Deeper Into Movies -- The Current (and Classic) Cinema

Book Review | Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (2003)

2012-02-11T09:23:00.011-07:00

The Empire Strikes Back

by Thomas Delapa

When Hollywood histories are usually written, surprisingly few shine any light at all on the late Lew Wasserman. Even in Ephraim Katz’s essential Film Encyclopedia, Wasserman doesn’t merit his own entry, whereas Lassie and Rin Tin Tin and fetch several paragraphs each.

Yet modern Hollywood as we know it wouldn’t exist without Louis “Lew” R. Wasserman, the secretive super-agent-turned-mogul who transformed Universal from a broke, low-budget studio into a worldwide multimedia colossus.

From the 1940s to well into the 1990s, Wasserman and his wife Edie were one of the U.S. entertainment industry’s high-voltage power couples, consorts and counsels to everyone from stars to presidents. A king and queen among Los Angeles royalty, this matched pair finally got their close-up—warts and all—in Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (2003), by Kathleen Sharp.

Not that Wasserman (1913-2002) would have wanted the scrutiny, even after death. A famously behind-the-scenes puppet master, he shunned the spotlight, preferring to pull strings from the wings. Few know that it was Wasserman who, as James Stewart’s agent in 1950, negotiated a momentous deal with Universal that gave the star a big chunk of the profits on his film Winchester ‘73. A model for “above the line” talent contracts to this day, it was a shot heard ‘round Hollywood, and one that would be another nail in the coffin of the old studio system.

Sharp traces Wasserman’s personal and professional trajectories from his childhood in Cleveland and marriage to the zesty Edith Brickerman, and on to his near-lifelong association with the formidable—and feared—Chicago-born talent agency MCA (Music Corporation of America) founded by Jules Stein. For every Wasserman success and triumph along the way, Sharp uncovers shadowy counterpoints, from antitrust investigations to mob connections and underhanded labor tactics, once in concert with a minor 1950s actor named Ronald Reagan.

At MCA, Wasserman was Stein’s indispensable right-hand man as it grew into Hollywood’s most powerful and aggressive talent agency after World War II, signing a galaxy of such A-list clients as Stewart, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Charlton Heston, as well as directors Alfred Hitchcock (a close Wasserman friend) and Billy Wilder. But as the old Hollywood studios began to eclipse in the late 1940s, buffeted by the TV revolution and antitrust busting, Wasserman and MCA saw the future before anyone else. In 1950, he engineered a deal to create Revue Productions to make TV shows, renting space at Universal’s massive, 367-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley. By 1958, MCA/Revue was so successful it bought outright the cash-poor Universal City lot for virtually a song. Wasserman’s prescient Midas touch would also include the purchase of undervalued studio film libraries (like Paramount’s), which would turn into a gold mine owing to TV showings and eventual re-releases through the post-1970s home-video bonanza.

While Sharp’s highly readable history glitters with accounts on Hollywood’s critical transition years, the book is a bit tarnished by the author’s resistance to chronological rigor. Rather than starting at the beginning of Wasserman’s life, she drops in jigsaw flashbacks to the 1930s and 1940s. Though strict biographical timelines might seem as prosaic as an old Andy Hardy picture, they’re also usually more complete. (Dennis McDougal’s 1998 The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood has a tighter focus.)

Most of Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood spans from the late 1950s to Wasserman’s death in 2002. (Edie died just this past year.) During that time, he reinvented himself at least once, dissolving from talent agent into studio mogul. When MCA tried to purchase the Universal studio in 1962, the government stepped in, charging that the deal violated antitrust laws; Wasserman would have to either get out of talent business or nix the deal. He and Stein chose Universal.

In the decades that followed, Wasserman and his executives—like production head Ned Tanen—transformed the former studio best known for monster movies and Deanna Durbin musicals into a conglomerate monolith. Not only did Universal become a major player on TV (with hits from Leave it To Beaver to The Rockford Files), and in the recording industry (Decca), it also morphed into a big-time movie studio, boosted into the stratosphere by such 1970s New Hollywood cash-cows as Steven Spielberg. Tearing a page from Walt Disney, Wasserman's multi-platform business genius also extended to his decision to start a small public tour of the Universal lot in 1964 (see Lana Turner’s dressing room!), which has since grown into one of Southern California's biggest tourist attractions.

As one of New Hollywood’s studio godfathers, Wasserman made his share of enemies, usually because of the lowball offers his many minions couldn’t afford to refuse. With a deadeye on profits, he has been cited as one of the originators of the notorious “Hollywood accounting” system, in which seeming financial winners are dubiously written off as money losers. James Garner, star of the lucrative, long-running Rockford Files, was rebuffed for years by Universal lawyers in his efforts to gain his rightful compensation.

Sharp plays a doggedly good flatfoot in this detailed investigation, finding her man (and woman). In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “not a half-dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” Add up all the facts in this book, and it’s easy to figure that Lew Wasserman was one of them.

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Film Review | The Artist

2012-02-02T11:21:00.016-07:00

Sounds of Silence

by Thomas Delapa

While Hollywood faded at the box office in 2011, three noteworthy movies took a long look back at cinema’s past—not in anger, but with love and nostalgia. The Artist, My Week with Marilyn and Hugo are all Oscar-nominated flashbacks that returned us to simpler times, well before the simpler minds of modern, Die-Hardened Hollywood.

If Martin Scorsese’s 3-D Hugo is deep on cinephile sentiment and short on depth, the Franco-American Artist paints a loving, lustrous portrait of Tinseltown in the late silent era. Few, if any, recent films have spoken with such eloquence on just how much the movies have lost by abandoning their roots in nuanced acting and pantomime.

Iris in on an ornate picture palace in 1927 Los Angeles. Onstage, suave matinee-idol George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) hams it up at the premiere of his latest flick before a packed house of smartly dressed Jazz Agers. In this cinematic love letter written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, Valentin’s character is sealed with a kiss blown back to such icons as Douglas Fairbanks as well as sound star Gene Kelly.

Despite Dujardin’s charming, nimble presence (he won Cannes’ Best Actor award), the real star of the show is the film itself, a jaunty black-and-white trip down the memory lane of the silver screen. Shot in the boxy 1.33 celluloid format of old, The Artist is anything but square; it looks so positively right that its negative might have been uncanned from the vaults of MGM, Paramount or Fox (pre-Murdoch) during the bygone studio years.

Whatever the vintage, Hazanavicius pays homage to a galaxy of Hollywood classics, from A Star Is Born and Sunset Boulevard to Singin’ in the Rain and Citizen Kane. The unkindest critical cut is that Hazanavicius excessively mimics his favorites, leaving us with a narrow, if crystal-clear, focus.

Starting with A Star Is Born (pick a version), Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guilliaume Schiffman shine a spotlight on Valentin as he’s eclipsed by Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a bob-haired flapper who ascends to stardom during the revolutionary switch from silent to sound. Stuck in a freeze-frame, Valentin does a Charlie Chaplin and refuses to talk on screen, insisting that the silents are still golden. Our hero’s downfall is what might have happened to Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood had he stayed indoors and sulked instead of singin’ (and dancin’) in the rain.

Despite the 90 or so minutes of silent pictures, they’re not at all hard to hear, thanks to a colorful and atmospheric score by Ludovic Bource that sometimes echoes too loudly with Bernard Herrmann melodies. As Gloria Swanson famously said in Sunset Boulevard, the silent stars didn’t need words, they “had faces”; Dujardin and company say what they need through a delicate dance of gesture and facial expression—as well as a sprinkling of intertitles. A Jack Russell terrier channeling Rin Tin Tin, Valentin’s faithful dog (Uggie) is one of the movie’s best friends.

Audiences may be amazed and delighted by Hazanavicius’s adoring attention to period detail, from Murphy beds and "Pickfair"-era Hollywood mansions to such quaint screen punctuations as wipes, irises and slow fades. While The Artist borrows too much to be an artistic masterpiece in its own right, it deserves a joyful exclamation—aloud—for its heart.

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1/29/12

David Mamet Is a Fan of Silent Movies

2012-01-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

By Steven Rosen

(This Denver Post interview originally ran in 1998, when Mamet was at Sundance Film Festival to promote The Spanish Prisoner. In light of renewed interest in silent movies because of The Artist, I have put it up on this Website, as it seems timely.)

David Mamet is a master of language - his award-winning scripts crackle with ominously witty, highly original dialogue. So it's surprising that he believes the best movies are the silent ones.

"It works better without words,'' the playwright and screenwriter says, relaxing in a small hotel conference room at Park City, Utah, the night after his new film "The Spanish Prisoner'' showed at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

"Hitchcock derogated dialogue films - he said they were just pictures of people talking.

"What I'm hired to do (as a screenwriter) is describe pictures,'' he explains. "The question is how to tell the story best at any given point. The answer always is to see if I can do it without words, because then I know I'm doing it right. But sometimes I'm not smart enough. But that's my ideal.''

Interviewing Mamet is like talking to a professor about language and literature. He is opinionated and authoritative, yet not dismissive or conceited. He has obviously thought hard about the process of his work, and enjoys the opportunity to analyze it.

"The Spanish Prisoner'' is entirely Mamet's film. He conceived of the idea, about an elaborate confidence game designed to bilk the inventor of a cryptic "Process'' out of his sole copy of the top-secret formula.

Mamet wrote and directed the film. His wife, Rebecca Pidgeon,co-stars with Campbell Scott, whose lean build and forceful, no-nonsense articulateness are reminiscent of Mamet himself. Also featured are Ben Gazzara and, as an allegedly wealthy businessman who gains the confidence of Scott's inventor, Steve
Martin.

"The Spanish Prisoner'' is a thriller, but not in the style of, say, "Face/Off'' or "Air Force One.''

"This is a more traditional style of light thriller - or Hitchcock thriller,'' Mamet says. "We're meant to understand it as an entertainment, which is meant to delight us, rather than as an exploration of violence.''

If there is a movie role model, it is Stanley Donen's devilishly clever "Charade,'' a 1963 film starring Audrey
Hepburn and Cary Grant. There also, however, are many literary influences. "I've done a lot of reading on the literature of con games for a long time - a whole strain of Western literature is taken off of
confidence games,'' he says.

"Thomas Mann wrote one that's called "Confidence Man.' (Herman) Melville wrote 'The Confidence Man.' It's just picaresque literature. It's a very strong element of our Western canon.

"This kind of literature rips the mask of hypocrisy from Western civilization,'' he says. ""It says those institutions and things which we believe in are really peopled by scoundrels and knaves and people no better
than you and me.''

Mamet assures that there is a real confidence game called the Spanish Prisoner. Still, it is a relatively obscure and allusive reference for a title. That risks confusing the potential audience.

"My theory on titles is that they should be provocative,'' Mamet says. "They should make you ask the question, 'Golly, what does that mean?' rather than telling you. Then you're provoked to go on and see the movie.''

Hollywood tends to see things differently, and that perturbs Mamet. He discusses the topic of effective movie titles as if he were critiquing a poem.

""I just did (wrote) a movie called 'Bookworm' about these two guys lost in Alaska,'' he explains. ""At the last minute the studio decided people didn't know what that meant, and decided to call it 'The Edge,' which is a kind of generic title.''

Mamet argued. ""Why is that the title to that movie? Nobody knows. They said that nobody knows what the title 'Bookworm' means. But if you take the title 'Bookworm' and put it next to a picture of a big snarling bear, somebody might get the idea something provocative is going on.''

Mamet realizes that the studio probably thought moviegoers would respond to "The Edge'' as an "edgy'' word rather than as a flat, undescriptive one. "They thought someone else migh think that word was provocative - someone in effect stupider than themselves,'' he says. The movie, released last fall, was a
big flop.

This time, Mamet chose his title and stayed the course. "I'd rather make my own mistakes than make mistakes figuring out what someone else might think.''

Mamet, who also received an Academy Award nomination for his work on the "Wag the Dog'' screenplay, has many new projects planned both for theater and movie. Clearly, despite his stated preference for silent films, he enjoys writing dialogue for the screen.

"I always wished I was a handyman - a guy who could fix the garage door, tune a car, rehang the shutter,'' he says. "I'm not good at that stuff at all. But I always admired those people who could take a few basic principals of construction repair and renovation and apply them to many different things.

"On the other hand, I hope that's what I do in movies and plays - take a few very basic principals of construction, renovation and design and try to apply them to various tasks.''

Get Reel

2012-01-27T11:39:00.007-07:00

Come blow your vuvuzelas! Deeper Into Movies -- The Current (and Classic) Cinema passes the 20,000 hit mark in two years. For reviews, musings and dissent, by Steven Rosen and Thomas Delapa. Also playing on Facebook and on Twitter as DeeperIn2Movies. Be a fan, no annual fee required.

Coming Soon: Reviews of The Artist and A Dangerous Method

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DVD Review | THX 1138 (1971)

2012-01-23T10:25:00.026-07:00

Where Were You in ‘71 and ‘72?

by Thomas Delapa

Forty years ago in a movie galaxy far, far away, George Lucas was just a bearded, bespectacled young filmmaker struggling to make it in Planet Hollywood. While today’s audiences may know that American Graffiti was Lucas’ mega-breakthrough on his road to mogul-dom, far fewer recognize that his debut feature was 1971’s THX 1138, a bleakly futuristic sci-fi fantasy that’s as distant from Star Wars as Alien is from E.T.

Lovingly restored by Lucasfilm and Warner Home Video in a two-disc DVD set first released in 2004 (and now out on Blu-ray), THX 1138 Director’s Cut Special Edition comes uploaded with stellar extras, including the director’s original student short that provided the seeds for the feature. For sci-fi fans, the film should be a revelation, not simply for a peek at Lucas’ early creative sensibilities but also for the pivotal part it played in the rise of a brave New Hollywood that would transform—and jumpstart—a stalled American movie industry.

If the meteoric path of Lucas’ career has by now entered into popular myth befitting Joseph Campbell, a review is worthwhile, if only because the Modesto, Calif.-born multi-media tycoon amazingly intended to shoot for a career as an avant-garde filmmaker. After a bumpy 1950s youth racing cars part-time, Lucas shifted gears to attend the burgeoning University of Southern California film school, where he sped into a prodigy during the premiere decade of the so-called “film brat” generation—movie-mad young turks like Steve Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, et al. Meanwhile, crosscutting to a parallel universe known as Hollywood, legacy studios like MGM and Warner Bros. were running on fumes in the 1960s, betting on elephantine old-school boondoggles like Dr. Doolittle and Cleopatra while largely dismissing the hip, youthful audiences that had hitched up to such anti-Establishment hits as Easy Rider and The Graduate.

At USC in 1968, Lucas made Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB, an award-winning experimental short about one man’s desperate escape from a sterile, automated Orwellian underworld. While obviously a cinematic whiz kid, the shy, slight Lucas lacked at least two parts necessary to mesh in Hollywood: fearless brio and bluster. Francis Ford Coppola, a heralded young Italian-American filmmaker at rival UCLA was hard-wired with both.

After an apprenticeship with producer/director Roger Corman at the low-budget American International Pictures (famed training ground for a long list of future luminaries including Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme and John Sayles) and one audacious self-financed film (1967’s You’re a Big Boy Now), Coppola vaulted the studio moat, landing as a writer/director at Warner Bros. In one of the golden meet-and-greets in movie lore, Lucas wandered onto the set of the musty musical Finian’s Rainbow, where he so forcefully impressed Coppola that the brash young cineaste made Lucas his assistant.

Some of these bright flashbacks can be gleaned from A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, a 60-minute documentary included in the DVD set (along with Lucas’ THX student film and a smarmy “making of” studio featurette from 1971). As ringleader in a band of rebels battling a fading movie empire, Coppola enlisted Lucas in his grandiose plan to create his own independent studio, splicing together a classic studio model with an “auteur”-centered élan inspired by the great 1960s European directors like Godard, Fellini and Bergman. Coppola dubbed his studio American Zoetrope (after a 19th-century pre-cinematic toy), based it in counterculture capital San Francisco, and managed to attract such raw USC talents as screenwriter John Milius and the gifted sound designer Walter Murch. Zoetrope’s debut, backed by a semi-bamboozled Warner Bros., would be a feature remake of THX.

Forty years later, the digitally upgraded THX 1138.2 is a widescreen eye-opener, especially enhanced by the spirited tag-team commentary of Lucas and Murch. Then-unknown Robert Duvall (one year before Coppola’s The Godfather) stars as the titular THX, just a cog in a stark-white, high-tech totalitarian society where sex is verboten and citizens are controlled by drugs and Big Brother-ish video surveillance. Using such futuristic locations as the nearby Lawrence Livermore lab and the under-construction BART subway tunnels, the 25-year-old Lucas and his guerrilla crew fabricated a striking alternate reality on a shoestring budget, with eclectic bits and pieces cobbled from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, and Godard’s Alphaville. Looking ahead, Lucas’ far-out vision appears to anticipate such dystopian milestones as Blade Runner, Brazil and The Matrix. (As in his digital tune-up of Star Wars, Lucas has slipped in stealth footage in spots, which may strike purists as a walk on the disingenuous dark side.)

Both Lucas and Murch say that the film was meant as a cautionary quasi-documentary “from the future,” which helps explain its deliberate foreignness as well as its chilly, off-putting absence of conventional plotting and character. Light years away from the warm-and-funny androids in Star Wars, THX’s black, baton-wielding robocops call up allusions to 1960s campus riots—as well as eerie flash-forwards to the incendiary 1991 Rodney King beating.

Betting on another revved-up Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde or maybe even 2001, the Warners studio suits reeled at their first look at the finished film. Far from the ultimate trip, they thought it was the ultimate bummer, demanding cuts and re-edits. Despite good critical reviews during a heady year that included such cutting-edge hits as The Last Picture Show and The French Connection, THX self-destructed in theaters, partially sabotaged by Warners’ lackluster marketing campaign.

Zoetrope’s misfire was not only a personal and professional blow to Lucas, but, worse, it caused Warner Bros. to pull the plug on Coppola’s dream studio (including a project written by Milius tentatively entitled Apocalypse Now). Yet like Star Wars’ rebel alliance, the Zoetropers would regroup to strike back against Hollywood, in both individual and collective sequels. Back at the front after a 1971 Oscar for co-writing Patton, Coppola reluctantly gave in to Paramount producer Robert Evans, who made him an offer he couldn’t easily refuse to direct a controversial novel about the American Mafia—a project that a dozen-odd elite directors had rejected. Much more the money-minded businessman than his mentor, it was Lucas who helped convince Coppola to take the job.

Over the decades in the duo’s leapfrogging rise to the top of a reborn Hollywood, Coppola has repaid his friend the favor several times over, most critically in his fronting of American Graffiti, made possible only because of Coppola’s clout after The Godfather became the biggest, baddest New Hollywood blockbuster until Jaws hit the beach in 1975. A jaunty semi- autobiographical comedy about hot-rodding teens in Northern California one night in 1962, American Graffiti was cool, fast and commercial, whereas THX was cold, grim and a black hole of humor. Riding the first crest of a 1970s nostalgia wave after a decade of tumult, the film would pass up Easy Rider on the list of the most profitable low-budget productions in history. Ever the anti-Hollywood outsider (even today), by 1974 Lucas had zoomed into the fast lane, ready to shoot for the moon—and far beyond—with cast and crew in a souped-up Millennium Falcon.

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1/23/12

Film Review | My Week with Marilyn

2012-01-15T16:20:00.012-07:00

Marilyn, We Hardly Knew Ye

by Thomas Delapa

There are movie stars, and there are Movie Stars. For ten short years, few shone as bright as Marilyn Monroe’s. In the fifties and early sixties, she was every American man’s dream girl, from presidents to princes. She might have been the quintessential female star of the Hollywood sound era, a pinup Greta Garbo in living, luscious color.

You won’t need to be a fan (or a man) to fall in love with My Week with Marilyn, which features some of the best performances of this past year. In a role that would scare off scores of actresses, Michelle Williams is nearly spot-on as the once-plain Norma Jeane.

At the height of her fame in 1956, Monroe traveled to Olde England to make The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by none other than Laurence Olivier, the regal grand man of the British stage and screen. During brief intermissions in the troubled production, the 30-year-old Monroe struck up an unlikely friendship (and perhaps more) with Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a lowly assistant director not unexpectedly dazzled by the blonde bombshell.

Clark’s 1995 memoir (The Prince, the Showgirl and Me) was followed by My Week with Marilyn in 2000, and those few days have been translated with taste and movie-loving brio by director Simon Curtis and screenwriter Adrian Hodges. Unlike the exploitative handling of Monroe before and after her tragic death in 1962, Curtis and company have fleshed out the person behind the one-dimensional star image: insecure, innocent, frightened, and mercurial—as well as a heavenly vision of beauty and sensuality.

My Week isn’t a kiss-and-tell dream date with Marilyn. It’s a smart, handsome film about celebrity, acting, exploitation, and professional insecurities. While Kenneth Branagh’s “Larry” Olivier greets Marilyn and her entourage with charm and open arms, he soon tires of what he sees as her Method madness, especially with her doting coach (Zoe Wanamaker) constantly whispering in her ear. The clash of acting styles deftly dramatizes the division between old-school U.K. acting (“the character is on the page”) and the erupting U.S. Method (“the character is in me”) of the Kazan/Strasberg/Brando school. Hodges’ script deftly echoes Monroe’s problems with her role with those coming from her own impossible full-time part as “Marilyn,” the voluptuous, girlish sexpot who keeps her underwear in the freezer. In one of her most revealing private moments, she coyly asks Colin, “Shall I be her?” before instantly turning on her radiant, full-lipped persona in front of an adoring crowd.

Williams’ wattage outshines her Oscar-nominated work in 2010’s Blue Valentine. It’s an imitative performance, but not an impersonation (take that, Meryl Streep); rather it’s a full-bodied interpretation that’s closer to alchemy than acting. The only blemish in the complexion is that Williams fades a bit during Monroe’s famed film performances. On some rarified level of the silver screen, only Marilyn seems able to spin pure gold.

While some have disputed Clark’s latter memoir, this is nonetheless a glistening fairy tale of fleeting love and friendship, with shadows lurking in the wings. Accompanied by her new husband, playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott)—an owl and the pussycat marriage if there ever was one—Marilyn is erratic and inconsolable at times, popping pills that Hollywood Dr. Feelgoods were/are only too happy to prescribe. We also get a dose of the sexism that sought to typecast Monroe as a dumb blonde, both on and off the screen.

While Olivier plays the smitten prince to Monroe in his star-crossed movie, it’s the young and perceptive Colin who gallantly comes to her aid. Their sweet, near-Edenic relationship—flowering in nature—also germinates a handful of droll lines. All Colin has to hear on the phone is “Marilyn wants to go shopping,” and he is galloping to her beck and call.

Along with Williams, Redmayne and Branagh, bows are in order for Judi Dench in the small role of actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, who maternally tries to reassure Monroe after Olivier’s nasty cuts. Like 2008’s underrated Orson Welles and Me, My Week with Marilyn engages in a touch of romanticizing star-worship, but it never basks in idolatry. It deserves a place on your calendar.

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1/15/12

Film Review | War Horse & The Adventures of Tintin

2012-01-05T10:39:00.016-07:00

War and Oats

by Thomas Delapa

Less is often more in Hollywood movies, but don’t tell that to screen general Steven Spielberg, director of two, count ‘em two, major holiday releases. In the case of War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg had an uphill battle before the first shots.

According to the Associated Press, Hollywood’s 2011 box-office numbers will hit a low not seen since 1995. With no blockbusters on the scale of Avatar or The Lord of the Rings, few summer smashes and most A-list directors taking a holiday hiatus, election-year adult audiences ought to be asking themselves, “Where’s the beef?” Instead of hefty films with bite, Spielberg and fellow auteur-in-arms Martin Scorsese (in Hugo) served up candy-coated corn.

Based on a children’s novel by British author Michael Morpurgo that grew into a hit play, War Horse is a handsome but skittish crossbreed between Black Beauty and All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a boy-and-his-horse story about young Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and Joey, a spirited colt who marches from the green fields of Devon to the bloody World War I battlefields of France. Forcibly separated from Albert, Joey passes from one owner to the next, finally arriving in the beastly trench warfare of the Somme.

Perched in the no-man’s-land between kiddie-lit and anti-war tract, Spielberg’s dramatic terrain is tricky, and he never quite finds his footing. As a plow horse, Joey saves the family farm from a mean landlord (David Thewlis), the melodramatic load lightened by Disneyfied comic touches and John Williams’ mickey-mousing score. Though Spielberg aims at making a heartwarming family film, War Horse only pulses during the few battle scenes, led by a David Lean-like British cavalry charge, bayonets drawn, against the Germans.

In the novel, Joey himself narrates his story as he’s yanked along under the reins of a string of good and bad owners. But with that voice gone on the screen, we’re left with the anthropomorphized sight of woeful, mistreated Joey, a mute Mr. Ed. Except for a kindly captain (Tom Hiddleston) who drafts the horse as his mount, Joey’s human co-stars have even less to say, surrendering to a script that comes up lame in the backstretch.

Whether affixed with bumper stickers that say War Is Hell or Be Kind To Animals, War Horse plods through a well-trod turf. Throughout Joey’s journey, we watch his human handlers making and breaking promises to each other and him, resulting in separation, loss, and death. The nadir of the fable is a mawkish vignette that drops Joey into the arms of a French farmer’s sugar-sweet granddaughter who seems airlifted in from a 1930s Deanna Durbin movie.

By the time the climax is dragged in, the battle for the audience’s minds, if not their hearts, is over. In the thick of a battle between the British and Germans at the Somme, Joey becomes the catalyst for the most improbable wartime plot turn since McHale joined the Navy.

For the bottom-half of his 2011 double feature, Spielberg drafted the Eurocentric Tintin comic-book series written by Belgian author Hergé. Like Scorsese in Hugo, Spielberg takes his first flying, in-your-lap leap into the world of 3-D fantasy, enhanced with motion-capture visual effects. If War Horse might claim partial victory on looks and animal magnetism, the retro charm of Tintin is conspicuously missing in action. For all the millions spent on this production, it’s hard to picture how anyone could generate such a generically lackluster teen hero. Only HAL 9000 might warm up to Tintin, a carrot-topped boy journalist who stumbles into a mysterious plot thick with thieves, treasure and ships in bottles.

Despite his G-rated retorts ("Great snakes!"), this kid also bizarrely packs a handgun, setting off a slew of frenetic chases and shootouts befitting a low-caliber action movie. For a director who went so far as to digitally delete the guns in his E.T. re-release, Spielberg seems to have sailed off into a weird new dimension, and a shallow one at that.

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1/4/12

D.A. Pennebaker Reconsiders "Don't Look Back"

2011-12-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

Film: Dylan Revisited

D.A. Pennebaker looks back for the deluxe edition of 'Don't Look Back'

By Steven Rosen · March 7th, 2007 · Cincinnati CityBeat

For D.A. Pennebaker, the time has come to look back. For the new digitally remastered "deluxe edition" DVD of his classic documentary Don't Look Back, which followed Bob Dylan during a 1965 solo acoustic tour of England, Pennebaker went back to his unused footage to make a film called 65 Revisited.

In doing so, he found himself confronting and challenging the very essence of Don't Look Back. That film, shot verite-style, is as much a freewheelin' narrative about the pivotal tour as it is a concert film. Much of it occurs in rehearsal rooms and hotels before and after the shows.

It's especially about an edgy, prickly young Dylan -- just on the verge of transferring himself from folksinger into Rock & Roll star -- cagily sparring with the press and others who try to get to know him. While it has a generous number of songs performed onstage by Dylan, many are excerpted so as not to detract from the film's own pacing and behind-the-scenes glimpses.

65 Revisited is a companion piece to Don't Look Back rather than a replacement. It's just a shade over an hour, and in places the sound and lighting are problematic. But it nonetheless serves as a meaningful alternative, a new take.

For one, Dylan is relaxed and even boyishly sweet with the fans he meets. He's also honest rather than evasive when asked questions.

He's generally happy and shows it -- in one scene he smiles with delight hearing his new Rock & Roll single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," on the radio.

And Revisited contains riveting, electrifying full concert performances of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "She Belongs to Me," "To Ramona," "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and the rare "If You Gotta Go, Go Now." There are also short scenes of Dylan composing new songs "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and "I'll Keep It With Mine" on piano.

Talking from his New York office, Pennebaker -- now 81 but still busy -- said the catalyst for Revisited came from his editor getting him to watch Don't Look Back's outtakes.

"It was like a towel being taken off my head," Pennebaker says. "I saw something I hadn't bothered to think much about for Don't Look Back. I saw that those performances themselves were really the whole reason Dylan had an effect on people.

"It wasn't just that he was this little Kerouac kid running around being funny with the press. It was those performances to those huge, hushed masses of English guys who thought it was poetry and music put together in an amazing way. So we sat down to make a film about that.

"I don't feel this knocks that one out of the box. It was just a further insight for me where I hadn't been looking before. The charisma that came off that stage when he got up and sang those songs is just startling."

When Pennebaker first agreed to make Don't Look Back, he knew virtually nothing about Dylan. He's still unsure why he was invited, although during the ensuing tour Dylan mentioned he had seen a documentary on cellist/conductor Pablo Casals that Pennebaker and partner Richard Leacock had shot for CBS.

"Albert Grossman (Dylan's manager) came into our office and asked would I be interested in accompanying his client to England for a tour," Pennebaker recalls. "It wasn't a job. I was going to have to pay for it, I suspected. But that was the offer and I said yeah.

"I think I knew one song by him, the one Peter, Paul & Mary were singing ('Blowin' in the Wind'), but I didn't know anything about him. I had read a piece in Time magazine suggesting he was a guy singing Folk music and wasn't very good at it. That sort of intrigued me."

Pennebaker thinks Dylan wanted to see how the director's intimate, fly-on-the-wall style of filmmaking worked.

"I think he wanted to see what making a film on this level was like -- not big-time filmmaking, just a single person. But I never knew, and he never talked about it."

The next year, when Dylan toured Europe with a Rock & Roll band called the Hawks, he directed a film called Eat the Document for an ABC special. Pennebaker served as his cameraman. Overly arty, that film was rejected by ABC and never released. Pennebaker prepared his own more straightforward film of that tour called You Know Something Is Happening. It, too, hasn't been released although portions were used in Martin Scorsese's 2005 Dylan film for PBS, No Direction Home.

Don't Look Back also is famous for starting with what has been called the first music video -- it opens in an alley, with Dylan holding up and discarding pertinent cue cards while "Subterranean Homesick Blues" plays on the soundtrack. His friend and road manager, Bob Neuwirth, and Allen Ginsberg stand in the distance. The deluxe set includes two alternate versions -- one shot in a park with Neuwirth and Ginsberg, another on a hotel rooftop with Neuwirth and record producer Tom Wilson.

"Originally, when I did the film I started off in the dressing room with Bob singing, 'You will start out standing (from the song 'She Belongs to Me'). I thought, 'That's a good way to start a film,' " Pennebaker says. "But as I looked at it before doing a final version, I said nobody knew who this guy is yet. So we had this thing we shot that we didn't have any reason for shooting. It was just a funny thing. I stuck it on the beginning and that was it. It never came off."

Film Review | Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004)

2011-12-26T10:16:00.019-07:00

Mass Deceptions

by Thomas Delapa

British statesman Benjamin Disraeli said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. When it comes to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration apparently bamboozled the public with all three.

Further, there are at least two travesties involving the devastating, must-see documentary, Uncovered: The War on Iraq. Only the first has to do with the war itself. The second is that the film is only playing in two theaters in Colorado. If you thought Fahrenheit 9/11 burned the Bush administration, Uncovered pours gasoline on the flames.

Dodging the pitfalls of Michael Moore’s feverish polemic, producer/director Robert Greenwald opts for a reasoned, deliberate approach. At the outset, Greenwald introduces us to his gallery of experts, from ex-security advisor Richard Clarke to former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay. Veteran CIA analysts, ex-military officers, politicians and diplomats round out the interviews.

Though we’ve heard much of the material before over the polarizing last 18 months, Greenwald summarizes it in compelling, if sound-bite, fashion. Uncovered should shock and awe audiences, leaving you infuriated that the U.S. engaged in its first preemptive war against a country that, contrary to the Bush administration claims:

1) Had no weapons of mass destruction.

2) Had no relationship with al-Qaeda.

3) Had no nuclear-weapons program.

In addition, the failure to find any of the above during the American occupation has effectively proven that the U.N. weapons inspection program was working.

Although the Bush administration has now expediently changed its tune for going to war, it behooves us to watch again Secretary of State Colin Powell’s momentous pre-war address before the United Nations. In the words of one sober observer, Powell’s crossing-the-Rubicon speech was "a masterful performance...but none of it was true." Time and time again on TV, Pres. Bush, Vice Pres. Cheney and the White House inner circle insisted that the Hussein regime was a clear and present danger to the United States–thus the decisive reason for going to war.

On that WMD front, today even Kay admits that "We were wrong." During the occupation, Kay’s inspectors were doled a budget of $600 million to seek out the WMDs. Kay sees parallels between the U.S.-led Iraq war and our disastrous 20-year intervention in Vietnam. Both Presidents G.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson (after the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident) were granted carte-blanche war powers by an acquiescent Congress.

The consensus in the film is the 9/11 attacks presented a convenient excuse for the Pentagon "neo-cons"–like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle–to execute their neo-imperialist, might-makes-right geopolitical plans. These advisors believe that America has no need to justify its foreign policy, not to its so-called allies and certainly not to the U.N. The plan to install a Western-leaning government in Iraq has been on (or under) the table for years, well before the 9/11 attacks, most notably circulated through the hawkish Project for the New American Century think tank.

Throughout the months leading up to the Iraq war, strategic analyses culled from the CIA were either distorted or selectively used by the White House to sell the war to the American public and the media. When Foreign Service veteran Joseph Wilson challenged these conclusions, he was first subjected to a smear campaign. Then someone* in the know leaked the name of his wife Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, to the conservative press, putting her cover–and life–at risk.

Uncovered: The War on Iraq unrolls like an American tragedy, delineating for now and posterity a watershed moment in our history. But perhaps the real tragedy is yet to come. In this critical election season, the damning truth of Greenwald’s exposé may be lost in the blinding fog of war.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 9/16/04

POSTSCRIPT: On December 18, 2011, the last U.S. troops left Iraq following nearly nine years of warfare. To date, the war has cost over 4,500 American lives and at least $1 trillion; while estimates of Iraqi deaths vary radically, most surveys count at least 100,000.

*Later determined to be Cheney's top aide "Scooter" Libby.

Film Review | The Descendants

2011-12-15T19:22:00.017-07:00

A-Low-Ha

by Thomas Delapa

After such critically acclaimed hits as Sideways and About Schmidt, you’d think that director Alexander Payne would have nowhere to go but up. But success can be a slippery slope in Hollywood. Even with hunky George Clooney out front and sunny Hawaii in the background, The Descendants is a balmy downer.

Call it Melancholia in Paradise, with Sir George playing Matt King, a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis. With his wife comatose in the hospital after a freak boating accident, Matt is morosely adrift, especially when it comes to handling his two troubled daughters. “I’m the backup parent,” he ruefully admits in his narration, a declaration that becomes obvious as watch his bewilderment faced with young Scottie (Amara Miller), whether acting out in grade school, or teenage Alex (Shailene Woodley), who curses—and drinks—like a sailor.

Based on a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants has risen dramatically in critics’ 2011 Top Ten lists, though I’m as bewildered as Clooney’s rather dull and doltish character is. Unless your idea of comedy is watching Clooney wildly run around Hawaii in sandals (imagine a pineapple balancing on his head), I’d say that old Hawaii Five-0 re-runs have more juice.

Payne does his own balancing act, erratically mixing low-grade laughs (aren’t bratty kids so funny when they swear?) with a dead-serious plot that digs into both mortality and infidelity. Not only does Matt’s wife lay stricken and comatose in a hospital bed, but he’s apparently the last one to know that she has been unfaithful to him. Out of this stiff contrivance arises our hero's madcap adventure to track down and confront his rival.

After last year’s turn as a stoic, coldblooded assassin in The American, Clooney goes to the humid extremes, wearing a dewy-eyed guise of bitter and hapless vulnerability. Payne’s camera comes in for so many close-ups of actors tearing up, I thought I was watching a Kleenex commercial.

The director’s once-reliable gifts for irony and satire seemed to have dried up, replaced by clammy sentimentality. As his wife’s health goes downhill, Matt must face the ultimate choice of pulling the plug.

During the crisis, he must also deal with the business of selling his extended family’s lush swath of virgin land on neighboring Kauai. Passed down from his mixed-race ancestors, 19th century settlers of Hawaii, the land is certain to net the clan a king’s ransom.

Other than as vehicle for Clooney to show off his warm side and great tan decked out in floral shirts, Payne’s pallid film seems content to pose the star against a series of scenic Hawaii locations, accompanied by banal island music that seems better fit for a luau. Even though dysfunctional families are still alive and functional in Hollywood, this is one family tree that’s full of sap.

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12/15/11

Film Review | Melancholia

2011-12-02T12:39:00.008-07:00

When Worlds Collide

by Thomas Delapa

Nothing if not provocative since his 1991 breakthrough with the neo-Expressionist Zentropa, Danish director Lars von Trier has stepped from the portrayal of carnal devotion (Breaking the Waves) to postmodern musical (Dancer in the Dark) and Brechtian Western (Dogville). He also was one of the founders of the influential “Dogme 95” group, which advocated an austere, anti-Hollywood filmmaking aesthetic. More infamously, while appearing at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he claimed to be a Nazi and “understood Hitler.”

Controversial gaffes aside (he’s since retracted those comments), his Melancholia may be the most depressing film of the year—excepting perhaps x-rays at a cancer clinic. Part psychodrama, part sci-fi, this intriguing but portentous end-of-the-world fantasy had me checking my watch, not the Mayan calendar.

You’re in for the time of your life if you fancy a close encounter with nebulous story lines and trippy imagery. Melancholia is really two movies, schizophrenically orbiting around a gothically apocalyptic plot. Following a surreal (and too-revealing) prologue, we’re invited to the wedding reception of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and her adoring groom (Alexander Skarsgard), held at the posh country estate of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her prickly husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland). Looming literally and figuratively at a distance is the planet “Melancholia,” once hidden behind the sun and now headed dangerously close to Earth.

Von Trier’s rogue planet might be the biggest metaphor in the universe, seeing how it shadows Justine’s unstable emotional state, which rises and falls as the party drags on. While we’re not told what’s wrong with her (other than she works at an ad agency), we do see her capriciously desert her husband and run off for a quickie tryst on the lawn with a stranger. As a flighty female neurotic, Justine is only a few feathers away from Natalie Portman in last year’s Black Swan.

Everyone at the party, including Justine’s bitchy, cynical mother (Charlotte Rampling), seems on edge, waiting for when the bride will crash and burn. “No scenes” warns her sister Claire; but the party doesn’t end well, much to the disgust of John, who had to foot the bill.

With scant coherence between or within the film’s two parts, von Trier jumps ahead to Claire’s story, which takes place vaguely later at the estate. As Melancholia nears, it’s no honeymoon for Justine or anyone else. Smugly buoyed by scientific predictions, John assures the family that the planet will easily pass by Earth. Justine, near catatonic and on her own dark side of the moon, is saturnine.

As Melancholia approaches, accompanied by an eerie low rumble and Wagnerian music, the film ascends to an otherworldly beauty, like a scene from a Ray Bradbury story. One night, the family ventures out to watch the uncanny and stunning sight of twin moons lighting up the sky. As Claire grows anxious and panicky, Justine becomes curiously calm, if not content. The world is evil, she says, so good riddance.

Though Dunst won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, you can just as easily credit (or fault) von Trier’s shaky, invasive camera, which gets in her face for every toothy smile and nervous frown, yet reveals much less about her character than meets the eye. Whatever one thinks of Dunst and her radiantly opaque performance, even she is eclipsed by von Trier’s astronomically glum ending, which might only please lunatic doomsayers—and maybe ancient Mayans.

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12/2/11

Review | Woody Allen: A Documentary

2011-11-23T09:49:00.010-07:00

Play it Again, Woody

By Thomas Delapa

Did you hear the one about the documentary that thought it was an artistic infomercial?

It’s no joke. You might think that in a three-hour-plus portrait of comic icon Woody Allen, more than a few discouraging chuckles might be heard. But in Woody Allen: A Documentary from PBS’ American Masters series (now on DVD), director Robert Weide doesn’t stray far from Allen’s corner—as dark as it might be. The result is a profile that’s long on fawning adulation and short on serious criticism. While rousing in stretches, Allen’s long take on life, love and death is a bit of a sleeper.

A TV director (HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm) and film biographer of such comedy titans as the Marx Brothers and W.C Fields, Weide has said that his profiles are “personal thank you letters” to his cultural heroes. Allen should send a thank you note back (plus roses) to Weide, who surrounds his uber-private subject with collaborators and ex-partners (like Diane Keaton and Louise Lasser), critics (like Richard Shickel) and a fellow New York director (Martin Scorsese), who only have praise for the famed, partially infamous, writer/director.

Few, if any, American film auteurs have had the staying power of one Allen Stewart Konigsberg, who precociously began writing jokes for national TV shows and newspaper columnists in the early 1950s, while still in his teens. Though obsessively publicity shy, Allen evolved into one of the most popular stand-up acts of the 1960s. In this heady time of such game-changers as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, Allen was something completely different, a bespectacled Jewish joke machine who looked like a cartoon character, yet fearlessly helped drag neuroses, sex and absurdist humor into popular culture.

Weide’s most entertaining bits come early, especially during rarely seen footage of Allen’s TV appearances, whether a 1980s BBC interview, guest shots on friend Dick Cavett’s talk show or, memorably, boxing a kangaroo. Granted a series of unprecedented interviews with the graying, gnomish, still horn-rimmed Allen (now 75), Weide talks to Allen in his office, his bedroom and, most nostalgically, while accompanying him back to his old Brooklyn neighborhood, where he reminisces about his boyhood home and local movie theater.

These trips down memory lane are bright and lively, as are the clips of Allen’s early film forays as writer/director, like Take the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971). For some critics (myself included), Allen hit his artistic peak in 1977 with the bittersweet, stylistically ingenious Annie Hall, which won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Practically nonpareil in U.S. filmmaking (not unlike Charlie Chaplin), Allen has managed to exert almost total control over his 40-odd films, from writing and casting all the way to the editing stage.

While Part I of the documentary arguably ends near Allen’s professional apex, there are ominous signs of hubris, if not artistic petty crimes and misdemeanors. Interiors, his hollow follow-up to Annie Hall, echoed with gloomy, derivative Ingmar Bergman—his cinematic idol—while Stardust Memories (1980) dimly reflected Fellini’s trend-setting, autobiographical 8 ½. Yet even though Allen’s career has decidedly alternated between luminous and lackluster over the decades, Weide doctors the spin, inserting comments from gingerly uncritical critics like Shickel and Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf. One can only wonder whether Allen put any conditions on Weide’s supporting cast, all fans, including Allen’s sister.

Mia Farrow, his one-time leading lady off and on the screen, is naturally not in the building. Weide does treat the scandalous 1992 Allen/Farrow split that led to his marriage to Farrow’s college-age adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, but it’s mostly glossed over in fast-forward, as if it were all just a bad movie.

An apparent workaholic, Allen is barely done with one film before he’s on to his next one, especially now since he’s been able to obtain European backing for his latest films/travelogues. He believes in the “quantity theory,” betting that the sheer number of releases will increase his chances for critical and box-office success. This anti-Kubrick strategy has translated into a torrential output of features in recent decades, many flimsy and forgettable, redeemed only by Allen’s reliable one-liners and his near-mesmerizing ability to attract A-list actors, especially dishy leading ladies.

While Allen has assuredly taken a place in the American cinema pantheon, too little has been written about his penchant for arty, arch dramatic pretensions, which he regularly drapes over his scrawny plots like a pair of baggy khakis. Near the end of Weide’s non-definitive chronicle, Allen wistfully rues that he wasn’t born a “great tragedian.”

Seriously, Woody, you’re right.

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11/22/11

Film Review | Like Crazy

2011-11-14T13:04:00.008-07:00

He Loves Me,
He Loves Me Not

By Thomas Delapa

As wispy as cigarette smoke in a cyclone, Like Crazy might be likened to a precious, humorless When Harry Met Sally. This surprise Sundance award winner is a little romance, and a lot of heartbreak.

Audiences might be mad about Felicity Jones after her radiant breakthrough as Anna, a young Brit attending college in Los Angeles. While Drake Doremus’ film falls short on classy luster, Jones may have graduated to stardom.

In light of Jones’ vivacious, scene-stealing charms, Like Crazy is a one-sided relationship in more ways than one. While Anna falls passionately in love with Jacob (Anton Yelchin), an American design student, it would be a stretch to say that the stolid Yelchin is Jones’ acting match.

Largely improvised by the leads, Doremus’ “script” hinges on a weak, squeaky post-9/11 plot. In violation of her student visa, Anna overstays her U.S. welcome after college, a transgression that comes back to haunt the couple. Once back in the U.K., Anna is told that she can’t legally return to the U.S. Though Jacob can visit her and her parents, he’s not crazy about moving to England.

So the romance ping-pongs back and forth across the miles and years, and often via a series of rather mundane telephone messages. Long-distance relationships may be common in our globalized world, but they don’t exactly reach out and touch you as intimate drama. Unless Elizabeth Barrett Browning is writing them, LOL, text messages aren’t as poignant as love poems or swooning embraces.

Pert and poignantly vulnerable, Jones almost dials up a winning connection. That’s in spite of Doremus’ maddening hand-held camerawork and jumpy editing, which seem to be his heavy-handed way of conveying the nervous fragility of the romance. The small, tender moments between Anna and Jacob are finely captured, but they amount to pecks on the cheek, not rapturous kisses.

Before their first forced separation, Jacob gives Anna a bracelet engraved with the word “patience.” It’s a watchword that he will begin to forget, much to Anna’s chagrin etched on her face. Doremus tracks the doubts and insecurities that can arise between lovers that grow apart physically and emotionally. Alone in his L.A. studio designing furniture, Jacob faithlessly falls for his fetching blond co-worker (Winter’s Bone Jennifer Lawrence). Climbing the ladder as a journalist in London, Anna turns to a former neighbor (Charlie Bewley) for consolation. In our crazy and fickle modern world, vows, like hearts, seem made to be broken.

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11/14/11

This Saturday night: Post-screening discussion of "Take Shelter" at Cincinnati's Esquire Theatre

2011-11-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

Join us Saturday night at the Esquire for Our Next "Open for Discussion" Series Q & A

Directly After the 7:30 pm Screening of

TAKE SHELTER

"Take Shelter," the award-winning new psychological thriller starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, is arousing keen audience debate over whether the apocalyptic visions experienced by Shannon's character are based on reality. This stylized, artful and profoundly thought-provoking film doesn't tell us outright, so after the 7:30 p.m. Saturday screening at the Esquire Theatre in Clifton, CityBeat contributing editor and film critic Steven Rosen will lead a discussion into how writer-director Jeff Nichols offers us clues to figure it out -- or not. He’ll also lead an open discussion about other aspects of the film. This movie seems headed for many end-of-year "Best Of" lists and maybe even Oscar nominations, so discussion about its intent and meaning will only increase in coming months. Be among the first in Cincinnati to get your voice heard -- and hear from others.

New DVD Release: "Music Makes a City"

2011-10-13T07:30:00.000-06:00

Music Makes A City

Owsley Brown Presents, 2010, Not Rated

By Steven Rosen · October 11th, 2011 · Cincinnati CityBeat

The Louisville Orchestra is in a sad state these days. While it attempts to reorganize after bankruptcy, its fall season has been canceled. So while waiting and hoping for it all to sort out, it’s a good time to watch this new documentary on the orchestra’s remarkable history.

Founded in 1937 after a devastating flood and smaller in size than established orchestras like Cincinnati’s, it floundered looking for a sense of purpose. Then the city’s visionary mayor, an intellectual populist and true original named Charles Farnley, and conductor Robert Whitney hit on an original idea. They would commission new pieces from contemporary composers around the world and then perform (and often record) them.

The orchestra also worked directly with the great dance choreographer Martha Graham.

This was at a time when the major orchestras and their audiences were wary of New Music, with its overtones of hard-to-understand atonalism and serialism, so you’d imagine it would be a really tough sell in a neo-Southern Midwest city like Louisville. Yet, against the odds, it worked and became a rallying point for a city looking toward the future. And the U.S. government, eager to promote Louisville’s modernism to the world during the Cold War, arranged for Voice of America broadcasts.

This fine documentary, directed by Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiller and narrated by Will Oldham, tells the story of that exciting era in the city’s history. It includes interviews with some of the composers the orchestra worked with (Elliott Carter, Lukas Foss, Gunther Schuller and more), as well as the Louisville Courier-Journal critic taxed with learning New Music in order to review the performances.

There’s a wealth of archival footage, and the film also pauses for musical excerpts of some of the commissioned works accompanied by ruminative nature photography. There’s also a full bonus disc with extra interview footage. Through it all, Whitney and Farnley emerge as fascinating figures. Louisville was lucky to have them; one hopes the orchestra today will find comparable civic and musical leaders to help it revive.

Grade: B+

Film Review | Moneyball

2011-09-26T13:31:00.010-06:00

A League of His Own

By Thomas Delapa

Brad Pitt is easy to like.

He might be the most likable big-league male star around, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Tom Hanks notwithstanding. If you throw in his liberal-minded leanings on top of looks and easygoing charm, Pitt is batting close to a thousand.

But likability, like good intentions, can be a road to perdition—just ask Barack Obama. For my money, Moneyball should have been called Brad Pitt Ball (or The Money Pitt). Gee coach, didn’t anyone tell him that there’s no “I” in team?

In this wobbly inside pitch at baseball, Pitt plays Billy Beane, architect of the Oakland Athletics’ winning ways beginning in the early 2000s. As a young general manager determined to shake up the old game, Beane took the A’s from the cellar to the penthouse in 2002, mostly with a bunch of bargain-basement players.

Not unlike Tom Cruise in his tailor-made Mission Impossible franchise, Pitt is close to a one-man team while the ballplayers themselves are as anonymous as the actors playing them. Pitt only shares the spotlight with Jonah Hill, cast as a boyish baseball wonk who convinces Beane that obscure statistical analysis (now called “sabermetrics”) can help turn the A’s from zeroes to heroes.

From a 2003 book by Michael Lewis, director Bennett Miller (Capote) fields a film that curiously stays outside the foul lines, focusing largely on Beane’s unorthodox moves that threw a curve at baseball’s most hidebound traditions for evaluating talent. Beane not only has to win out against conventional wisdom, but has to spar with his old-school manager (a sour Philip Seymour Hoffman), who thinks Beane’s ideas are totally off-base.

While hardcore fans will likely enjoy this scruffy, locker-room look at the game, most audiences may want to reach for an overpriced beer. Director Miller’s costliest error might be that he tosses in a minimum of on-field drama, and only as fuzzy TV replays. You can look it up: Compared to The Natural or even A League of Their Own, Moneyball has all the action of a seventh-inning stretch.

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9/26/11

"Tabloid" Is Ripped From Yesterday's Headlines.

2011-09-11T08:54:00.000-06:00

Tabloid

By Steven Rosen

Even though Errol Morris’ best-known documentary, Oscar-winner The Fog of War, was about one of the most important men of modern American times – Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense when the Vietnam War started – the director has always shown a penchant for films about offbeat, colorful characters whose life stories are more weird than profound.

He’s returned to that predilection with Tabloid, the bizarre story of an American beauty queen – Joyce McKinney – who in the 1970s chased her runaway Mormon boyfriend to England, where she kidnapped him, manacled him to a bed, and had her sexual way with him. The story was a huge tabloid sensation in England; she eventually did some jail time and disappeared from the public eye.

Until a couple years ago, that is, when she went to South Korea to clone her beloved dog. Morris loves vividly expressive, emotional interview subjects; his camera studies their faces as Rembrandt would when doing a portrait.

And has he ever got a live wire in McKinney! She is so charming, naughtily flirty yet defiantly defensive today about all her actions. But she wears out her welcome, as does our interest in her 15-minutes-of-fame story, well before the film is over. It becomes pretty clear she’s an unreliable witness, and the film grows tedious since her kidnap subject – still alive – doesn’t participate in the film.

Morris’ attempt to broaden the subject matter to investigate Britain’s tabloid culture is a good call – British tabloid journalists also make colorful on-camera interview subjects – but compared to the revelations now sweeping that country about Rupert Murdoch’s corrupt tabloid empire, this is pretty minor stuff.

Since cooperating with Morris, by the way, McKinney has turned against the film and been vociferously complaining about how it makes her look.

Grade: B-

(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 8-31-11)

Film Review | The Help

2011-08-29T15:20:00.010-06:00

Mississippi Groaning

by Thomas Delapa

If any summer movie badly needs help, both dramatically and historically, it is, yes’m, The Help, which serves up a big slice of white-bread liberal fantasy about black life in the Jim Crow South.

Based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help tells of the crusading “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), a frizzy-haired, fair-skinned graduate of Old Miss who has a dream to help, if not free, the city of Jackson’s segregated black maids in the early 1960s. As improbably played by Stone, Skeeter seems less like a female Atticus Finch than a slumming cheerleader from High School Musical.

The daughter of wealthy bigots and friend to a coven of racist socialites, Skeeter nevertheless has a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son prominently displayed in her room. But Skeeter’s enlightenment towards blacks really brightens when she’s shocked to discover that her friends’ African-American maids are forbidden to use the bathrooms in the homes where they work. (Um, do you suppose Donald Trump’s help is allowed to use his master bathroom?) Led by the vicious Hilly (lily-white Bryce Dallas Howard), these tinny magnolias decide that their maids should have their own outhouses, in-house.

As a theme (and odious punch lines), feces circulate throughout this revisionist sitcom drama, shot in glossy, overcooked colors and acted with an accent on melodramatic, Tyler Perry-flavor anguish. Director Tate Taylor, who wrote the script with Stockett, drops in period TV footage to remind us we’re in the tumultuous real world of the Medgar Evers and JFK assassinations, instead of Skeeter in Wonderland.

Taylor and Stockett also toss a cinder or two of Mississippi Burning into their hot pot. Skeeter reads from the appalling Jim Crow laws regarding the separation of the races, while the two central maids, the downtrodden Aibileen (Viola Davis) and the sassy Minny (Octavia Spencer), suffer constant indignities under the feet of their high-heeled, tight-skirted masters.

One could argue that the movie is faithful to the “spirit” of the times, but is it? A budding writer, Skeeter buzzes around town secretly gathering the oral histories of the maids, getting a tentative go-ahead for a book from a slick publisher in New York City. The film gives the fictional impression that Skeeter/Stockett courageously sought out the interviews and hammered out the exposé in the pivotal sixties. Perhaps Taylor needs a helpful reminder that Stockett’s novel was only published two years ago, while the author herself was barely out of diapers in the early 1970s.

If Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was the last great literary whitewash about the Civil War, plantation South, The Help goes to the other side of the fence, painting the whites as lazy, ignorant racists (excepting the pre-feminist Skeeter), while the black maids are canonized as saint-like figures who nevertheless adore the neglected white children of their loveless bosses.

Fiddle-dee-dee. As a liberal Hollywood fantasy dripping in white guilt, crudely mythologizing mammies into martyrs, The Help belongs right on the syrupy shelf next to The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

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8/23/11

Film Review | Super Size Me (2004)

2011-08-21T11:55:00.008-06:00

My Big Fat American Meal
by Thomas Delapa

We’re talking fat, not phat.

When Morgan Spurlock decided to embark on a month-long "McDiet," little did he know he would gain 25 pounds, suffer liver damage and, in general, feel like hurling each and every McDay.

For 30 days straight, the New York filmmaker was his own guinea pig (emphasis on the pig), eating only McDonald’s meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. With camera in one hand and a Big Mac in the other, Spurlock documented his dieting debacle. The result is Super Size Me, which might even give Ronald McDonald indigestion.

By now, most of us have heard the gross facts about fat America. Two out of three of us are overweight or obese. Poor diets and sedentary suburban lifestyles are the biggest culprits. In Manhattan alone, McDonald’s has 83 outlets. Not only do Americans eat too much, but restaurant portions are taking on monster proportions. The 7-11 Double Big Gulp contains 64 ounces of soda--a whole half-gallon. An order of McD’s super-sized fries has a whopping 600 calories.

On the eve of his experiment, Spurlock sees a battery of doctors, who all give him a bill of good health. After 30 days of Quarter Pounders, fries, Cokes and Egg McMuffins, Spurlock balloons from 185 pounds to 210 and his body fat rises from 11% to 18%. Before the month is up, his doctors tell him that his liver is showing signs of toxicity.

Now, you say, nobody eats nonstop fast food for 30 days. True, but millions of people eat fast food several times a week, and have done so for 30 years or more. Even McDonald’s’ "healthy" salads, when slathered in dressing, have equivalent calories to their burgers.

Despite the weighty subject, Spurlock’s style isn’t always delectable. His capacity for calories exceeds his ability as a stand-up comic. And he could have thinned down all those repeated shots of pot-bellied passersby.

But Super Size Me comes with an order of extra-large social comment. Spurlock’s tour of a Wisconsin grade-school cafeteria appallingly reveals kids regularly lunching on snacks, sweets and other junk foods.

If you want the skinny on America’s flabby diets, start with Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and top it off with Spurlock’s fast-paced, low-carb documentary. Together, they may wipe the smile right off your Happy Meal.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 5/20/04
Winner of Denver Press Club award, 2005

Film Review | Cowboys & Aliens

2011-08-02T14:02:00.007-06:00

The Only Good Alien...

by Thomas Delapa

“Cowboys & Aliens opens tomorrow. I wonder what that’s about?”
--David Letterman

If the classic western has gone south, and science fiction is plumb tired, what’s a desperate Hollywood to do? Well, if you’re director Jon Favreau, the answer is easy, pardner: Take both genres, mix them up, add a stampede of special effects, and point and shoot.

With such producing honchos as Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard riding herd, you might figure Cowboys & Aliens would gallop off into the sunset as a sure-fire winner. But once you look beyond the bizarre blend of gunslingers, sagebrush, barroom brawls and evil E.T.s, Favreau’s mixed-up mélange is a close encounter of the worst kind.

Basing their script on a 2006 graphic novel, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci steal from western classics (like The Searchers) for their template, hogtied to a malodorous plot about alien abduction. Our amnesiac, Bourne-again hero is Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), who wakes up on the prairie to find a weird, space-age shackle on his wrist. When three grubby outlaws try to rob him, Jake shows us what a tough hombre he is.

Just to make sure we know we’ve landed in a western (as opposed to the real West), Favreau loads in clichéd dialogue (“Palms to heaven, friend”) to go along with the iconic, widescreen landscapes. From this well-trod fictional universe, we are transported into an empty, politically correct no man’s land where evil, bloodthirsty aliens take over the role that used to be played by Indians.

In the corrupt town of Absolution, the good guys (and a tribe of nice Indians) are forced to team up with the bad guys to fight the monstrously ugly invaders. Though Favreau pays lip service to the classic western, this travesty only comes to life during the alien attack on the town. From their marauding spaceships, the creatures brutally lasso the humans with hooks, dragging them back to their desert lair for unearthly experiments.

Away from the dramatic attacks, Favreau’s dialogue is as flat as Death Valley. As the laconic Jake, Craig rides short in the saddle, glaring his vacant blue eyes and looking as comfortable on a horse as James Bond in a leisure suit. As the town’s leathery cattle baron with a trigger-happy son (Paul Dano), Harrison Ford scowls and spits out his lines, a Han Solo gone to seed.

With the double-barrel star casting, you might reckon it means that Ford is passing his rusty action-hero badge on to Craig. Whatever the aim, the gesture is nothing but a bum steer.

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8/2/11

Strong New Documentary on Folk Singer Phil Ochs Released on DVD

2011-07-26T13:10:00.000-06:00

Phil Ochs: There But For Forture (Review)

First Run Features, 2011, Not Rated

By Steven Rosen
from Cincinnati CityBeat, July 27, 2011, http://www.citybeat.com/

Phil Ochs was Bob Dylan’s chief rival as a Folk-based protest singer in the 1960s — Christopher Hitchens, interviewed in this documentary, maintains Ochs was better, more politically pointed and with a more sarcastic and thought-provoking lyrical bite. But while Dylan went electric and became a Rock & Roll star, Ochs struggled with the transition to Pop, although his first ambitious attempt — a heavily orchestrated album called Pleasures of the Harbor — had astonishing variety and great beauty.

Ochs, a good-humored idealist who studied journalism at Ohio State, idolized President Kennedy at first but grew ever more radicalized at the outrages of the 1960s and early 1970s (the assassinations, Vietnam, civil-rights turmoil, Watergate). He also had personal demons — alcohol and depression, especially. This all led to him working against his best interests career-wise and fading from public view. After all sorts of misfortunes in the 1970s, he committed suicide in 1976 at age 35.

This documentary by Ken Bowser, produced by Ochs’ brother Michael, moves at a fast clip but gives due to all the facets of Ochs’ career and life, both the tragic and triumphant. And it does delve into what he did in the 1970s, away from the limelight, when he was struggling. The variety of archival footage, including performances, is impressive, as is the lineup of those who wanted to be interviewed about Ochs: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Tom Hayden, Sean Penn and more (but not Dylan).

There are times when the film tries to be a primer on the politics of the era and loses track of its subject, but it always returns. It also makes a pretty good case for the music Ochs recorded after Pleasures — his derided-at-the-time attempts at flat-out Rock and even County. Grade: B

Discuss the Meaning of "The Tree of Life" This Sunday

2011-07-19T08:59:00.000-06:00

Discuss "The Tree of Life" This Sunday (July 24) after 1 p.m. Screening at Cincinnati's Esquire Theatre

Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" -- winner of the top prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival -- has provoked all sorts of discussion on its meaning and the nature of its narrative structure. Some people find its investigation into existence and the presence of cosmic consciousness to be profoundly spiritual and religious, the first great mainstream American movie to address such questions since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "2001." Others are just perplexed or wary -- they wonder why a film ostensibly about a family in small-town Texas in the 1950s has an interlude with dinosaurs, or shots of a mysterious flickering light. And why does the story line jump around so much?

This Sunday (July 24th) at 1 p.m. at the Esquire Theatre, 320 Ludlow Ave. in Cincinnati, you can see the matinee and then stay for an audience discussion moderated by Steven Rosen, Cincinnati CityBeat film writer. The price is $6.75 -- standard matinee admission.

Malick has only made five movies in a long career, starting with 1973's "Badlands," and each is painstakingly personal and marked by an attempt to see his characters as players on a larger stage where nature, itself, has equal billing. Is "The Tree of Life" his masterpiece? Or is it overly ambitious?

This is your chance to see the movie, discuss it and hear other ideas. Weigh in on one of the year's most talked-about films and a potential Oscar nominee. For more information, visit http://www.esquiretheatre.com/.

Revisiting "Benjamin Button" as an Allegory for the Bush Presidency

2011-07-15T06:48:00.000-06:00

The Curious Case of Benjamin ... Bush?
Is David Fincher's film a veiled allegory for America under George W. Bush?

By Steven Rosen

(This first appeared in Cincinnati CityBeat, Feb. 18, 2009

I’ve been perplexed by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which leads all movies with 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

Yes, it’s beautifully crafted, with transformative makeup and digital effects to support its central concept — a man ages in reverse while those he knows get older. And the acting, too, is involving.

Brad Pitt unsentimentally plays Benjamin as an everyman, and his New Orleans accent has a pleasantly melodic ring. Cate Blanchett is spectacularly attractive as his great love, Daisy.

But this film is roughly three hours, and what is its point, exactly? Yes, it goes to great length to illustrate a truism — you can’t turn back the hands of time. But to quote the philosopher Peggy Lee, is that all there is? Further, Pitt’s Benjamin, while a New Orleans-born everyman, is not an especially smart one. A follower rather than a leader, passive rather than active, he has no special wisdom to impart or lessons to learn from his unusual circumstances. He seems to know that his life is a drag on others, which is why he pulls away from Daisy when she needs him most. But he just plods along toward the inevitable.

Even Benjamin’s journal, discovered after his death — the key plot device — lacks insight; it’s just description. He is incapable of truly enlightening self-reflection. That makes him a tragic figure, and the movie has an overall morose, melancholy and fatalistic tone to match, aided by David Fincher’s direction and its cinematography. One passage is even set in Murmansk, Russia, which looks to be one of the coldest places on Earth.

Benjamin is like an unfunny Seinfeld character — no lessons learned. Or like … George W. Bush? I’ve been wondering if this film can be read as a veiled allegory — or epitaph — for America under the vacuous Bush. An epitaph not just for the Bush Administration, now mercifully departed, but for what’s left of the country — war and recession — in the debris of his hurricane-like wake. The film is not hateful, not angry. It might even see him as a victim, too. But it is filled with a rueful post-9/11 sadness.

In that regard, we are like the film’s aged and dying Daisy, in a hospital bed in New Orleans, retreating into the “fantasy” of Benjamin as her daughter reads from his journal. Is there a parallel to our own fantasy of the past eight years — that the endlessly rising home prices of the unregulated Bush years would take care of us in the future?

This notion came to me because of the ominous way the film starts. As Hurricane Katrina approaches, the hospitalized Daisy wonders what will come next. Katrina, coming about a year after the “re-election” of Bush in 2004, was the event that finally exposed his incompetence even to his supporters. And things really went to hell after that. So making it such a specific reference point in this movie encourages a political reading.

So too does the central metaphoric symbol, also introduced early in the film. After World War I, while everyone in New Orleans is celebrating victory, a Monsieur Gateau creates a train-station clock that works backwards. “So perhaps the boys we lost in the war may come back again,” he explains with doomed naivety. (The device is reminiscent of the French anti-World War I classic, Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, in which slain soldiers return to life.)

Benjamin, although he’s born at the same time and, indeed, lives backwards, learns nothing from that clock. The parallel? In America, Bush launched a war in Iraq under false pretenses, still with no clear end. He learned nothing from the past, even while giving us another Vietnam.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m desperately trying to read something into the pointlessness of Benjamin’s life. The film’s origins are in a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but that is set in the 19th century, so the film is hardly meant as a faithful adaptation.

And Fincher’s other films seem to have a dark, pessimistic, metaphoric attitude. Certainly Se7en, Fight Club and The Game, and reviewers called 1992’s grim Alien3 an AIDS allegory. His last film, Zodiac, about a real-life San Francisco murderer who was never caught, had a sociopolitical context.

The principal screenwriter, Eric Roth, wrote Forrest Gump, a film I detest, but more recently he contributed to Munich and The Good Shepherd (about the CIA), two political films that take a dim view of the costs to a person’s psyche of endless war.

And one other thing: Benjamin, as born, is an aberration — a freakish event, a baby in his eighties. Bush’s ascendancy to the presidency in 2000 was similar, losing the popular vote and needing a partisan Supreme Court decision to stop a Florida recount of disputed ballots. And it’s been all downhill — or backwards — from there.

So what, then, is to be learned from Benjamin Button? An aphorism is repeated several times in the film, “You never know what’s coming for you.” That’s post-Bush America, all right.

Film Review | Larry Crowne

2011-07-11T12:30:00.004-06:00

Happy Days

by Thomas Delapa

As cine-therapy during the Great Depression, Hollywood gave us The Grapes of Wrath, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Dead End. During the Great Recession, Hollywood has bestowed on us...envelope please...Larry Crowne?

If you want to see how depressingly out-of-touch mainstream movies have become, buy a ticket (if you can afford one) to watch Tom Hanks show us the sunny, funny side of unemployment. If life is like a box of chocolates, director/star Hanks tells us that getting fired can ultimately be a sweetheart deal.

As titular everyman Larry Crowne, big-box retail clerk, Hanks earns a pink slip from his smarmy supervisors, ostensibly because of his lack of a college degree. Recently divorced and now downsized, Larry pauses only briefly before he goes to work reinventing himself, usually accompanied by a soundtrack of bouncy, optimistic Tom Petty songs.

Hanks and co-writer Nia Vardalos (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame and fortune) tick off a litany of topical problems that Larry overcomes as easily as Forrest Gump jumping over shrubs. Big, gas-guzzling SUV? Just trade it in for a cute motor scooter. Too much stuff around the house? Just sell it to a haggling but helpful neighbor. Can’t afford the house? Just give it back to the bank, no questions asked. As for income, we never see Larry waiting in line at the unemployment office or stressing about bills. In short order, he gets a job as a cook at a friend’s diner. Yep, Larry pulls himself up by his bootstraps, enrolling at a local L.A. college where overqualified instructors teach a generation of underachieving students.

“Times are tough” says Larry in his Tom Joad moment, but they’re about to get a lot easier, at least for him. At the college he’s promptly taken under the wing of a pretty young student (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who teaches him to text in class. She also treats him to a hip makeover, accessorized with trendy glasses. But Larry really scores when he signs up for a speech class taught by Miss Tainot (Julia Roberts), a smoldering burnout married to a porn-addicted blogger. Roberts, still flashing that A-list smile and those million-dollar legs, struts in to help turn this big-screen sitcom into a remedial version of Welcome Back, Kotter.

For Hanks and Roberts—crowned with three best-acting Oscars between them—Larry Crowne must have been a lark, not even a job, since neither shows an inclination to do any real acting. Tanned and puffy-faced, Hanks has especially regressed; he’s so dull and uninvolved, right now he’d have a hard time passing muster in his old Bosom Buddies role.

In this cloying, sub-sophomoric movie, no child is left behind, not even Larry’s fatuous classmates who are magically transformed by Miss Tainot’s inscrutable classroom skills. The audience never learns how Larry’s college experience will help him find a good-paying job, but that’s academic. As long as he makes the grade with his hot teacher, life will work out fine and he’ll graduate into his reborn American dream.

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7/10/11

Now "Food Inc." Is Threatening the Honeybee

2011-07-07T17:53:00.004-06:00

Queen of the Sun (Review)

New Documentary looks at the importance of honeybees

By Steven Rosen
Cincinnati CityBeat
Grade: B

In the wake of Food, Inc. have come numerous documentaries about how our profit-oriented tinkering with the natural world is producing disastrous results for both our health and that of the plants and animals we depend on for our food. Not to insult another species, but we are pigs.

Queen of the Sun, directed by Taggart Siegel (The Real Dirt on Farmer John) investigates how we’ve now managed to screw up the life of honeybees — there’s a crisis of what’s known as “colony collapse disorder,” in which the worker bees are disappearing from hives. And this has a threatening impact on the entire world, since we’re crucially dependent on pollination for agriculture.

We also learn in the film about a growing threat to American bee health — the wholesale trucking of colonies to California for use by the almond industry. So a lot is at stake in the subject of this film. Yet it is beautiful to watch. The close-up photography is superb — the colonies with their queen and workers, the way that bees are attracted to flowers and crops, the way that honey is produced … we have a front-row seat to watch nature in all its intricacies and delicacies.

We also learn about the grassroots movement toward “green” beekeeping and creation of bee sanctuaries (a movement strong in Cincinnati). And we get some expert commentary on the problems affecting honeybees from, among others, author Michael Pollan and beekeeper/writer Gunther Hauk. And this raises the one problem I had with the film. I attended a screening where Hauk spoke afterward and blamed “colony collapse disorder” on genetic engineering. The film could have gone into that subject in more detail.

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Wild Man Fischer: First "Derailroaded," Now Departed

2011-06-30T05:57:00.003-06:00

Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Larry "Wild Man" Fischer (Review)
MVD Visual, 2011, Not Rated

By Steve Rosen
. . . . . . .

Frank Zappa loved his freaks. Through his record labels Straight and Bizarro, he recorded such one-of-a-kind acts like Alice Cooper, Captain Beefheart, the GTOs (a bunch of groupies) and, last but not least, Larry “Wild Man” Fischer. Fischer, who died a couple weeks ago at age 66, was a manic-depressive, paranoid-schizophrenic Los Angeles street singer whose songs (“Merry Go Around”) have an appeal to those looking for truth and purity in the art of “outsiders.”

Fischer brought an extremely unusual voice to the venture — an enthusiastic yelp that is equal parts joyful and alarming. Zappa produced a two-disc album called An Evening With… that sold all of 12,000 copies. Fischer, whose volatility once prompted him to pull a knife on his mother, was so angry at Zappa for failing to make him a Rock & Roll star that he threw a bottle at him, just missing Zappa’s infant daughter. That maybe should have been his end, but Fischer hung around L.A. as a local personality, even recording a song popularizing Rhino Records in the 1970s.

Derailroaded, which Josh Rubin and Jeremy Lubin named after a Fischer song and worked on for years as a labor of love, both with and without an often-troubled Fischer’s cooperation, considers whether Zappa insensitively opened a Pandora’s box without understanding the consequences, but it also shows that Fischer’s wild music and good humor — when he was in the right mood — was pretty infectious on those who encountered him.

The movie has a deeply sobering, sad side — as Fischer got older and more difficult, the weight of his illness bearing down on him and those nearby, you worry how he gets through every day. Yet even still there are those in the L.A. music business who try to help — especially the novelty-song producers known as Barnes & Barnes (Robert Haimer and Billy Mumy), who are extensively interviewed. They somehow arranged for one of the strangest chapters in Fischer’s career (and in the film), a 1986 duet with Rosemary Clooney on a song called, fittingly, “It’s a Hard Business.”

Grade: B

(Cincinnati CityBeat, 6-29-11)

Film Review | Super 8

2011-06-27T14:10:00.010-06:00

8 Is Enough

By Thomas Delapa

Interviewed for Super 8, his retro, 1970s-era monster movie, writer/director J.J. Abrams declared to Parade magazine his idea was to “invoke the spirit of films that inspired me as a kid without xeroxing them.”

Well, no one can possibly say that Abrams’ toothless send-up is a carbon copy of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. or any other Steven Spielberg monster 1970s/1980s hit. It’s astronomically inferior. It makes 1941 look like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The creator of TV’s Lost who’s also made a small leap to the big screen, Abrams even got Spielberg to co-produce. What might be hero-worshipping homage for the former adds up to reel self-glorification for the latter.

Subpar on almost every level, Super 8 unspools as an ode to old-school amateur filmmaking in the days before the ascendancy of the video—and digital—universe. In the small Ohio town of Lillian, a group of nerdy kids (think Goonies) are making their own zombie flick. It’s the brainchild of chubby Charles (Riley Griffiths), whose crew includes the mop-haired Joe (Joel Courtney) and a blond leading lady (Elle Fanning) without a license to drive. In the first of Abrams’ tin-plated plot conceits, little Joe has just lost his mother to a deadly accident at the local steel mill.

An adolescent auteur in search of a story, Charles’ quest for cool production values leads the cast and crew to a desolate railroad station in the dark of night. But living truth demolishes undead fiction when a speeding truck slams into a passing train, causing a gratuitously over-the-top, pyrotechnic derailment that could only exist in a digitally juiced-up Hollywood movie of today.

In the aftermath of this wreck (both train and movie), all hell breaks loose in the town. Hidden aboard the train, the kids find a mountain of strange white metallic cubes. But something else has been unleashed, something gnarly and weird, and only the sinister U.S. Air Force knows what. That’s not the biggest mystery in Abrams’ story: Lillian must be such a backwoods burg, no media outlets bothers to cover the ensuing events, even as the calamities approach Three Mile Island fueled with War of the Worlds.

While Abrams pays lip service to the power of old-fashioned filmmaking, he derails it at every twist and turn. Loaded on as the major plot device, Charles’ Super-8 camera inadvertently captured the train disaster, but the revealed footage doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know or haven’t previously seen; the whole scene is treated like an outtake instead of a major MacGuffin. When we do find out what the train’s top-secret cargo is, it’s also thrown in like excess baggage. Abrams’ cavalierly hands the menace over to his special-effects crew, who generate a super-fluous digital monster that would put Roger Corman to sleep.

By contrast, take any of the aliens, spaceships or even demonic trucks from Spielberg’s classic sci-fi/horror hits and it’s striking just how much they were invested with a wondrous, otherworldly quality and weight. Abrams has no sense of wonder or real imagination. He’s a synthetic, low-gauge sampler of somebody else’s dream works.

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6/27/11

Film Review | Midnight in Paris

2011-06-09T10:47:00.010-06:00

Night at the Musée

By Thomas Delapa

In the opening minutes of Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen presents a loving—yet languid—montage of postcard-pretty sights from the City of Light. Mon dieu, we get it, Woody: Paris is a beautiful backdrop whatever time of day it is.

In the latest stop in Allen’s expatriate cinematic tour after London and Barcelona (If it’s Tuesday, this must be France…), the serio-comic auteur toasts Paris, home to all things cultured, sophisticated and artistic. After Manhattan, Paris is Allen’s self-proclaimed spiritual home, and now he’s turned that moveable feast into a movie fantasy, if a half-baked one.

No, you’re not dreaming. In Owen Wilson, Allen makes a baffling choice, casting the Texas-born comedy star as his newest cinematic alter ego. Wilson is Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter on vacation abroad with his vapid fiancée (Rachel McAdams). A closet Proust, Gil yearns for “Paris in the twenties in the rain,” and before you can say “slushy plot device” three times, he’s magically whisked to that literary and artistic golden age. Each night at the stroke of 12, he’s picked up by an antique coupe to begin his rendezvous with a gallery of greats, who all treat him like a long-lost comrade.

By day, Gil contends with an assortment of ugly, boorish Americans, whether his girlfriend’s shopaholic parents or a pompous professor (Michael Sheen) who’s an expert on everything, even correcting a museum tour guide (French first lady Carla Bruni). What Allen expediently forgets is that the faux casting of Wilson is almost as crass as his bluntly caricatured Yanks. Every present-day American in the film is a French-fried twit, excepting, of course Allen’s starry-eyed stand-in. Acting as supporting props to the Paris sights is a handful of chic French beauties who ooze charm, culture and ooh-la-la.

Meanwhile, back in the Jazz Age past, Gil hobnobs with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali. As a swarthy, pre-Papa Hemingway, only Corey Stoll shows off some grace under pressure, punctuating his impersonation with droll and, yes, Hemingwayesque bravado. The rest of Allen’s cameos enter and exit like walk-ons from a wax museum.

While neatly dressed up with cigarette holders and Cole Porter music, Midnight in Paris clocks in as a high-toned Night at the Museum, with Hemingway taking Teddy Roosevelt’s place in the semi-living tableaux. Wilson—who appeared in the latter—has a penchant for light, slacker comedy, but his nasal voice and boyishly gee-whiz persona are wearing old, and he’s fast becoming part of a lost generation of 40-something Hollywood actors.

Wilson is out of step with the Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard, indifferently cast as a Picasso groupie who herself is nostalgic for the belle époque of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge. Gil can insist all he wants that “Prufrock is my mantra” to a visiting T.S. Eliot; when it comes to a fitting movie setting, Wilson may slip right into Shanghai Noon, but in Midnight in Paris, he’s way out of time.

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6/8/11

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

2011-05-31T20:36:00.012-06:00

Bona Fide Funny

by Thomas Delapa

How to describe O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers' latest wild and wooly film fantasy? Ostensibly based on Homer's Odyssey, it attempts to do for the deep South what Fargo did for the upper Midwest, only in a far lighter vein. It may be the only movie to combine Greek myth, bluegrass music, a biblical flood and a Ku Klux Klan rally.

The gods must be smiling on the Coens, for somehow this wacky extravaganza works.

I may live to regret saying this, but I take back almost everything I've said about George Clooney's acting abilities. Discarding his stolid, tough-guy roles, Clooney dusts off a bright, charming comic personality to go along with his matinee-idol good looks.

Clooney plays Ulysses Everett McGill, one of three prisoners who escape a Mississippi chain gang during the Depression 1930s. With him are his dim, down-home cohorts, Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (the wild-eyed John Turturro). As incentive to escape, Everett promises the other two a share of the million dollars he's hidden away from a robbery.

After the Odyssey, the brothers Joel and Ethan take the idea of a husband trekking home to claim his wife after years away. But the Coens also borrow from Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges' 1942 screwball comedy which told of a Hollywood director who hobnobs as a hobo to research his upcoming human-interest drama called Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

You don't need to know Greek to enjoy the misadventures of this trio. Blessed with the gift of pedantic gab, Everett is a cheery optimist who's obsessive about his brand--Dapper Dan--of hair gel. When it comes to winning back the wife (Holly Hunter) who's disowned him, he insists, "But I'm the pater familias" in a manner that suggests Bugs Bunny crossed with Clark Gable.

Clooney's ably supported by Nelson and Turturro as his partners in grime and ex-crime. The dumbest of the bunch, Delmar postulates that Pete was turned into a toad during a close encounter with a threesome of sultry sirens along a riverbank.

Along with Roger Deakins' glowing, golden-hued cinematography is a toe-tapping sprinkling of old folk favorites as the score. Once the boys wander in to a recording studio and serendipitously sing "Man of Constant Sorrow" accompanied a black guitar player (Chris Thomas King), unknown to them they become a sensation on the airwaves. Toward the end, they get to reprise their hit in rambunctious hootenanny wearing false beards.

O Brother might have been better had it ended with its gleeful musical finale. Instead, the Coens bother to add on a deus ex machina flood that washes away some of the buoyant momentum.

Nonetheless, after the big letdown of The Big Lebowski, the Coens are back on top in this terrifically odd but uplifting Depression odyssey.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 1-18-01

Film Review | Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011-05-23T13:09:00.007-06:00

Dead Man Swimming

by Thomas Delapa

For the fourth voyage of Pirates of the Caribbean, producer Jerry Bruckheimer set sail with a new director at the helm, a slimy new villain and a salty leading lady. But don’t shiver your timbers, mateys—flighty Cpt. Jack Sparrow is back at the wheel, this time with zombies, mermaids and a load of mascara in tow.

Subtitled On Stranger Tides, this waterlogged swashbuckler sends Depp and crew on a—wink, wink—quest for the legendary Fountain of Youth. With three-time director Gore Verbinski, as well as stars Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, wisely abandoning ship, new skipper Rob Marshall (Chicago) goes overboard to revive a foundering franchise that by now should be sleeping with the fishes.

The new cast netted Ian McShane as the infamous Blackbeard, who’s enhanced his piracy with voodoo powers and a super-sized sword. Barely onboard is Penelope Cruz as Blackbeard’s daughter, whom Sparrow deflowered in a convent and now vows revenge. Hamming it up from stem to stern, Geoffrey Rush got his King’s Speech transfer and returns as Sparrow’s peg-legged rival Barbossa.

Screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio treat the rudderless plot like driftwood. Rather than be beaten by the hated Spanish, England’s King George hires Barbossa to find the Fountain of Youth first, with Blackbeard’s ghostly ship in vague pursuit. Blackbeard has “zombified” his crew, which is a pretty fair description of Pirates’ remaining ticket-buying public. In another lethargic nod to Depp’s original homage, Keith Richards flies in for a cameo as Sparrow’s dad, just long enough for a crusty in-joke. (“Does this face look like it’s been to the Fountain of Youth?”)

Exactly where all these pirates and privateers are going is as clear as mud, since almost every scene is an excuse for a tsunami of stunts, dull swordplay and special effects. An unusually bewitching scene with a singing mermaid quickly morphs (literally) into a screaming attack by a school of mermaids, digitally spawned into man-eating monsters.

With Knightley and Bloom in dry dock, the surviving stars are castaways in an inane story that gets old before anyone finds the Fountain of Youth. Cruz—evidently pregnant during the production—comes off as peaked, if not seasick. Depp’s tipsy, swishy shtick should have been deep-sixed two movies ago, but Disney and first mate Bruckheimer have never been shy about wringing the last drop of box-office booty from their franchise mega-hits.

On the surface, one might think that McShane—so suavely menacing in TV’s Deadwood— might be able to singlehandedly keep this Pirates voyage afloat. But like everyone else, he goes down with ship, victimized by a moribund story and scurvy dialogue.

Aye, avast the S.O.S. On Stranger Tides is a washout.

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5/23/11

Harry Shearer's Very Serious Film About New Orleans

2011-05-19T07:58:00.004-06:00

The Big Uneasy (Review)
Harry Shearer looks at why the New Orleans levies failed

By Steven Rosen (www.stevenrosenwriter.com)

Cincinnati CityBeat 5-11-01
. . . . . . .

The compelling argument that the catastrophic 2005 flooding of New Orleans was caused not so much by Hurricane Katrina but rather by negligence in the construction and operation of levees by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been reported in newspapers and magazines.

But because the information has come out in dribs and drabs after the fact, it hasn’t really made much of an impact on the national public consciousness, much less produce a sense of outrage.

So Harry Shearer, the This Is Spinal Tap actor and humorist (and part-time Crescent City resident), has decided to get serious and put all the story elements together in this (literally) muckraking documentary.

It’s a worthy effort, filled with great insight into the making of the flood and the troubling revelations about the arrogant way the Corps does business and is protected by the U.S. Congress.

But it also shows the limits of a single 98-minute film to clearly and easily (and visually) keep track of such a complex story. That’s a nice way to say it’s easy to get lost following the many points it makes, and the editing doesn’t help.

It could use more narration by Shearer and less jumping around among interviewees. But there is an excellent graphic, at the film’s beginning, about how the levees were breached, where they collapsed from shoddy construction, and how that caused a chain reaction of flooding. And the section about the environmental hazards of a boondoggle of a Corps project called “Mr. Go” (Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet) is downright frightening.

The core of the film consists of interviews with Ivor Van Heerden, head of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, who led a state investigation critical of the Corps and appears to have been fired for it; Robert Bea, a UC-Berkeley professor who led a National Science Foundation investigation also critical of the Corps; and Maria Garzino, a Corps engineer who has criticized the quality of new pumps used to protect against future flooding.

Grade: B

Film Review | Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

2011-05-15T20:55:00.007-06:00

All in the Family

by Thomas Delapa

Of all American institutions, none is quite as sacred as the family. It’s been the fodder (and mother) for a score of sitcoms, from Leave It to Beaver to Home Improvement. Even dysfunctional families–like the Osbournes–have their own TV shows. The family is that great, warm-and-fuzzy bulwark against the world, a safe haven that’s revered, if sometimes reviled.

Yet families are fragile things. Divorce and death–and time itself–can tear them apart. But nothing comes close to the destruction of New York’s Friedman family, caught on film in Andrew Jarecki’s riveting Capturing the Friedmans.

A Sundance award-winner, this disturbing documentary unfolds like a factual version of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Both films are deeply concerned with the labyrinthine relativity of truth. Both attempt to rehash traumatic past events from the prism of individual testimony. Is the truth ever really out there? It all depends whom you ask.

In the early 1980s, the Friedmans were a typical middle-class, Jewish family from Long Island. Arnold was a quiet, respected schoolteacher who taught piano and computer classes at night. Arnold and wife Elaine were busy raising three teenage sons, David, Seth and Jesse.

"I had a good family, right?" Elaine asks in retrospect. We’re reminded early on that looks are deceiving. In 1984, the FBI arrested Arnold on charges of receiving child pornography through the mail. Agents searched his house and found kiddie-porn magazines hidden behind the piano. It was just the beginning of the Friedman nightmare. Soon after, both Arnold and Jesse were put on trial, charged with more than a hundred counts of child molestation and sodomy. The alleged victims were boys from Arnold’s computer class.

Capturing the Friedmans is dicey, difficult material, and not simply due to its ghastly subject matter. The Friedmans–first Arnold and then son David–were almost obsessive about documenting their lives in home movies. Jarecki in turn skillfully incorporates that footage into his film. The result is a devastating record of a family coming apart before our eyes.

At the same time, Jarecki shakes our belief in the nature of truth and justice. Through interviews with the principals in Arnold and Jesse’s case, Jarecki raises troubling questions about the way the police conducted the investigation. The judge staunchly maintains that Arnold was guilty. A journalist who specializes in such sex cases argues that Arnold and Jesse were victims of overzealous police and a Crucible-like community hysteria.

Yet Jarecki isn’t a muckraker a la Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (his 1988 documentary that helped exonerate a Texas man convicted of murder). Jarecki raises questions, but doesn’t necessarily set out to answer them. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Arnold Friedman’s trial is that absolutely no physical evidence was submitted. The conviction came strictly on the boys’ testimony, some of which came through the dubious use of hypnosis.

It is evidently true that Arnold was a pedophile. He had several clandestine relations with teenaged boys apart from the computer class. To this day, David vehemently believes in his father’s innocence. In one of many of the film’s wry ironies, David today is one of the most popular "birthday clowns" in New York City. (Seth refused Jarecki’s request for an interview.)

On first glance, the Friedmans’ home movies exude an air of normalcy. But Elaine’s hindsight criticism of the unusual bonds between Arnold and his sons made me look closer. The outrage voiced by both David and Jesse may be indicative of two brothers working on at least two decades of denial.

As you watch the Friedmans destruct at home around the dinner table, you wonder if the truth of what went on will ever be known. And you may worry just how close similar deviance is to other "normal" families. On the surface, the Friedmans were right out of Ozzie & Harriet. But lurking under the dinner table, there was something dark and festering that no one dared say–even today.

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[N.B. Arnold Friedman died in prison in 1995; Jesse Friedman was released from prison in 2001 after serving 13 years of his sentence.]

Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 7/24/03

Now That It's May, It's Time for Some 'Fair Weather'

2011-05-06T06:28:00.004-06:00

“It’s Always Fair Weather”
(Warner Home Video)
Grade: A

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat

http://www.stevenrosenwriter.com/

Any short list of the greatest movie musicals should include this inexcusably overlooked 1955 MGM masterpiece from co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a sequel of sorts to “On the Town” and “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Way ahead of its time, it’s a biting, surprisingly pessimistic satire on 1950s-era consumer culture – television, advertising, fixed boxing – and middle-aged angst, punctuated by some of the greatest dance numbers ever choreographed.

Kelly, Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd dance with trash-can lids on their feet, Kelly has an astonishingly graceful yet athletic number on roller skates as he sings “I Like Myself,” Cyd Charisse goes at it with beefy boxers on “Baby You Knock Me Out,” and the wonderful Dolores Gray has two numbers as a preening TV host.

DVD extras include a Kelly/Charisse dance number (with just partial audio) cut from the film as well as a short documentary about “Fair Weather’s” history. (It’s sold separately, or part of an MGM “Classic Musicals” box that also has “Till the Clouds Roll By,” “Ziegfeld Follies,” “Three Little Words” and “Summer Stock.”)

Film Review | United 93 (2006)

2011-05-05T12:00:00.010-06:00

United They Fell

by Thomas Delapa

On the day of infamy that was Sept. 11, 2001, America wasn't any more prepared for a sneak attack than it was on Dec. 7, 1941. If you need reminding of this and other appalling 9/11 facts, fasten your seat belts and spend 95 harrowing minutes aboard United 93. Director Paul Greengrass' exacting reenactment lands in theaters as one of the must-see films of the year.

On the fateful morning that changed America, no one onboard United's Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco could have known that their final destination would be a field in the middle of Pennsylvania. Of the four jets hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists that day, 93 was the only one that didn't find its target. The crew and passengers' "Let's roll" heroism is now the stuff of heart-wrenching legend. Greengrass and company tell their story with soaring moral authority.

Yet United 93 expands its flight plan with a provocative review of 9/11 as experienced by those who helplessly watched the events unroll first-hand. Greengrass tracks the paths of the other three airliners through the eyes and ears of the air-traffic monitors, both military and civilian, along the Eastern seaboard.

This is a film every American should see, if only to be reminded of how easy it was for a handful of hijackers armed with razor blades to mount a devastating and demoralizing attack on the most powerful nation on Earth. In but a few shockingly unreal minutes, the terrorists destroyed the most visible symbol of American financial might, and came close to destroying this country's military headquarters.

Greengrass' "real-time" re-creation begins with the four neatly dressed terrorists preparing to board the Boeing 757 at the Newark airport. At the gate, oblivious passengers chat on their cell phones. In a cruel twist of fate, one man barely makes it on the plane before it departs.

A British director, Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) approaches his subject with exceptional diligence and respect. There are no Hollywood stars here, only non-professional actors who were cast for their similarities—in appearance and background—to their models. Former United pilot JJ Johnson plays 93 Capt. Jason Dahl. In an eerie bow to verisimilitude, the role of FAA operations manager Ben Sliney is played by Sliney himself, whose first day on the job began the morning of Sept. 11.

From the thousands of audio recordings that day, Greengrass and his crew reconstruct the chaos, confusion, shock and terror that shook the U.S. to its roots. Necessarily, we are also made to watch again the unthinkable inferno of the World Trade Center towers, images that will forever burn in the minds of Americans.

For all its agonizing familiarity, United 93 also dramatizes the little-known events that were of crucial importance in the terrorists' success once the planes were airborne. Forty years ago, Stanley Kubrick gave as doomsday scenario of Dr. Strangelove, which ridiculed our arrogant reliance on military technology. For all the billions of dollars in high-tech equipment at the disposal of the government, effective communication was muted by bureaucracy and complacency. Minutes before the hijackers stormed the 93 cockpit, a sign warning "Beware of cockpit intrusion" was flashed to the pilot and co-pilot.

This lack of preparedness was duly followed all down the line, from the civilian to military oversights. Well after the U.S. military was made aware of the hijackings, it was only able to muster two fighter jets in the air to intercept the planes. Meanwhile, since the president and the vice president were both incommunicado, it was impossible for anyone to give the command to shoot down the hijacked planes.

As the surreal doom settles in, Greengrass puts his attention on the last horrifying minutes of Flight 93. For those who believe United 93 should have never flown as a movie, please feel free to locate the exit doors and go stick your head in the sand.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly 5/04/06

Film Review | The Conspirator

2011-04-26T11:28:00.007-06:00

Northern Exposure

by Thomas Delapa

It was a Southerner, William Faulkner, who said, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

And so too with the Civil War, 150 years hence. With modern America’s polarizing battles on states’ rights about everything from health care to immigration law, there may be more disunion in these United States than at any time since the Vietnam War.

Set on the eve of Reconstruction, The Conspirator sets out to reconstruct the little-known, but telling, events that followed in the wake of Lincoln’s fateful assassination. Any smart 5th grader can tell you that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, but how many of us know that he was only one member of a larger conspiracy that aimed to send most of Lincoln’s cabinet to kingdom come?

At the very least, Robert Redford’s weighty courtroom drama is downright rebellious in its thoughtful and reasoned pace, lined up against the scattershot caliber of today’s Hollywood. In this his best film since Quiz Show, Redford marshals winning performances from his cast, led by Robin Wright and Atonement’s James McAvoy.

One doesn’t need to be Shelby Foote to feel the 21st century reverberations in the way Redford and his screenwriters shape the story of Mary Surratt (Wright), the one woman put on trial for the conspiracy. Though she was a citizen—if a Southern sympathizer—the government ordered that she be tried in a military tribunal, not a civilian court. So although the evidence was patently circumstantial, her defense was next to impossible. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) was out for swift revenge—and to make sure those damn, cotton-pickin’ Rebs learned their lesson.

Redford takes up Surratt’s cause, much in the same wary way that her young, inexperienced Northern lawyer, Frederick Aiken (McAvoy) does. Reluctantly taking her case, Aiken alienates his friends and his betrothed (Alexis Bledel) in his fight to save Surratt from the gallows. Like Lee at Gettysburg, Aiken faces major odds, especially with Stanton deviously tipping the scales behind the scenes.

So while you’re witnessing the diligent acting from McAvoy and company, Redford’s pace will allow you time to weigh the strong evidence of irony afoot. For a trial about an insidious conspiracy, Stanton—who could be a bearded Donald Rumsfeld—is busy rigging his own conspiracy. We can also strenuously object at the way Surratt’s constitutional rights are trampled upon, this in the days following a horrific war expressly meant to save the republic and its Constitution.

While didactic, and a mite dry, The Conspirator makes its plea for truth and fairness, set off against dim, stuffy interiors that blot out the few rays of truth. The (im)moral of the story is that, in times of war, politics trump justice. But Redford serves to remind us as individuals—whether blue, red or gray—of the cowardly and dishonest choices we make when we march in lockstep to the drumbeat of expedience.

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4/25/11

No Country for Old Tires: "Rubber" Review

2011-04-21T11:28:00.004-06:00

Rubber (Review)

Quentin Dupieux’s horror satire centers on a killer tire

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat

April 20, 2011

. . . . . . .

It’s tempting to call Rubber an intimate glimpse into the tire condition. But that might seem excessively flippant.

True, it’s hard not to describe this new independent film about a killer tire, which can be seen first-run in Cincinnati on Time Warner Cable’s video-on-demand platform, without allowing for some humor. It’s just such a weird premise.

Yet this indie production has some serious issues on its mind about the absurdity of the human condition and the desensitizing (and dehumanizing) of American filmgoers to mindless, sadistic violence. Or at least I think it does. Maybe it is just a big goof — a film about a killer tire that uses telekinesis to blow up people’s heads.

It’s part Camus, part Goodyear ad and part David Cronenberg (especially Scanners). It also, in its way, is out to satirize and one-up those endlessly banal children’s animated movies that relentlessly anthropomorphize every animal known to humankind.

Made by French director Quentin Dupieux (who also wrote the story and shot and edited the film, plus co-wrote the vaguely Morricone-esque score under the alias “Mr. Oizo”), it is in English and set in the sun-baked California desert. That’s where that misunderstood 1970 masterpiece about the alienation of American youth, Michelangelo Antonioni’s cryptically deadpan Zabriskie Point, also was shot.

Rubber begins as a car approaches a seemingly random destination in the desert, its driver carefully turning the wheels to slowly knock over a series of chairs placed in the roadway. A police lieutenant (Stephen Spinella) gets out of the car, as a nervous young man (Jack Plotnick) stands somewhere nearby, and launches into the strangest existential monologue ever uttered by a movie cop.

Why is the alien in Spielberg’s E.T. brown? “No reason,” he explains.” Why don’t the characters in Texas Chainsaw Massacre ever go to the bathroom? “No reason.” Why, in Oliver Stone’s JFK, does a president get shot by a complete stranger? “No reason.” And in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, why does a gifted pianist have to live like a bum? You guessed it: “No reason.”

It’s pretty clear the lieutenant is talking about life itself, not just the movies — The Pianist is about the Holocaust, after all. But as he joins his officer in the car and drives off, it’s not evident the message about the human condition has registered with the group of people he’s been addressing.

They are mismatched, cranky “moviegoers,” who have been led to the desert likes lambs to slaughter to watch from a safe distance as Rubber unfolds in (seemingly) real time before their eyes. And to complain whenever the action slows down — they are hungry, literally, for graphic violence and, maybe, some sex. They are the subjects of the filmmaker’s disdain — fools who, in the face of the unfairness of existence, show not empathy but bloodlust. A bloodlust, by the way, that Hollywood feeds.

Among them is a crusty older wheelchair-bound gent (Wings Hauser) who seems wiser than the rest. For much of what follows, Dupieux cuts between the “action” and this Greek chorus’ commentary on the action … at least until their hunger gets the best of them.

As the plot gets underway, the camera turns to an undistinguished patch of dirt, where an abandoned tire rests. It slowly, twitchingly, magically comes to life and begins jauntily rolling down the road — killing an animal or two in its way. It seems attracted to a young, dark-haired French woman (Roxane Mesquida) driving through the desert, even using its powers to stall out her car. But a passing motorist interferes — and later pays for it.

The tire moves on to a dilapidated motel, where the French woman is staying and where it shows a Psycho-like fondness for showers. The police lieutenant reemerges to both conduct a murder investigation and break the fourth wall by discussing the film-in-progress with his confused deputies. They think this is a serious hunt for a maniacal tire, not a movie.

The tire, which is listed as “Robert” in the credits, has its own cathartic moment. As it rolls along, it comes across a field where workers are burning others like it. This is no country for old tires, it realizes. After it watches the bonfire, its attitude toward the human race seems to harden. Its murders up to that point have been semi-provoked. Afterwards, the provocation is inherent in the human species itself.

It’s hard for Dupieux to always maintain the delicate balance of tire-black humor and faithfulness to narrative, to not get so navel-gazingly “meta” about his intentions that Rubber becomes an exercise in film theory first and a movie second. Toward the end, there are shaky, superficially developed moments. Yet there is a funny late-movie scene — worthy of Super Troopers — where the police and the French woman try to coax the tire out of a house by using a bomb-laden mannequin.

It’s useful to compare this with American exploitation horror films that try to be knowingly clever while laying on the violence — the Scream series, including the new 4, for instance. Or those films that just plain old revel in torture and sadism, like the sickening Saw or movies by another director whose first name is Quentin.

I don’t want to pretend Rubber isn’t violent, but Dupieux cues the blow-up scenes with sound and visual effects and minimizes our exposure to the actual carnage. Surprising as it sounds, given the film’s premise and storyline, he’s a humanist.

Grade: B+

Film Review | Hanna

2011-04-13T19:25:00.006-06:00

Run Hanna Run

by Thomas Delapa

Once upon a time in an icy northern land, there was a little girl named Hanna, endowed with magical superhuman powers. Though she loved her father, Hanna couldn’t wait to grow up ... and start kicking ass.

A fairly appalling modern fairy tale, Hanna begins with the Brothers Grimm and ends in a grim, grungy post-humanism. Take a mishmash of Run Lola Run, The Terminator and Spy Kids, and upload with fashionable Y2K brutality, and—hocus-pocus—you’ll have director Joe Wright’s bastard Frankenstein creation.

Helen Reddy has nothing on Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), an ethereal 16-year-old whose wide-eyed robotic demeanor hides a hair-trigger urge to kill. When we first find her in the Finland tundra, she’s slaying a deer with bow and arrow. Yes, kimo sabe, her dad (Eric Bana) has trained her well. Her mission, which she has no trouble accepting, is to track down and knock off Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), a nasty CIA operative with a Southern drawl and a fetish for chic shoes.

Even if Wiegler is a wicked witch of the West, this is no Cinderella story. But it’s not a stretch to see Hanna as a blond Red Riding Hood, kicking and shooting her away through Europe and Morocco, while eluding a pack of German nihilists. This all might have been fun had Wright (Atonement) and his screenwriters dodged a terminally hip violence that recycles the pulpy premise into flashy trash.

You can imagine Hanna as the virginal Aryan flip-side to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Himmler himself couldn’t dream up a more uber-perfect Hitler youth than Ronan’s Hanna, whose fanatical devotion to her father(land) results in a trail of broken limbs and dead bodies. When she’s not busting heads, Hanna tags along with a cheeky Australian girl (Jessica Barden) and her family.

As wispy as Hanna’s tousled hair, Wright’s back story comes in fits and starts, and only serves to prime the pump in the high-octane, techno-fueled action. Despite a handful of fanciful locations—like an outdoor Berlin museum of decrepit dinosaurs—Wright’s sense of action doesn’t evolve much beyond his prehistoric slo-mo fight scenes.

In an archly stylized movie that coldly combines the unreal with the ludicrous, Wright does what heretofore seemed an impossible mission: He coaxes a crummy performance out of Blanchett, one of the screen’s best actresses. The only thing that stands out in Blanchett’s flat, walk-on villainy is her nice set of legs.

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4/12/11

Sidney Lumet's Last Film Was an Excellent One

2011-04-11T10:10:00.004-06:00

Film: Review: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead:

Sidney Lumet strikes again with a taut cautionary tale

By Steven Rosen

(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 2007) . . . . . . .

Eighty-three-year-old director Sidney Lumet is a genuine American Master -- his career includes classic live television dramas of the 1950s as well as such outstanding, naturalistic cinematic investigations of ethical conduct under duress as 1957's 12 Angry Men, 1964's The Pawnbroker, 1973's Serpico and 1981's Prince of the City.

Yet his work of the past 10 years has been a minor footnote to his achievements -- Sharon Stone's remake of Gloria, Night Falls on Manhattan, Find Me Guilty. When he received a 2005 Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, it seemed a given that Lumet's best work was behind him.

So much for assumptions. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is among his best work -- a ferociously unsentimental look at how easily life can become terrible, especially when one puts ambition ahead of ethical conduct and morality. Tightly, smartly written by playwright Kelly Masterson and propelled by an ominously melancholy Carter Burwell score, it is a cautionary tale with the tough, haunting power of Greek tragedy and the grittiness of film noir.

It's also cleverly constructed, with a bitterly just and black-pitched ending, and filled with fine acting. It's about two New York adult brothers named Hanson -- Philip Seymour Hoffman's Andy and Ethan Hawke's Hank -- who plan a robbery of their parents' Westchester County jewelry store that turns unexpectedly violent.

How it went wrong has something to do with Andy's hubris in believing it wouldn't -- he figured it'd unfold safely and insurance would cover the loss. And it has something to do with Hank being the kind of weak-brother screw-up who can't do anything right. Instead of committing the crime on his own, for instance, Hank hires an irritable Jersey hothead named Bobby (Brian O'Byrne) to do the dirty work.

Lumet's structure is fragmented so the truths about how and why the robbery failed play out through an abruptly shifting yet uncomplicated flashback structure. It's Rashomon-like in that it replays crucial events from different viewpoints.

Lumet, old man though he might be, is not timid about sexuality and nudity. The film opens with a married couple -- Hoffman and Marisa Tomei as his wife Gina -- engaged in some provocatively graphic sex while on vacation in Brazil. As it emerges from their subsequent post-coital discussion, they would like to renew themselves and start over, maybe even move to Brazil. Maybe that's where the idea of the robbery comes from; maybe the sex makes Andy want to live dangerously and not get old and boring.

Hoffman's Andy, a slick and controlling corporate payroll officer, is slyness spilling over into sliminess. Seemingly middle-class but easily corruptible, he can manipulate his insecure younger brother Hank in all ways but one -- Hank is having a secret affair with Gina. Hoffman is terrific here, his few big outbursts never showy, and the too-often too-passive Hawke finds his inner soul as a desperately scared, frightened man who might be pathetic but whose heart hasn't yet turned to stone.

The brothers' father Charles is, too, a towering, controlling figure who views Hank as a "baby," but in a protective way. Albert Finney plays him like a battlefield general who is mortally wounded but not ready to die despite the pain. His confusion and anger about what happened at the robbery is simultaneously brave and pathetic. And his sorrow makes him unpredictable. The dynamic between Finney and Hoffman recalls James Coburn and Nick Nolte in Affliction.

Tomei, who plays quite a few scenes semi-nude, might just be too beautiful to be convincing when her Gina worries that beefy Andy doesn't find her attractive anymore. But while her character's low self-esteem is a stretch given the actress' physical attributes, Tomei's willingness to buy into it and give her all is impressive.

The title, explained in the opening credits, comes from an old saying: "May you be in heaven for half an hour before the devil knows you're dead." It's more curse than benediction. To underscore that, a memorable character played by Leonard Cimino -- a crooked, wizened diamond dealer -- adds this observation to Charles: "The world is an evil place. Some of us make money off it, others are destroyed by it."

Words to remember from a film that will also be remembered.

Grade: A

(photo of Ethan Hawke, left, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman)

Remembering a Truly "Beautiful" Documentary

2011-04-06T12:36:00.004-06:00

By Steven Rosen

(From The Denver Post, 1997.)

Grim, difficult "Sick' shows why art needn't be pretty-

When people say art is beautiful, they don't just mean it's pretty in superficial and cliched ways.

They mean the artist takes great risks to tell the truth as he sees it, for the benefit of those of us who either can't or are too afraid.

Bob Flanagan, who died in 1996 at age 43, was such an artist. And the truth as he saw it was very upsetting. He had cystic fibrosis, a painful congenital disease that makes breathing difficult. Victims often die in their 20s. Three of his parents'f ive children had it.

Because he felt the need to confront that pain and because he also eroticized it, Flanagan became a ""supermasochist.'' This was his perverse version of Outward Bound. His devoted lover, photographer-artist Sheree Rose, administered the sexual torture yet also provided empathy and support when the illness' effects seemed too much for him to accept. By 1991, he used an oxygen tank to breathe.

In a way, they're a modern-day Romeo and Juliet - except that the extraordinarily unflinching documentary about them, ""Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist,'' isn't about a man choosing to die. It's about how Flanagan, with Rose's support, fought the inevitable with every painful cough and breath. Theirs is a powerful if very unconventional love story.

Flanagan wrote about and video-recorded their sadomasochistic acts, creating art exhibits that mixed glimpses of this intimate behavior with accounts of his illness. He and Rose also collaborated on performance-art pieces, some of which are in this film.

In one, ""Autopsy,'' he pretends to be dead while she examines the scars of their love life. "Bob always accused me of being too nice,'' Rose says, as he groans in the background.

This sounds excruciatingly grim and hard to watch, and at times it is. But Flanagan also had a self-deprecating sense ofhumor about his life and work. Until he is hospitalized, he never seems defeated. He is dedicated to experiencing life to its fullest, which for him is the same as experiencing pain to its fullest. Maybe his is an idiosyncratic rather than universal message; maybe it isn't.

Director Kirby Dick's "Sick,'' begun in 1993 and made with the co-operation of Flanagan and Rose, is certainly the best documentary about a tortured artist since 1994's "Crumb.'' And it is more - a "Howl'' for the 1990s.

Dick (and Flanagan) remind us of an inherent cruelty of life and encourage us to feel its unfairness in our bloodstream -good people suffer unfairly. This movie won the Special Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

There are several touching scenes, but also several that force you to grimace. Without the latter, the movie would seem eviscerated. It'd be about a masochist without letting us see what that really means. But one notorious scene goes too far and becomes cruel to the audience - Flanagan nails his penis to a board and lets the blood spurt.

This is how Flanagan "fights back,'' in the words of his confused but understanding father. But he does it in more humane ways, too. He sings funny songs at a meeting of a sadomasochistic club and reads a riveting poem about his choices in life, "Why.''

"Sick's'' most heart-wrenching scene involves old footage of the young Flanagan visiting the Steve Allen show in 1962. He's just a kid, like any other. The talk-show host is impressed. "You're a fine-looking young fellow,'' Allen tells Flanagan.

By then, of course, Flanagan knew what he was facing. You imagine his sadness about life, at such a young age. For 22 years, from 1973 until soon before his death, Flanagan served as a counselor at a cystic-fibrosis camp. There is footage of him singing his bitterly funny compositions while breathing from his oxygen tank.

Among other things, "Sick'' is a compelling portrait of a world where people, many of them quite young, have no illusions about their fate. He was a role model for some of them. In a fascinating scene,a 17-year-old girl suffering from cystic fibrosis and her mother visit Flanagan and Rose during a trip arranged by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. To her, Flanagan is a beacon of courage and truth.

"You always think of them being sick and feeble,'' she says of fellow disease victims. You won't think of Flanagan as ""feeble'' after seeing "Sick,'' even though you may not find him such an appetizing role model. But whatever you think after seeing "Sick,'' take a moment just to feel the evening air and not feel frightened about breathing.

And then thank Flanagan's art - and this difficult movie - for not letting you take that for granted.

Film Review | Win Win

2011-04-04T11:41:00.004-06:00

So-So

by Thomas Delapa

Even in the best of all possible indie worlds, high-school wrestling, New Jersey and Paul Giamatti probably wouldn’t add up to a box-office sleeper hold.

But give writer/director Tom McCarthy a few points for trying. If you don’t nod off during Win Win, it’s because Giamatti stays on top in one of his trademark middle-class loser roles.

Three states and two centuries away from his Emmy-winning John Adams, Giamatti’s Mike Flaherty is a foundering father and struggling small-town lawyer. His business is nearly broke—as is his office toilet. Even the local wrestling team he coaches regularly throws in the towel.

Were it not for Giamatti, I have a hunch that McCarthy’s sputtering vehicle would have never left the off-Hollywood garage. At the risk of redundancy, Win Win’s small victories are no match for the double troubles in both script and supporting cast.

Grappling with debts and anxiety attacks, Flaherty cooks up a crooked way out. He convinces a judge to grant him legal guardianship of Leo (Burt Young), a doddering client with money to spare. Against Leo’s wishes, Mike unscrupulously moves him from his home to a care facility, pocketing $1500 a month for his troubles.

A serious breach of ethics? You bet. But McCarthy (The Visitor) wiggles his own way out of the drama, gumming up the works with cheap, saccharine laughs that are only a few grades above Jersey Shore. Washing up among the non-supporting roles is the tag team of Terry (Bobby Cannavale), a lowbrow bachelor, and Mike’s law partner (Jeffrey Tambor), who, as Mike’s assistant coaches, belong on the bench. Only Amy Ryan, as Mike’s feisty, Bon Jovi-loving wife, plays with Giamatti on his level.

The wild card in the deal is Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a mopey, mop-haired teen runaway who arrives in town to announce that he’s Leo’s grandson. (As Mike is fond of saying, “It’s complicated.”) But this potential disaster for Mike flips right around when he discovers that the kid is some kind of all-star wrestler.

From a drab, offbeat drama about today’s squeezed middle class, Win Win takes a fall when McCarthy drags a Bad New Bears subplot out of hibernation, switching to Kyle’s unspectacular exploits that turn his adopted team into a contender. With few exceptions—1950’s Night and the City the great one—as a dynamic movie subject, wrestling ranks somewhere with synchronized swimming. While Giamatti is constantly throwing him a lifeline, the opaque, poker-faced young Shaffer barely keeps his head above water.

If two wrongs don’t make a right, at best Win Win winds down as a draw.

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4/4/11

Film Review | Lost in Translation (2003)

2011-03-30T10:55:00.006-06:00

Lost and Found
by Thomas Delapa

Read between the lines in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and you’ll discover a tender mood piece about the lost and dislocated feelings that can envelop you as a stranger in a strange land.

Back in 2000, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola made an auspicious directorial debut with The Virgin Suicides. Translation is similar only in the younger Coppola’s interest in capturing life’s small, fleeting moments–the times spent blankly gazing out the window, lying awake at night or having a drink alone at a hotel bar.

You could say that Coppola’s precious film is her version of The Royal Tenenbaums. In the same way that Wes Anderson wrote and directed Tenenbaums as a custom vehicle for Gene Hackman, so is Bill Murray (essentially as Bill Murray) the center of Coppola’s attentions. As Murray has aged, the former farceur has acquired a melancholy depth that stands him apart from his comic contemporaries.

Murray plays Bill Harris, a Hollywood star in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial for Japanese TV. (Japan has lured many an American and British celebrity to shoot commercials there, primarily those who refuse to do the same in their own countries.)

Married with children, Harris has come alone to Tokyo, a Blade Runner-like monstropolis teeming with shimmering neon, skyscrapers and as many karaoke clubs as noodle bars. The city itself is the other Coppola preoccupation, and it’s been beautifully photographed by Lance Acord to stress its gaudily postmodern amalgamation of east and west.

The other dislocated principal is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young New Yorker who’s tagged along on a work trip with her distracted photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi). Blessed with a face that’s wholesomely serene and inquisitive at the same time, Johansson has joined the front rank of promising screen actresses.

After a series of close encounters, Bill and Charlotte strike up an unlikely friendship that’s somewhere between platonic and romantic. That may sound weird given the age difference, but Coppola and her leads handle the material with a maximum of delicacy and diffidence.

Coppola leans on mood to an extreme to engage her story. She tugs at that feeling of weightlessness you get when you’re in a foreign country, the sense of discovery but also the solitude and the strangeness. The experience is exaggerated in a city like Tokyo, where consumerist technology has been embraced with all the reckless enthusiasm of a child tearing open Christmas gifts.

Working from her own script, Coppola prods her camera and her cast to be tourists themselves. She skips into sushi bars, dodges pedestrians in busy thoroughfares and follows Murray and Johansson as they run together down streets like kids. As she eavesdrops on a noisy game parlor where one youth obliviously bangs away on an electric guitar, Coppola’s documentary instinct may be finer than her dramatic one.

Lost in Translation is a jangly comedy of manners about two people, lost and alone in a strange city, who discover each other. They have little in common, yet they accomplish writer E.M. Forster’s dictum to "only connect." In one gorgeous sequence, Bill and Charlotte go out for a night on the town, stopping to sing a couple of karaoke songs in a high-rise bar. Mimicking his Saturday Night Live lounge act, Murray mouths Elvis Costello’s "What’s So Funny about Peace, Love and Understanding," followed by Johansson pretending on a Pretenders song. The plot evaporates like morning mist on a summer window, but what’s left is a simple epiphany. Or in Japanese terms, it’s mono no aware–the transience of things.

Capitalizing on Murray’s famous deadpan double takes, Coppola adds a dash of comedy. But it’s mood that carries this movie, not mirth. In any language, Lost in Translation means much more as estranged feelings than as words.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 09/25/03

Remembering Favorite Actors: Wally Cox

2011-03-27T09:22:00.003-06:00

DVD Review:

“Mister Peepers” (S’More Entertainment) $39.99 One of the first hit sitcoms of television, 1952-1955’s “Mister Peepers,” also holds up as one of the best, thanks to the late, great Wally Cox’s sly, goofy and – a word not often used in reviews of sitcoms anymore – humane performance as the young and mild-mannered new science teacher at a Midwestern high school. Not that the shows were low-key – Cox’s Robinson Peepers had a nose for weird trouble. In one episode collected here, he gets his hand stuck inside a halibut! Today, Cox reminds one a lot of Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker – they have the exact same combination of shyness and sweetness. This four-DVD set, licensed from UCLA Film & Television Archive, collects the first 26 episodes of the Emmy-nominated series. Extras include a Dom DeLuise interview about Cox as well as his appearance on “Laugh-In” in the late 1960s. -- Steven Rosen

(note: Since this story ran in 2006, there's actually been a second volume released, also by S'More.)

Film Review | An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

2011-03-21T12:08:00.008-06:00

Truth or Consequences

by Thomas Delapa

Admittedly, it's a little daunting to interview a man who, for a brief, shining moment, was the president-elect of the United States.

Though it would easily suit him, no one played "Hail to the Chief" when Al Gore sauntered into Denver's Hotel Teatro, dressed in casual black blazer and open collar. Warm, engaging and forthright, Gore was in town to publicize An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary based on his one-man multimedia show that turns up the heat on the global-warming debate.

Since the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, Gore has turned his attention to putting the Earth first. An environmental advocate since his days in Congress, the former Tennessee senator and Clinton vice president has delivered his traveling presentation hundreds of times to audiences around the globe. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth is now conveniently in theaters in most U.S. cities.

Not simply passionate about the project, Gore has an ardent hope that audiences will see global warming as the watershed issue of our time, superseding politics.

"The thing that's most gratifying to me is that audiences tell us over and over that they don't see the film as political," says Gore. "Republicans, Democrats, liberals and conservatives have come out of the movie saying that they were entertained, but also transformed, and they want to be part of the solution. I love that, because that's the whole point of the film and the [accompanying] book."

Gore is emphatic in his desire that the American public view global warming as a "moral issue," not unlike the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

"The movie will open at the exact moment in time when millions of people in this country are feeling, maybe for the first time, a sense of urgency about the climate crisis," he says.

In a timely coincidence, the film also opens at the onset of the Gulf Coast hurricane season. Last year's devastating season—topped by the apocalyptic wrath of Hurricane Katrina—may only be the tip of the iceberg if global climate change isn't averted.

"For the first time in history, they had to go to the Greek alphabet... they actually ran out of names for the hurricanes, there were so many. Not only that," says Gore, "in my part of the country, we broke an all-time record for tornadoes."

The consensus among climatologists is that the ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases is the main culprit behind rising global temperatures, triggering extreme weather patterns. In Gore's foreboding film presentation, he clicks off fact after fact, amply supported by pictures that not only tell a thousand words, but should come with exclamation points. Among them: 2005 was the warmest year on record since atmospheric temperatures have been measured; the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 1990; since 1978, the Arctic sea ice has shrunk by about 9 percent per decade.

Clearly the heat is on, though there is some question whether the rise is an aberration. In the film, Gore points to a super-sized graph that reveals a shocking correspondence between global temperatures and the production of greenhouse gases—mainly a byproduct of automobiles and coal-fired power plants.

Some might say that the rise in temperatures has gone to peoples' heads—and they're trying to cool off by burying them in the sand. What automobile-addicted Americans, in particular, have been slow to realize is the nexus of human behavior and the Earth.

"We can't seem to imagine that we as humans can have a lasting effect on the environment. The new reality is that we've slowly transformed our relationship to the Earth, both because of our advanced technologies and overpopulation," he says.

Gore is only restating established fact when he brings up the Bush administration's policy of downplaying the consequences of global warming—even to the point of censoring the findings of government's own scientists. The White House has found allies in "a small but well-funded group of companies that made a decision to reinforce scientific uncertainties in order to paralyze political action, even if it means intentionally confusing people."

At least in part, Americans have warmed to the idea that something must be done on a grand scale.

"People are hearing a louder voice from Mother Nature, and they're saying to themselves, 'This has to change and we have to force the change,'" says Gore.

Gore's Spock-like mastery of facts and figures in support of his case is impressive, whether citing the 230 U.S. cities that have independently ratified the Kyoto Protocol on global warming (which Gore helped develop) or the 85 evangelical ministers who've broken with the Bush White House position on the issue.

But what's most impressive about Gore isn't his lawyerly recall. It's the genuine zeal and patriotic passion that he brings to his cause. Even after the fishy fiasco of the 2000 presidential election—enough to sour anyone on our democratic process—this ecological Paul Revere still believes in the American public's willingness to answer the call.

"As Winston Churchill once said, 'The American people generally do the right thing, after first exhausting all the alternatives,'" he says.

Flashing a glimmer of folksy charm, Gore wryly adds, "Maybe that's why I'm an optimist. We've just about run out of alternatives."

Gore's demeanor toughens when I edge him into a wider discussion of the Bush administration policies.

"Imagine," he says, "if after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, President Bush hadn't made such a horrible mistake by diverting away from bin Laden to Iraq, and instead had launched an all-out effort to convince the American people that we can no longer be dependent on foreign oil."

With that, Gore's voice tails off, "Instead we took another course."

Coming from the man and public servant who won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential race, Gore's rueful words couldn't help but remind me of what abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier once said: "For all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"

For information on global warming, go to www.climatecrisis.net.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 06/08/06

An Inconvenient Truth won the 2006 Oscar for Best Documentary.

Why Do They Make Movies like "Battle: Los Angeles"?

2011-03-17T08:15:00.002-06:00

Apocalypse Again
Battle: LA is the kind of movie 9/11 was supposed to make unthinkable

By Steven Rosen

(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 3-16-11)
. . . . . . .

Back in 2003, I interviewed director Peter Weir on the occasion of his newest film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That was, all in all, a good action/adventure movie. Based on a well-regarded Patrick O’Brian novel about British Royal Navy life and set on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars, it was rooted in history, had an excitingly palpable sense of oceanic journey, was free of excessively gratuitous mayhem and had involving, complex characters played by such good actors as Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany.

Best of all, it didn’t ask viewers to suspend their intelligence in order to get some thrills — it appealed to something other than the latent human desire to see things explode and humans shot up on the big screen. In other words, it wasn’t Independence Day, Armageddon, Con Air, Godzilla, Deep Impact, Twister, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard sequels, True Lies, et al ad nauseam.

Weir explained to me how he managed to make such an unfashionable film. He and John Collee had spent a full year working on the script, beginning in August 2000.

“Then everything was put on hold because of the tragedy of Sept. 11 (2001),” he said. “It wasn’t until later in September that we kind of staggered back to work that they decided to go ahead. I think they had canceled all the movies about terrorists but were looking for an action/adventure thing, so suddenly this became a plum.”

We tend to forget now that Hollywood’s 9/11 guilt — the Onion famously compared the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to a “bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie” — produced a cease-fire on using CGI to churn out $100 million-plus films depicting mass urban destruction. Even Bruckheimer, the chief culprit of such films, decided to turn to more benign movie fantasies like Pirates of the Caribbean (and crime series for TV).

Alas, while hardly a flop, Master and Commander didn’t earn the kind of money domestically ($94 million) to make Hollywood clamor for more. And, slowly but steadily, with time we’ve been seeing a return to the pre-9/11 urban-destruction extravaganzas.

The new Battle: Los Angeles is a prime example.

Many of these movies have been disguised as comic-book fantasies (Dark Knight) to avoid being pegged as exploitation of history; Day After Tomorrow and 2012 by Roland Emmerich (the pre-9/11 Independence Day) have been floated as ecological cautionary tales. (A low-budget 2006 indie film called Right at Your Door imagined a terrorist attack on L.A., and barely got released for going there.)

In Battle: Los Angeles, Aaron Eckhart leads a small contingent of badly outnumbered Marines through one ear-blasting, gritty firefight after another with aliens who have wiped out Santa Monica and are moving eastward toward downtown L.A., killing all humans in their way. We follow them on their interminable journey to survive and, maybe, save America.

The story is kept barebones to heighten the action — the movie aims to put you in the middle of a war, rather that to be about a war. The upside of that, I suppose, is it heightens the ultra-realism, as do all the shaky camera movements and terse, minimalist dialogue. The downside is that it drains the film of any ideas.

There are some real-world touches. The Marines are combat veterans of Iraq/Afghanistan; the aliens use drone planes for air attacks. This had me wondering for awhile if the film’s director, Jonathan Liebesman, and writer, Christopher Bertolini, meant it as metaphor for civilian casualties in our overseas wars — see how it feels when it happens to you! But, if so, it’s way unarticulated (as opposed to a “realistic” 2009 film about aliens amongst us that pronouncedly read as a commentary on immigration and apartheid, the South African District 9).

By the way, there’s an honorable tradition of science fiction trying to scare us with end-of-the-world scenarios. Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds — presented as news bulletins — tapped our fears about the Depression and European war threats. A whole slew of 1950s monster movies got at our fear of nuclear war or, in the great Invasion of the Body Snatchers, post-war domestic conformity. To some extent, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds was an attempt to respond to post-9/11 anxieties, although he overdid it with the mayhem and succumbed to melodrama.

Battle: Los Angeles isn’t bad because of its science-fiction element — that’s what’s good about it. It’s bad because it emulates two recent war films that, while praised at the time (by me, among others), in retrospect can be seen to have had a detrimental influence on the art of cinema: 2001’s Black Hawk Down and Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan.

While Saving Private Ryan realistically shows the D-Day invasion no-holds-barred (“blood” splatters on the camera lens), Spielberg then goes on to recreate another horrific battle, as if he can’t get enough. Black Hawk Down, produced by Bruckheimer and directed by Ridley Scott, strips away all the complex background of U.S. involvement in Somalia and focuses solely on the struggle by U.S. soldiers to survive an attack.

If these films’ rationale was to make us civilians feel the hell of what our soldiers actually went through, they also allowed us to get off on it by indulging in excess. They created a formula. These films seemed to enjoy staging battles for battles’ sake.

And so we have Battle: Los Angeles. It led the box office last weekend with $36 million. I can’t imagine it will do well for very long — it’s arduously repetitive in a Black Hawk Down way, without even the benefit of truth as an excuse.

Moreover, current events have quickly overtaken it — watching the misery and horror produced by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan takes the pleasure out of viewing something similar in the name of entertainment.

Film Review | The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-08T19:25:00.007-07:00

Hold on to Your Hats

by Thomas Delapa

Science fiction fans, heed the warning: Whatever you do, don’t confuse The Adjustment Bureau with Blade Runner. Though both films evolved from Philip K. Dick stories, only the now-classic Blade Runner is the real deal. Now showing (likely briefly), The Adjustment Bureau is but a sci-fi replicant, and a dull, maladjusted one at that.

A Bourne Identity without an identity, The Matrix without any cool tricks, Bureau features a hollow, bottom-drawer performance by Matt Damon. He plays David Norris, a budding, post-partisan U.S. Senate candidate from New York who has a close encounter with a dapper band of supernatural conspirators. Do we humans have free will, or are we simply meat puppets blind to the strings of predestined fate?

Like last year’s Inception, this is one of those sci-fi fantasies that is constantly explaining—and breaking—its own rules, partly to gloss over the filmmakers’ own inability to make sense of them. To his befuddled consternation, David discovers that his life is rigged, presided over by a shadowy bunch of fedora-clad men in black assigned to make sure he fatefully follows the Big Picture. If humans—or at least good-looking elites like Damon—don’t follow the plan, the Adjusters step in and press the reset button. God forbid, don’t call these guys guardian angels; they’re secularized “case officers.”

Trouble is, David obstinately doesn’t get it. Like Toto, he accidentally sneaks a peak behind the curtain, and sees Richardson (Mad Men’s John Slattery) and the Adjusters at work futzing with the future. David truly goes “off plan” when he insists on chasing after a pretty ballerina, Elise (Emily Blunt), whom he meets by chance—maybe—and is convinced is his soul-mate.

Though writer/director George Nolfi transparently calibrates the film with wistful themes of true love and noble sacrifice, the chemistry between Blunt and Damon hardly registers on the molecular scale. Most in the sketchy cast act like stick figures, mouthing wooden dialogue that sounds like something out of a dim Star Trek episode. Only Terence Stamp, as an ominous high-level Adjuster, raises the stakes, but he’s a momentary blip amidst the low-grade storytelling.

Nolfi’s silly finale might be subtitled “Run for Your Wife,” as Damon makes a mad, marathon dash through the streets and skyscrapers of Manhattan, sporting one of those dopey fedoras. He first must rescue the fatally flabbergasted Elise, as well as find a way to outrun his fate.

Hollywood marketing plans to the contrary, I predict that most human audiences will exercise their free will and walk away from the pedestrian Adjustment Bureau.

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3/8/11

Some Post-Oscar Thoughts on "The King's Speech" versus "The Social Network"

2011-03-01T11:03:00.005-07:00

By Steven Rosen

While The King's Speech" won an Oscar for David Seidler's original screenplay and "The Social Network" won for Aaron Sorkin's adapted screenplay, the differences in their approaches to writing may point out why "Speech" won a Best Picture Oscar at "Network's" expense.

Sorkin's screenplay is smart, insightful and funny in many ways -- in providing character insight, in showing how Harvard is the incubator of new trends (and leadership) that will soon change America, in providing his story with suspense by making it a courtroom drama. But one thing he doesn't do especially well is show in methodical detail how Facebook came into being technologically. Showing the process is beyond his ability to satisfactorily dramatize -- or, maybe, even fully understand. Plus, it could be deadly boring -- guys at computers for hours on end.

To a younger audience already familiar with Facebook, that doesn't matter -- they accept its invention/creation as a given, as part of their lives, and don't ask the film to "show me." Like the wheel. But maybe an older audience finds that missing.

By comparison, Seider's screenplay for "The King's Speech" is very much about the step-by-step process by which Lionel Logue teaches King George VI to control his stutter. It is about a problem resolved. We learn from it.

Movies don't often teach us in detail about how people work -- and how they solve important problems related to their work. They're more about fantasy, adventure, conflict (often with guns), melodrama...or, conversely, about probing a character's mind and feelings for psychological. "The King's Speech" framed its problem-solving in a setting filled with conflict-tinged melodrama, but it never ducked a detailed, well-dramatized explanation of how the King learned to control his stutter.

Maybe that's the edge that helped it win Best Picture from an Academy that has many older members.

Film Review | The Queen (2006)

2011-03-01T10:33:00.006-07:00

Royal Flush

by Thomas Delapa

All hail Helen Mirren in The Queen. As Queen Elizabeth II, Mirren gives a commanding performance that cries out for an Oscar, if not a star-studded crown.

In director Stephen Frears' uncommonly fine docudrama, we're transported to the court of the Queen of England in 1997, during the upheaval surrounding the death of Princess Diana. Playing opposite the queen as loyal foil is Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), the newly elected Labor Prime Minister.

Mixing People magazine and Shakespearean people, Peter Morgan's juicy script aims to please, but it does so with appropriate pomp and circumstance. Bows and curtsies are in order for Frears' superbly directed cast, from Mirren and Sheen to American actor James Cromwell as Prince Phillip and Helen McCrory as Blair's cheeky wife, Cherie.

Frears begins his stately procession in May 1997 with the election of "Just call me Tony" Blair and his gingerly arrival at Balmoral Castle to receive the official blessing of the queen. Though the queen views her role in a constitutional monarchy as one to "advise and warn" the government, the events of the subsequent months flip the positions. With the shocking, paparazzi-caused death of Diana in a Paris auto accident, it is the House of Windsor that teeters on the brink of collapse. Following the 1996 divorce of Diana from Prince Charles, the royal family closed ranks, treating the former Princess of Wales like a pauper. Cherie Blair is more blunt: The queen "hated her guts."

If the clash between old and new is at the gilded heart of Frears' drama, Mirren provides its blue-blooded pulse. Never just an impersonation—though Mirren does that with aplomb—her performance grants the queen a heart and soul, however rooted they are in the musty Victorian era. Appalled at the public outpouring of grief at the death of the "peoples' princess," the queen is assuredly not amused. Leading with her stiff upper lip in the Brit tradition, the queen insists that Diana be mourned "quietly, with dignity."

Secluded at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the royal family goes into a siege mode befitting Macbeth at Dunsinane. Prince Philip, fuming with snobbish disdain toward his people, would rather be hunting. Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), acutely aware of his sinking image, timidly makes requests of his mum to honor Diana in death.

Considering the princely exchanges between Mirren and Sheen (who previously played Blair on British TV), The Queen ascends to greatness in its quietest moments. In one of Morgan's invented scenes, Elizabeth is dumbstruck by the sight of a regal 14-point stag on her estate. That sobering moment is bettered by the queen's humbling trip to Diana's former palace, as a bow to public outcry. In both scenes, the silence evokes a touching sense of majesty.

Ultimately, it is Blair, not the queen, who provides the London bridge between modernity and tradition. Initially, he brashly sees the queen as a dinosaur, fit only for a wax museum. But it is Blair who brilliantly maneuvers his queen into a face-saving move that may have also saved the monarchy from dissolution. Blair's compromise perhaps gives an insight into his rash (some say, toady) expedience vis-a-vis his decision to ally with America in the Iraq War.

Given Frears' previous populist-minded films (like Dirty Pretty Things), it's not surprising that he'd paint an unflattering portrait of the royal family. But with Dame Helen on the throne in The Queen, one thing is for sure: She rules.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 10/19/06

An Overlooked Accomplishment by Aaron Sorkin

2011-02-21T11:41:00.003-07:00

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: The Complete Series (Warner Home Video)
Video and DVD

By Steven Rosen . . . . . . .

STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP: THE COMPLETE SERIES

2006, Not Rated

Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network is probably going to get an Oscar on Sunday, and deservedly so. But the previous accomplishment by this writer, who knows how to tackle topical ideas about the role of media in society and offer complex, compelling characters, has been unjustly overlooked. Hopefully, Social Network will encourage people to take a second look at Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip -- a great series.

As they did with Lisa Kudrow's superb but ill-fated The Comeback, wrong-headed TV critics attacked the daring Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sorkin's knowing, brainy and fantastically-acted follow-up to the The West Wing. They labeled it "pretentious" and "not funny enough." As a result, the show never got the buzz it needed to be a success, and NBC canceled it after its first season.

It's a great loss. This drama -- it's not a comedy -- ostensibly is about the struggle of two head writers/producers (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, both excellent, with Perry a revelation) to put on a weekly Saturday Night Live comedy show.

But that's just the window into Studio 60's real subject -- the ethics, policies and politics of network television. And, next to the White House, what better institution for Sorkin's lacerating, fast-paced and quick-witted writing style? The best of these 22 episodes include sizzling, literate, argumentative back-and-forth among Perry, Whitford, Steven Weber as the network chairman and Amanda Peet as the network president. Grade: A

(Adapted from Cincinnati CityBeat)

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Film Review | The Last Waltz (1978)

2011-02-19T15:04:00.011-07:00

And the Band Played On

by Thomas Delapa

Was the greatest American rock ‘n’ roll band, gulp, (mostly) Canadian?

Before you start waving Old Glory or invoke the Patriot Act, consider the case of the Band, one of rock’s most influential groups and arguably the most musically virtuoso. If the Doors, the Grateful Dead and the Beach Boys represented the cream of West Coast classic rock, the Band was the best from the American Heartland.

Whatever your affections, the Band’s The Last Waltz still may be the last word in rock-concert documentaries. An exuberant, star-studded record of the band’s 1976 farewell concert, it’s one rockumentary that still rolls, nearly 35 years later.

On San Francisco’s famed Winterland stage on Thanksgiving Day, the Band got together to say goodbye after 16 years as a group. Among Canadians Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, Arkansas-born Levon Helm was the lone Yank when they were first incarnated as the Hawks. It wasn't until the mid-sixties that “the Band” moniker stuck, and by then they had emerged as Bob Dylan’s backup group. Robertson (guitar) and Helm (drums) were with Dylan at his tumultuous Forest Hills, N.Y., concert in 1965, when he shocked his folkie fans by plugging in and going electric.

It was during those heady days that Dylan and the Band collaborated on one of rock’s most celebrated underground recordings—eventually released as The Basement Tapes in 1975. In 1968, the Band came out with their heralded debut album, Music from Big Pink, containing such signature tunes as “The Weight.”

As rock critic Greil Marcus once wrote, the Band “brought us in touch with the place where we all had to live.” No other U.S.-based band was so immersed in such an eclectic array of musical sources. Rockabilly, country, the blues, jazz, gospel—and classical—were among their touchstones; in retrospect, they also formed the leading edge of burgeoning “country rock,” along with Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Allman Brothers. The Band’s roots in bygone musical Americana go way back, so deep that one critic observed that they were the only rock group that might have played at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration.

And now we can be nostalgic about the Band, which has sadly unraveled since its official 1976 swan song. A long-running feud between Robertson and Helm (over songwriting credits) resulted in Helm’s absence when the group was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Rick Danko died in 1999, while Richard Manuel took his own life in 1986.

What remains, as always, is the art and music, and fans should be grateful that director Martin Scorsese conducted The Last Waltz with a polished, first-class elegance, shooting it like a feature film with multiple 35mm cameras. Scorsese—then in the midst of his own triumphs with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—sandwiches the 20-odd songs with brief backstage interviews with the band members, a pool table and a Confederate flag acting as dissonant backdrops. Scorsese’s own backup included a trio of star cinematographers in Michael Chapman,Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs.

What gives The Last Waltz its shake and shimmy isn’t just the songs but the cavalcade of guest stars that are practically a primer of three decades of popular music. While Neil Young, Dr. John, Emmylou Harris, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, the Staples Singers, Muddy Waters and, yes, Neil Diamond all drop in, it’s a spangled Van Morrison who burns up Winterland, pumping up the volume on “Caravan.” To top it off, a cool Dylan strolls in for his own fancy footwork, leading the ensemble in the anthem-like “I Shall Be Released.”

The Last Waltz was released on DVD in 2002, and includes a commentary track by Scorsese and Robertson, bonus footage and a "making-of" featurette.

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2/19/11

Groundbreaking PBS Documentary Out on DVD

2011-02-12T08:29:00.004-07:00

Couch potato

DVD review

By Steven Rosen

(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 2-9-11)

MIDDLETOWN (ICARUS FILMS) 1982, Not Rated

Middletown, a 1982 PBS documentary series about everyday life in Middle America — Muncie, Ind., where Robert and Helen Lynd based their landmark 1929 sociological book, also called Middletown — has had a troubled history.

Produced by Peter Davis — who had won an Oscar for the critical Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds and written a book, Hometown, about life in Hamilton, Ohio — it was meant as a return to the searing, revelatory, verite-style reality television that PBS pioneered with 1973’s An American Family.
That it was, as Davis and other directors looked with precision and empathy at such subjects as hometown politics (“The Campaign”), religion (“Community of Praise”) and divorce and re-marriage (the lovely “Second Time Around”).

But the final episode, the two-hour “Seventeen,” directed by Joel Demott and Jeff Kreines, turned out to be a hot potato — or, maybe, a hand grenade. In dealing very frankly with a group of Muncie Southside high school seniors, it unnerved PBS with its talk of sex and drugs, its depiction of tense interracial relations and the foulmouthed disrespect the students showed their teachers. It starkly showed how public education can fail.

After advance-screening it in Muncie, PBS canceled its broadcast amid heated, angry charges all around. Davis was able to show “Seventeen” in limited theatrical release, and it even won a 1985 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for best documentary. But it has never been widely available until now, released with the five other Middletown episodes on a four-disc set, with a 16-page booklet featuring a new essay from Davis.

“Seventeen” is daring, but looking back almost 30 years later, it’s painful to watch. That might be why Davis reports in the booklet that most participants are reluctant to talk today. But Middletown does constitute an important chapter in TV-documentary history, and it’s good to finally have it available.

Grade: B

Film Review | Biutiful

2011-02-11T11:30:00.007-07:00

Biuty and the Beast

by Thomas Delapa

The Mexican-born director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu isn’t much on subtlety. The doleful life portrayed in his latest globalized drama, Biutiful, is anything but beautiful. Despite a pretty fine performance by Javier Bardem, dramatically Biutiful is less than skin deep.

Oscar-nominated for his lead role as Uxbal, Bardem is a conflicted Barcelona grifter who deals in the ugly business of human trafficking. As shady middleman, he procures illegal Chinese immigrants for his brother’s construction jobs. Uxbal also has his dirty hands in the exploitation of drug-dealing African immigrants, who are continually rousted off the street by the Spanish police.

Through the prism of jagged, herky-jerky storytelling we’ve seen before in Inarritu’s Babel and 21 Grams, we glean that Uxbal is one hombre with mucho problems. He’s separated from his needy, bipolar wife (Maricel Alvarez). He tries to be a good father to his two kids, but they’re a handful, especially at dinnertime. (The film’s title comes from his daughter’s misspelling of “beautiful.”) But most dire, Uxbal’s doctor shocks him with the news he has prostate cancer. At night he anxiously stares at his stained ceiling, pondering his fate and misspent life.

The glum underworld flip-side to Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona (which Bardem also starred in), Biutiful isn’t on any tourist map, except for ironic glimpses of Gaudi’s famed Church of the Holy Family off in the distance. Looming larger are factory smokestacks seething black plumes. This is a place of squalor, crime and corruption, where Uxbal’s cancer is nothing if not a creeping metaphor of a sick and impotent culture that feeds on its young.

Inarritu is a tricky director, hiding his blunt, post-colonial themes under a veneer of grubby naturalism. Like Babel, Inarritu’s picture of the Western world is so biblically decadent and diseased, death appears as the only just way out. Few rays of hope shine in this hell, one falling on a beatific black immigrant (Diaryatou Daff) whom Uxbal redemptively tries to stake to a new life.

As a dirge for a doomed man, Biutiful makes Leaving Las Vegas look like Sleepless in Seattle. Inarritu and his cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto are determined to make us recoil in horror, sorrow and pity. Uxbal exhumes his dead father’s decaying body to say his final goodbye. Step by Golgothan step, we chart Uxbal’s bathroom miseries as the cancer progresses. To make sure we have a Joseph Conrad anti-epiphany (“the horror, the horror”), we witness what happens when you mix a room full of sleeping Chinese laborers and a cheap heater.

In this cadaverous exercise in cultural self-flagellation, Bardem marches on, treated like a lab rat forced into a meat grinder. We dutifully expect (and get) scenes of Uxbal’s potential atonement—along with obscure visions of an afterlife—but this is a character far less deserving of otherworldly redemption than a down-to-earth judge and jury.

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2/10/11

Film Review | No End in Sight (2007)

2011-02-03T20:14:00.007-07:00

The Blind Side

by Thomas Delapa

Hindsight may be 20/20, but in the case of the Iraq War, No End in Sight clearly deserves a second look.

Director Charles Ferguson ended his eye-opening 2007 documentary on the eve of the American “surge”—a time when the Iraq occupation was looking like an interminable, Vietnam-style quagmire. Today, while U.S. military operations there have officially ended, some 50,000 American troops remain, and the government's battle against violent, sectarian insurgency remains an ongoing campaign.

Neo-revisionists looking for a way to resurrect George W. Bush’s moribund presidential legacy won’t find any ammunition in this major post-mortem. While Ferguson’s interview subjects run the range of the political spectrum, a consensus appears that America’s overall war strategy was (pick one or more): “a fool’s errand,” “a grave error,” and “we did almost everything wrong.” Perhaps we should go as far to quote former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, who once ominously warned of U.S. intentions in Iraq: “You break it, you own it.”

Ferguson delves primarily into the U.S. postwar strategy following President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” proclamation in May 2003. Many high-level participants— such as senior occupation officer Col. Paul Hughes—seem to agree that American mistakes revolve around three fateful decisions made immediately thereafter: 1) the decision not to declare martial law in the wake of looting and disorder in Baghdad; 2) the wholesale, indiscriminate “de-Ba’athification” that purged the Iraqi government of skilled workers and bureaucrats; 3) the decision to disband the Iraqi army. With regard to the latter, some in the military (which might have been utilized to keep order during the occupation) instead ended up fighting in the insurgency as part of anti-U.S. militias.

If there’s a nonstop theme in No End in Sight, it’s that the Bush administration utterly failed to formulate an adequate plan for the occupation and reconstruction in the aftermath of all that shock and awe. Winning the war was relatively easy. Winning the peace remains as elusive as the search for Saddam Hussein’s WMDs.

While rueful experts such as Hughes and former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine were either marginalized or fired, and many Pentagon policy recommendations were ignored, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld White House instituted a top-down, take-no-prisoners approach, for instance vastly underestimating the total number of troops needed for the occupation. Not-so-fun fact: In World War II, the Allies devoted two years on a strategy for the German occupation; by contrast, the Bush White House spent less than two months on a plan for postwar Iraq.

For those willing to reconstruct these crucial events, No End in Sight recoils with biting sound bites that tragically refute what we now know. Way back in 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney declares that Iraq was in “the last throes of insurgency.” Likewise, at a 2003 press conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flippantly states that he “doesn’t do quagmires.” And in Famous Last Words department, Arlington division, in 2003 Bush scoffs at talk of an insurgency with a bellicose “Bring ‘em on.”

With the estimate of the war’s overall cost (including veterans’ care) escalating to well over $1 trillion, American taxpayers are still pouring it on. This is a far cry from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s rosy 2003 pitch that Iraq’s reconstruction would pay for itself, the cost offset by gushing Iraqi oil revenues. To date, over 4000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, along with at least 100,000 Iraqis. Some three million Iraqis have fled their country.

Contrary to Bush administration predictions, the Iraq War has been no magic carpet ride. One expert even goes as far to say that the war and the chronic Iraqi national instability have actually been instrumental in “reviving radical Islam in the world.”

While the outcome of the tumultuous current events in Egypt are far from certain, recent social revolutions—as in the case of the Soviet Union—have shown time and again that history must take its course, and that the ultimate end to despotic regimes must lie in the power of the people, not in disastrously myopic superpowers.

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2/2/11

Film Review | A Beautiful Mind (2001)

2011-01-23T14:42:00.009-07:00

Mind over Matter

By Thomas Delapa

A Beautiful Mind is a beautifully shot drama about the mental workings of a schizophrenic. Amazingly, the mind in question belonged to John Forbes Nash, the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics.

The tricky biopic that emerges from director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman is one that chillingly goes inside the head of its subject. Not literally, of course. Your own head may be spinning while you're watching the bizarre events unfold. Was Nash was really a paranoid schizophrenic, or was Cold War America of the 1950s slightly crazy? "Yes" may be the answer to both questions.

Oscar winner Russell Crowe stars as Nash, who in 1947 entered Princeton University with a bright future. Withdrawn and arrogant, Nash was obsessed to formulate an original math theory as a way to distinguish himself from his preppy colleagues. Nash was also brilliant at deciphering codes, a talent that is quickly put to use by the Pentagon.

Your opinion of A Beautiful Mind will rest on whether you mind being manipulated, perhaps even deceived, by the filmmakers. As the 1950s pass, Nash is drawn further and further into the top-secret Cold War assignments given to him by a sinister G-man (Ed Harris). However hush-hush, Nash's government work seems believable given the exploding Cold War tensions of the times.

Howard and Goldsman aren't especially forthcoming with the facts, sacrificing "reality" in order to increase the mystery and suspense. But the suspense they create has all the logic and internal perfection of a Newtonian formula.
I found Crowe's performance, while painstaking, to be mannered and overly technical. More naturalistic is his striking co-star Jennifer Connelly, playing the M.I.T. student who becomes his steadfast wife.

In the equation that adds up to A Beautiful Mind, two shining parts are the art design (by Wynn Thomas) and the cinematography (by Roger Deakins). In an amusing demonstration of Nash's "game theory," we scientifically witness how single males compete for an attractive female in a bar. Later, the sight of Nash's office and garage plastered with magazines—part of his decoding work—is creepy.

I wish Howard and Goldsman would have devoted more time to Nash's important mathematical work. After all, were it not for his published theories, he would have probably been just another anonymous academic afflicted with mental disease.

A schizophrenic, says Nash, is someone who "doesn't know what's true." Given the subterfuge, delusions and paranoia of the Cold War era, that diagnosis could have easily been applied to millions of normal Americans.

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[A Beautiful Mind was winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Best Picture.]

Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 12/27/01

Film Review | Somewhere

2011-01-17T11:05:00.007-07:00

Nowhere Man

by Thomas Delapa

Somewhere inside Somewhere there might be a good movie trying to break out, but I doubt it. Director Sofia Coppola’s painfully understated meditation on Hollywood celebrity is nearly as shallow as its subject.

Decadently ensconced at L.A.’s ritzy Chateau Marmont hotel is Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), an A-list, bad-boy movie star who’s tres bored and between pictures. Johnny is so jaded that he falls asleep while twin blond pole dancers writhe at his feet in his room. By day he buzzes around town in his sleek black Ferrari, trolling for women. By night, he gets them. To a succession of loose, luscious females, all he has to say is, “Hi, I’m Johnny,” and he’s off for a tumble.

Have we not had our fill of stories about debauched and narcissistic American screen idols? Coppola has no reservations about yet another sequel, and proceeds to unreel a bite-sized, saccharine version of La Dolce Vita. You have to wonder why the producers would give the green light to this project, considering that Dorff gives the impression of black hole rather than big star. If we want to believe that Johnny is the “biggest U.S. star”—a la Leonardo DiCaprio or a Brad Pitt—we at least need to know what makes him shine.

But the Lost in Translation director is less interested in Johnny as in his flickering relationship with his estranged 11-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning). With his ex-wife out of town, Johnny gets to play father for a few weeks. You don’t need to read People magazine to get the feeling that Coppola is rummaging somewhere in the autobiographical basement, furnished with memories of her relationship with her own famous ex-Hollywood father, director Francis Ford Coppola.

The meandering, impressionistic (or lazy) plot perks up when Fanning’s sunny Cleo rises in Johnny’s deadened life. While he’s lost in a haze of casual sex and breezy, air-kiss encounters, Cleo is all that is pure, true and good in the female world. Not only does she ice skate with ethereal grace, but she cooks up a happy meal, too.

All this might be palatable had not Coppola served it up as something fresh and revelatory, instead of the rehash that it is. Father and daughter even voyage to Italy, land of the original La Dolce Vita, and embark on a garish publicity tour that might have come out of 1960s Fellini outtakes. It’s never a good sign when a film’s best scenes don’t include its lead actor—as when Cleo and Johnny’s slacker friend (Chris Pontius) hang out and riff some small talk while they play Guitar Hero.

With Coppola and similar indie directors today, there’s a new vogue for episodic movie minimalism. On the surface, that’s all well and good, but preciously self-conscious long takes are only window dressing if there’s nothing to watch behind the curtain. While Johnny’s extended stay takes place in the chic environs of the Chateau Marmont, the low-rent plot feels like it was picked up somewhere near Motel 6.

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1/16/11

At Indiana University, Kinsey Film Collection Still a Touchy Subject

2011-01-11T07:53:00.004-07:00

Indiana University Cinema was created in part as a showcase for its film holdings, but since they include Alfred Kinsey's sexually explicit films and videos, it's a complex issue.

By Steven Rosen, Special to the Los Angeles Times

December 30, 2010

When Jon Vickers was interviewing for his job as the first director of the new Indiana University Cinema, he was told there might be a tricky problem if he was hired.

"The comment I heard frequently was, 'You'll have to figure out what to do with the Kinsey Collection, because it's different than all the others,' " Vickers says. "There was an assumption the programmer would work with the collection, but how to do that was a question for everybody."

And, as he prepares to open the college cinematheque on Jan. 13, it still is.

The "Kinsey Collection" refers to the roughly 14,000 films and videos belonging to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which has offices on the school's Bloomington campus in southern Indiana. Biologist Alfred Kinsey, who started the institute in 1947 and died in 1956, and his researchers collected the films as part of his world-famous (and the institute's ongoing) research into human sexuality.

There are all sorts of films, including sex-education titles, racy vintage Hollywood fare and the erotic Brazilian art-house classic "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands." But the largest grouping, and perhaps the most historically valuable, consists of the one-reel historic stag films made independently from the 1920s through the 1960s. The Kinsey Collection has about 2,000 of these, slightly more than its Swedish erotica and art movies.

In an age before readily available adult-movie theaters, X-rated DVDs and online porn sites, these films were shown surreptitiously at stag parties and other typically male gatherings. They had suggestive but only rarely explicit titles, such as "Silk Stocking Sirens in High Heels" and "The Nympho Nurses."

Because of their nature, the institute had been storing them in what Rachael Stoeltje, IU film archivist, calls "the Kinsey cage." It is a locked section of a film storage area — a converted bowling alley — near the central campus. (The school has recently completed moving them, however, to an updated facility.)

"Kinsey had relations with police departments all over the country," Stoeltje explains. "They would send him copies whenever they confiscated [such films]. They're all amateur, all illegally made, all with bad lighting, but real gems. They're unique because this doesn't exist anymore."

Liana Zhou, Kinsey's director of library and archives, knows of no other public collection of stag films like it. But that doesn't mean the new cinema will soon be promoting to its students that "Saturday night is Kinsey night," she says, laughing.

"We are very excited to have the venue," she says. "If I have a preference, in the beginning I would definitely be working with conferences and events, and not really [offering] regular programming."

In 2007, IU's president, Michael McRobbie, announced plans for renovation of a vacant 1941 centrally located theater, once used for stage productions, into a state-of-the-art 260-seat cinema and other performance spaces. The total estimated cost is $15 million, to be raised from university funds and gifts.

The state university created IU Cinema in part as a showcase for its own film holdings. IU's Black Film Center Archive, for example, owns 18 special collections and has a strong grouping of independently made African American films from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The large David S. Bradley Collection contains about 3,900 16-millimeter feature films spanning cinema history, including Bradley's own 1941 adaptation of "Peer Gynt" that featured a teenage Charlton Heston.

The Kinsey Collection presents a challenge to film programming that Vickers didn't face in his previous job, as managing director of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame. So far he has decided it's permissible to show some non-controversial titles, especially avant-garde films by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jean Genet and others. To that end, Anger is coming to the cinema Feb. 11-12 for a presentation of his films.

Indiana University in general is both proud of and touchy about Kinsey's legacy. A 2004 movie about Kinsey's life — "Kinsey," starring Liam Neeson — received an Oscar nomination; the institute's offices in an older campus building have a gift area selling mugs and T-shirts and an art gallery that stages exhibitions.

On the other hand, Kinsey Institute employees make it emphatically clear that all materials are owned separately from the school and are acquired without tax dollars. Until now, the institute has been very careful to only let scholars and researchers see films privately. One rare exception — a public screening of stag films — occurred in 2003, during the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female." UC Berkeley film and media professor Linda Williams presented four movies as part of a program called "Between 'White Slavery' and the 'Ethnography of Sex Workers': Women in Stag Films at the Kinsey Institute."

But Zhou does want to see a more public profile for Kinsey's stag films, partly in order to spur preservation efforts. "We will look forward to creative, tasteful programming so more students, more interested public and more faculty and scholars would know the treasures we have," Zhou says. "Then we can look for ways to preserve them — that has been a major concern."

Meanwhile, there are those on campus who think IU Cinema should go ahead and plunge into the stag films without too much fretting. Gregory Waller, chairman of the school's department of communication and culture, believes the collection is a viable part of film history.

"That there's arguably pornographic stuff being shot as soon as people pick up cameras, it's a tradition as long as the history of the cinema," he says about the collection. "It's basically been unacknowledged and unwritten, so making that visible seems to be important."

(The photo is from the poster of a film in the Kinsey Collection.)

Film Review | The King's Speech

2011-01-08T13:34:00.008-07:00

The Mouth that Roared

by Thomas Delapa

Despite the upper-crust, high-flown tone, The King’s Speech may stick in your throat, especially those not amused by the all-too-common History Lite style of filmmaking. This made-for-export British import says too much, emphatically, yet ends up saying precious little.

The king in question is England’s future George VI (Colin Firth), son of the aging King George V (Michael Gambon). As the duke of York in the prewar 1930s, “Bertie” can hardly utter a word without stammering, let alone annunciate the king’s English. And in the new 20th-century era of radio and microphones, Bertie’s humiliating impediment echoes through every ear in the U.K. The failure of conventional speech therapists leads Bertie and his pert wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) to Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a saucy, unorthodox Aussie who’s never at a loss for words.

Tom Hooper, the award-winning British TV director, gives his royal subjects exactly the opposite treatment that won him kudos in HBO’s John Adams and Elisabeth I miniseries. He trades in-depth complexity for glossy simplicity, downsizes wit into glibness. In 100-odd minutes, Bertie battles his stutter, silences his insecurities and majestically finds his inner monarch, all crowned by his ascent to the throne. While this biopic is delivered as King George’s story, the filmmakers take revisionist liberties, putting words in Firth’s mouth which practically shout out: “My kingdom for an Oscar!”

A regal actor, Firth deserves better. When Logue first meets Bertie, pain and shame are written all over his face as he struggles to spit out his words. When he can speak, he’s alternately self-deprecating (“Timing isn’t my strong suit”) and angry, fuming with rage against Logue’s insolent quips. But after an auspicious prologue, screenwriter David Seidler recites rote formula, regurgitating the uplifting teacher-student lessons from the My Fair Lady/Educating Rita school of dramatics. The pronounced twist here is that it’s the Aussie commoner who’s Henry Higgins, while Bertie is the linguistically challenged timid prince with a frog in his throat.

In a movie calculated to serve up a checklist of pop talking points, Logue also pulls up a comfy Freudian couch in his ruddy, womb-like office. Lurking unspoken behind Bertie’s stutter are deep but not-too-dark childhood insecurities. He only has to face up to his bullying father and older brother (Guy Pearce) and tell them off, at least symbolically. When Bertie finally works up the courage to shout out “I have a voice!” all the audience can say, in unison, is “By George, I think he’s got it.”

While quite a few modern accounts address Bertie’s brother, the infamous and ill-fated King Edward VIII, as a man who romantically, even heroically, chose love over the throne, Hooper dismisses him in few words as a weak and frivolous playboy. The less said the better about another saggy caricature, Timothy Spall’s bulldog-jowly Winston Churchill.

Little is left unsaid in The King’s Speech, especially not the barrage of four-letter words that Bertie blurts out as damn-breaking shock therapy. Not only is the king a man of the people, but this blue-blood bloody well knows how to curse.

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1/7/11

Looking Back: A 1998 Interview with "Blue Valentine's" Derek Cianfrance

2011-01-04T12:19:00.004-07:00

(In 1998, 23-year-old Derek Cianfrance's movie "Brother Tied" was accepted into Sundance Film Festival's American Spectrum series -- his first breakthrough, even if the film subsequently was little seen. At the time, Steven Rosen interviewed him for the Denver Post. Cianfrance's critically heralded "Blue Valentine," featuring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, has just been released.)

Taking Their Chances at Sundance: Coloradan's "Brother Tied' given Park City exposure

By Steven Rosen
The Denver Post
1-11-98

-TEXT-
Beginning Thursday and continuing for the next 10 days, the
center of the motion-picture world will be Park City, Utah.
That's where the Sundance Film Festival - which determines
the independent- and small-film hits for the rest of the year -
will be held. It began in 1978 and has been operated by the
nonprofit Sundance Institute since 1985. And a separate festival
called Slamdance, now in its fourth year and specializing in the
work of first-time filmmakers, takes place at the same time.

So all eyes will be on Park City. And this year, Park City's
eyes will be on Colorado - certainly not exclusively, but
definitely to a noticeable extent.

That's because a 23-year-old local filmmaker, Derek M.
Cianfrance, has a movie called "Brother Tied'' in Sundance's
American Spectrum program. It combines a traditional narrative
with a daringly advanced approach to sound use, editing,
shadow-and-light interplay, and photomontage techniques.

The feature, mostly in black-and-white, is a sobering look at
two troubled brothers and the young man - a barber - who comes
between them. As a character study, it pays as close attention
to the men's faces and their very skin as to their words. Yet
there also is high drama. When one of the brothers sets fire to
the barbershop, the victim seeks violent revenge. Since the
events occur during Christmas, the overall effect is very
troubling.

Keith Zimmerman and Jason Hauser play brothers Cal and Aaron;
Carey Westbrook is the outsider, Cassius, who becomes Cal's
close friend. Since Cassius is African-American and the two
brothers white, the story has an uncommented-upon racial
element. There also are erotic undercurrents in the relationship
between Cal and Cassius.

It was filmed in Longmont and Denver, especially at
Longmont's Elite Barber Shop, during portions of the past three
years. Cianfrance made the film on a small, privately raised
budget, collaborating with friends from his film classes at the
University of Colorado-Boulder. He hopes to sell distribution
rights during the Sundance festival.

While American Spectrum films are not in competition for
major Sundance awards, there is fierce competition for the
program's 18 slots. This year, Sundance received 869
feature-film submissions and chose 16 dramatic films and 16
documentaries for its juried-competition programs. They all are
having U.S. premieres at Sundance. Another 18 were selected for
the relatively new American Spectrum series. They need not be
having U.S. premieres at Sundance, although "Brother Tied'' is.

Overall, Sundance is presenting 103 features and 68 shorts in
a variety of programs. Of those, 16 are high-profile but
out-of-competition "premieres'' of invited films that bypassed
the submission process.

"... Cianfrance has a feel for his medium that extends well
beyond his years,'' wrote Geoffrey Gilmore, director of
programming for the Sundance Film Festival, in the festival's
1998 guide. "Elliptical, sometimes a bit ambivalent, and
beautifully filmed with great montages, music and editing,
"Brother Tied' is a filmic realization made by a director who
understands the power of his craft.''

This year's Sundance certainly is extremely important to Cianfrance and the
young men who went without salaries - and often sleep - to help
him make "Brother Tied.'' Those include screenwriters Mike
Tillman and Joey Curtis and sound designer Jimmy Helton, as well
as the cast.

They all are very excited about its screening, at 11:30 p.m.
Friday. The film also has been invited to next month's Berlin
Film Festival and will be screened in March at New York's
Lincoln Center.

"Once we got into Sundance, my phone started ringing off the
hook,'' Cianfrance said. "I started getting calls from people
who had the tape on their desk but never watched it. Sundance is
the validation in the eyes of people.''

Cianfrance had submitted the movie to Sundance last year. It
was praised but turned down because of its 140-minute length.
The Berlin Film Festival also passed. After refashioning a
109-minute version, the director tried the Edinburgh Film
Festival in Scotland. It was accepted and had its world premiere
there in August.

All this has tended to support Cianfrance's decision to drop
out of CU to work full time on the film. Raised in Lakewood, he
first starting making videos while at Green Mountain High
School. "What I was doing was learning the craft of filmmaking
by doing it,'' Cianfrance explained.

Zimmerman, 23, who plays Cal in "Brother Tied,'' first
started acting in Cianfrance's high-school video projects.
"When you see Derek's work, right off the bat you know he has a
gift for the visual storytelling medium,'' he said.

"I started realizing the films I wanted to make were going
to take advantage of all the different aspects of the cinematic
medium,'' Cianfrance explained. "I don't necessarily like a
film like "The Brothers McMullen.' That could as easily be a
stage play. What I always wanted to do was make things that
could only exist as a film.''

At CU, he learned about the work of American and European
avant-gardists, especially early Russian filmmakers. His
16-millimeter silent film won awards and was shown on
television's Independent Film Channel.

When he realized he wanted to make a feature-length 16mm
sound film, he drew inspiration from an unusual source - a moody
Elvis Presley Christmas album. That made him want to devise a
downbeat, ruminative story set during the Christmas season.

For a theme, he drew upon the advice of his late grandfather
- "never take anyone's side against the family.'' "That's the
way I grew up,'' he said. "If your family kills somebody,
you're on their side - not that my family are killers or
anything.'' (His mother taught school; his father was a district
manager for a shoe retailer.)

"So I wanted to address that in a film - someone brought up
in a family like that who has to struggle with that. Someone who
has a family member who is no good. Do you still stand by their
side?''

"Brother Tied'' could be a breakthrough for its actors as
well as director. After the Edinburgh screening, The Guardian
newspaper praised "a strong cast, especially the charismatic
Carey Westbrook as Cassius.''

Westbrook, 27, moved to Colorado from Chicago to study
writing and poetics at Boulder's Naropa Institute. He has acted
in training videos and commercials, and has had small parts in
several movies. He replied to a newspaper notice seeking actors
for "Brother Tied.''

"I didn't expect it would be that big a deal,'' he said. "I
didn't know it had the potential to be as great as it turned out
to be. I knew it was for free, and I'm not used to doing free
gigs. But I just said "to hell with it' and tried it out. "What struck me was the integrity of the character - a man
struggling with his own soul. It was a universal human character.

"I try to keep a clear head and stay practical about this,''
he said. "The fact of the matter is I'm a room-service waiter
right now, and I will be one until we go to Sundance. I'm hoping
I don't have to be one when I come back.''

(photo at top of Derek Cianfrance)

Film Review | The Fighter

2011-01-02T10:56:00.002-07:00

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Half-Brother

by Thomas Delapa

Some labors of love are just labors.

It took actor/producer Mark Wahlberg five long years to wrestle The Fighter to the screen. In the story of welterweight boxer “Irish” Micky Ward and his drug-addict half-brother Dicky, Wahlberg sparred with a tag-team of directors (like Darren Aronofsky) and co-stars (including Brad Pitt), before settling on David O. Russell and Christian Bale. To his credit, Wahlberg never did throw in the towel, though that doesn’t mean dazed audiences won’t want to.

Any boxing movie made since champs like Rocky and Raging Bull faces long odds. On one hand (or fist), there’s Rocky’s ethnic blue-collar, underdog formula to contend with. On the other is Raging Bull’s brutal naturalism and superbly choreographed fight scenes. While The Fighter battles to be its own movie, it ends up on the ropes, done in by a lightweight plot and a flabby midsection.

In this 1990s biopic of Boston-area blood brothers and foul-mouthed family feuding, Wahlberg’s Micky should be the main event. Instead, The Departed star steps aside for Bale's Dicky, Micky’s crack-addicted, sometime-trainer brother. Gaunt, wired and wild-eyed, Bale is a moving target, rarely standing still long enough to connect with the audience. An ex-boxer himself who once fought the legendary Sugar Ray Leonard, Dicky now takes his blows at the local crack house, giving new meaning to the phrase “rope-a-dope.”

While Bale answers every bell with madly Methodical intensity, the soft-spoken, near-ascetic Wahlberg always seems to be shadow-boxing with the gloves on. Russell and Wahlberg so knock themselves out building this movie from the outside with streetwise cred, they give Micky a pedestrian treatment. Yo Adrian, this Fighter is short on fight.

Outside of the ring, Russell takes some amusing jabs at Micky’s crass, loud-mouthed mother (Melissa Leo) and her entourage of seven shrewish daughters. But even these big-haired harpies are too grotesque to be funny, except as lumpy punching bags. The catalyst for Micky’s break from his family is Charlene (Amy Adams), a tough, straight-shooting bartender whom he slowly wins over to his corner. Beside the flurry of family squabbles, Bale and Leo do score a few points for a running gag that shows Dicky defenestrating himself out of the crack house to escape his mother’s wrath.

Though The Fighter wears its blue-collar squalor around its neck like a medal, there’s nothing fancy about its footwork, least of all in the obligatory rock-music montages celebrating Micky’s boyhood roots in the ‘hood. Round 1 of his rise to the top kicks off with the ubiquitous (and misdated) “How You Like Me Now?” by the Heavy. Answer: Not so much.

Even more routine is Micky’s Rocky road to triumph once he beats down his Freudian baggage and pounces back into the ring with the eye of the tiger. With a leaner, punchier script, maybe The Fighter could have been a contender. However you score it, it’s no heavyweight.

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1/2/11

The Best Documentaries of 2010

2010-12-31T13:03:00.003-07:00

(photos of Joan Rivers, top, and Banksy)

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat, 12-29-2010

The golden age of documentaries continued in 2010, with filmmakers tackling all sorts of subjects with stylistically innovative approaches. But you had to work hard to keep up with them. Our local independent theaters didn’t book everything. Some played first-run on cable-television’s video-on-demand platform; others on HBO. And thank goodness for our great Public Library system, which seems to buy every documentary available as soon as it’s released on DVD. Here are my 10 favorite docs:

1. Inside Job: Charles Ferguson’s masterful look at the unchecked greed that caused our economy to almost collapse in 2008, and at the close ties between those charged with monitoring Wall Street excess and those getting rich from it. It unfolds like a great thriller, filling you with outrage while at the same time making a complex subject accessible.

2. Exit Through the Gift Shop: Count me among those who believe this Banksy-“directed” look at the world of street art and its cooptation by consumer culture isn’t really a straightforward documentary. But if the movie itself is a prank, it’s a deeply layered, clever one that makes you love it — and art itself — all the more.

3. A Film Unfinished: This disturbing, mournful meditation by Yael Hersonski on the meaning of 60 minutes of forgotten raw footage that the Nazis shot in the Warsaw Ghetto is an important addition to Holocaust studies. It shows the cavalier, inhuman way the Germans tried to exploit as Jewish-caused the horrors of ghetto life — starvation, corpses in the streets, improper sanitation — that their own genocidal policies caused.

4. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child: Director Tamra Davis had interviewed the doomed young artist in the 1980s, right as he was becoming an art star, and uses that footage as a starting point to build this perceptive study of his life. Among her important points is that he wasn’t a naf — he was well-informed on art and culture and smart about his intentions.

5. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work: Directors Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern treat Rivers with respect, not as the desperate, aging celebrity that pop culture likes to present her as. She rewards them by revealing the tough, sensitive, shrewd, outraged and outrageous comedian-philosopher that she has always been.

6. Casino Jack and the United States of Money: Alex Gibney intricately lays out the way Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, working with the Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay and others (including former Ohio Rep. Bob Ney) put the interests of the country (and, in some cases, Abramoff’s own clients) second to their own financial interests. It’s a strong, penetrating indictment of Republican politics in the George W. Bush era.

7. Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?: In the year’s best music documentary, director John Scheinfeld reminds Boomers (and educates younger viewers) about how gifted a singer-songwriter the late Nilsson was. While he doesn’t shy away from depicting the artist’s self-destructive, substance-abusing side, he also shows that Nilsson never stopped trying to be a productive, caring human being.

8. The Tillman Story: With the cooperation of Pat Tillman’s family, director Amir Bar-Lev methodically unravels the government cover-up about how the football-player-turned Army Ranger was killed in Afghanistan, and the attempt to turn the atheist, intellectual athletic star into a clichéd stereotype of a God-fearing, unquestioning soldier. After the movie, I felt I knew him much better.

9. Gasland: Thanks to HBO for presenting this provocative, artfully made film by Josh Fox about the environmental dangers of a form of natural-gas drilling called “fracking” and the role Vice President Dick Cheney played in making it easier to do. It’s a useful, unexpected addition to the debate on energy policies.

10. The Art of the Steal: Don Argott’s look at the history of Philadelphia’s Barnes Collection of priceless Impressionist art portrays the imperious Dr. Albert Barnes as a rebel against Philadelphia blue-blood society who fought to keep his art out of their greedy hands. I don’t completely buy it — Barnes seems to have confused the collecting art with the making of it in terms of importance — but this is a lively, opinionated slice of American art-collecting and museum history.

2010 Was an Epic Year for Crime Dramas

2010-12-28T15:36:00.005-07:00

LAW BREAKERS:

It was an epic year for crime dramas

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat, 12-22-10
. . . . . . .

Any short list of Best American Movies would include Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather films from the early 1970s, maybe as a single entry. Using the world of crime for its potential to offer great drama and action through interlocking narrative, they also serve well as knife-sharp metaphor for the political and economic rot underneath the nave American Dream — they are deserved masterpieces. Epics, even.

So maybe it’s not surprising, then, that Hollywood rarely if ever tries to equal that achievement, anymore. Coppola certainly failed with 1990’s Godfather, Part III. The kind of complexity and real-world relevancy is just too hard — and maybe too, well, challenging for today’s American movie audiences.

And yet 2010 was a year filled with attempts to make “crime epics” worthy of the first two Godfathers’ ambitions and acting levels, if not always with the same kind of resources available to realize the vision of Coppola’s classics. But they’ve moved beyond the American dream — these new attempts often come from abroad and play the art-house circuit. And, increasingly, they’re being made for television. Two great American examples — Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire — are on cable channels. The British Red Riding trilogy, while released to theaters and video-on-demand in the U.S., started life as a television project.

French director Olivier Assayas’ Carlos is the fact-based story of the Venezuela-born terrorist/revolutionary Ilich Ramirez Sanchez who committed violent acts on behalf of radical groups the world over, including the brazen 1975 kidnapping of OPEC ministers at a meeting in Vienna. It already has played in the U.S. as a Sundance Channel miniseries. A shortened version that still packs a wallop is now available on video-on-demand and in some theaters, and gives Edgar Ramirez a showcase for acting.

Jacques Mesrine was a notorious, egotistical French criminal who had delusions that his crimes — bank robberies, kidnapping, prison escapes — in some way constituted revolutionary acts. Before French authorities finally ambushed and killed him in 1979, he seemed invincible. In the four-hour biopic Mesrine (divided into two separate films, which played here briefly) directed by Jean-Francois Richet (and based on the criminal’s own autobiography), Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) as Mesrine shows swagger, passion and the sexiness, but also cold-hearted cruelty and volatility.

Ajami, an Israeli film that played here briefly, locks together separate stories about Arab and Jewish residents of Tel Aviv/Jaffa, showing its characters’ interconnectedness. It starts with a drive-by shooting in a gritty Arab neighborhood called Ajami, a payback for another shooting, and from there builds as the various parties become ensnared in both the problems of a criminal underworld and the society at-large.

Set in Melbourne, David Michod’s Animal Kingdom — an almost-hit on the art-house circuit — features a family of low-life criminals ruled by a deceptively cheery matriarch played memorable by Jacki Weaver. Living in a suburban-style home, at war with a corrupt police force but by no means an honorable alternative, they are deromanticized and made ordinary by this film. Their world seems like ours, which makes them all the more relevant. And horrifying.

The British Red Riding trilogy, an adaptation of novels by David Peace, made it to American video-on-demand as well as a few art houses (not here) this year and is now on DVD. Consisting of three separate but interrelated movies by three directors, it’s set in the era of the real-life Yorkshire Ripper serial killer — 1970s to early 1980s. But the trilogy is far more concerned with a corrupt, murderous police force that sees the Ripper as a nuisance at most. The trilogy boils over with the atmospheric rot and bleakness of a crumbling urban society.

Ever since The Sopranos, there’s been recognition that American cable-TV series about gangsters can, given the time to burrow deep into their settings and develop their characters, provide profound commentary on the American experience.

So far, one great post-Sopranos crime series has emerged — AMC’s Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, which finished its third season this year. But rather than occurring in a Mafia-laden New Jersey, it takes place in the bright, sunny Southwest, the land of growth and promise. An Albuquerque chemistry teacher stricken with lung cancer and distraught over medical bills, resorts to making the best meth possible to support his family. Bryan Cranston has won three Emmys as that teacher, Walter White, and the series has followed as he slowly travels ever deeper into a world of evil he struggles to stay above. It’s a slow, transfixing Dostoyevskian journey.

Boardwalk Empire, an HBO series that just completed its first season, is set in the wide-open Atlantic City of the Prohibition Era and is modeled on the life of a historical figure, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, who got rich making sure booze stayed plentiful in that resort town. As played by Steve Buscemi with estimable range and subtlety, the somewhat-fictionalized “Nucky” is the city’s treasurer and undisputed political boss.

Created by Sopranos writer Terence Winter, Boardwalk’s ambition is to place crime (and greed) front and center as a shaping force of the 20th-century American character, and to show how politics, urban development, personal relationships, entertainment — wealth — depend on it. With a sizeable production budget and a Ragtime-like sensibility for mixing real-life figures (Warren Harding, Sophie Tucker, Al Capone, the Chicago Black Sox) with literary creations, it aims to be a genuine crime epic.

So while we wait for more mainstream American movies to pick up the Godfathers’ mantle and carry it, just look elsewhere. You’ll see it’s been a good year for these kinds of filmed stories. They’re just not often at the multiplex.

(Film still from Carlos)

Film Review | True Grit (2010)

2010-12-26T13:42:00.008-07:00

No Country for Young Women

by Thomas Delapa

True Grit may not be reckoned a great movie, but it does have a fistful of great scenes—and all of them with young Hailee Steinfeld, sitting tall in the saddle in the Coen brothers’ sprightly Western remake. As a 14-year-old pigtailed whippersnapper hell-bent on revenge, Steinfeld nearly lassos the picture right from under marquee stars Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon.

Old-timers will recollect that John Wayne bagged a Best Actor Oscar for the original 1969 oater, based on Charles Portis’ gem of a novella. As boozy U.S. marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, the Duke himself had a sharp female foil in Kim Darby, playing the part of the headstrong Mattie Ross out to avenge the murder of her father.

Youngins expecting either a blackly comic or tongue-in-cheek treatment from the brothers Joel and Ethan (Fargo, No Country for Old Men), will be mighty disappointed. Neither bloody nor simple, this is truly an homage, not to any one star in particular, but to the classic Western as whole, from its rugged, wide-screen vistas to the old-school sense of morality and violent retribution.

“There is nothing free except the grace of God,” is how Mattie commences to narrate her neo-biblical quest in the valley of the shadow of death, otherwise known as the Old West. True Grit rises to the heights when it most closely follows the trail of Portis’ language, a richly idiosyncratic blend of colorful prose and quaint 19th-century regionalisms. The “pitiless man who loves to pull a cork” is none other than the ornery, one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, sought out by Mattie to make good on her vendetta. The lowdown varmint they’re after is Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), rumored to be hiding out with “Lucky” Ned Pepper and his gang.

In an old flour sack, Mattie lugs around a hulking six-shooter that belonged to her father, and she aims to use it on Chaney. But in this mean, windswept country overrun by desperadoes and other bad men, Mattie’s most potent weapon is her tongue. In likely the movie’s best showdown, Mattie puts a few holes in the ego of LaBoeuf (Damon), a puffed-up Texas Ranger who makes the fool mistake of trying to put Mattie in her place. It’s not a hard chore to begin with, but Damon’s low-key, likably simple-minded part will make you forget all about singer Glen Campbell’s sorry misfire in the original.

Toe-to-toe against the towering Hollywood legend of John Wayne, the Oscar-winning Bridges trots out in a different, meandering direction. Sometimes drunk and usually disorderly, Bridges underplays his hand, taking Brando-esque mumbling out on the range, while frequently burying his lines. But this Rooster sobers up and flies right just long enough to do what a man has got to do, especially one with true grit and a dead shot. Mattie isn’t just on a quest for her father’s killer, but a fatherly knight in shining leather.

Shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins in New Mexico and Texas, True Grit rides to the screen as a handsome elegy for the classic Western, but armed with a modernist afterglow on the moral consequences of violence and revenge. In this barren and brutal land, even Mattie has a fall from grace, tumbling down a mineshaft crawling with snakes. In the Eden that once was America, the God-fearing and righteous also succumb.

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12/26/10

Who Is Harry Nilsson -- Really?

2010-12-25T07:29:00.003-07:00

Who Is Harry Nilsson? (Review)
Lorber Films, 2010, Not Rated

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat (12-15-10)
. . . . . . .

Harry Nilsson was a late-1960s/early-1970s Los Angeles-based songwriter’s songwriter — The Beatles adored him and Three Dog Night recorded his “One” — who also had such a fluidly expressive vocal range that he briefly became a best-selling recording artist with both hits that he wrote (“Me and My Arrow,” “Jump Into the Fire”) and ones he covered (“Everybody’s Talkin,’ ” “Without You”). But a weakness for booze and drugs, as well as a reputation for being difficult and ambivalent about success, caused a fade from public view long before he died of heart disease at age 52 in 1994.

On his way down, Nilsson and John Lennon once famously got ejected from an L.A. club for heckling the Smothers Brothers.

For this documentary, which has a wealth of archival footage — as well as excerpts from candid audio interviews with Nilsson about his life — director/writer John Scheinfeld sets out to explore in depth just how strong his artistic accomplishments were. And he doesn’t shy away from the self-destructive aspects of his personality.

A who’s-who of L.A.’s great Boomer songwriters (Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Paul Williams, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson) are on hand to share their opinions and remembrances. (So, too, are the Smothers Brothers.) Richard Perry, the producer of his million-selling breakthrough Nilsson Schmilsson album, offers deep insight into the creation of that classic, as well as some damning opinion about why Nilsson subsequently tried to sabotage that success.

But actually, as you hear the music he went on to make — including a stately album of standards and a lovely song for the movie The Fisher King — you wonder if Perry was right. Nilsson also honorably dedicated himself to handgun control after Lennon’s assassination and tried to do right for his family as he grew weaker from ailments.

Overall, he emerges as a kind, caring but deeply flawed man and a terrific songwriter. Grade: B+

Film Review | Black Swan

2010-12-19T18:53:00.008-07:00

Bird Watching

by Thomas Delapa

In the jarring clash between high and low art that is Black Swan, let’s just say that culture takes it in the neck. Darren Aronofsky’s freakish thriller set in the ballet world even turns Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake into an ugly duckling.

For this dark backstage fantasy of ambition, sex and jealousy, Aronofsky (The Wrestler) shines a spotlight on Nina (Natalie Portman), a mousy ballerina with more Freudian baggage than Norman Bates. A 30-year-old virgin, Nina lives with her controlling, passive-aggressive mother (Barbara Hershey), who gave up her own dance career when she had Nina.

In the featherweight script (by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin), Nina’s art takes over her life—the plot is a pale, sexed-up knockoff of Michael’s Powell’s classic The Red Shoes. Nina’s dream comes true as a nightmare once the company’s crude, autocratic, but so French director (Vincent Cassel) chooses her for the double lead roles of the White Swan and the Black Swan in Swan Lake.

Aronofsky’s bizarre Frankenstein creation is sort of like David Cronenberg grafted onto Margot Fonteyn. As the fragile and neurotic Nina, Portman comes up short as a prima donna, skittishly tip-toeing through the movie less like a swan than an anorexic deer caught in the footlights. Aronofsky’s camera follows Portman relentlessly, framing her in a series of mirrors that reflect her own narcissistic and delusional traps.

But Aronofsky cheats in both plot and his urban-gothic visuals, dancing around what is real and what are Nina’s paranoid delusions. Just as Nina gets the lead, she’s haunted by a doe-eyed rival dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), who’s everything—confident, sexual—that Nina isn’t. Aronofsky peels away the beauty and grace to find the pain and obsession underneath, yet he also simplistically (and perhaps chauvinistically) reduces Nina’s neurotic compulsions to her fear of sex.

This is where Black Swan takes a nose-dive. Despite its guise as a modernist, female-centered psychodrama, underneath it’s mostly lurid male fantasy, trumpeting on one pole Portman’s sex-starved nymph and Kunis’ wanton, lesbian leanings on the other. Somehow Nina wins the lead role, despite her lack of oomph as the Black Swan. The director is fond of sexual euphemisms to criticize Nina’s rehearsals. When he’s not French-kissing her to tap into her inner vixen, he’s yelling “Let it go!” as if she’s making a porn movie, not a ballet. Lily’s rehearsals, on the other hand, are sultry and seductive. “She’s not faking it,” he sneers at Nina. This is not your father’s George Balanchine. Achtung, you don’t need a German dictionary to figure out that the shadowy Lily is Nina’s doppelganger diva, whether real or imagined.

Black and white or in living color, Black Swan tries to soar with the eagles, but crash-lands into high-toned kitsch.

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12/19/10

Film Review | Avatar

2010-12-10T16:19:00.013-07:00

Pandora’s Box

by Thomas Delapa

Since its release one year ago, Avatar has soared to become the biggest box-office hit in the known universe, even leaving writer/director James Cameron’s own Titanic in its wake. Yet audiences following the advice of the DVD tagline (“Return to Pandora...”) may well be amazed by the sci-fi fantasy’s epic lack of depth, made even clearer when bereft of the digitally generated 3D theatrical spectacle.

While it’s notoriously difficult to argue with—or stem the tide of—any Hollywood blockbuster, the few choice discouraging words that greeted Avatar now loom larger now, with or without glasses. Whether you derisively dub it Dances With Smurfs or Bambi Goes to Outer Space, Cameron’s environmentally correct outer-space morality tale uproots just about every cliché in the revisionist book, transplanting them for a story that pits tree-hugging big blue humanoids against an armed invasion of evildoing Earthlings.

In place of Union soldier Kevin Costner going native in the old West, Cameron drafts wooden B-lister Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine who lands on the faraway planet of Pandora. In this Alien-ated, energy-starved universe, the ruthless RDA Corporation is set to mine all of Pandora’s precious “Unobtanium.” Standing in the way are the super-sized Na’vi people, a race of ten-foot-tall, blue-hued natives who are one with nature. While a compassionate scientist (Sigourney Weaver) wants to make nice with the Na’vi, a scarred, sneering colonel (Stephen Lang) is happy to terminate them with shock-and-awesome firepower.

A Y2K Spielberg with his pulse on the anemic poundings of popular culture, Cameron shrewdly mines the burgeoning video-game anti-aesthetic to boot up the plot. To surreptitiously befriend the Na’vi on their own turf, the scientists have developed hybrid humanoid shells called Avatars—much like the fantasy alter-egos beloved by players in the cyber-game universe. These ginned-up genetic disguises allow Jake and company to leave their bodies behind at the lab so they can fraternize with the locals. In his Blue Man guise, Jake instantly strikes up a relationship with the lithe and loinclothed Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Cameron’s Pandoran Pocahontas.

Little matter that neither Cameron nor the audience can figure out how the Avatar process practically works. Throughout his adventure, Jake constantly ping-pongs back and forth between his Edenic life with Neytiri and his time back on base, but it’s never clear how this is possible. This is a guy who never sleeps, and has the magic ability to be in two places at the same time.

On the small screen, Avatar’s eye-popping, computer-generated splendor fades against a plot and characterizations that are, at best, wallpaper. With the zeitgeist of ecological cataclysm during this year (cresting with the BP oil spill), Cameron’s message obviously hit a mother lode with worldwide audiences, grafting environmentalism with pro-Native (American) sentiments. Yet as with most Hollywood big chiefs, the director’s naive, touchy-feely themes are no match against his delight in delivering massive battle scenes designed to bring out the popcorn warrior in us all.

Once the Jake-led Na’vi insurgents go on the warpath, how their arrows manage to smash through the glass of heavily-armed space helicopters is a mystery only Yoda could solve. Yes, Jake goes native in a big and tall way, even taming the king of flying dragons to take the homeland fight back to the colonel’s evil corporate army.

At the 2010 Oscars, while his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow walked off with the Best Director and Best Picture awards for The Hurt Locker, Cameron nevertheless won the box-office war in a rout. He still may be the king of the world, but in today’s diminished Hollywood, that world is very small indeed.

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12/10/10

Vincent Cassel -- Public Enemy No. 1

2010-11-20T08:11:00.002-07:00

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (Review)

Vincent Cassel rules again in tale of real-life French gangster
By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat 11-17-10)

Part two of the lean, explosive, unsentimental French biopic of that country’s most notorious gangster of the modern era, Jacques Mesrine, has just as much rivetingly realistic, kinetically filmed excitement and great acting as part one, which is just finishing its run at the Esquire Theatre.

Public Enemy No. 1 basically covers Mesrine’s life in France in the 1970s — one of numerous bank robberies, shoot-outs with police, prison and courtroom escapes, lovemaking with beautiful women, prideful boasts to anyone who’ll listen and occasionally frightening outbursts of violent anger — that finally ends with a veritable assassination by police.

The action in the film — directed by Jean-Francois Richet from a screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri (with Richet) — happens furiously fast and unfolds with verite-style breathlessly tense realism in the assured hands of cinematographer Robert Gantz. There is barely time for expository transitions. But what there is time for is the amazingly alive, alert and downright magnetic performance by Vincent Cassel as the chameleon-like Mesrine.

Looking like a combination of Bruce Springsteen and Raging Bull-era Robert De Niro (including a sizable paunch as he ages), with moments of Robert Mitchum-like late-period heavy-lidded sadness alternating with a mischievous sparkle, Cassell keeps you watching every scene he’s in. And that’s every scene.

While this is not a panderingly sympathetic portrayal, it’s hard to not feel the character’s sense of loss in short, tender scenes with his daughter and dying father. Public Enemy No. 1 also has excellent supporting acting — especially Mathieu Amalrec (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as a far more cautious criminal accomplice and Georges Wilson (who since has died) as an elderly millionaire who takes a fatalistic attitude toward his kidnapping by Mesrine. Grade: A

Remembering George Hickenlooper's "Mayor of the Sunset Strip"

2010-11-01T19:43:00.003-06:00

From HARP Magazine
2004

“Mayor of the Sunset Strip”

By Steven Rosen

Rodney Bingenheimer is a rock ‘n’ roll Zelig. He’s also a rueful Ponce de Leon, searching for his Fountain of Youth in pop culture.

In “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” the enormously entertaining and surprisingly poignant – revelatory, even – documentary about him by George Hickenlooper, we see the short, pixieish Bingenheimer as a stand-in for Davy Jones of The Monkees on the set of the TV series. They’re side-by-side on the set, the same build with the same circa-1960s modish features. Both are young, of course, Bingenheimer only recently has arrived in L.A. from northern California, where he was a misunderstood adolescent. (The film will be released theatrically in March.)

Thirty-five years later, Bingenheimer is still with the hot rock celebrities he has befriended – only now as a late-night weekend deejay playing whatever he wants on modern-rock station KROQ. Coldplay and No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani are among those seen with Rodney in this film.

And he still looks ageless – a tiny slip of a man dressed in casual black outfits and wearing his brown hair in a still-1960s modish, rooster-style cut with bangs. His face still has its little-boy gentleness, although a crease around the mouth now gives him a frown-like smile like the comedian Joe E. Brown.

Hickenlooper, whose fine documentary “Hearts of Darkness” was about the making of “Apocalypse Now,” has a very different subject from Francis Ford Coppola in Bingenheimer. He seems to cruise through his life passively rather than trying to shape and change it. He is a facilitator rather than an artist, but he’s always where the action is.

This film nicely separates Bingenheimer’s public and private lives, without losing sense of him as a mysterious whole. The public life is a delight – Hickenlooper extensively uses archival film and video footage as well as the subject’s own material. There’s even a taped phone call of a very young Bingenheimer trying to reach President Kennedy in the White House.

To a giddy and exhilarating rock sound track, Hickenlooper shows Bingenheimer with everyone who ever mattered musically to L.A. rock from the 1960s onward. He’s seen with Sonny & Cher, Nancy Sinatra, X, Brian Wilson, the Beatles, Bowie and his beloved groupie friends the GTOs. Many of the celebrities sit for new interviews – Bowie, Jones, Sinatra and Courtney Love are especially insightful, loving even.

And the rowdies of L.A.’s 1970s-era glam/glitter scene, where Bingenheimer ran Rodney’s English Disco and was one of the first to champion arty, theatrical British rock, are present here, too. The towering Kim Fowley is hilariously vulgar – scary, even – as he talks about all the sex he got from the young girls who went to Bingenheimer’s club.

But the film captures the other side of Bingenheimer, too. There’s a loneliness reflected in his quietude – he admits to longing for a family he doesn’t have. In some emotionally raw footage, he tries to tell a younger friend, Camille Chancery, he loves her while she sits uncomfortably by his side.

His mother has recently died, and he keeps her ashes in his crowded apartment awaiting a trip to England to spread them. Hickenlooper follows him to England, where he releases the ashes on a tour boat and silently prays.

Bingenheimer also is resentful, although he’s too polite to get angry about it, that his radio station has slotted him on a graveyard shift – Sundays midnight-3 a.m. He’s never earned much, so it’s unclear what his future will be. “It’s unbelievable somebody could be in music this long, help so many people and just be in it for the music,” a younger KROQ deejay observes of Bingenheimer.

Indeed, it is – it’s also a little painful, too. But the great music that still makes him happy, and is as much a part of this movie as he is, alleviates as much of that pain as is possible.

(George Hickenlooper died Oct. 29, 2010.)

Lebanon: Claustrophobic Israeli Film About War

2010-10-12T07:32:00.003-06:00

By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 9-24-10)

LEBANON
Grade: B+

Today’s war movies — like today’s wars — are a long way from The Longest Day. The Hurt Locker, Restrepo (a documentary) and now the Israeli Lebanon are claustrophobic and involved with the almost existential day-to-day survival of their soldiers, mired in tight quarters in Mideast wars where the impossibility of decisive victory seems a foregone conclusion.

Lebanon, from director Samuel Maoz and based on his own experiences during Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, ups the ante. Virtually all the action occurs either within the tight confines of an Israeli tank alone in a hostile town, or as seen from the gun sight of it. The four young soldiers are grimy, sweaty, nervous, scared, sometimes profane, sometimes philosophical, sometimes heroic and sometimes not. In this, they seem very human — which is the film’s main draw after one tires of the limited setting.

The four are Shmuel the gunner, commander Assi, ammunition loader Herzl and driver Yigal. Comparisons to Das Boot are inevitable, but the spaces here are tighter (and the action is less dynamic). Because they are played by actors working from Maoz’s script, the characters are more dramatically satisfying to watch than the real American soldiers in Restrepo, whose macho-obsessed lack of introspection wore this viewer out.

Israel is clearly haunted by that war — there’s a tough, embittered melancholy to this as well as 2008’s animated Waltz With Bashir that’s overall much more mature and weary than American movies about Iraq and Afghanistan, which still are full of posturing. But, sadly, it looks like there will be all too many opportunities for our current war films to improve.

Film Review | The Social Network

2010-10-07T11:21:00.008-06:00

Anti-Social
by Thomas Delapa

With a friend like Mark Zuckerberg, you obviously don’t need enemies.

In The Social Network, writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher flip through the dirty back pages in the life of the whiz-kid billionaire Facebook founder, and it all makes for a good and juicy read, but a slick one.

Those in need of a heavy volume of dramatic irony will find it in this breezy chronicle, which shows how one lonely, brilliant misfit can make a million virtual friends and several fortunes while deleting all his real friends in his rise to the top of the Internet heap. Call it Revenge of the 'Net Nerds when Harvard undergrad Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) has the idea of a “cool” way for his fellow students to connect and form friendships online–not to mention get girls.

But along with his vision of a brave new virtual world, Zuckerberg’s own profile includes a marked like for smart-ass sarcasm, double-dealing and outright betrayal, judging by this biopic based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires. Did Zuckerberg copy his idea from two rich Harvard frat boys and then cheat his best friend Eduardo Saverin out his rightful stake in the company?

In zippy jigsaw flashbacks, Fincher and Sorkin paste together the genesis of the now-holy Facebook, but they also make the connection between Zuckerberg and the revolutionary zeitgeist mindset that places the impersonal virtual world head and shoulders over the real one. Starting with Eisenberg, Fincher’s young faces turn in impressive performances, including Justin Timberlake as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who slithers in as Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley Mephistopheles.

As well as The Social Network works with its wit and drive, it also leaves you unsatisfied on a deeper level, not unlike Fincher’s Fight Club and his other punchy contemporary dramas. He and Sorkin are so busy turning the Facebook/Zuckerberg pages, they don’t seem to much care about what’s going on between the lines.

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Originally published in The Perpetual Post, 10/7/10

A Review of The Tenth Inning

2010-10-01T11:56:00.010-06:00

Hits, Runs and Errors
by Thomas Delapa

The Tenth Inning of director Ken Burns’ winning PBS Baseball series felt less like a fall classic than a classic forties film noir: A foul sense of doom and gloom was ever lurking on-deck, despite the two decades of on-field drama and brilliant heroics. The lurking gloom, of course, was steroids, Major League Baseball’s crippling scandal that made the Black Sox cheaters look like bush leaguers.

Fans of the game must have been crying in their beers during Burns’ painful blow-by-blow on the rise and fall of such tarnished diamond stars as Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire and Roger Clemens. Taking up his chronicle in the early 1990s, Burns returns with his documentary instincts intact, though not the same behind-the-scenes team that made the first nine episodes so much of a hit. Lamentably gone is the seasoned narration by John Chancellor; Keith David is only average off the bench. Burns’ lineup of sportswriter commentaries was also a bit out of left field, with too much playing time given to lesser-knowns at the expense of veterans. The largely generic background music is a weak out.

In the last two decades, professional baseball has been it’s own worst enemy. A renaissance in the grand new era of urban ballparks was followed by the near-suicidal players’ strike in 1994. All-star stories like Cal Ripken’s Iron Man endurance record, the superhuman hitting feats of Ichiro Suziki and the New York Yankees’ deep-pockets resurgence are left on base while Burns ploddingly shadows baseball’s surly dark knight, Barry Bonds, in his unholy quest for all those once-sacred home run records.

An unsung refrain in this ode/dirge doubleheader is “greed, greed, greed.” Most fans, however loyal to their teams and the sport itself, blame the players in our era of multi-million free-agent contracts for banjo-hitting utility infielders. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, indeed.

As to the ugly Steroid Era (which may still be playing at ballpark near you), muted whistle-blowers like Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci have their turn at bat, sending blistering line drives in the direction of the players, the owners and MLB commissioner Bud Selig, who all happily played Three Blind Mice during the travesty. Ironically, however the baseball world cheered the 1998 McGuire/Sammy Sosa home-run race as welcome relief from the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, ultimately baseball was far worse at cleaning up its own dirty laundry. On the subject of the ever-woeful Chicago Cubs after the infamous 2003 Steven Bartman foul ball, Verducci hits this winner: “They’ve had a bad century. It’s time to rally.”

But in Boston, long-suffering Red Sox fans finally rejoiced in 2004, burying the Curse of the Bambino as their team won its first World Series in 86 years. In this bright highlight, Burns swings for the fences and gets there, wrapping up Boston’s amazing, history-making comeback against the hated Yankees, a series that miraculously turned on the few inches between Dave Roberts’ hand, a glove and a stolen second base. Like a home run disappearing in the night sky, the lyrical play-by-play comments from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and columnist Mike Barnicle lift The Tenth Inning from mere sport reportage to a poignant sweet spot deep in every true fan’s heart.

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Originally published in The Perpetual Post, 10/1/10

Film Review | The Tillman Story

2010-09-25T11:09:00.006-06:00

Not Coming Home
by Thomas Delapa

It’s long been said that the first casualty of war is the truth. When it comes to the tragic Pat Tillman story, truer words were never spoken.

All-star NFL football player. Free spirit. Square-jawed jock. Patriot. All-around good guy. Pat Tillman was all of the above. When he and his brother Kevin enlisted in the Army in 2002, shocking their friends and family, even the White House stood up and saluted. Upon learning that Pat Tillman was to be sent to the frontlines in Afghanistan, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent out a paternalistic memo to the Secretary of the Army, stating “we might want to keep an eye on him.”

By now we know the recoiling hollowness of Rumsfeld’s words. On patrol in April 2004, Cpl. Pat Tillman was shot to death by his own men, in an outrageous—and still baffling—case of friendly fire. The official military term is “fratricide”, though there was nothing brotherly about what Tillman’s Army band of brothers did to him—either then or in the six years since his death.

Much as many Americans would like to bury the long-running wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, director Amir Bar-Lev’s explosive film The Tillman Story brings the war home, front-and-center. For Tillman’s mother, Mary “Dannie” Tillman, she and her vociferous family willfully enlisted to make the documentary to “set the record straight.” It’s a story that, for the Tillmans and countless others, has become a heart-broken record after more than eight years of war.

When Tillman joined the Army, walking away from a million-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals, the media shot off a salvo of praise for this seemingly gung-ho American. In death, he was eulogized by President Bush as a “fierce defender of liberty.” Of course, those tributes were delivered when his death was initially reported as a result of enemy fire. He was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for valor, and the nation, led by the flag-waving Fox News, rushed to memorialize him as a fallen hero.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to Arlington. To start with was Tillman’s expressed wish not to be given a military funeral. Cracks in the propaganda myth started appearing before the plaster had dried. By late 2004, the Tillman family began to suspect that the Army was lying to them about Pat’s death. Partially through their own investigation, corroborated by witnesses, the family determined that not only was their son killed by friendly fire, but that military authorities had covered up the facts in the case from day one.

Through interviews with former members of Tillman’s Army Ranger unit, as well as recent footage from the Afghan mountainside where he was killed, Bar-Lev methodically reconstructs the chaotic firefight that took place on April 22, 2004. Since there was no Taliban in the area, when the smoke clears, it becomes horrifically apparent that Tillman’s death came at the hands of jumpy, trigger-happy members of his own unit. To date, no individual has been held responsible for his murder, while only one higher-up—Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger—was sacked for the cover-up.

In what amounts to salt in the wounds, the makers of The Tillman Story recently lost their battle to get its rating switched from “R” to the more box-office-friendly “PG-13” —chiefly because of its barrage of F-bombs. Audiences who do see this powerful and poignant film will quickly realize that the real obscenity is what happened to Tillman, from his outrageous death to the cowardly and disgraceful burial of the facts.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 9/24/10

Film review | I'm Still Here

2010-09-17T12:31:00.014-06:00

Nowhere Man

by Thomas Delapa

Joaquin Phoenix may be still with us, but his really awful mock documentary, I’m Still Here, is going nowhere fast.

Dumped in theaters with little fanfare, the film has now been revealed to be a hoax. In a recent interview with The New York Times, director Casey Affleck said that virtually the whole act was made up. Except for the truly gullible (“Unflinchingly honest” raved Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman), the few people who’ve actually seen Phoenix’s bizarre pseudo reality show might have hurriedly left doubting what they saw.

In a long, 108-minute crash-and-burn, Affleck follows Phoenix from his 2008 “retirement” as an actor to his to aborted rebirth as a hip-hop performer. From the tabloid fodder of his disastrous appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman to his mawkish auditioning for rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Phoenix implodes before the cameras, looking like a cross between Charles Manson and the Unibomber. In his private, profusely profane, moments, he lets it all hang out, starting with his pot belly. When he’s not trashing his friends and cronies in fits of mumbling paranoia, he’s imbibing with cocaine and hookers. The spectacle quickly goes down the toilet, bottoming out in a disgusting scene of scatological revenge. The meltdown climaxes in Phoenix’s short-lived appearance at a Miami night club, where he hops into the crowd to fight a heckler.

While Phoenix and Affleck may have pretentiously meant I’m Still Here as an attention-getting satire on celebrity, the laughable joke is on them. Phoenix doesn’t need a director or even a therapist. It seems obvious that this sophomoric poseur still needs to be potty trained.

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Film review | The American

2010-09-12T16:27:00.005-06:00

Born in the USA

by Thomas Delapa

George Clooney isn’t just a bona fide movie star. He may be the last American matinee idol. In a time when most U.S. leading men are either fading (Jack Nicholson), aging (Al Pacino), strange (Mel Gibson), selective (Tom Hanks) or forever adolescent (Tom Cruise), Clooney still shines with the kind of looks and charisma that hark back to old Hollywood.

But King George is also reluctant movie royalty. Apart from his lucrative roles in the leaky Ocean’s Eleven franchise, he prefers to swim upstream in risky, offbeat and independent films. For a heartthrob, he’s a wallflower when it comes to old-school romance. To this critic, there’s no question his most likable performance was as a conniving convict in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Likable is likely the last word you’d use to describe Clooney’s role in The American, a stark, Europeanized thriller that’s as far from Hollywood as Tuscany is from Tuscaloosa. Just to get our attention that this isn’t your father’s George Clooney, in the first scene he shoots a woman in the back.

In a role that only the NRA could love, Clooney’s Jack is an itinerant underground arms dealer who specializes in custom-built guns. He works alone, travels alone and—mostly—sleeps alone. His only contact is a chilly superior (Johan Leysen) who warns him to, above all, “don’t make any friends.” Ambushed in Sweden, Jack hightails it to Italy, where he goes on the lam in the harsh (and earthquake-prone) mountainous region of Abruzzi.

If Clooney’s vehicle is of a peculiar anti-commercial caliber, it also isn’t especially original. It’s loaded with homages that recoil with imagery from cinema’s minimalist past, from Fred Zinnemann’s fine The Day of the Jackal to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s famed existentialist dramas, such as 1975’s The Passenger.

In their adaptation of Martin Booth’s 1990 novel (A Very Private Gentleman), director Anton Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffe seem to want to ascend to the lofty peaks of allegory. Jack isn’t simply an American, but the American–in the oft-quoted words of D.H. Lawrence, “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” Clooney is all those things, and less. We know nothing about him, other than he has a butterfly tattoo on his back, is bravura in bed, and is equally adept breaking a man’s neck with James Bondian license-to-kill authority.

For the other dramatic details, we’re supposed to read between the lines. The trouble is, those lines are as meandering as the curves on the prostitute that Jack shacks up with in the small town. For all the chaste anti-commercialism that the movie shoots for, Clara (Violante Placido) is the sort of happy Italian hooker that only Hollywood could dream of: sweet, young, voluptuous and ripe for the taking.

In Jack’s daytime hours, he gets busy filling a custom rifle order for Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), an alluring assassin and master of disguise who looks like she belongs on Goldfinger’s payroll. As Jack works methodically to assemble the gun and its special silencer in secret, Corbijn packs these scenes with minimalist pop, crafting a statement on the torrid longstanding love affair between firearms and the man.

Elsewhere, Corbijn and his cinematographer put Jack in the crosshairs, positioning him alone in composed long shots that underline his isolation, if not desolation. Despite the warning, Jack tentatively befriends a wise local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who refutes Jack’s naive Americanized notion that he can “escape history.”

If Jack is aimed to be the violent, allegorically ugly, American, neither can Clooney escape his fateful inability to express his character through an arsenal of long silences, blank stares and airless ennui. I’ll grant that Corbijn’s nifty twist finale finds its target, but otherwise The American is more miss than hit.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 9/8/10