorite film ever (at least, until I see another film that overthrows it in my affections).

When it comes to those handful of films that I prize above all others (Playtime, Vertigo and Fallen Angels are among that select few)...well, I don't really have any set criteria to make such a determination. As with a lot of my reactions to films, it's mostly a gut feeling, one that will eventually (hopefully) be buttressed by some kind of critical/intellectual content. In the case of Playtime in 70mm, that feeling manifested itself in the big smile on my face and a familiar lightheaded feeling that I get only from certain great films—a feeling Roger Ebert might call "elevation"—neither of which dissipated for all of the film's 124 minutes. (Only a maniacal elderly laugher sitting two seats to my right threatened to derail my blissful savoring of the experience, intruding as he did with horse-like top-of-his-lungs laughter that made one of my viewing companions want to strangle him.)

What is it about this particular film, though, that inspires me to proclaim it as the one I prize above all the others I've seen in my (admittedly relatively brief) lifetime? I think it has a lot to do with the fact that, within its deep-focus compositions, its de-emphasis on central characters and its ceaseless comic imagination, I sense a full expression of my own way of looking at the world.

I remember the first two times I watched Playtime, seeing it first on a tube television set while still a college student at Rutgers, then later on a plasma-screen TV at home after having received the updated Criterion DVD edition as a birthday present. Back then, my trips to New York City were far more infrequent than they would later become...but every time I would travel into midtown Manhattan, I would stare up at the tall buildings surround me and always think back to the skyscrapers and various other pieces of city architecture in Tati's Paris, and how overwhelming and coldly industrial they can all seem to an outsider. Then I started commuting into Manhattan regularly for my job, and gradually that sense of wonder dissolved, as it inevitably will once familiarity sets in.

So seeing, once again, that group of American tourists traveling through Paris—with occasional detours into the side adventures of Tati's own M. Hulot—helped reawaken that initial sense of wonder at experiencing the big city for the first time. But, having felt like I've lived a bit since the last time I saw the film, Playtime reawakened a lot of other familiar feelings. Its opening scene, for instance, set at the Aéroports de Paris, perfectly catches the sometimes bewildering hustle and bustle of being at an airport, and Tati is able to convey this not by taking one character's point of view and following his/her progress through an airport, but by basically taking an omniscient perspective and inviting us to observe all sorts of people interacting in this one unmistakably modern environment—and, in this film, Tati is so generous with giving just about every character something amusing to do that there is always something to look at, in just about every inch of its widescreen frames. (That kind of attention is detail is the reason why this film works better projected big in a theater rather than on a much smaller TV screen.)

It's that generosity, in the end, that moves me the most about Playtime. By de-emphasizing central characters, Tati is thus free to roam around all the various spaces in his (recreated Parisian) metropolis, to look not only for comedy wherever he can find it—whether in the sounds made cushioned chairs, or even in the droop of a model airplane in a restaurant with too much heat—but also for the possibilities of human connection in the potentially alienating modern milieu he so pitilessly captures. It's the same kind of generous spirit I'd like to think I embody in my own life: an embrace of humanity, in all its variety and mystery; an openness to all the world has to offer around me; and a willingness to forge personal connections wherever possible, especially in a highly populated metropolis such as New York. (That last part can sometimes be frustratingly difficult, as I've come to discover in the past few weeks...but I persist nevertheless, because you never know what sparks may fly in a chance encounter.) It's that curiosity about the world, and especially about the people who inhabit it, that I expect from any great artist and any great work of art; Playtime gives that cherished philosophy possibly its most sublime cinematic expression. 

For all the talk over the years about the film being about big-city alienation, Playtime is ultimately an exhilarating, enlivening and genuinely inspiring celebration of life. Even as, during its euphoric second hour, a fancy restaurant experiences one mishap after another, the people dining in that restaurant manage to find ways to look past the mess and enjoy themselves anyway. (Seriously, every weekend for me in New York should be like that extended restaurant sequence, dammit!) And then there's the gift that M. Hulot's gives to the pretty young female tourist (Barbara Dennek) as she is about to head back to the U.S. It doesn't even necessarily matter what it is he gives her; the point is, even though he realizes he may never seen this young woman again, he has nevertheless made a connection that may well be remembered for the rest of both their lives.

I live for those kinds of connections. And I live for movies like Playtime. Films like that are why I love this art form as much as I do.

Oh yeah, I saw other stuff this past weekend. I'll get to those. For now, though, allow me to just bask in the afterglow of Tati's masterpiece.

Blue Eyes

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Starting today, I have three days this weekend, rather than the usual two, to catch up on films, socialize (I hope) and just generally enjoy life outside of my day job. I already have my Saturday set, for the most part: The newly designed Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is re-opening tomorrow, and among the films being screened on its first day jumping back into New York cultural life? Jacques Tati's Playtime and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey—both in 70mm! I will be seeing both, even though, honestly, Playtime—one of my five favorite films of all time, even though, up 'til now, I've only seen it on tube and widescreen TVs via DVD—is the one I'm more excited to see in its original format. (I admire 2001 a great deal, don't get me wrong...but it's probably my third favorite Kubrick film overall, behind Barry Lyndon and Dr. Strangelove. Of course, I don't discount the possibility that may well change tomorrow, seeing it on what I hope is a laaaaarge screen.) Also planned for this weekend: the new 35mm print of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin at Film Forum—a classic of the cinema which, to my shame, I have not yet seen; and catching up with one or two of the newer releases. Somewhere within all that moviegoing will be a stage performance and, I hope, a TV on which to watch the Jets take on the Patriots Sunday afternoon.

In the meantime, though: some catching up from last weekend.

In addition to The Leopard—which I do plan to blog about, but not until I can get my hands on a copy of the Criterion DVD—I finally caught up with Derek Cianfrance's highly praised Blue Valentine (2010) this weekend. Let me sum up my reaction this way: I was far from unimpressed, and occasionally I was moved, but I'm not convinced it fully realizes its grand aims either, for all its incidental beauties and obvious depth of feeling.

Blue Valentine—along with that other celebrated relationship drama of 2010, Maren Ade's Everyone Else—attempts to dissect a relationship going south. Instead of Ade's chronologically linear behavioral observation, though, Cianfrance cuts back and forth between Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy's (Michelle Williams) sour current reality and the relationship's more innocent beginnings. In that way (and this is not meant to trivialize the film, by any means), Blue Valentine plays like a far less playful, more serious-minded (500) Days of Summer, where one cut between past bliss and present disillusionment can pack a devastating emotional punch. Cianfrance adds to the contrast between past and present by shooting Cindy and Dean's courtship sequences on a markedly grainier film stock and with a more vibrant color scheme than the present-day scenes, with its slicker look and duller, earthier tones.

For all the non-chronological slicing and dicing, Dean and Cindy's relationship follows a fairly familiar trajectory. They meet while Cindy is in college, and Dean—working for a moving company at the time—sweeps this ambitious, career-minded woman off her feet with a banjo and an earnestly sung tune (which, not too subtly, is called "You Always Hurt the Ones You Love"); she becomes pregnant from a previous relationship, though, and after she finds herself unable to go through an abortion, they decide to get married. But, of course, that original romantic spark doesn't last in married life. The film itself opens in the waning days of their marriage, and later on, we see Dean—a house painter, bearded, given to fits of alcoholism—making one last desperate attempt, in a futuristic sex-hotel room, to rekindle the heat missing in their union.

Within this familiar story, however, Cianfrance and his two lead actors manage to locate moments of messy emotional truth, most memorably in those lengthy scenes in that sex-hotel room. As Dean and Cindy circle each other, awkwardly trying to rouse each other to some kind of romantic passion, these sequences gradually take on a John Cassavetes-style power—a sense of raw, unadulterated life being played out in front of a closely observing camera.

And yet, for all these impressive moments, by the time the movie was over, I found myself struck by how little I felt I actually knew these two characters. Basically, what you see—what Cianfrance wants to show you within the moments he chooses to film—is what you get; the result is that Dean and Cindy feel more like sketches of character types—Dean seeming like a wannabe-bohemian type, Cindy an ambitious go-getter type—than fully fleshed human beings. Maybe Cianfrance is aiming for universality by deliberately blurring his characters' specifics...but the skin-deep characterizations might explain why, for me, the ending doesn't quite pack the emotional gut punch that it clearly aims to evoke (unsuccessfully aided by attendant fireworks in the background as one character walks away from the camera and another walks toward it).

Not even the undeniable virtuosity of its two lead actors are enough to transcend the script's psychological gaps. Williams does the most creditable job with her part; the long-suffering Cindy ends up being the one that elicits the most sympathy. As for Gosling, though...well, now that I think about it, this may well be the first time I've actually seen him act onscreen (no, I haven't seen either The Believer, Half Nelson or even The Notebook), and based on his performance here, I'd have to say that I find his technique—his way of twisting and shading line readings in ways you never quite expect—interestingly suggestive at best, merely show-offy at worst. He's never not watchable as Dean, to be sure...but, for all his wannabe-Brando mannerisms, you're always aware of Gosling's mental gears turning underneath rather than his character's, with almost every gesture feeling calculated for the camera rather than lived-in.

Of course, maybe Gosling is merely compensating in his own way for a character that ultimately seems more sketched in than completely imagined...and for a film that, in the end, feels more like a superficial gloss on broken relationships than an emotionally draining immersion in one.

Blue Valentine is, all in all, not a bad film, really. But this weekend, I know I'll be seeing better ones!

To Jupiter, and beyond the infinite!

(Oh, and go Jets.)

Baadasssses: My Last Film of 2010 and First Film of 2011

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—The last film I saw in 2010? Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946), the last film the German director completed before he died in 1947.

Lubitsch's work—often celebrated for its generally high level of wit and sophistication—remains one of my many cinematic blind spots, so, thanks to a new 35mm print of Cluny Brown at Film Forum that was screened throughout last week, I was able to take one small step toward filling in that particular gap. What I discovered was a comedy of manners that cloaked a slashing satire of class differences in elegant manners, witty dialogue and warm humanity.

The two main characters here are both outsiders: Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer) is a Czech writer who has taken refuge in the U.K. to escape Nazi clutches on the eve of World War II, while Cluny (Jennifer Jones) is a vivacious amateur plumber whose uncle—complaining that she "doesn't know her place" in society—sends her off to work as a maid in a wealthy country estate owned by the Carmels. A woman who is an amateur plumber? In high British society, that's not only something that isn't seen every day, but is also something to be actively hidden and suppressed, it seems. Too dirty a vocation for a "proper" woman, perhaps? In the vision of high society Lubitsch conjures up in Cluny Brown, many things are frowned upon beyond all reason other than blind acceptance: Servants, for instance, are not allowed to mingle with those they serve, much less become romantically involved with them. Even in Cluny herself, a battle rages on between her expectations of a settled life from Wilson (Richard Haydn), the boring nasal-voiced pharmacist; and Belinski, the outsider who encourages her to give in to her passions.

Throughout Cluny Brown, Lubitsch delights in tweaking our expectations of characters. Belinski, for instance, is considered a hero by the Carmels' son Andrew (Peter Lawford)—but while Andrew worries loudly and often about whether he's doing enough to combat the impending Nazi threat, Belinski himself barely seems bothered by all that. And the script (by Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt, based on a novel by Margery Sharp) adds another romantic relationship to the mix—Andrew's chasing after the chilly socialite Betty Cream (Helen Walker)—that acts as a kind of reflecting mirror of the Cluny/Wilson relationship, one borne more out of societal/personal expectations than deep passion.

Lubitsch's bite is sharp, for all the surface urbanity...but, most importantly, it is also deeply empathetic as well. There's real pathos, for instance, in the way a scene in which Cluny dines with the Carmels ends in something like heartbreak when the Carmels slowly realize they have been eating with hired help and turn off their affectionate stance towards her; apparently, eating with servants is considered beneath them. And, of course, there's the disappointment in Boyer's voice when he hears about Cluny's tryst with Wilson—though Belinski, ever the gentleman, hides his romantic feelings and supports her anyway. Of course, as with most romantic comedies, the two leads finally do come together in the end—but thankfully, their consummated love feels less like preordained formula, and more like an inevitable union of confidants trying to navigate their way through the puzzlements of a society that can't help but seem somewhat alien to their romantically impulsive selves, however much they try to conform within it.

Cluny Brown is funny and romantic, sure...but it is also packed with wisdom and deep feeling. It was a wonderful way not only to introduce myself to Lubitsch, but to close out a very fine 2010.

***

Then 2011 hit. And what was my first film of this new year? It wasn't Blue Valentine, which was sold out at the screening a friend and I were aiming to catch Saturday evening up at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Instead, after dinner with another friend from out of town, my buddy and I decided to go over to Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater for a screening of yet another classic neither of us had seen 'til then: Melvin Van Peebles's groundbreaking blaxploitation firestarter Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

Firestarter? You bet! Even 40 years after its release, the film still manages to pack an incendiary wallop, politically and cinematically. From an opening title card dedicating the film to "all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man" to a closing title card imploring all of us to "watch out" for Sweetback coming back to eventually "collect his dues," Van Peebles's film—made quickly and on the cheap, and looking bracingly raw and ramshackle as a result—pulses with anger at the injustice blacks suffer at the hands of whites.

After filling in Sweetback's backstory—featuring a scene in which a young Sweetback (played by Melvin's son Mario, who would later chronicle the making of his father's film in his 2004 film Baadasssss!) is seen having sex with a much older woman—the film basically becomes a series of episodes in which the mostly silent character (played as an adult by Melvin himself) witnesses police brutality, fights back, hides out, runs away and gets help from his black brothers through it all. The film's sense of agitation extends to its guerrilla filmmaking style: handheld camerawork, whizz-bang montages and a soundtrack featuring a funky/gospel-tinged/jazzy Earth, Wind and Fire score, cues from which Van Peebles sometimes overlaps. Viscerally speaking, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song often seems to coast simply on the energy of its balls-to-the-wall technique. And even though Van Peebles's sense of visual play isn't quite enough to transcend a certain creative fatigue that sets in during its last half-hour, the film, at the last minute, rallies for a shocking, gruesome and hilariously liberating final jab involving a skinned dog.

If Cluny Brown is about people who long to embrace their, um, badass sides, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is about people who have decided they're not going to take it anymore and embrace it to the point of righteous violence. Longueurs and all, it's still one hell of a movie...and an invigorating start to another year of movie-watching.

Cheers!