Movie Cross Rhodes

2011-10-14T19:31:00.002-04:00

Film Clip #243: Gravedigger

2011 – Fiction, 88 min.
Director: Sandor Kardos (Hungary)
Cast: Mari Torocsik, Anga Kaksziistvan, Papp Alina
SYRFILM screening: Friday, October 14, 7:00 PM, Watson Theatre, Waverly Avenue, SU Campus.

Some of us always keep a sharp look-out for the Hungarian and the Czech films that turn up each year as part of the SYRFILM line-up. This evening Sandor Kardos’ feature length Gravedigger is up against what is perhaps the festival’s signature – and usually best attended – event, the silent screen classic accompanied by a specially commissioned live jazz performance. But SYRFILM has put Gravedigger at Watson Theatre on the SU campus (in the Menschel Media Center, next to Light Work, on the corner of Waverly and Comstock Avenues), so maybe the film will catch the campus crowd who are willing to brave the rain but not enough for the trek to Eastwood.

Listed as “experimental,” Gravedigger is a series of stills that pan from right to left (and occasionally in the other direction) – much like a photographic story-boarding of a film. But, made with a photo-finish camera like those used to capture the exact instant a race horse’s nose crosses the finish line, these stills are elongated and distorted. If you don’t know this, you may think the DVD is bad or the projector broken, but no: it’s entirely on purpose. There’s an adjustment period involved here – Gravedigger is not immediately and obviously captivating – but it’s worth the wait.

Set roughly in the 19th century, Gravedigger easily offers itself as a fable, and opens with the gravedigger of the village of San Rocco having died and the leader seeking a new man for the job. For three weeks there are no applicants and, after all, what is a “’cemetery without a master”? One day a stranger arrives, wanting the job, and he transforms the cemetery into a flourishing garden, not to mention winning the heart of Gita, the village leader’s lonely daughter. Suddenly, the villagers do not fear the weight of death so much. The gravedigger’s wisdom lies in his observation that people’s great sorrow lies not in death but in a failure to reach one another. A premonition of the coming plague and Gita’s death, however, cast a pall over the village and replace the flourishing garden with death piled on death. Suddenly there is no more ceremony around death – instead, the few remaining among living heave the bodies over the cemetery hedge. As an allegory of personal and collective grief alike, Gravedigger literally stertches its images to breaking, and stays with you long after you think it would be gone.

2011-10-14T18:14:00.003-04:00

Above, the aged Miri (Irit Levi) has a tense exchange with Oleg (David Hess) in Rob Nilsson’s The Steppes. Hess was supposed to accompany Nilsson to Syracuse for this screening, but passed away suddenly last week.

Film Review #244: The Steppes
2011 – Fiction, 107 minutes
Director: Rob Nilsson (USA)
Cast: Irit Levi, Nancy Bower, David Hess
SYRFILM Screening: Friday, 10/14/2011 @ 9:15 PM, Redhouse Arts Center, Armory Square/ Downtown

Nilsson’s The Steppes premiered a few months ago at the Moscow International Film Festival, which also presented a mini-retrospective of Nilsson’s body of work. Last weekend he premiered a related film, What Happened Here, at the Mill Valley Film Festival north of San Francisco. It’s a shame that the two films can’t be seen together, for their web of associations make that a natural double bill.

In the 70s Nilsson read the freshly released edition of My Life by Leon Trotsky and ever since he’s been captivated by the contradictory luminary of the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew the Russian Czar. Trotsky ran afoul of Stalin, who exiled him in 1929 and whose agents chased and finally assassinated him in 1940 in Mexico. Nilsson was captivated especially by Trotsky’s views on art, which he says few if any other Bolsheviks shared.

Ironically, as Nilsson was discovering Trotsky, the revolutionary’s home village in Ukraine was being abandoned and its houses and synagogue (built by Trotsky’s father, Davyd Bronstein) dismantled by area farmers for their materials. Last year, in part thanks to new connections made here in Syracuse, Nilsson was able to travel to Ukraine and seek out the story of Trotsky’s home village’s disappearance. That story includes the Holomodor, a scheme of Stalin’s that resulted in several million deaths by starvation in 1932-33, and the massacre of that village’s Jews by the Nazis in 1941. After a year's research, Nilsson also managed to locate the single survivor of that massacre in Isreal and traveled there to record his story.

The Steppes, on the other hand, is a fiction film centering on an aged woman living in a flea-bag in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District called the Odessa Hotel, whose name harks back to her own family’s flight from starvation and Germans in Ukraine in the same period that Trotsky hid out from Stalin’s agents and his home village fell in the Nazi tide. Having just lost her husband and having no plan and no resources, Miri seems close to collapse. Her niece Rachel (Nancy Bower) arrives, determined to save her aunt and get some answers about how come her mother – Miri’s sister Olga – could never love her. Reminiscent of the harrowing single night that a man and woman spent in Nilsson’s Imbued last year, The Steppes recounts how Miri and Rachel mightily resist one another until each budges just enough to let the stories out. Few tellings of an old mysterious trauma on screen manage to be quite as redemptive as this one. What Happened Here is the backstory of those events.

Nilsson’s DP, Mickey Freeman, has never been better than he is in The Steppes, and Nilsson moves away from his “direct cinema” approach with a scripted movie that seems to signal a new phase in his work.

Read more about Nilsson’s current projects early in 2012 in "Stone Canoe Journal" in the Moving Images section.

2011-10-06T15:33:00.003-04:00

Film Review #242: Gone
2011 – Documentary, 85 minutes
Directors: Gretchen & John Morning
Cast: Kathryn Gilleran
SYRFILM screening: Sat., Oct. 15, 1:00 PM at the Palace Theatre, James St. in Eastwood. Q&A afterward with Kathryn Gilleran.

“What is the first word you think of about your son Aeryn?” asks the woman off-screen, filmmaker Gretchen Morning.

Kathy Gilleran pauses, swallows deeply – the camera angle emphasizes her long throat – and a single word squeezes out.

“Gone.”

Although much of it takes place in the Austrian city of Vienna, this is very much a Central New York story. Gilleran is a native of the small city of Elmira in the Southern Tier, who started as a social worker and later switched to policing. In 2006 she retired after more than 21 years as a police officer in Ithaca, New York. During that time she won awards for crime prevention and human rights advocacy, and she was one of the first female police officers in the nation to complete Advanced SWAT training with the International Chiefs of Police. The film’s opening montage has a clip of then-Senate candidate Hillary Clinton mentioning Gilleran’s public comments on community policing during a campaign stop in Ithaca. During Gilleran’s Ithaca police career, she raised two sons in the nearby village of Groton.

And by late October of 2007, Gilleran had gotten what she called her “retirement job” at the county SPCA in Cortland and was planning to visit her older son, Aeryn, for an early Christmas. Instead, on October 31st, she got a phone call from Vienna, where he worked for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. His boss at UNIDO said Aeryn was missing, hadn’t show up for work in two days.

Gilleran left for Vienna on November 1st, where she stayed five and a half weeks in her son’s apartment while trying to find out what happened. She recounts on-screen how she showed the police her retirement badge, adding, “In America, police officers take care of police officers,” and mimics the dismissive shrug she got as an answer, a response that was to become standard when police weren’t criticizing her instead.

Aeryn Gillern (his mother kept the family spelling of their surname but he dropped the “a”) had started work at UNIDO in 2003. He was an out gay man well-known in Vienna’s gay community, a fact that helped Kathy Gilleran as she started her own investigation. Aeryn had been named Mr. Gay Austria in 2005 and 2006, sponsored by the same upscale sauna, Kaiserbründl, where something happened that sent him fleeing naked through the streets before his disappearance. According to Viennese police theory about common behavior among gay men, he had jumped to his death in the frigid Danube Canal as a “spontaneous suicide.”

Despite the behavior of the Vienna police – the U.S. Consulate was not much better, given that a staff there grabbed her crucifix and said she’d pray for Aeryn when his mother said he was gay – Gilleran did find allies in Vienna, among Aeryn’s friends and inside UNIDO.

“They called me each morning to make sure I was up – and frankly I think to make sure I was still alive,” Kathy Gilleran told me by phone last weekend. “I would go to UNIDO and eat in their cafeteria, see their psychologist Anjelika, use their phone. They had just hired Anjelika and I was her first case. But she took me for coffee, she went to meetings with me constantly, she checked on me.”

Despite Kathy Gilleran’s efforts and persistence over the next four years – she’s met with Aeryn’s partner and his friends, members of Parliament and the Green Party, a founder of the gay police support project in Vienna, a journalist who turned up two witnesses to Aeryn’s run through the streets, staff from the US Consulate and lawyers and police investigators – she has never seen the police report nor has any body ever been found. Through all this, the Vienna police offered wildly, ever-morphing accounts of what happened, who did what and how come.

Gilleran returns to Vienna each October to hold a vigil across the street from the Kaiserbründl sauna. But during those first weeks after her son's disappearance, Gilleran had been standing outisde and a young man named Jens, a manager at the sauna who had known Aeryn, invited her in and provided a tour. With the instincts and training of a good cop, she paid attention to whether the elegant, wood-paneled, labyrinthine private club had video cameras – it did, though the police had told her there were none and they never entered the sauna nor interviewed anyone inside that night.

Similarly, Gilleran also re-traced many of her son’s routine paths, as well as the steps he supposedly took through Vienna’s streets from the sauna to the canal. She narrates this section as the camera simply shows what’s there, demolishing the credibility of the police claim that no one saw a naked man running through a well-lit, busy neighborhood with a train stop, outdoor cafes and cosmopolitan shops.

The husband and wife filmmaking team of John and Gretchen Morning were living in Fayetteville in the fall of 2008 when they first contacted Kathy Gilleran through the Cortland-Ithaca branch of PFLAG, which she'd just joined that summer. (Similarly, I was able to contact her in the same way, through my parents, who are members). The Mornings then met with her in Cortland’s Blue Frog café. They shot the first interview session that December and then provided her with a camera when she returned to Vienna in 2009 and 2010 for her annual vigils, so that she did much of that filming herself while there.

Gretchen Morning had been working for the Discovery Channel as an editor, writer and producer when she and her husband heard about this case through local coverage of the anniversary. Both the Cortland-Standard and Syracuse’s Post-Standard ran stories and Channel 5 did a television report as well.

You can see that this is very much the first feature-length film made by a film editor. The Mornings employ an editing strategy to structure the film that aims pretty effectively at making it primarily the story of a mother’s quest. So there are three elements: close-up interview segments with Gilleran against a dark background (from her clothing and hair, there appear to have been two major interviews filmed); still photos that are matched nicely with the sound of a slide projector’s click when the image changes; and footage that retraces Gilleran’s journeys (mostly in Vienna but with some Central New York footage), which is doubly effective because it serves to present evidence and to highlight that Kathy Gilleran, as a veteran cop, was equipped to challenge the official story by knowing what to look for.

Although the Mornings did interview other people for the film, they have explained their decision not to include any of that material as a way to highlight Kathy Gilleran’s portrait and have argued that such material duplicated what she said anyway.

There is one exception to this strategy and it has the force of a slap across the face. Late in the film, the Mornings insert a short home-video clip that Aeryn Gillern made for his mother about three years before his disappearance. Here, in the popular way of grown-up children establishing a household elsewhere, he offers a little narrated tour of his first Vienna apartment, anticipating that she’ll visit sometime, at the end of which we see him saying good-bye and turning off his videocam.

This scene also appears to be the only place in the film where Aeryn’s younger brother, who was 26 when Aeryn disappeared, gets any mention. Aeryn points out the many framed family photos on his wall: “Here’s you…. Here’s your Dad …. Here’s Grandmother…Here’s Rahman.”

It’s not that Rahman is a secret exactly – there are photos of him on the film’s official website and the bio there lists Kathy Gilleran as the mother of two sons. Despite its undeniable power cinematically, one wonders at the unseen collateral damage of leaving this son and brother out, and whether, in the service of creating a stronger, starker screen portrait of a mother, what kind of position this placed Gilleran in with her remaining child.

And it’s hard to erase him entirely, since on-screen Gilleran often describes events in terms of “we” did this or that, “we” went here or there. Gilleran told me that Rahman went to Vienna too in November 2007, arriving five or six days after she did and staying another ten.

“He thought as a man he could help,” she told me. “And he idolized his big brother.”

Expanding on her screen account of a particularly harrowing interview with two Austrian investigators, one of whom refuses to speak English or even pause for her translator, Gilleran told me that her son Rahman was there too. On-screen we hear how the lead officer, after silently observing proceedings, suddenly strides across the room and disparages her at close range, sarcastically asking, among other things, if she’d really been “just a meter maid.” What’s left out is that Rahman had lit a cigarette while sitting there with her, that the investigator strode up to him first and slapped him across the back of the head, as one might a little boy, before turning viciously on her.

If Rahman’s absence in this film is unsettling, one can only applaud another brief scene that survived, shot during her 2009 trip, about a parallel that many filmmakers would have left out. Here, Kathy Gilleran visits Vienna’s Judenplatz, which commemorates the Austrian Jews turned over to the Holocaust. Carefully stating in the voice-over that she doesn’t wish to stereotype the Austrian people, Kathy Gilleran notes that sixty years ago there was widespread hatred toward other groups in Vienna besides gay men.

“Some Austrians have criticized me for that scene,” she told me. “But there’s another scene that didn’t make it into the final cut. Last year, 2010, we went back to get the last of the filming. I did some of it too and, you know, that camera was my shield. I wasn’t afraid of the police when I had it! The police are always around the synagogues in Vienna. Last year one of them spoke English and I asked him about this and he said, ‘We have to guard them. People don’t like the Jews – those and the queers.’ Austrian synagogues are guarded 24-7. People here don’t know that!”

Gone premiered in April at the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York City and has done well at other festivals and screenings since then. Tula Goenka, who with Roger Hallas co-directs the annual Human Rights Film Festival at Syracuse University earlier in the fall, says they’d tried to get Gone for this year’s program “but SYRFILM beat us to the punch.” Gilleran says that a DVD is possibly in the works and may include extras with interview material of others that wasn’t used in the film.

Since 2007, Gilleran has become acquainted with other disappearances.

“There are so many Aeryns out there!” she says. “A country as civilized as France just got rid of all their gypsies in this past year. We have the exact same economic conditions that gave rise to the Nazis in the 30s. I want people to know that kind of hatred is still out there. And Americans are naïve about what our government will and will not do. The Department of State publishes no stats on U.S. citizens missing abroad. There will be no translators, no attorneys, no money, no transport, no shipping the remains home for you.”

Near the end of our lengthy conversation I asked Kathy Gilleran if she had a theory of what might have happened.

After a pause she said, “You know, I spoke with two different attorneys in Vienna and each of them told me I would never see the police report. Each of them pointed out that an exclusive gay sauna existed in this neighborhood – I mean, two doors from the Gucci store! – and was never bothered by police. There was an ultraconservative politician who was killed in a car crash about a year after Aeryn disappeared. There were rumors he’d been at party in a gay bar and rumors that he was intoxicated. He was xenophobic to the max – he had gotten laws passed against homosexuals. And do you know it’s now illegal in Austria to publicize anything suggesting he was gay?”

Jörg Haider died two weeks after he made a political come-back climaxed by his election as Austria’s president. When a man who claimed he had been Haider’s lover gave an interview in the press, Haider’s widow pursued legal means of silencing him and any media coverage regarding his claims of an intimate relationship with Haider.

“So I wonder if he frequented the Kaiserbründl,” said Gilleran. “If he was there that night. Someone knows something.”

*****
Gilleran returns to Vienna later this month for the fourth anniversary of her son’s disappearance. She’ll be here in Syracuse on Saturday, October 15th, answering questions after the SYRFILM screening at 1:00 PM at the Palace Theatre on James St., Eastwood.

2010-12-30T11:43:00.003-05:00

Film Review #241: True Grit
2010
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper

I confess I was skeptical about the Coen Brothers’ re-make of True Grit. Based on Charles Portis’ 1968 novel, the 1969 film adaptation starred John Wayne as crusty old marshal Rooster Cogburn, and made a decidedly comedic and reassuring swerve away from Portis’ darker story-line. The Hollywood producer Hal Wallis, as it turns out, bought the screen rights to Portis’ novel from Simon & Schuster even before the novel’s publication, and apparently helped the novel’s success along by sending employees to buy up cartons of the book at bookstores known to be part of The New York Times’ best-seller list calculations. In retrospect, the 1969 film that he and Paramount released, directed by Henry Hathaway, is a little like the Wild West show that a grown-up Mattie Ross visits in 1903 at the end of the Coens’ re-make – a side-show version of wilder events served up for popular entertainment without real menace.

Now, setting the record straight, we have Mattie’s memory-inside-a-memory – that is, from the windswept, lonely hillside of her family’s private burial plot in the early years of the 20th century, the 40-year-old “cranky old maid” recalls her 1903 trip to that Wild West show to see Rooster and, as she alights from the train on her way there, she remembers the trip they made together deep into the “Indian territory” beyond Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1873 in pursuit of Tom Chaney, her father’s murderer, when she was just 14. As it turns out, older Mattie is three days’ too late – Rooster has just died – a span of time the Coens wisely do not make much of but leave to percolate along with their other Biblical references.

As Cogburn the Coens have cast Jeff Bridges, with Matt Damon as the preening bounty hunter/ex-Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, new-comer Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, Barry Pepper as the outlaw Lucky Ned Pepper and Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney. There is not a mediocre performance among them, and the bloom is off the rose so far as any romantic notion of frontier life goes. A world of exposition is supplied by attending to the right placement of filthy fingernails, from Dreyer’s long-ago suggestion of how bleak was Joan of Arc’s confinement right down to Mattie’s first encounter with Lucky Ned, into hands and care she falls. That young Mattie, inside the first ten minutes, attends a triple hanging and briskly agrees to share a night’s lodging with the remains – her father’s undertaker has depleted her funds by overcharging her and this is the best hospitality he offers – does prepare us for what she’ll have to take in stride later.

Despite pronouncements every few years that Westerns are dead, the genre has endured and even enjoyed resurrection, often in times of war and political conflict. Westerns, after all, are the template for our national tale – or for how we re-cast that to fit the moment’s challenges – and in the decade since 9/11 they’re back again. Portis’ novel recognizably came out of the Vietnam era. And while its first screen version rode that era’s resurgence of Westerns – the Hathaway film closely followed the release of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and preceded Robert Altman’s even darker 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (belatedly named this past week to the Library of Congress’ National Registry of Films) – not for nothing do we find John Wayne reassuring the audience that all is well.

And though we’ve waited for the Coens’ re-make longer than Mattie waited to see Rooster again, they give us two boys who torture a tied pack-mule with sharpened sticks, echoing Peckinpah’s opening scene of The Wild Bunch where some laughing kids famously set ants and a scorpion afire just to amuse themselves.

This True Grit is more Deadwood than it is Andy Devine (if you’re old enough to remember that actor’s Aw-shucks Western persona). Like David Milch’s late lamented HBO parable about how the country civilized itself with all its fissures showing, this film takes its central action out of the settled United States proper, reminding us that any sea-to-shining-sea manifest destiny was a lengthy, bloody struggle that still resurfaces. Just as Deadwood depicted an historic renegade town, the lawless “Indian territory” beyond Fort Smith is much like the tribal areas– the “ungoverned spaces” – of today’s conflicts. The same filmmakers who gave us No Country for Old Men three years ago really revisit the genre with this story of a gutsy, whip-smart girl who “earns her spurs” alright in the pursuit of justice and the payment of accounts – the be-spurred LaBoeuf himself bestows that tribute – but did she, or we as a nation, grow up to be happy?

One trait of the so-called “revisionist” Westerns released in times of turmoil has been an overt mention of the Civil War. Traumatized by the national conflict and the immense, often gruesome loss of life it entailed, the country in one sense used settling the Western frontier as a way to simply change the subject. Classic depictions of settling the West on-screen have, depending on the decade and the degree of national consensus, followed suit. Westerns since 9/11 tend, as I have written elsewhere, like the Westerns of the late 60s and 70s, to reject the timelessness of classic Westerns in several ways. They often specifically give us characters with back-stories in the Civil War and who carry that conflict into the frontier. Very early, Cogburn and LaBoeuf clash over this history, though both are former Confederates. The Texas Ranger, after establishing his own credentials as an officer of a Virginia company – implying he was once a gentleman too – accuses Cogburn, who rode with the guerilla force Quantrill’s Raiders, of being a barbaric “marauder” who murdered women and children. Cogburn hotly denies such behavior, but to the end of his life maintains and takes refuge in those ties. Mattie’s visit to the Wild West show leads her to two of Cogburn’s cohorts there: Cole Younger (one of the Younger Brothers who rode with outlaw Jesse James) and Frank James (Jesse’s surviving brother), all of whose associations date from Quantrill’s Raiders. Mattie’s parting remark to Frank James – “You can keep your seat, trash!” – on the surface answers his discourtesy in not standing to speak with a lady. But it’s also about her judgment of his crass betrayal of Jesse, whose grave, history buffs will know, Frank charged money for tourists to visit.

Finally, one of the joys here is the cadenced, vivid and sometimes witty language, with much of the dialogue coming verbatim from Portis’ novel. That bracing speech itself comments on how the frontier was settled. It’s not just that the King James Bible and Shakespeare were the two most familiar books on that frontier – and both available by performance from the pulpit or the traveling stage to those who couldn’t read. Listen to the back and forth between Mattie and the stable owner when she comes to settle her father’s accounts over his string of ponies, his missing gray saddle horse and the saddle itself. Or to Mattie’s explanation in the crude mountain lean-to to Cogburn and LaBoeuf of the difference between natural law and man’s law – she pauses to translate the Latin term for them – or indeed to any of the rapid-fire exchanges in the film. What anchors these exchanges is the language’s precision and rhythmic delivery. It’s not exactly iambic pentameter, of course, but it reminds you of what Shakespeare sounds like on stage; at times you glimpse how the language itself is a civilizing, ordering force in both thought and behavior. And Mattie actually does know her place and its precariousness (“That is a silly question,” she chastises Cogburn at one point, reminding him, “I am fourteen years old.”). In a moment when Orwellian double-speak has returned to much public conversation, the Coens give us a film whose language is anything but vague or accidental.

After True Grit, I quickly took myself to see The King’s Speech too, a moving and gorgeously acted film, also about the role of language in a nation’s survival during crisis. And I highly recommend it. But I think True Grit is a better, and for us yanks, more important film. It just might be the best this year.

*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the December 30, 2010 print edition of “The Eagle” weekly and the full review at www.theeaglecny.com.

2010-12-30T11:34:00.002-05:00

Film Review #240: Black Swan
2010
Director: Daron Aronofsky
Cast: Nathalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassell

Somewhere in the vaults of my family’s old home movies, there’s a reel – yes, that long ago – of the ballet recital that climaxed the after-school classes my mother and grandmother made me go to for a single year. I remember the recital, with myself togged up as one of the white swans – white fluff, white satin, silver trim – running in and out of the circles of other girls. I looked as miserable as I surely was. After that, they let me stop.

Quite a few of the audience at Manlius Art Cinema’s opening night screening of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan looked like they were young dancers themselves. They had the same slenderness and carriage that Natalie Portman (as Nina Sayers) and Mila Kunis (as her rival, Lilly), even though both already had years of formal dance training, spent months of full-time training and dieting to achieve before shooting began. Two of them sat just behind me and throughout the film one or the other would periodically gasp or exclaim at the proceedings on-screen. As we left after the credits, we shared that universally understood combination of sound and gesture – part eye-roll, part shrug and part dramatic exhalation – that made adding the words “I’m exhausted!” unnecessary. Out in the lobby, somebody did say that.

Absorbing, by turn hallucinatory, appalling, gorgeous and deeply sad, and billed somewhat bizarrely as a “dance thriller” in the shorthand of ad-speak, Black Swan contains few lulls and several very fine performances. Besides the principal leads, Vincent Cassell is the controlling, Balanchine-like dance master, Barbara Hershey is Nina’s creepy mother and, somewhere beneath raccoon eyes and a fright wig, an unrecognizable Winona Ryder– who is that? I kept wondering every time this woman appeared – is the waning prima ballerina abruptly and publicly “retired” to make room for younger Nina Sayers to dance the double lead in Swan Lake, who goes round the bend.

Well, she is not the only one. Set in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center – as is New York City Ballet in real life – Black Swan concerns the long-held dream of company dancer Nina Sayers to dance the lead in Swan Lake, a double role of the good Swan Queen and her rival/double/shadow self, the Black Swan. The daughter of a former dancer whose unplanned pregnancy abruptly ended her career, Nina lives with her mother in a maze-like apartment on the upper West Side. Her mother ostensibly lives only for Nina’s success, but of course – we are dealing with archetypes here – jealously and cruelly undermines her at every turn. When Thomas casts Nina as the lead, her anxiety sky-rockets even as she struggles to emerge as her own person, upsetting the delicate see-saw between mother and daughter. In a single scene shows us how vulnerable Nina really is – and signals the rising arc in Portman’s astonishing performance – she races to the privacy of a dressing room to telephone her mother and announce, in the tones a child might to her Mommy, that she got the part.

Lily’s arrival in the company complicates matters further. Between Lily’s own ambitions, Nina’s insecurity and utter lack of experience in discerning what a real adult friendship might look like, and Thomas’ manipulations of both, very quickly it’s hard to tell what really happens and what Nina imagines. As physically demanding as top-flight professional dancing may actually be, Black Swan extends this considerably here, adding physical abuse and humiliation from Nina’s mother, hallucinated self-mutilation, sexual violation real and otherwise, and murderous attacks with shattered pieces of mirror on the triumphant opening night.

On Monday, Black Swan was cited for “Worst Female Images” in a film released theatrically in 2010 by the national Women Film Critics Circle during WFCC’s year-end awards announcements – beating out Burlesque, The Killer Inside Me, and The Social Network. With the sole exception of the unnamed older woman, quiet, focused, dignified, clearly accomplished, who runs the warm-ups and classes for the company dancers during rehearsals – in a film that contains some cinematically brilliant sequences, the comparatively understated moment in which the camera simply watches her back and shoulder muscles for a moment as she shows a dancer a sequence of moves is one of the best – there’s no female character here that we’d want any of our daughters or nieces or godchildren or sisters to take as a role model. And from opening night’s audience, I’d say they pretty much get that.

But Aronofsky wasn’t making a movie about role models. Instead of agit-prop, as he’s said extensively and about which there’s no great mystery, he’s exploring ideas of identity and doubles, how we contain our opposites, how performers use their bodies as their medium and the dangerous nature of images (Plato warned us, after all, to ban the artists), a variation and extension of previous films such as last year’s The Wrestler. For those harrowing, edgy achievements, see this dazzling film.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the December 23, 2010 print edition of "The Eagle" weekly in Syracuse and at www.theeaglecny.com. “Black Swan” continues at Manlius Art Cinema and has also opened at Carousel Mall.

2010-12-30T11:23:00.003-05:00

Film Review #239: Fair Game
2010
Director: Doug Limon
Cast: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, David Andrews

Now I want you to drive to Ithaca, in this weather, to see a movie? Right.

So, the plan this week was to present you with that box of Christmas candy otherwise known as The Tourist, with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Then Friday afternoon a couple movie buddies – one an intrepid driver with four new tires – said, "Let’s go to Ithaca and see Fair Game.” Directed by Doug Limon (who did his own cinematography too), starring Sean Penn as former diplomat Joe Wilson, Naomi Watts as outed CIA operative Valerie Plame and a wickedly good David Andrews as Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, this film combines the individual memoirs written by Wilson and Plame to recount how the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq with doctored intelligence evidence about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program and then retaliated when Joe Wilson went public in a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece about what he didn’t find in the African nation of Niger.

Well before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA was already investigating the regime of Saddam Hussein, in particular whether he was developing nuclear weapons (or “WMD,” in the parlance of newspaper shorthand of the day). In 2001, also before 9/11, Valerie Plame was made head of operations for the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq. Plame’s husband had been ambassador to Niger during the Clinton administration and therefore knew the country well, so he was in a position to be asked to informally re-check a persistent story that Iraq was buying “yellowcake” uranium from Niger (a form of uranium necessary for the fabrication of nuclear weapons). He determined this could not have happened and so reported back. In one riveting scene, Wilson watches a TV news broadcast of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the United Nations that the CIA had determined that Niger had indeed sold “yellowcake” to Iraq.

9/11 of course changed everything, and some of the most effective scenes in this film involve the fall-out among intelligence agents and organizations once it became apparent that there had been missed clues that, followed up on, might have prevented those attacks. With regard to Iraq and Saddam’s WMDs, agents of the vice-president’s office returned repeatedly to the CIA to press them about the likelihood of various surmises and conclusions, really to change those conclusions to concoct another case. In one such scene a heretofore competent and committed agent is reduced to a stuttering mess by the relentless Libby’s interrogation.

It was Scooter Libby who leaked information to the press that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative – leaked multiple times, as it turned out, for good measure, in case any reporter given this tidbit might have qualms about printing it. Columnist Robert Novak broke the story, which of course cost Plame her career, but – as both her memoir and the film make plain – also cost the lives of many, perhaps hundreds, of civilian “assets” she had developed who were in vulnerable positions and mid-stream operations. The film dramatizes this in the form of the abrupt abandonment of Iraqi scientists whom she had recruited to defect and promised to get safely out of that country along with their families, who were rounded up subsequently and disappeared. And the pressure of Plame’s outing almost cost her and Wilson their marriage, as they each struggled with how to respond publicly, each feeling abandoned and betrayed by the other. In a cameo as Plame’s father, Sam Shepherd burnishes a single scene in which he listens to her anguish and, with all the compact but deeply felt reticence of a career military officer – read, unassailable patriot – answers softly, “What they did [to Wilson and her] was just wrong.”

This is a very, very good movie. Naomi Watts gives her best performance in ages and Sean Penn is now mature enough to deliver the performance he clearly aimed for with All the King’s Men. To some extent, that includes his emerging capacity for restraint at the right moments.

The same applies to Doug Limon, who as a filmmaker has visited espionage cinema before in two very different films – The Bourne Identity (2002), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, his 2005 re-make of Hitchcock’s 1941 comedy about married spies and notable as the occasion igniting Brad Pitt’s off-stage romance Angelina Jolie. There has been some criticism of Fair Game as imperfectly blending Plame’s memoir with its “personal” bent and Wilson’s, which is more political in focus. I find that not such an issue; instead, I’m pleased that Limon seems to know, first, that this is not another movie fantasy and, second, that he’s stuck to a fairly straightforward time-line that makes some sense of complex events, when his temptation might have been to tart things up. And did I mention that the sound track is superb?

Fair Game, which has just picked up several nominations for year-end awards from the national Women Film Critics Circle, ought to be playing in major multiplexes across the land – and certainly here in Syracuse. If you’ve been wondering, as I have, how come we just don’t seem to be getting some movies very quickly this winter, this one takes the cake. Last Saturday morning I asked on my Face Book page, “Why isn’t this movie playing in Syracuse?” Nat Tobin answered that he had tried to book Fair Game for Manlius Art Cinema but there were simply very few available prints and he couldn’t get one.

Even so, it’s still playing at Ithaca’s Cinemapolis the rest of this week and next – that is, held over twice and available until Christmas Eve, with two evening screenings during the week and two matinees added on the weekends.

The Tourist is a tasty little bon-bon of a movie. But Fair Game sticks to your ribs.

*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the December 16, 2010 print edition of "The Eagle" weekly. “Fair Game” continues until 12/24 (held over two weeks) at Cinemapolis, 120 East Green St., Ithaca, behind the Commons, www.cinemapolis.org, with two evening screenings weekdays (7:25 and 9:25) and two matinees added on the weekend (2:25 and 4:25).

2010-12-30T11:06:00.002-05:00

Film Review #238: Stretching Boundaries: The Life Work of Sculptor Arlene Abend
2010
Director: Courtney Rile
Cast: Arlene Abend et al.

Arlene Abend in her studio. Photo: Courtney Rile, Daylight Blue Media.

If you haven’t seen the Arlene ABEND retrospective, Resin-ating Metal, which opened at Edgewood Gallery at 216 Tecumsah Road on November 5th, you’ve still got all of December to see it, because it’ll be on view through New Year’s Eve. A survey of more than three decades worth of Abend’s sculpture – in cut, cast and incised steel, bronze and other metals plus the later, ground-breaking cast resin pieces – is a lot to shoehorn into such a small gallery, but this exhibition of 33 pieces has been managed pretty successfully. Well, make that 36 pieces – because the three large, circular wall pieces sold almost immediately. Gallery owner and curator Cheryl Chappell asked Abend to make replacements, which she delivered last Saturday – by mid-afternoon two of those sold too.

On Tuesday morning, Abend said, “These were some of the most difficult pieces to do, because they are deceptively simple – every element has such an impact. And it’s a kind of silent conversation between myself and the materials – I pick a hanging point, but they really find their own balance as I make them. And it was a total surprise that people would enjoy them so much! I had thrown these pieces on the floor a couple years ago – they were scrap metal and I wasn’t really doing wall sculptures much anymore. But at Cheryl’s gentle urging I made these.”

Although as curator Chappell picked most of the pieces and decided upon the exhibition’s floor-plan, Abend insisted on including one piece depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (the snake is there too), an almost-life size upright piece made of a single sheet of steel that, bent and folded, presents front, side profile and back views of the couple.

Abend calls it a “big plasma cut,” referencing the torch conventionally used to cut steel, which she has adapted for the intricate, lacey cut-outs of garden vegetation and surface incisions that depict the couple and so resemble drawing with a brush. Years ago, before the need to work in three dimensions overtook her, Abend primarily made drawings and paintings, and this piece reminds us of her facility as a graphic artist.

“Well, I make very good rear ends,” she laughed. “But you do need to be able to draw when you work as much on commission as I have. Your client needs to see what you’re only describing, so I make drawings or maquettes. Then I have to become my own fabricator and make the piece and sometimes that is more mechanical. Although I would say that commissions push me in a way that has led me into new areas – when I have to design in terms of the context where a piece will be and consider things I wouldn’t if I were just doing something for myself.”

Abend also wanted to point out the arresting three-part wall sculpture Remnants, made in 2005, three oblong pieces of cast bronze with parts of her face emerging in pieces from each surface. I remembered seeing this in her studio when I had first visited and found it retains its hold now.

“This started out as wax remnants from something else,” she commented, “and it just wanted to be made. It’s so different from the original piece – really very dark and distorted and emotional. I had an idea of the patina I wanted but I rushed it and it turned green on me.”

Even more emotional for Abend, she says, are the series of cast resins she had made, which may include tiny cast metal figures or clear casts of her own face and hands. They are technically difficult – when she began working on them there was some question of whether the material could even do what she aimed for – and demanding in other ways.

“The resins ask of a lot of you!” she said. “They are mechanically difficult, they are physically hard to do, they are dangerous because the material takes planning and safety measures and time, and the final grinding and polishing is quite a commitment. And I did these alone. I wanted to work with refractions so I gave them many surfaces – that’s why all these pieces are on turntables so you can see through them from every angle – and I worked with the cracks and bubbles that have been part of the process. And they have been the most emotional for me of any of the work. I started with that one, Breaking Out, which has to do with my need thirty years ago to have more than a life as wife and mother, and this last one, from this year, Fascinating Failure, seems like the opposite – my hands are covering my eyes – like the need to keep from seeing what’s ahead. But will I do more? Well, never say never.”

See the movie this Saturday at 2:00 PM

The Edgewood’s opening reception in November also featured a TV monitor looping what documentary-maker Courtney Rile called a “teaser” – you can see that below, at the end of this story – of the documentary Stretching Boundaries: The Life Work of Sculptor Arlene Abend. The film has its premiere this Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM in the Everson Museum’s Hosmer Auditorium at Harrison and State Streets downtown.

Rile and Mike Barletta together comprise Daylight Blue Media. They made last spring’s popular documentary, The 15th Ward and Beyond on commission by Syracuse University’s South Side Initiative. That film had a red-carpet premiere last spring at Syracuse Stage that sold out two weeks in advance and has had several other public screenings since – each of them packed – the most recent on Tuesday night at McKinley-Brighton Magnet School on West Newell St. The 15th Ward and Beyond is eventually destined to wind up on the South Side Initiative’s Syracuse Black History Project’s online “virtual museum,” and there hasn’t been a decision yet among all the parties on whether to make it available separately on DVD.

Last Sunday Rile and Barletta let me watch a rough cut of the new film abut Abend, then a tad over an hour long. Rile said they were aiming for 50 minutes or so in length – they had material to edit out, some to add, decisions about music and transitions – but there was enough there to see that this is an even better film than The 15th Ward and Beyond. It’s an excellent film about how an artist works, and an excellent portrait of an artist in our midst who’s now taking stock on what such a lifetime means.

Around 50 minutes is a good length for television broadcast, though Rile and Barletta haven’t gotten to discussions about whether that will ever happen. But they have gotten to discussions with Abend about making the film available on DVD and one of the pleasures of Tuesday’s gallery walk-through was learning that they’ll take orders after Saturday’s screening for DVDs and also that they plan to make copies available at the Edgewood through the holiday season too.

“Stretching boundaries” is a phrase Abend suggested for the title because she says her entire career as an artist has been about that stretch. She notes for example that when she first turned from drawing and painting to sculpture – she began with ceramics, wedging clay in her bathtub and making constructions rather than throwing pots on a wheel – her adult-ed instructor kept telling her to downsize, that her work was too large for the kiln. In New York City, Abend went on to study at Cooper Union, where she says the entire approach was based on the question, “What if?” After moving to Syracuse and taking up metal sculpture, Abend completed a fine arts degree at Syracuse University with the legendary Roger Mack as her mentor – but she also spent five years in night classes for vocational welding at Central Tech, at a time when one of the instructors thought teaching women to weld was “just wrong.” Abend says that “Pfft!” of a welding torch lighting still excites her after all these years.

“She’s only five feet tall,” notes The Post-Standard columnist Dick Case in an interview in the film. “I have said before that she’s a small woman who works on a grand scale.”

Abend, whose sculpture Earth’s Energy in the World Trade Center was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, also had the commission to turn a salvaged, slightly bowed World Trade Center steel girder into a sculpture for the memorial outside DeWitt Town Hall – she says as a welder she understands the degree of heat that was necessary to bend that girder – and the film has footage of that towering piece, far larger than anything in Edgewood, with Abend dwarfed beside it. She’d like to go that large again, she says.

Case has been following Abend for years and he relates to Rile and Barletta the fate of Abend’s Carousel Mall commission – 17-feet-high polished aluminum horses for the entrances of the mall: a race horse, a zebra, a Pegasus, a unicorn and two smaller horses – now all taken down and stored, except for the race horse and the unicorn.

There are also interviews with Jim Hueber, president of the local steel fabricating company, Mack Brothers, who’s known Abend three decades and speaks about respecting her for her craftsmanship and work ethic. Gallery director/artist Anne Novarro Capucilli of Limestone Gallery in Fayetteville speaks about first meeting Abend in Rochester. Teacher Mary Cunningham relates how Abend tackled the project of teaching welding to public school students. Delavan Center owner Bill Delavan relates how the Labor Day storm of 1998, which destroyed Abend’s studio there, couldn’t destroy her enthusiasm for celebrating her quarter century in his building with a bottle of champagne. Linda Bigness – who pitched in to make the retrospective a success – relates how Abend’s story and example inspired her own leap into becoming a working artist.

The film remains ever cognizant that Abend turns 80 next spring and that the Edgewood exhibition is a career retrospective – as she says on screen, “like a period on a sentence” that she is grateful she’s able to have the time to make. There is footage from Abend’s father’s home movies – amazingly, that toddler is clearly Abend herself, playing in the sand at Brighton Beach and even then, she comments now, making sculpture. And there’s a clip from a television interview that must date to the 70’s, when the knock-out lady welder briskly shows how it’s done.

Yes, I’m going to the annual Plowshares Crafts Fair too, among Saturday’s many travels – but I wouldn’t miss this. This is what “local treasure” is all about.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the December 2, 2010 print edition of "The Eagle" weekly in Syracuse, and in entirety at www.theeaglecny.com.

2010-12-30T10:55:00.002-05:00

FILM REVIEW #237: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
2010
Director: Daniel Alfredsson
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyquist, Georgi Staykov

Last April Nat Tobin brought us the first of the Swedish films adapted from Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy novels, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and in August the second installment duly arrived, The Girl Who Played with Fire. There was a comfortable year's gap in the narrative between the end of the first and the beginning of the second, a feeling that life went on for crusading journalist and magazine publisher Michael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist), even as the mysterious Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) herself had repaired to some exclusive tropical isle to gather her own forces too.

No such breather this time. Played with Fire ends as a medical helicopter carries Salander, with multiple gunshot wounds including one in the head, grimy from her father's effort to bury her alive, off to a hospital. A second helicopter bears that father, Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov), almost dead thanks to the axe she planted in his head. So exhausting and chaotic is the final harrowing sequence that I found myself needing to sort out exactly who was dead and who was still, though barely, alive.

As the third installment begins, those medical helicopters are just arriving at the hospital, and it's a tribute to the power of this story and these characters that the audience's intervening three months – as we have gone back to our lives between films – seem to vanish as we settle into our seats. Like the previous two installments, Kicked the Hornet's Nest is a long movie, almost two and a half hours, and again the time flies past. I even found myself sitting forward in my seat a good deal of the time. Now be honest: how often in a movie theatre are you really on the edge of your seat?

As with any good procedural-action thriller hybrid, trying to summarize the plot's various twists and turns in a paragraph or so is folly. Again Salander is framed for murder; again Blomkvist sets out to prove her innocence; again the forces of evil employ a frightening array of subterfuge, blackmail, intimidation and brute force, and a truly chill mastery of apparently passive public institutions. What's satisfying, especially if you've watched this film's two predecessors, is that the seemingly slow arousal of brave and decent people finally pays off here. In the way this films ties up strands from the previous two films it may be most satisfying. The single lone cop with integrity in Played with Fire, Inspector Jan Bublanski (Johan Kylén) returns with a whole shadowy task force this time, empowered directly by the prime minister and capable of lightening speed when needed (will they race across town in time to thwart Blomkvist's would-be killers?)

There are also moments of mind-blinding terror that repeat like a musical theme from film to film. In an early scene here, Salander – rescued from the grave, on the mend, seemingly well-protected in her hospital bed with a sympathetic doctor who smuggles in both pizza and a wireless device – hears that Zalachenko is down the hall, also still alive. This news triggers a flurry of reflex effort to free herself from her IV lines and flee: this panic is pure brain stem reaction in a universe where survival depends on mastering such impulse. You too may savor the expression that flickers across her face when she learns he's been killed.

Also like musical themes the violations of Salander's life re-play – moments we have seen in each film again – the moment of setting her abusive father afire as a child, her confinement to a psychiatric facility where she is held in restraints (now we learn that the officious Dr. Peter Telorbian kept her in full restraints for 381 days because she would not agree to his sexual advances at age 12), the rape she secretly filmed by her guardian after no official office would take her complaints seriously – though this time expanded upon in a courtroom trial.

Salander's attorney is Blomkvist's sister Annika (Annika Hallin), initially there entirely as a favor to her brother. As someone new to the saga, Annika acts as a reality check for us too – those of us returning a second or third time are perhaps used to Salander's strange ways of relating, already rooting for her – and she has her own posse of fanatically loyal misfits onscreen too – but Annika's reactions are a splash of cold water. How well can this young woman survive in the world, really? And Blomkvist's editor Erika Berger (Lena Endre), whose character has been restrained in the previous films, unfolds here as well.

Trilogy cinema – after all, these three movies were all filmed together – may be the movies' answer to HBO series story-telling, and this film proves the worth of taking the time to let a story mature and ripen through installments. We call it the "final" Steig Larsson because he died suddenly of a heart attack, actually before these three novels were published, though reportedly he left most of a fourth novel on his laptop of the projected ten-book series; his estate is still disputed by his long-time companion and his family. This film suggests that interruption amounts to a greater loss than we might have imagined.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the 11/18/10 print edition of The Eagle weekly in Syracuse, and the full review at www.theeaglecny.com.

2010-10-22T13:03:00.005-04:00

Film Review #237: Never Let Me Go
2010
Director: Mark Romanek
Cast: Carrie Mulligan, Keira Knightly, Andrew Garfield

Having enthusiastically lent my own copy of Kasuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go to a friend after finishing it, I don’t have it here to check the exact page where the Japanese-born British writer actually uses the word “clones” for the first time. I did circle the word when I came upon it, and I’m betting it’s within the last 25 pages out of just over 300. As novels go, this is something of a triumph, because of course you “know” well before that moment, but not having seen the word itself for so much of the story creates a kind of tension.

The last time I recall reading a novel that I so could not put down, it was Caleb Carr’s historical murder and detective mystery The Alienist. That was in 1994. I read The Alienist all the way to Vancouver on a plane and was, I’m afraid, fairly anti-social for the first day or so between sessions of the conference I was attending until I finished it. As NPR and Washington Post book reviewer Maureen Corrigan reminds us, such novels are really about thinking – about how we know what we think we know – and The Alienist combines a cracking good serial murder yarn, set vividly in New York City at one of its most fascinating moments, with the very roots and early invention of detective work.

But Ishiguro’s novel, which has a huge following of fierce partisans – among them the remarkable English actress Carrie Mulligan, who plays Kathy H., the narrator, and has said she “could not bear” to think of anyone else getting the part – is not really about thinking, except on the surface as something to occupy us and the characters alike, even though there are a number if plot lines that seem to be about finding something out. In fact the 28-year-old Kathy H. is clearly not honest and searching with herself much of the time.

Instead, it’s really a story about being. As such, given its meditative style, it’s extremely hard to consider adapting this novel for the screen. Though it’s been called “sci-fi” that label seems odd somehow, because it completely lacks the action-blockbuster arc of its cousins in most contemporary re-tellings of the Pinocchio tale. Such close relatives would be films with characters like Wesley Snipes in the Blade movies, or Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley who takes that ontologically tantalizing swerve in the last installment of the Alien films, for example. But even on a grand scale, movies about being that are not made in the action-blockbuster mold have a hard time connecting – witness Spielberg’s criminally under-rated A.I., Artificial Intelligence.

Mark Romanek’s screen version, which released in mid-September, has been eagerly anticipated because the novel itself is so well-regarded, but also because this film has some of the best casting in memory. If you’re old enough to remember the 1982 screen version of John Irving’s 1978 novel, The World According to Garp, you’ll recall it was inconceivable that anyone but Robin Williams could play Garp. Just so here: no one but Mulligan could play Kathy H., Keira Knightly is brilliant as Ruth, and Andrew Garfield – plastered all over American multiplexes in The Social Connection, but first coming to my attention last year in Red Riding Trilogy – embodies Tommy. Moreover, I’ve never seen such good casting of younger versions of movie characters. Isabel Meikle-Small as young Kathy looks like Mulligan – and has her facial expressions and movements down cold. Ella Purnell is immediately recognizable as the child who becomes Keira Knightly’s Ruth. And Charlie Rowe makes Tommy actually clearer than he is in the novel – just as Sally Hawkins does for Miss Lucy, the teacher who abruptly fired for explaining to the students at Hailsham what their lives will be and what they are for.

Hailsham is a secluded boarding school in the British countryside where, in the 1970s, we meet Kathy, Ruth and Tommy in what I presume to be the fifth or sixth grade. Charlotte Rampling is headmistress Miss Emily, presiding over the school’s regimen of keeping the children in serene isolation and optimally healthy while engaging them in an education that emphasizes the arts and sports. The arts, as they figure out years later, somehow comprise “verifiable proof” of their true natures. Kathy and Tommy decide that artistic production might be evidence they can truly love – they track down Miss Emily to seek deferrals of their own “donations” of body parts – whereas Miss Emily refines that stab in the dark to mean more precisely that they have souls. A teacher of mine once talked as hauntingly about the ancient cave paintings at Lescaux in this way: that at the moment those prehistoric cave dwellers picked up their charcoal and made images, they became human.

Word of mouth and a great deal of buzz have surely informed you that this is a love triangle of sorts: first it’s Tommy and the not-very-admirable Ruth, and then Kathy and Tommy, with the soon-deceased Ruth’s blessing. This occurs over three chapters roughly each a decade apart, in school, leaving the school to be stashed in some backwater cottages and imagine finding their “originals,” separate and some years later reunite briefly as one by one they “complete.” It is Kathy who’s left in the end, gazing into a field on a scrubby back road, her last voice-over an additional piece of dialogue not in the novel, in which she wonders – somewhat jarringly and redundantly, the very opposite of what Ishiguro accomplishes by withholding the word “clone” for so long – if she and the rest of us are not so different after all.

These performances are just superb and I will likely see this movie again. But the film has some flaws that explain complaints that it “fails to connect” and arise, ironically, from some effort to make this more “cinematic.” First, there is Rachel Portman’s overbearing and melodramatic score, so intrusive that it becomes distracting. We do not need a note of it, much less the Douglas Sirk-like deluge we get, to feel anguish in the presence of this story and these performances. Second, so much is pared away from the novel in order to emerge with a lean and action-laden, a less “interior,” plot, that I’m left wondering – as I wondered after “Garp” – whether I would like the movie if I had not read the book. That is, perfect casting or not, would the film be as rich, as emotionally intelligible, without already knowing the novel?

That is too late for me to answer. Ishiguro himself doesn’t mind. In fact, he’s long met regularly with his neighbor, Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplay, to talk over their work, and besides serving as the film’s executive producer, pronounced himself pleased with the script.

So Never Let Me Go is, I suppose, a murder mystery after all.

*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the October 21, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. “Never Let Me Go” screens for the second week at Manlius Art Cinema.

2010-10-22T05:15:00.003-04:00

SYRFILM Round-up: 7th Annual Syracuse International Film Festival

First, the Winners!

Last week I told you in my column "Make it Snappy" that Marek Najbrt's film Protektor (also the Czech official Oscar entry) was the best film in the festival. And on Sunday night, the SYRFILM judges agreed. Protektor took Best Fiction Feature Film, Best Actress (Jana Plodkova), Best Editor, Best Music, Best Screenplay. Syracuse native Mary Angiolillo, who now lives in Prague and teaches at the national film school there, FAMU, sent Protektor to SYRFILM.

Other award recipients were:
Best Experimental Film: Homewrecka by Joey Huertas (USA). Huertas has had a film entered in SYRFILM each of the festival’s seven years, and this documentary about domestic violence was the third win for him in this category.
Best Animation: Ariadne’s Thread by Bertóti Attila (Romania).
Special Judges Citation in Animation: Chameleon by Anna Rettberg (USA).
Best Central New York Film: Thicker Than Water by Bradley Rappa (USA), documentary.
Best Short Documentary: One Day Will be Once by Anca Miruna Lazarescu (Germany).
Director’s Special Citation for Short Documentary: Kayatsum by Grigor Harutyunyan (Armenia).
Best Short Fiction: Rosenhill by Johan Lundborg and Johan Storm (Sweden).
Special Judges’ Citation for Short Fiction: Pile-Up/Koccanás by Ferenc Török (Hungary).
Director’s Special Citation for Short Fiction: Requiem for Kosovo by Dhimiter Ismailaj (Albania).
Best Feature Documentary was awarded to two films: Long Distance by Amikam Goldberg (Israel) and The Two Escobars by Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist (Colombia/USA).
Judges’ Special Citation for Artistic Achievement in Feature Documentary: Queen of the Sun by Taggart Siegel (USA).
Best Cinematography in a Narrative Feature: Larry Smith for Bronson (UK) Best Actor: Tom Hardy in Bronson
Best Director: Nicholas Wending Refn for Bronson
Judges’ Special Citations: Sand by Rob Nilsson (USA) and To Catch a Billionaire by Tomas Vorel (Czech Republic).
Director’s Special Citations: Pizza with Bullets by Robert Rothbard (USA) and Touching Home by Logan and Noah Miller (USA).

SYRFILM occupied a new spot on the calendar this year, moving from late April to mid-October. Students, who have usually been scarce at a festival that ran during final exam week, were much more in evidence this year. SYRFILM also shortened its run to four and a half days, down from the previous gargantuan nine, and reduced local screening venues to four (The Palace in Eastwood, Redhouse Arts Center in Armory Square, Watson Theater on Syracuse University’s campus and Grewen Auditorium at LeMoyne College). But the festival also added four “satellite” venues in the out-lying communities of Hamilton, Rome, Geneva and Oswego. By Friday evening it was apparent that festival-goers liked this more relaxed schedule with fewer films, less rushing around the city and more chance to interact with one another. This year festival judges also escaped spending their days locked in a room watching one film after another until they were hollow-eyed; provided with screeners of the films in competition two months before the festival, they also relaxed, networked, and caught other films they usually wouldn’t have time for.

As one of those local arts organizations that saw its county budget totally cut the same week it opened for the seventh year, SYRFILM is used to reinventing itself and remains determined to make a go of it. Christine Fawcett Shapiro remains an integral part of the festival, but she’s retired as managing director and now focuses on outreach and development. Until the fate of managing director is determined – Syracuse University funds that position – KC Duggan has been interim managing director for this year’s fest. Duggan, a filmmaker herself who returned to Syracuse to do this job of nuts and bolts madness, is worth at least her weight in gold. If SYRFILM can’t find a way to keep her, she’ll be somebody else’s Genuine Find.

Both SYRFILM’s opening night (the screening of Pizza with Bullets and the presence of its star, Vincent Pastore, and director, Richard Rothbart) and closing night (besides the awards ceremony, the screening of two Ed Harris films, Touching Home and the still-lustrous Pollack, plus Harris himself) have had attention. Some of what happened in between – and whom – well, not so much. Here are just several thumbnails.

Javon Jackson Channels Alfred Hitchcock for The Lodger

Every year since its inception, SYRFILM has shown a classic silent film accompanied by a live jazz performance. While this has become increasingly popular nationwide in the last several years, it’s been a SYRFILM signature event that usually sells out. This year’s event was packed too, despite a freezing downpour and whipping, icy wind. But after all, such weather was appropriate to the 1927 tale of a serial murderer who preyed on young blondes in London’s foggy night streets. Lemoyne College and the Society for New Music co-sponsored this event, the latter finding some local musicians to fill in some of the seats for Los Angeles-based saxophonist Javon Jackson, who brought just the rhythm section – the drum, the bass and the piano players – of his octet.

Society for New Music also located local singer Bridget Moriarty, who got Jackson’s score a month before the screening and made do with a marathon rehearsal of four or five hours the day before. Jackson said after the performance that Moriarty “came in so meek and got behind the mic and turned into a maniac.”

That was Christine Fawcett Shapiro’s idea, the singing. As far as they know, the current crop of live jazz-silent classic screenings hasn’t included any choral component until now. Jackson, who calls her “my surrogate sister,” met Christine Fawcett Shapiro at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester during an event where he was a presenter. Both say they “immediately clicked.”

SYRFILM chose Hitchcock’s early thriller - the English master director director was in his 20s when he made it - as part of a focus on Hitchcock in collaboration with Syracuse Stage, which opens The 39 Steps this week, a comedy based on the Hitchcock film of the same name. The Lodger is available for instant streaming at Netflix, and that’s how Javon Jackson first watched it himself. He says it was a difficult commission.

“There are a lot of abrupt tempo changes in the score,” he said last Friday night after the screening and performance. “Unlike live performance, if we were recording, we’d just splice the pieces.”

Jackson said he started the score last February with a goal of finishing the score by July 15th and he made his deadline. “I’d go through and watch about ten minutes at a time and work on that. I went on two European tours while I was writing the score. The themes would just come as I watched and I actually saw a lot of humor in some parts. We’ve had a lot more diabolical characters since that time – Jason, for example. I wanted a balance between the music of Tin Pan Alley in the 1930s and 40s and jazz now. That great stride piano stuff at the end, that’s from the period of Tatum and Fats Waller.”

Jackson, who also talked with two Lemoyne classes during his visit here, will be back in Central New York on Tuesday, December 7th at SUNY Oswego, where he’ll do a musician’s clinic and a concert. His next tour takes him to New York City, Pittsburgh, points in California and Kansas City, and sometime in there a date in Albany at “the Egg” in the State Capital.

Haim Bouzaglou’s Session Premieres; Hotel Syracuse in the Works

On Friday eve the fest buzzed with more than Javon Jackson’s sizzling jazz performance. This year’s weird election doings even penetrated the fest; that day a State Assembly candidate’s mailer accused his opponent of enormous payoffs to the “special interests” of “Hollywood” while at the same time excessively taxing New Yorkers. This refers to tax incentives to attract film production to New York State, which has the second largest film and television industry in the nation. Most often such productions have very little to do with “Hollywood” studios but everything to do with indie productions and in the case of SYRFILM, a particular focus on attracting foreign filmmakers who wish to make their first American feature. SYRFILM has been at the forefront of efforts to attract such film productions upstate, where local talent and facilities and permit fees are all less expensive than those in New York City. Jerry Stoeffhaas of the Governor’s Office on Motion Picture and Television attended the entire conference. According to one recent study, in 2008 such productions paid $3.3 billion in wages directly to New Yorkers, before even mentioning other revenues generated by rents, purchases and use of New York-owned facilities. While such film production has long been centered in New York City, in recent years upstate cities and regions have actively developed packages to attract filmmakers. Visit www.nylovesfilm.com to learn more about upstate’s regional film offices.

Israeli filmmaker Haim Bouzaglou’s feature film Session, which premiered on Thursday night at the Palace Theatre, is one result of such efforts. With a score by Oscar-winning composer Jeff Beale – a result of the two meeting at last year’s festival – Bouzaglou’s film is now set to screen in Los Angeles, with a number of European festivals in the offing. Bouzaglou has been here before, both as a festival entrant and as a visiting professor at Syracuse University. Session, which he developed with SYRFILM’s Owen Shapiro, is part of a two-film project. The second film, Hotel Syracuse, has signed John Malkovich as the lead actor.

“We are aiming to shoot next summer at this point,” Bouzaglou told me Friday night. “While John’s schedule is hard to work around, he has also invested in this film and led me to others who support it.”

This includes the lead actress whom Bouzaglou said they would not reveal publicly until she had actually signed. Bouzaglou shoots his next film in France, which he says he’ll enjoy because, “I have a baby – well, four – and another child, and I can take them all with me to France.”

From Israeli Consulate to SYRFILM Judge

Herself from an Israeli family of filmmakers, Shani Hashnaviah‘s relationship with SYRFILM dates back several years. From early 2006 until late 2008 she worked with the Israeli Consulate in New York City as director of film promotion and outreach for the US and Canada. In this capacity she managed distribution of Israeli films in North America, Oscar campaigns, and interactions with film festivals and touring filmmakers. A documentary filmmaker herself, Hashnaviah left the Consulate to work full-time in her own new company, Phantasia Films, in film production, filmmaker event production, and lectures on Israeli cinema. Her talks include the history of Israeli cinema from the 1950s and teaching peace through Israeli documentaries. She returned to the festival this year as a judge in the categories of short fiction and feature documentary.

“Now I can see Syracuse!” she exclaimed, chatting on Saturday morning in her hotel lobby. “It was a great change - this year we got the competition films two months in advance. I could go back and watch one again and take my time. It’s a huge responsibility – I’m a filmmaker myself and the way a film is received early in your career can really affect you.”

The night before, Owen Shapiro had noted, “This festival is really a family. We have filmmakers and judges who come back a second and third time. Each year it expands a little and they bring someone else in. Our lifetime achievement winner from last year, Rob Nilsson, sent us another film this year called Sand, which I know you've seen. It's briiant, and he would be here himself except that he’s being honored this weekend at what’s really his home festival in Mill Valley, California. Last year Tom Bower and Robert Knott were here with the film Appaloosa and now each of them is back here – Tom’s chair of the honorary board, he had a role in Haim’s film Session, and he’s brought us Robert Young, this year’s lifetime achievement winner. Rob Edwards is one of the rising young Black screenwriters. He did Disney’s The Princess and the Frog . His son is at Cornell and he says he’s good to come back the next three years too. The three of them have done a three-day screen-writing seminar with SU film students – one of the students emailed us that those three days have been more useful to him than all his years of study. And filmmakers meet each other here – they create projects, they network, they stay in touch with each other and with us.”

Hashnaviah echoed that sentiment, saying that she considers many of the filmmkaers she worked with friends now. And as the festival wound to a close, she’d signed on with the West Coast folks to bring Robert M. Young’s film Human Error back to the screen. A FaceBook page has already followed and the “gang,” as Tom Bower calls them, is off and running.

Robert M. Young Awarded SYRFILM’s First Sophia for Lifetime Achievement

He’ll be 86 next month and he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, but at twenty past midnight in the Palace lobby, with a reception still expecting him, director Robert M. Young was patiently gracious with one festival-goer who wanted to register his opinion about whether the ending of Caught was the best one. Young had just received the first Sophia that SYRFILM awarded that evening. The new inscribed crystal sculpture uses the festival logo designed several years ago by the Italian master poster-maker Compaggi from his own painting of Sophia Loren, masked with a strip of celluloid. (Actually Young gets the second one; earlier Owen Shapiro had surprised his wife with her own Sophia for her service to the festival, though he’s still claiming that Christine “hoodwinked” him into starting SYRFILM in the first place).

Young’s debut feature was the 1964 Nothing But a Man with Ivan Dixon and Abby Lincoln. Netflix has a handful of his films and there are more online if you look. The festival screened four of Young’s films: the noirish 1996 Caught, based on Edward Pomerantz’ novel, a key episode of Battlestar Gallactica (both starring Edward James Olmos, often a lead in Young’s films and here to present the award to him as well as spend an afternoon with Latino youth on the West Side), the 2004 Human Error with Tom Bower and Robert Knott and – for the screenwriting seminar students – a 43-minute documentary made in Italy that is otherwise unavailable.

Said Olmos in presenting the award, “In one hundred years, people will be watching Robert Young’s films for their psychological truth, which is his trademark. In one hundred years people will still be watching Dominick and Eugene – they will not still be watching another film released the same year, also about two brothers, one of them autistic, Rain Man. And this is one of the most important film festivals that we have. I’ve been trying to get here for two or three years now. This is one of the few places you can see this kind of film.”

“I think Eddie loves me and that is why he’s so generous,” said Young in accepting the award. “I also want to mention my wife Lily and my brother Irwin, who are in teh audience, because both of them have lost a lot of money on me. And Tom Bower and Ursula, and Bobby Knott. How can you fail if you are surrounded with people who love you and are very talented and also very honest? I have tried to follow my heart.”

Young said the last time he’d seen Caught was several ago at another festival screening. “I never see a film I’ve made unless it’s at a screening like this,” he said. “I go back to the place I was when I made it and it can be very emotional for me if it doesn’t ring true now.”

Human Error, the story of a futuristic (or perhaps not so much) industrial plant producing toxic materials deep in a jungle and the toxic relationships that develop among the three white supervisors at the plant, premiered at Sundance in 2004 and had a short theatrical release in New York at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in the fall of 2005. But the film was quickly tied up in probate after that and just turned loose in time to screen it here. Tom Bower and Robert Knott and Xander Berkeley – the three stars – have in mind touring it again, to college campuses and galleries and museums.

“Distributors told us young people wouldn’t like this film,” said Bower. “But the students who came to the campus screening the other night got it! They were very receptive, and they understood it just fine. So we want it to get out there again.”

And as a post-script, my annual plea to the festival’s tee-shirt designers: please put the logo on the chest.

*******
A shorter version of this article appears in the October 21, 2010 print edition of The Eagle, a Syracuse weekly, where Make it Snappy is a regular column.

2010-10-08T23:36:00.004-04:00

Film Review #236: Mao’s Last Dancer
2009
Director: Bruce Beresford
Cast: Cao Chi, Joan Chen, Bruce Greenwood

In his weekly email bulletin to patrons of Manlius Art Cinema on the eastern outskirts of Syracuse, Nat Tobin announced on Monday that Get Low had done so well he was holding it over for a third week. Since Nat has stuck to a firm opening date of Friday the 15th for Never Let Me Go, that meant that the single week’s run he had scheduled for Australian director Bruce Berseford’s Mao’s Last Dancer just got squeezed out of the queue. Good news if you haven’t got around to Get Low yet – not so much if you put off a drive to see Mao’s Last Dancer so you could catch it here. That film ends today at Rochester’s Little Theatre, but it’s being held over again in Ithaca at Cinemapolis.

Furthermore, this Sunday the theatre hosts Cornell University Law School’s own nationally recognized immigration attorney, Steve Yale-Loehr, who leads a discussion after the 4:25 PM screening. As it happens, Yale-Loehr is old friends with Houston attorney Charles Foster, who won asylum for Li Cunxin in 1981 after the 19-year-old Chinese dancer, on a summer exchange program with the Houston Ballet from the Beijing Dance Academy, decided to defect so he could remain in the US.

Filmed in China, Australia and Houston, Bruce Beresford’s film is based on Li Cunxin’s best-selling 2003 autobiography of the same title. Portraying Li is Chi Cao, principal dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet in the north of England, who was himself trained first at Beijing Dance Academy and whose parents, both dorm directors there when Li was a student, remember the 11-year-old poor farm boy plucked from a remote Chinese peasant village’s freezing one-room school for dance training.

In 1981 Li Cunxin went to Houston as one of the first two visiting Chinese students finagled by the British dancer, choreographer and ballet director Ben Stevenson. Formerly a dancer with the British Royal Ballet, Stevenson directed the Houston Ballet from 1976 to 2004 (he now directs the Texas Ballet Theatre in Forth Worth). Also in 1976, China’s Mao Zedong died and his wife, the eccentric, doctrinairely literal and brutal Jiang Qing – aka “Madame Mao” – was denounced and imprisoned, creating an opening for some change. In 1978 Stevenson first went to China as part of a cultural exchange program and long returned almost annually to teach at the Beijing Dance Academy. Stevenson brought teachers of modern dance and jazz to China – for example, Gwen Verdon, and in the film Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) brings Gershwin’s music – and in 1985 helped create the Beijing Academy’s Choreography Department. Stevenson is the only foreigner to be named “honorary faculty” at that school.

We see only the tip of this lengthy and deeply significant relationship with the infrastructure of Chinese dance in Mao’s Last Dancer, though perhaps enough to account for Stevenson’s fury when Li Cunxin first admits he’s secretly married the young American dancer Elizabeth Mackey (played by the San Francisco Ballet’s Amanda Schull) and plans to defect, aided by several defiantly sympathetic Houston Ballet board members. “How could you be so selfish!” Stevenson demands at first of the young man whose name means “keep my innocent heart,” perhaps stung that all Li’s evenings at Kung Fu movies must’ve been something else, and adding that Li’s defection would “ruin all I have worked for.”

That moment occurs on-screen inside China’s Houston consulate, which briefly held Li Cunxin prisoner after the young man agreed to go inside to state his case, and quickly catches the attention of the international press, not to mention the drawling judge awakened from his night’s sleep by attorney Charles Foster (Kyle MacLachlan), the FBI and one Texan vice-president who negotiated Li’s release from Washington. In fact Stevenson got over his angst at Li’s defection, forged ahead and that relationship with Beijing dance endured, his long-range plans only briefly deflected. In July 1995 – in the film this is compressed to a short text scroll before the final credits that highlights Li Cunxin alone – Stevenson took the Houston Ballet on a two-week tour of China with performances in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The Houston Ballet was the first full American ballet company invited by the Chinese government to tour the country. The opening night performance of Stevenson’s production of Romeo and Juliet – Li Cunxin danced the lead – was broadcast live on television to over 500 million Chinese.

Li Cunxin danced with Houston Ballet for 16 years. Elizabeth Mackey left him to pursue her own dancing – though the credits thank her especially for her cooperation on the film – and in 1987 Li married Australian ballerina Mary McKendry (Australian Camilla Vergotis, who dances with the Hong Kong Ballet). Later in 1995 – after the China trip – they moved to Melbourne, where Li became principal dancer with the Australian Ballet. Now 49, Li makes his living as a stockbroker. The 2003 autobiography this film is based on stayed on that country’s best-seller list for a year and a half. So Li is a much appreciated figure is his adopted land. And despite the international cast and location shooting, this is very much an Australian film – director Beresford, screenwriter Jan Sardi and principal producer Jane Scott are all Australian, as are many in the production company and the film’s choreographers Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon.

Hence perhaps the unusually detailed sequences about how dancers learn their profession – I found myself so wanting to watch this film with a dance teacher to check out my intuitions there – and the undercurrent, since Australia has had its own racial tensions, of quiet pride in both this adopted son’s odyssey and success and Australia’s own growth. Hence also the patient affection with which Beresford draws Li’s village and family and his Chinese teachers. The great Chinese-born Joan Chen plays Li’s mother – coincidentally she too landed in the US in 1981 to begin an American career. Zhang Su is the gentle, non-doctrinaire teacher Chan, who reveres Russian ballet and, spotting young Li’s talent, gives the boy a VHS tape of Baryshnikov soaring across a stage after his defection. Thus when the performance scenes occur – Li’s sudden elevation in Houston, when the lead dancer strains a muscle, in Strauss’ Don Quixote, then later Swan Lake, and Stravinsky’s fiery Rite of Spring – they are both magnificent and coherent because they come out of a discernible process. And I defy you to come away from Li’s surprise reunion with his parents dry-eyed. For such moments was the word “unabashed” devised.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the Octber 7, 2010 issue of The Eagle weekly in Syracuse. “Mao’s Last Dancer” is held over another week at Cinemapolis, 120 Green St., Ithaca, 607.277.6115. Following this Sunday’s 4:25 PM screening, a discussion with Cornell University Law School professor Steve Yale-Loehr. Go to their website at cimemapolis.org for directions and screening schedule. Cinemapolis is located at the edge of Ithaca Commons, with tickets and popcorn both cheap enough to offset your gas from Syracuse.

2010-09-19T15:19:00.004-04:00

Film Review #235: The Town
2010
Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite

Quick: how many movies can you name that depict the crook’s decision to go straight after this one last job, one last run, one last fight or race? Sometimes he’s not the bad guy, but what he does is usually really dangerous and makes him a loner. Usually there is somebody in the story who’s not letting him go gently. Often some new connection that will be outside his grasp unless he does change has inspired this. Sometimes, he is even a she. Anyway, faulting Ben Affleck’s The Town for being “formulaic” is short-sighted and misses the point. Of course we know what’s coming. But we’re interested, again and again, in how it arrives, and in this titillating notion that one might, as Affleck’s Doug MacRay says gutturally, groping for words for this new idea, “make a change.” The Town opened in wide release last Friday and went right to first place at the box office, so apparently quite a few of us still wonder enough about this to pay the ever steeper ticket price.

The Town opens shortly after another similar film, Dutch director Anton Corbijn’s The American with George Clooney in the title role as the assassin Jack. Affleck began his later-in-life debut as director with Gone Baby Gone and The American is also Corbijn’s second feature film, following his formidable 2007 debut, Control, about the band Joy Division and their lead singer, Ian Curtis, who hung himself on the eve of the band’s big American break.

The American and The Town are radically different in some ways on the surface. Jack lives anonymously, traveling where he’s told by his Rome-based handler, his few incipient attachments a dangerous weakness. When attacked, he erupts with icy, unhesitating ferocity, chasing down and killing his enemies. Previously a photographer, Corbijn places Jack against vast landscapes – first a frozen Swedish lake beside a brooding forest and then the sparse Italian hill country – and proceeds to disrupt American expectations of this genre by long, patient, often largely quiet blocks of story. Granting Jack a lovely young woman who agrees to go away with him, Corbijn has Jack give her an instruction utterly out of character for its sheer logistical improbability – Jack’s nothing if not coolly strategic – when Jack tells her to meet him “by the river,” all for the sake of returning Jack to their private Eden for his last breath.

Clooney’s an absurd figure in a fragmented world where the center does not hold, but Affleck’s bank-robber Dougie MacRay is so rooted in his working-class Irish enclave that he can’t get free to turn around. Lifelong resident of Charlestown, just across the bridge from Boston proper, MacRay’s never been out of this metro area except for one ill-fated trip to hockey camp – he blew that picking fights – and trips to visit his father (Chris Cooper) in prison. No quiet, lingering pans of vast hillside in The Town – ough there are some sweeping pans of metro Boston - it’s fast and tight, fully urbanth, and fully orchestrated. Doug lives with fellow robber Jem (Jeremy Renner), whose family took him in as a kid after his mother disappeared, and Jem’s sister Krista (Blake Lively). Unlike Jack, Doug prefers not to kill, his reluctance framed against the constant menace of Jem’s jittery, tightly coiled violence. (Intriguingly, Jon Hamm’s special FBI agent is not far from Jem in his own edge of menace.) Both Jem and Krista expect Doug to stay – according to “the rules we grew up with,” says Jem – as does local boss Fergie (Irish actor Pete Postlethwaite).

Here is a point of overlap: Jack’s handler and Doug MacRay’s handler are equally business-minded and merciless. Another: Doug and his girl – the bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall), who’s kidnapped in the first robbery and stalked by Doug to the local laundromat, where romance ensues – also have a sort of Eden, though this time it’s a community garden. And then there’s the scene in each movie of the star doing his calisthenics – derided as vanity – but that comes right out of Luc Besson’s The Professional (1994), and surely before: the body as weapon, not temple.

You can make these lists all day – what we expect of any genre and how somebody making a movie goes against it. Even if The American does go off the rails, I still want to see what Corbijn does next and it’s nice to see Clooney try this stretch as an actor. But Affleck has a winner, populated with one terrific performance after another, all of them wrestling with whether we could change – and get away with it.

*******
This review appears in the September 23, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. Ben Affleck’s “The Town” is playing in wide release and so is Anton Corbijn’s “The American” with George Clooney.

2010-09-19T15:11:00.003-04:00

Film Review #234: Winter's Bone
2010
Director: Debra Granik
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser

“Oh, lord!” mutters the girl under her breath. She climbs out of the pick-up with a suddenly impatient sigh, using the same inflection as innumerable, usually much older women before her who have followed their men, their fathers, their sons – this one is her uncle – into some dive to haul them out. Once inside, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is already practiced at the right balance between deference – she locates him across the crowded, smokey room and stays far enough away that she’s not interrupting – and no-nonsense demand – one jerk of her head toward the door. Pausing a single beat to show he’s the one deciding, Teardrop (John Hawkes) follows her outside.

One of our best character actors, John Hawkes is easily matched in every scene they share by Kentucky native Jennifer Lawrence, about whom you’ll be hearing a lot and, if there’s any justice, part of that will include an Oscar nomination. Ree and Teardrop were supposed to be looking for her father, Jessup Dolly, who’s vanished, missing his court date. Teardrop doesn’t get much farther than she does. We never see Jessup, except in an old photo album snap with Ree’s mother, taken when they were kids themselves and Ree’s mother is almost unrecognizable as the vacant-eyed woman Ree now gently tends.

Jessup is a meth cooker, “known for,” as Ree tells a neighbor who tries to convince her Jessup burned up in a meth lab explosion, “knowing what he’s doing and not making any bad batches.” His disappearance has put his place – a rickety log cabin accessorized with a great deal of plastic and what must have been an expensive trampoline in the yard for the kids – along with his 100-year-old timberlands, at risk for bail forfeiture. At this point in the story where she retrieves Teardrop from the tavern, Ree is pretty sure her father’s dead, but she has to prove that in order to stave off the bail bondsman. Eventually she retrieves the proof from a fetid pond, with the help of a chainsaw and two crones right out of MacBeth.

Women grow old fast in the raggedy backwoods of southwestern Missouri, the region we know as the Ozarks. Ree has a little sister named Ashley Dawn, 6, and a 12-year-old brother named Sonny – like many of the cast, drawn from the local people during the on-location shoot – to whom she’s teaching survival skills equally. So they both learn how to shoot a gun, hunt squirrels and skin and gut them and make a stew. (This scene, in which Ree tells Sonny there are things he’ll have to get over when he balks at gutting the squirrel, nicely foreshadows what the two crones’ insist she must get over too.) But Ree’s friend Gail (Lauren Sweetser), who’s already got a baby and doesn’t ask her husband why when he won’t let her take the truck, tells Ree, “It’s different when you’re married.” Writer-director Debra Granik, who adopted this film from Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same title, avoids adding melodrama about how it is that Gail shows up with Baby Ned and the truck one day at Ree’s cabin, having left the husband and his head-banger music, but it’s easy to imagine there was some. Ree’s own single attempt to get away is demolished by a patient, practical Army recruiter who explains, in unusually knowing terms, that it will actually be braver for Ree to remain at home.

Lest we start thinking about the people in Winter’s Bone in terms overly mythic or picturesque, I should say that this film is as good a study as you’re likely to find of how come most kids into drugs most anyplace and right here in Syracuse too aren’t about to snitch, and how come whole communities remain implacably against the law’s perceived intrusion. When Teardrop tells Thump, a distantly-related patriarch – played by another non-actor who goes by the nickname “Stray Dog” and evidently got to wear his own biker vest for the part – that Jessup “went against our ways,” he’s not talking about Jessup’s illegal activities. And when Teardrop, in one of the final scenes, suddenly says he knows who killed his little brother, about the only people you don’t suspect – outside Jessup’s own household – are the musicians at a house-party Ree visits, who provide much of the film’s marvelous Ozark music.

Marideth Sisco, whose own busy summer festival schedule probably has rivaled the director’s, is the singer at this house-party with her band, the Davis Creek Rounders. Sisco also sings many of the songs in the film – “High on a Mountain,” “Farther Along,” “Fair and Tender Maidens,” “Missouri Waltz,” and “Teardrop’s Ballad: Bred and Buttered.” Twice Ree reminds the sheriff that she’s “a Dolly, bred and buttered,” indicating a depth of loyalty and identity that we learn as the tale unfolds can go either way.

******
This review appears in the September 9, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. “Winter’s Bone” opens at Manlius Art Cinema on Friday, September 10. Both the DVD and the soundtrack come out on October 26.

2010-09-19T14:52:00.003-04:00

Film Review #233: The Girl Who Played with Fire
2010
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Per Oscrasson

“I used to live in that city!” exclaimed one of my companions as Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) arrives in Göteborg on Sweden’s southwest coast, having driven the 250 miles or so from one side of the country – the capital city of Stockholm in the east – to the other through the night, in search of Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), who’s made the same journey a few hours ahead of him. “And I made that same drive every week I was there,” she added.

Most US audiences watching The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second of the Swedish screen versions of the late Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy novels, won’t have that advantage, or even know that the filmmakers actually shot the Göteborg scenes on location (even IMDB gets that wrong). But Swedish audiences will know that, especially those who actually live in and around Göteborg, where the film had a special screening at that city’s international film festival in January.

I mention this because there’s been some grumbling about this film and you should not let it keep you away. This installment retains key cast members – the remarkable Rapace as fugitive computer-hacker Salander and Nyqvist as Millennium magazine publisher Blomkvist; also Lena Endre as Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s editor-with-benefits, and Peter Andersson as Salander’s slimy legal guardian, Nils Bjurman – and also wisely kept on Jacob Groth to provide the understated but hugely effective, disturbing score. (A word about US-tailored promotion: the image on the movie poster appears nowhere in this film and the trailer’s generic thriller music may come from some movie but not this one.) But this film has switched directors (from the virtuoso Niels Arden Oplev to the more workman-like Daniel Alfredson) and cinematographers (from Jens Fischer and Erik Kress to Peter Mokrosinski, whose look is considerably more workmanlike and sometimes out of focus for no discernibly good reason). And you might spend some time objecting to both. But – proof of the pudding – this film is over two hours long, and I didn’t wonder once how soon we’d get there, especially during the rising dread of the second half.

In Played with Fire, crusading publisher Blomkvist hasn’t seen Salander for a year. (The first film ended with hints – a glimpse of her exiting an expensive car, dressed with uncharacteristic elegance, at some clearly exclusive tropical resort – though this new film neglects her sojourn there, which occupies a significant section of the novel, cutting to the chase of her Stockholm return.) Instead a breaking story about a sex-trafficking ring occupies Blomkvist, until the young couple who’ve researched that turn up executed and the police blame Salander. Sure that she’ll contact him, he sets about solving the murders and her connection, as his Millennium editorial staff set about finishing and publishing the story. Along the way – the reason for that cross-country dash – Salander finds her long-lost father (Georgi Staykov), determined to finish with an axe what she started as a child with a match and a gas can.

What carries this film is the intriguing, increasingly layered and unconventional relationship between Blomkvist and Salander (those in turn carried by wonderful lead performances – I particularly recommend Rapace’s extended scene of reunion with her father). In a story about how we know the truth about anyone else, it’s worth thinking about how they have come to utterly trust one another. They don’t physically share a single scene until the end, but the film extends their virtual relationship with convincing immediacy; in one scene Salander turns off a door alarm with three seconds to go – watching Blomkvist remotely on a security camera – from the other side of Sweden. And amidst much deeply sordid behavior, Blomkvist isn’t the only good man here; there’s the young free-lancer Dag, Salander’s old advocate Holger Palmgren (Per Oscarsson, from the 1966 classic Hunger), and a promising cop named Bublanski. I’m more than ready to see where #3 goes.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo packed Manlius Cinema in April. Nat Tobin is pretty sure he’ll keep Played with Fire around a couple weeks anyway, and reminded Friday night’s crowd that the finale – The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – has a mid-October US release. He’s also arranged for a one-time screening at 6:30 p.m. next Tuesday, the 31st, of the documentary Millennium, about the book-to-movie project with Larsson’s novels. That screens at Manlius Library (in the Village Center plaza, past Little Cesar’s Pizza).

*******
This review appears in the August 26, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. “The Girl Who Played with Fire” is screening locally at Manlius Art Cinema. Next Tuesday, August 31st, at 6:30 p.m. you can also see the documentary “Millennium,” about Steig Larson and the Millennium Trilogy novels, at Manlius Library.

2010-08-08T15:08:00.004-04:00

Film Review #232: The Kids Are All Right
2010
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Cast: Annette Bening, Julainne Moore, Mark Ruffalo

At long last her good manners have snapped, but her dignity has never been more intact. Striding to the front door from the supper table in a way that makes you breathe, “Uh-oh!” – I remember my grandmother was able to do this too – Nic (Annette Bening) comes up behind her 15-year-old son Laser (Josh Hutcheson) to have a word with his father. Actually Paul (Mark Ruffalo) was the sperm donor of Laser and his older sister Joni (Mia Wasikowska), and has come belatedly into their lives during that transitional summer between Joni’s high school graduation and departure to college. Just as Joni needs to pull away a bit from her family, Laser has convinced her to seek out their common dad, who runs a local eatery supplied by his own garden and seems to have his pick of the women staffing both.

“…Well, this is not your family,” concludes Nic, just before slamming that door in Paul’s face. “This is my family. If you want a family, go make your own.”

Filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko has said of Nic – older partner of Jules (Julianne Moore), family breadwinner, OB-GYN physician, guardian of shaping the children’s social graces, who has endured much from the genial, shambling Paul as has everyone in her household – that “she’s a bit of a mama bear.” This is not clear earlier in the film or even for quite some way into the story, not before the quite remarkable dinner scene in which Nic first wills herself to see what about this man her partner and kids find so appealing, reveals her own tender side – they both love the vintage album Blue by Joni Mitchell, Nic’s daughter’s namesake – and then discerns from Paul’s bathroom the betrayal a lover would grasp in a flash.

Cholodenko has been nursing this film project since 2005, when Julianne Moore, for whom she wrote the part of Jules, was already on board. Cholodenko was delayed in making the film and meanwhile she and her partner had a sperm-donor child of their own, an experience she attests sharpened the final script as well as her direction of its singular performances. It may also sharpen your experience of this film to realize that since the film’s wide release on July 23rd, a California court has struck down that state’s ban on gay marriage – put in place by voter referendum in 2008 as Proposition 8.

The film takes it name, of course, from “The Kids Are All Right,” the Pete Townshend song that first appeared on The Who’s 1965 album My Generation and has become an enduring, often-recorded anthem of successive decades asserting that the young folks are turning out just fine, thank you. Cholodenko has the same answer for those worrying about children growing up in gay unions, and in doing so avoids the legalistic “balanced argument” pitfall that is so deadly when it shows up in fiction. Cholodenko does this with a terrific script, terrific performances – there is not a slouch among them, even in very minor characters – and the strategy to frame the “issue” initially as a comedy of manners.

Instead of creating characters as mouthpieces for opposing positions, The Kids presents real and memorable people doing the best they can, which often falls short of what any of us would hope. Cholodenko systematically explores each character’s experience and point of view for a few scenes and then quietly shifts to the next. This is risky; to see why Jules and the kids and Paul find Nic overbearing and fussy and a little comical, we have to see her as – well, overbearing and fussy and a little comical. The reversal has to be, as in the dinner scene, pitch perfect – or Nic becomes merely lugubrious and we feel jerked around by a filmmaker who can’t decide on or manage her tone.

Reversals and misunderstandings among the earnest are the stuff of farce too, and this is a very funny movie, often at the expense of people behaving in the ways they think are proper and expected. But it’s not just a device that, for example, Nic insists the kids learn to write timely thank-you notes – of such details one builds the social freedom to navigate far and wide, to engage in respectful relationships, to be courteous when you don’t feel like it but know you must, to build a life one chooses. Marriage is hard, as Jules says late in the day, and I join those who find this the best and most knowing movie about that in a long time.

*******
This review appears in the August 12, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse "Eagle" weekly and also in the A&E section of Eagle Newspapers' online site, www.cnylink.com. “The Kids Are All Right” is screening locally at Manlius Art Cinema and Carousel Regal Cinemas.

2010-07-25T20:37:00.003-04:00

Film Review #231: Salt
2010
Director: Phillip Noyce
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor

It’s true that Angelina Jolie’s fugitive spy Evelyn Salt will remind you of Jason Bourne’s sheer full-tilt physical courage and propensity to throw himself off high places. And if you caught the third installment, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), you’ll be able to see Salt’s nighttime leap from the helicopter into an icy Potomac coming – though Salt director Phillip Noyce doesn’t repeat that mesmerizing shot from below Bourne’s still body when, stunned and drifting, back-lit by some light far above, he suddenly jerks to life, making of New York’s freezing East River a place of re-birth for this man with no identity. What Salt won’t remind you of is Tom Cruise, originally destined for the part.

Many readers know – as I write this, Salt battles Inception for box-office first place – that Evelyn Salt is a CIA operative whom a “walk-in” Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) accuses, as she interrogates him, of being a Russian infiltrator set to assassinate Russia’s current president when he gives the eulogy at the funeral of the US vice-president in Manhattan. The two men had engineered a major thaw between their nations. Orlov’s claim turns on a decades-old, Cold War-era plot to train a vast, fanatic, unbreakable team of Russians from birth to pass as ordinary folk until “Day X.” To leap ahead, the plan also involves hi-jacking the US nuclear codes to launch strikes on Tehran and Mecca so that Muslims will be provoked to finish destroying the US.

Well, Salt is a double agent, though what she’ll do with that, and why, and what the set-up really is, provide the pull here. Jolie has said that re-writing the part for a woman was tricky. For example, this character wouldn’t have a child because a mother wouldn’t so endanger her child. But Salt has a husband, Mike (August Diehl), a spider researcher, a gentler, more retiring type than we expect for Jolie’s partner, so her fear is for his safety. All of Salt’s relationships are with men – except for the little girl who agrees to look after Salt’s Toto-like dog when she first goes on the run – and none of them is quite Atticus Finch, so next time I’d like another woman in the mix. The excellent actors Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor play, respectively, her laid-back superior Ted Winter and the more aggressive, suspicious counter-intelligence agent Peabody, who see-saw over how to contain her. Only once, as a last resort, does Salt use her feminine wiles and for a minute you’re not sure she doesn’t mean it.

Go back further than Bourne to Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and you grasp better what Jolie has done here. Of course, it’s scarcely possible to imagine a host of women’s film roles without that Ripley ancestor, especially in that quartet’s second film, Aliens, directed by James Cameron in 1986. Believe me, some fans can recite much of the dialogue from repeated watchings of Aliens. There’s the time when the gutsy soldier Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) plunges down a tunnel to certain death with the line, “Let’s rock and roll!” Or the exhilarating moment when Ripley, clad in her giant forklift – a.k.a. the “exo-suit cargo loader” – faces down the mother monster to protect the orphan Newt. Right before you see this, Ripley utters the line, “Leave her alone, you bitch!” Cameron brought unmistakable echoes of Vasquez and Ripley to last year’s Avatar, casting Weaver as his chain-smoking ecologist and finding a Vasquez look-alike in Michelle Rodriguez as his rebel helicopter pilot.

All of these stories of action heroes involving clandestine loyalties, espionage and empire riff on images of death of self, resurrection, birthrights and lost identities that shuttle between the rootless orphan and the disguised, unknowing lost heir. By adding the mind-bending factor of a woman hero, the Alien films took these images to sci-fi extremes, first with the acid-dripping mother monster and her brood of offspring implanted in the chests of human hosts, then further with the cloning rebirth of Ripley and her own discovery of her various trans-species selves.

Political spy yarns like Salt really run on a parallel track, especially in the past decade. It’s unsurprising that such films aren’t concerned with literal plot credibility, and unsurprising that the subject of a Russian menace returns when it provides that resonant image of “Mother Russia.” You can enjoy Salt for its accomplished brute spectacle alone. Salt also offers performances and ideas about the ways we have gotten lost that will linger.

*******
“Salt” opened nationwide last Friday and is now on multiple local screens. This review appears in the July 29, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse "Eagle" weekly.

2010-07-08T13:25:00.004-04:00

Catalina Saavedra in the title role as Raquel. Photo: Elephant Eye Pictures.

Film Review #230: The Maid/ La Nana
2009/DVD 2010
Director: Sebastiàn Silva
Cast: Catalina Saavedra, Claudia Celedón, Mariana Loyola

How different the second surprise birthday party is! Sebastiàn Silva’s The Maid opens with a profoundly reluctant Raquel, just turned 41, refusing to come out of the kitchen for the lit cake and presents she knows await in her employers’ dining room after supper. After all, she has been with the Valdez family for 23 years, since before the birth of the oldest, Camila (Andrea García-Huidobros). Mundo, the father (Alejandro Goìc), furiously rings the hand bell they use to summon her – “Can’t we move this along?” he asks, impatient to get back to his ship model-building – and the mother, Pilar (Claudia Celedón), sends Raquel’s favorite among the four children, Lucas (Augustín Silva), to fetch her. He decides, and reports back to the table, that she is “too embarrassed.” Eventually drawn into the moment when the family bursts out with cheers and applause – presumably this beneficent ritual surprise occurs annually like clockwork – Raquel reacts with an equal mixture of pleasure and resentment. This turns into ammunition later when she cuts short a call from her own mother, saying, “I have to go – we are celebrating with the family!” She savors this especially since she thinks she’s just fended off Pilar’s suggestion to hire a second maid to help her.

Near to the film’s end comes the second surprise party, which Raquel herself has organized for that second maid, Lucy (Mariana Loyola). Bestowing a genuine surprise out of real though unexpected affection, Raquel turns the format she’s endured from the Valdezes into a moment of enthusiasm everyone shares. Like the first party, this one is also followed by an unwelcome announcement: Lucy has decided to leave and return to her family. Raquel is bereft. There’s been quite a lot of water, as they say, under the bridge.

The Maid is set in Santiago, Chile, in the filmmaker’s own parents’ gated compound where, he informs us before the end credits by way of an old family photo, there once really had been two maids named Raquel and Lucy and a favorite son who was an acute observer of domestic relations. The boy Lucas – played by Silva’s son – is in part so appealing because we feel Silva means him as a sort of self-portrait and, while the boy empathetically describes Raquel as “embarrassed,” Silva’s willing to recall his younger self as equally so. One of the running comic threads here is Raquel’s almost daily task of washing the 12-year-old’s sheets and pajamas. When she finally complains to Pilar about this extra work, the boy’s mother chastises him about masturbation. Stiff-faced and mortified, Lucas marches outside to find Raquel – Silva drolly has her watering the lawn with a hose for this scene – where he delivers a single explosive word, “Thanks!”

There are other moments that explore the spectrum of gratitude in this film where what’s given and owed is sometimes so ambiguous and class boundaries can be so abruptly declared in small ways. Determined to defend her corner of the universe against encroachment, Raquel – prone to headaches, dizzy spells, fits of stiff-faced rage and some emerging mental instability – sent two second maids packing before Lucy, one a gentle girl, the other a battle-ax. But Lucy disarms Raquel – intriguingly she wonders what the Valdez family has “done to” Raquel – with humor, kindness, an invitation home for Christmas, the promise that she “won’t be here forever.”

Astute, witty and blessed by excellent performances, The Maid is the second film made by Silva and his writing partner, Pedro Peirano. Premiered at Sundance in early 2009, it took a special jury award and won Saavedra the best actress prize. Released here theatrically last October, The Maid earned some acclaim – the National Board of Review named it among the five best foreign language films of 2009 and Saavedra was nominated for a number of year-end awards – but fell short of the Oscars. These days, not making that cut halts marketing efforts for most foreign films, and may make the difference in whether one-screen indie movie houses like Manlius can feasibly book a title. But two weeks ago Oscilloscope released the DVD.

Claudio Celedón worked with Silva and Peirano on their 2007 debut film; the three, along with Saavedra, reunite for the just-completed Old Cats, due out later this year. The ensemble is a taste you’ll want to acquire sooner rather than later.

*******
This review appears in the July 7, 2010 print issue of “The Eagle” in Syracuse, New York, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column. “The Maid” on DVD is available at Netflix, Video on Demand and rental stores.

2010-07-05T10:54:00.003-04:00

Photo © Ellen M. Blalock, used with permission.

Film Review #229: Beyond Boundaries in Ghana
2010
Director: Ellen Blalock
Cast: Beyond Boundaries members and residents of Ghana

In the last moments of one of the most powerful sequences of Ellen Blalock’s new film, Beyond Boundaries in Ghana, two small children play on the massive white-washed ramparts of the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana, West Africa, even dancing a bit to some music in the air, it seems, though that music has been on the soundtrack, cutting back and forth with the sound of the immensely deep ocean waves washing unceasingly over the rocks below. What has been a fairly straight-forward documentary until this sequence – the chronicle of the 2006 visit to northern Ghana by the Syracuse-based organization for cultural exchange, Beyond Boundaries, whose group stops in Cape Coast on their way back to the States – catches you unawares in something less contained, soaring well beyond the journalistic. Overlaid images that suggest recollection, dream and the presence of ghosts, dark passageways into dungeons, the reactions of these travelers once they step foot onto this actual site of the Atlantic slave trade, and glimpses of the churning, unchained ocean visible just past the gunner’s slits in the castle wall – all these combine in an intense metaphor of revelation over what this trip means and what endures long past the castle’s eventual crumbling.

After the premiere screening finished last Sunday afternoon at ArtRage Gallery, the photographer Marjory Wilkins, who had raptly occupied a front row seat, declared, "This needs to be shown in the schools! Children need to see where they come from and that they come from something!"

Blalock is a multimedia artist and this is her first feature-length film. Besides her professional photojournalism and short profile videography for the local daily Post-Standard, she is a painter, portraitist and quilt-maker of note who has exhibited in galleries and been a university-level teaching artist in residence a number of times. Coming in at just over 41 minutes, Beyond Boundaries in Ghana is a confident and winning work. Blalock edits with grace and precision, catches exactly the telling comment and moment, and shuttles with ease between narrative and metaphor.

Every four years or so Beyond Boundaries makes another trip to Bolgatanga – an abbreviated version is scheduled for later this year – the community in northern Ghana they visited first in 1994. Beyond Boundaries was founded by local activists Mardea Warner (who was born and raised in Liberia) and Aggie Lane, devoted to providing cross-cultural experiences and creating lasting partnerships with the communities they visit that support women’s health and financial independence and the idea that all children should be in school. In the beginning, says Warner, they were clear they wanted to contribute more than, say, building a school and leaving – instead, they wanted, says Warner, to “bridge the gap between all those divisions in our lives.” They have also made trips to Native American communities such as Pine Ridge out west, to Canada and to the Gullah community in the Sea Islands off the Carolinas. They hope future trips will include Puerto Rico and – Mardea Warner walked from the front of the room at ArtRage, when this film premiered last Sunday afternoon there, to a wooden door and rapped on it – “Knock on wood,” she said - “eventually to Cuba.”

But the Ghana connection has remained special, and in 2006 Blalock went along to document that trip. Fellow travelers included journalist and musician Jacque “Kofi” Thomas, speech pathologist Stephanie Cross and her daughter Alex (Cross said this was a 50th-birthday present to herself and a 13th-birthday present to Alex, who rates it in the film as far better than a more conventional present like a new iPod), special education Pre-K teacher Valeria Escoffery, and occupational therapist Barbara Flock. The group hires a van and drivers – Gordon Akon-Yamga has been their “chief navigator” since the year 2000 – and they travel and eat as Ghanaians would on a similar trip, landing first in the capital city of Accra and passing through the city of Kumasi on the 450-plus mile trip to Bolgatanga in the northern corner. It is not, deadpans Mardea Warner, your typical Club Med experience.

In Bolgatanga the group meets with partners from local organizations. CENSUDI (Center for Sustainable Development Initiatives) was created by sisters Franciska and Mary Margaret Issaka, whose work includes educational initiatives. Mary Margaret Issaka says on screen of Beyond Boundaries, “We see them as our brothers and sisters. When they came here” – this would be about 1998 – “we just melted into each other. For us, that is equally important as any resources we get from the group.”

Stella Abagre of the Single Mothers Association, which is now training 259 women to process and sell rice and provide feeding programs in schools as well as marketing the distinctively styled woven “Bolga” baskets, says, “Beyond Boundaries was the very first friends we made.”

They also visit the Sirigu Women’s Organization of Art and Pottery, geological formations, a crocodile pond, the Mole National Park and, on the way back through Kumasi, the huge open-air market, the Manhyia Palace Museum of Ashanti kings and queens, and further on, the suspension bridges through the tree-tops of Kakum National Park, before they make their detour to Cape Coast. But the sum of the trip - and the film - is more than its parts. Escoffery noted that she now experiences Africa as her home, and the musician Thomas commented, "I was not born in Africa, but Africa is born in me. Now I know people there, I have seen the land, and it's more real."

ArtRage Gallery on Hawley Avenue has been quietly building itself a solid track record for screening good film right along with exhibiting visual art and photo. Besides the film program curated there by Jeff Gorney ArtRage has hosted a number of notable premieres by local filmmakers. This one took advantage of the wonderful photo show of work by Mima Cataldo and Ruth Putter, Images of Resistance, that had had its opening reception the night before. Blalock says the film will be shown again, and she’s making DVD copies available.

*******
A version of this review appeared in the June 17, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle and also on the Eagle Newspapers website, www.cnylink.com - click A&E.

2010-06-14T16:15:00.004-04:00

Review #228: Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and The Tangerine
2008/DVD 2009
Directors: Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach
Cast: Louise Bourgeois, Gerry Gorovoy, Deborah Wye

When French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois died after a heart attack in New York City on June 1st, obituary writers were clearly ready. After all, she was 98 years old. (Born on Christmas in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois had her first solo show – twelve paintings – in 1945.) Even so, her last exhibition – Fabric Works, sculptures of her signature spiders woven from ribbons – opened four days later (last Friday) in the Italian city of Venice at the Fondazione Vedova. Last summer Bourgeois was also inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in nearby Seneca Falls (along with noted local feminist attorney Karen DeCrow), and in 2009 she also enjoyed a retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC.

Bourgeois’ death might now hasten Netflix to stop dawdling and add the wonderful documentary about her by filmmaker Marion Cajori and art historian Amei Wallach, which has been out on DVD for the past year. Cajori, who died in 2006 before the film’s completion, also made well-respected films about the artists Joan Mitchell and Chuck Close. Wallach was able to finish the film in time to premiere in New York City in June 2008, two days before the opening of a full-career retrospective of Bourgeois’ work at the Guggenheim.

This film was made over fourteen years, assembled from some 190 interviews, vintage footage and photographs, and more recent interviews with Bourgeois’ long-time assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, and her middle son, Jean-Louis. There are also key curators and commentators, all of whom have themselves published work on Bourgeois, as has Gorovoy himself. Carlotta Kotik was curator of the US Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, where Bourgeois was the first woman to represent to US with her room – she called them “cells” – housing the arresting Arch of Hysteria sculpture, a woman's legs and torso bent backward in spasm. Writer and curator Robert Storr, former dean of the Yale School of Art, knew Bourgeois well before her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater (who pioneered our understanding of primitive art, took Bourgeois out of war-time France and introduced her to the Manhattan art scene on the 1940s that included Peggy Guggenheim, exiled French Surrealists whom she did not like and later, Abstract Expressionists, whom she did, and dealers such as Leo Castelli, himself now the subject of a new biography). Deborah Wye met Bourgeois in 1976 and, as chief curator of prints at MoMA New York, engineered the first major retrospective by a woman - Bourgeois - at MoMA; this was in 1982, when Bourgeois was 71 years old. Frances Morris was curator at the Tate Modern in London when, for its inaugural exhibition at the turn of the Millennium, that museum unveiled Bourgeois’ massive, mirror-hung three-tower installation, I Do/I Und0/I Redo.

I Do/I Undo/I Redo in fact serves to title each of the three chapters of the film, and it’s especially satisfying, after this has been used to structure the story, that the film winds up with a detailed section that documents the installation and opening of that work at the Tate Modern. This illustrates a certain trust the filmmakers have in their audience, who may or may not be familiar with this installation or the artist herself - chronicler of the body's vulnerability, memory, the family's abandonment and reconciliation, equally at home in the representational and the abstract - and an approach to making a film about an artist that gets on with its exploration without too pedestrian a recitation of the facts and figures. The film has often been criticized for assuming too great a knowledge of Bourgeois’ life and work on the part of the viewer and, particularly by Eleanor Baden of the Feminist Review, for including far too little on Bourgeois’ views on feminism, marriage and motherhood (she and Goldwater had three sons).

On the contrary, I found the balance just right. There is plenty here about her views on all these issues – albeit through the art itself rather than through literal pronouncements – if one cares to pay attention. The film’s title refers to Bourgeois’ signature giant spider sculptures, which she called her Maman or mother pieces (the family business was embroidery and tapestry restoration and her mother was a master weaver); to her father’s live-in mistress Sadie, ostensibly the governess; and to the humiliating, sexually-charged Sunday dinner game her father played in front of guests involving the skin of a tangerine. All have their explanations in due time.

And all exemplify the dilemna of balancing biography with aesthetic standards of judgement. Both Robert Storr and Jerry Gorovoy discuss, for example, the first time that “the mistress story really came out,” in an exhibition that included old family photos, and Bourgeois’ subsequent regret at revealing this bit of biography. Says Gorovoy in the film, “She decided telling the story of the mistress was a mistake, because people used that to interpret the work. And that’s crazy. The work is much more complex than that.”

Set this next to Bourgeois’ own resonant, multi-layered observations about having met Constantin Brancusi, observing that when he became very old and could not longer lift enormous, heavy pieces of wood, “this was his changing time” as an artist. There’s a voice-over of Bourgeois that plays over old footage of the scaffolding needed for the erection of Brancusi’s iconic 1937 sculpture Endless Column, in which she wonders if he knew that the pillar is a mother image and that “when you’re angry at the mother you cut it in pieces.” Or compare it to Bourgeois’ own recollection of how come she couldn’t stand most of the exiled French Surrealist “father figures.”

Feminists want to claim Bourgeois. In fact in 1992 they protested that the Guggenheim Soho’s planned inaugural exhibition was “four white boys” and got Bourgeois added in a show re-titled From Brancusi to Bourgeois. There’s a 2007 clip of a couple of the Guerilla Gurlz recalling that and proclaiming, “She’s our icon, whether she likes it or not!”

Bourgeois didn't like it, but - gun-shy of the literal - she may have resisted any declared allegiance as too constricting. Wye tells the story that even Bourgeois' dealer wasn't certain how much work she had and how Bourgeois showed Wye a cellar-full of sculptures but abruptly shut the light off with the remark, "I've showed you too much."

Certainly Bourgeois experienced a resurgence of work and new attention after her husband died in 1973 and she returned to making art (buying a studio in Brooklyn in 1980 allowed the larger work to unfold) that also coincided with convergence of a number of trends in the 70s and 80s. Both Gorovoy and Wye speak incisively about this time – the waning of formalist standards in the judgment of art and the rise of protest art, women’s consciousness, and the opening up of what art could be – and how it supported Bourgeois’ own later flowering.

Cranky and difficult and sometimes self-destructive – her intimates are clear she was challenging – Bourgeois yet consistently understood that a too-literal correlation of her work with her biography would prove reductive. The filmmakers understand that too – magnificently.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the June 10, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle on page 12. “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” is readily and reasonably available online at Amazon.com and other sites, but you can encourage Netflix by adding it to your “Save” queue. You can also watch online PBS’ “Art 21” segment on Identity (from 2001), which features Bourgeois and four other artists.

2010-05-29T11:45:00.004-04:00

Film Review #227: The Secret in Their Eyes
2009
Director: Juan José Campanella
Cast: Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Guillermo Francella

Thanks to starring in this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film, Ricardo Darín, one of Argentina’s most successful and well-regarded actors, may finally get the attention here that he deserves. Only a handful of his films have been available in the US. Notably he played the lead in Fabián Bielinsky’s only two films before that Argentine’s director’s untimely death in 2006 – as the double-crossing master crook Marcos in Nine Queens (2000), a deeply pleasurable whiplash of a tale about a scam involving counterfeit stamps whose images provide the film’s title; and then as the amateur taxidermist from the city, Esteban, out of his depth in more ways than one in the remote countryside, whose epilepsy provides the title for The Aura (2005). In 2001, Darín also starred in Juan José Campanella’s comedy, The Son of the Bride. The first two are available at Netflix and the Campanella is slated for US DVD release, also thanks to this year’s Oscars.

In Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes/ El secreto de sus ojos, Darín rejoins that writer-director and heads a fine ensemble cast as Benjamin Espósito, both a retired police investigator trying to make sense, in the year 2000, of the Morales case, a vicious rape and murder that occurred almost a quarter century before, and in flashback as Espósito’s younger self in 1974 Argentina as the nation descended into what would become its Right-wing “dirty war.” Darín is now in his 60s, but has the sort of face and carriage that make him easily believable as the younger man with darker hair and a full beard, in the flashback sequences. The same is true of the excellently matched lead actress, Soledad Villamil, who plays the aristocratic Irene Menéndez-Hastings, both as a young Cornell-educated lawyer who joins the prosecutor’s office as a law clerk and supervises Espósito, and as the older, successful judge whom Espósito contacts again in the new century.

The film’s ensemble is rounded out with these principals: famed Argentine stage comic Guillermo Francella, making a rare foray on-screen as Pablo Sandoval, Espósito’s prodigiously alcoholic and fiercely loyal investigative partner; Pablo Rago as Ricardo Morales, the mild-mannered bank clerk whose only passion was his young wife; Javier Godino as Isidoro Gómez, soccer enthusiast, useful petty henchman and the murderer; and José Luis Gioia as the corrupt Inspector Báez.

Cold case procedurals that uncover the marriage between thuggish domestic or private-sector behavior and Right-wing politics have abounded recently – Britain’s Red Riding Trilogy, Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, France’s Une Prophete, and of course The White Ribbon from Austria’s Michael Haneke. The last two of these competed with The Secret in Their Eyes for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and played recently at Manlius Art Cinema, where the Campanella film opened last Friday for a two-week run. Despite some of Haneke’s earlier accomplishments, The White Ribbon fell short for me and I thought there were some serious problems with its editing, particularly in one scene that even had me wondering if Manlius might’ve had a damaged print. But Une Prophete was way better than I anticipated, so Secret had a lot to live up to for me.

What all these films have in common in their use of a particular genre type as scaffold is, first, a mastery of the elements of that type that raise these films beyond good pulp entertainment – it should come as no surprise that Campanella has directed a bunch of US television dramas, including 17 episodes over the past decade of Law and Order – and second, a treatment of character that radically shifts them out of the plot-driven mode to something else. This is why one properly starts with a look at the cast of characters in The Secret in Their Eyes rather than the working out of the plot twists – while there’s a real doozy at the end too, as breath-stopping for the audience as it clearly is for Espósito – and how come it matters what particular traits the actors possess.

Not that Campanella doesn’t give us an elegantly, deftly handled plot. As book reviewer Maureen Corrigan reminds us so well about really good mysteries, their working out is really about thinking – thinking is all its both-brained glory that weds logic and intuition. And the method here is immersion followed by the sudden insight – the “research,” if you will, is qualitative, asking what the evidence will give up, rather than proceeding from a preconceived abstraction that one sets out to prove. This is vastly enjoyable to partake of an audience member.

It also merges with the aesthetic working out of stories – thus does Esposito, in his retirement, return to this case as a novel he means to write, imagining his way to the answers. And in flashback, thus does Espósito discover his suspect from a string of reappearances in old photos and Sandoval alight upon Gómez’s passion for soccer and thus the place to find him. (Last Friday Manlius Art Cinema’s Nat Tobin remarked, “I still don’t know how they filmed the chase in the soccer stadium,” something he shares with more than one fan of the film.) Thus Sandoval’s sudden insight that the assassins who kill him don’t know what Espósito looks like – Espósito figures out what must have happened 24 years later himself, illuminating one puzzling detail about the murder scene. Thus does Irene sadly call Espósito a “dummy” when he fails to see what he feels for her she has always returned. This is why they need to say so little in the final scene.

And like the other cold case procedurals above, Secret has a strong feminist strain. When Gómez resists Esposito’s interrogation, it’s Irene who breaks him down, playing on his outsized machismo and resentful entitlement. This is a fairly extreme scene, shocking to Espósito and perhaps to us, but lays the groundwork for how a character like Irene has the savvy to survive the “dirty war” above and beyond the protection of her wealthy family (it’s likely her father was an American who’s married into an old Argentine family, and she sends Espósito to a distant province – once Gomez is on the loose again and a danger to him – where she says her cousins rule “like feudal lords.”). Their nemesis, Inspector Báez, the one who releases the convicted Gómez because he makes a good thug and informer, understands he can’t touch her.

All of this unspools from the discovery of the body in the Morales case and the long moments that Espósito takes this in, because of the kind of man he proves to be and the affront to the very core of his being that this crime is – not because the director “aestheticized violence” by the artful arrangement of the body, as some have claimed – a scene of mournful taking-in that is echoed near the film’s end by Esposito’s visit to Morales’ on the ex-banker clerk’s distant farm.

*******
The Secret in Their Eyes runs through next Thursday, June 3rd, at Manlius Art Cinema. Re-printed here from the Syracuse City Eagle web version, published on 5/27/2010 at www.cnylink.com - click A&E.

2010-05-19T10:45:00.004-04:00

Film Review #226: The Messenger
2009/DVD 2010
Director: Oren Moverman
Cast: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton

“I’m not gonna be giving any hugs,” Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) assures Capt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), in a tight, careful voice. Sent home from Iraq after a combat injury, Montgomery lands in Fort Dix, New Jersey, where the Army finds something for him to do in the last few months of his hitch. Stone, an older career soldier and veteran of the first Persian Gulf War, has been briefing him on proper deportment with the “N.O.K.” – next-of-kin – during a Casualty Notification call. There’s a manual that covers every eventuality in excruciating detail, which Stone goes through with the younger man over diner coffee, demanding twice that Montgomery look him in the eye when he answers.

Always tethered to beepers, Montgomery and Stone are racing to beat CNN and FOX News and Face Book to survivors. They speak only with designated next-of-kin – never to neighbors or mistresses – and can, if asked, relate how a soldier died and call someone for the next-of-kin if needed. When they cross one wide yard in a tract of military bungalows and a line of silent women press against a chain-link fence watching them, knowing what two officers in dress uniforms means, you start to wait for the IED to explode and begin to see that is what happens for families who get this visit.

Stone is completely earnest about doing his duty correctly here, not because he likes the power of rank, but because this is the way he can serve. Stone is an alcoholic shakily on the wagon – later he and Montgomery share an epic binge during which each stands up for the other, recreating in a lakeside brawl and a drunken invasion of a decorous wedding reception the battlefield solidarity each feels he has so fallen short of – and beneath Harrelson’s big-lug exterior you can see both Stone’s fastidiousness and his decency. Casting Harrelson in this role was audacious, and he picked up a slew of nominations and awards last winter for his performance.

Ben Foster first hit my radar in the 2007 re-make of 3:10 to Yuma, playing the jittery, primping outlaw Charlie Prince, almost feral in his closeness to thoughtless savagery, in thrall of Russell Crowe’s outlaw Ben Wade and of a type as capable of turning on Wade as say, Robert Ford did on Jesse James or Jack McCall on Wild Bill Hickok. Foster has some of that same riveting, tightly-wound quality as Will Montgomery, enough to generate an attentiveness in us that’s mirrored in Montgomery’s own hyper-alertness and, here, a deceptive calm. He is all watchfulness, this soldier, and fittingly his injury endangered his vision (the film opens with him putting drops in his eye and inspecting his eye socket, scarred with a delicate crescent, in a mirror).

Montgomery has seen things he can’t talk about and done things he’s ashamed of, his old girlfriend Kelly (Jena Malone) is marrying someone else, and he doesn’t feel much like the hero the newspapers make him out to be. Kelly visits him on base and it emerges that she came to retract the invitation she ill-advisedly mailed him to her wedding. She also takes this opportunity to sleep with him one last time. Somehow, because she’s on top, you understand this was her idea, and that he’s letting her, just as he lets her spin him a tale of how she came to leave him and tells her it’s alright. And it is alright too, even a relief, because in this small part, Malone conveys that the vapid, pretty Kelly would never be equal to what Montgomery will need now.

That would be a grown up, and on one of his notification calls with Stone, Montgomery meets Olivia Pitterson (the great Samantha Morton), whose first response is regret for how hard this duty must be on the men who brought her the news. She has a nine-year-old biracial son, Matt, and when Montgomery comes back, she lets him stay for pizza. Olivia has a watchfulness that matches Montgomery’s as they inch toward one another. And as it happens, he does give hugs: one day in a tiny convenience store run by the next dead soldier’s parents, to Stone’s incredulous dismay. When the elderly father vomits and collapses, Montgomery crouches on the floor next to the couple and gathers them in his arms, completing his script in a low voice.

There are six vignettes of notification in this film around which Montgomery and Stone form a friendship and Montgomery and Olivia tentatively start a relationship. Former Israeli paratrooper Oren Moverman has spent a couple decades learning screenwriting and that shows here; he is also directing his first feature-length film. He shepherds remarkable performances from Foster, Harrelson and Morton, as well as vivid cameos from Malone and also from Steve Buscemi as one angry father. (Both Foster and Buscemi are working on one of Moverman’s new film projects, titled Rampart.) The Messenger was shot over 28 days in May 2008 in half a dozen New Jersey towns around Fort Dix, and premiered at the Sundance Festival in January 2009. It opened theatrically in November, just in time for a couple Oscar nominations. While it’s remained on a few screens ever since – at most, 36 one week nationwide – it never did hit Central New York. Of course we are already fighting the terrorists here, and I don’t mean in Times Square.

*******
Posted for the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 5/18 at www.cnylink.com – click A&E. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column that appears in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.

2010-05-02T14:26:00.002-04:00

Film Review #225: Disgrace
2008/VD 2010
Director: Steve Jacobs
Cast: John Malkovich, Jessica Haines, Antoinette Engel, Eriq Ebouaney

Serious area film buffs may be noticing a curious lull about now – for years now, end-of-April-beginning-of-May has been spring film festival season in Central New York. It still is downstate, where TriBeca’s been running full blast. West of here, the re-named Rochester 360/365 festival opens next Wednesday with James Ivory’s The City of Your Final Destination (2009), the first Merchant Ivory Productions film made without the late Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005. Ivory will be on hand for that, which is doubly significant for the region because the George Eastman House has just acquired the Merchant-Ivory film archive.

But this year, the Syracuse International Film festival makes a move to mid-October for its main events, though SYRFILM has been busy with monthly special screenings at the Palace in Eastwood since mid-winter, has hosted several visiting filmmakers and just completed its annual round of public pre-screenings of festival entries.

Word was, there’d be another kind of run-up over the summer to this year’s SYRFILM. Actor John Malkovich is expected to arrive here in August to shoot Hotel Syracuse with Israeli director Haim Bouzaglou. Set in the venerable old downtown landmark, which also houses SYRFILM’s offices and has been a sometime festival screening venue, this film is a project put together by SYRFILM’s Owen Shapiro. It would be the second film collaboration with Bouzaglou, whose already-completed, Syracuse-made Session will opens this year’s festival in the fall. Final green light on the Malkovich project still awaits the signing of the lead actress, so far a carefully guarded secret.

Meanwhile, another Malkovich film released this week on DVD. Disgrace has had scant upstate screen time except for four showings earlier this spring at Cornell Cinema. This 2008 film brings South African J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning 1999 novel of the same name to the screen, the first feature-length film by Australia-based husband and wife team Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli. Disgrace is a difficult and unsettling film, but Malkovich’s daring performance as David Lurie has been widely and I think correctly praised as worth the price of admission; it was certainly worth the drive to Ithaca. Whether or not SYRFILM eventually arranges a local screening once Malkovich is here, you don’t have to wait.

As David Lurie, Malkovich plays a Cape Town professor of Romantic poetry who loses his job after his student, Melanie Issacs (Antoinette Engel), reports his unwanted attentions after first attempting suicide and her boyfriend and then her father confront him. US reviewers tend to call Melanie Issacs simply a “mixed-race student,” though I suspect to a South African audience – the film has been shown in 17 countries so far, but notably not yet there – this status might be more complicated. One of the early scenes suggests this, as Lurie is hauled resentfully before a panel of colleagues who will make a recommendation. He is completely uncooperative and unrepentant. This scene astutely presents a good many things – the dynamics of male faculty who bend over to help Lurie keep his post, the women who don’t, and Lurie’s obstinate refusal to play by the commonly understood script, which sets up his later act of penance and perhaps the comeuppance that provokes that – but it also lays out in some detail what comprises, in that setting of international crossroads, a jury of one’s “peers.” That is, given the names and hues of the panel, one of wider variety and background than we may be accustomed to imagining in South Africa.

US reviewers also customarily call Lurie a “university professor” when really he’s teaching at a somewhat lowlier “technical college” in a department that’s now, we are to understand, downgraded from “Literature” to “Communications.” His colleagues are worried for him that losing this job – “in these times,” as one murmurs – will make his precarious situation worse. So David Lurie has come to rest on a rather shabby rung of the ladder and, despite his pretensions, he knows it, which sharpens both his disappointment and the fact that he is not a likable man. Once fired, he toys with an idea he’s had for a while – one he dangled before Melanie Isaacs to impress her – that he’ll write that opera about Romantic poet Lord Byron’s sojourn in Italy.

Professor Lurie’s fall from academic grace occupies a good half of the film, after which he repairs to the rural farm of his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines, in a stunning performance), on the eastern Cape. Lucy had settled there with another woman with the idea of homesteading, raises flowers and vegetables for the local marketplace, and now that her partner has left her, has sold part of her land to Petrus (the excellent Eriq Ebouaney, Patrice Lumumba in Raoul Peck’s 2000 film about the martyred African politician).

Petrus works relentlessly and noisily – a fact that pokes some droll fun at David’s disturbed contemplation – building his own cinderblock home, acquiring a new wife, planting a garden, and acting as the benign patriarch of an apparently large extended family. This clan includes a “troubled” boy named Pollux (Buyami Duma) who, with two other teenagers, rapes Lucy, sets David on fire and shoots Lucy’s guard dogs. It is Petrus who ultimately brokers a solution to this situation.

Both the novel and the film (quite faithful though the film rearranges events to change the ending) play a bit with the likelihood that many in teh audience want to see Disgrace primarily as David and Lucy’s story – whites who have not yet found their footing or their bearings in the roiling post-apartheid South Africa. Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr notes that these Europeans are themselves much like “stray dogs.” David volunteers at a veterinary clinic in town and assists in putting down stray dogs – even one lame pup he takes a shine to – and Petrus introduces himself to David, “I look after the dogs and water the garden. The dog man – yes.”

But really this is a tale with, if not a parallel track, a shadow image – a tale of two aggrieved fathers, two violated daughters, two acts of what seem – at least to David – like attempted suicide, two initial refusals to repent, despite the one being tricked out as cultured and the other as what some European characters first see as savage.

*******
Appeared in the April 29, 2010 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Disgrace” is available on DVD already from Netflix.

2010-04-25T13:24:00.003-04:00

Lisbeth Salandar (Noomi Rapace) and Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) in “The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.” Now at Manlius Art Cinema, also elsewhere upstate at The Little in Rochester, at Spectrum in Albany, and opened Friday at Cinemapolis in Ithaca.

Film Review #224: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2009
Director: Niels Arden Oplev Cast:Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Sven-Bertil Taube

What’s most exhilarating is the moment of “disappointment” when his victims realize they won’t get away, confides the killer, a connoisseur of single malt whiskey and calibrated cruelty, to Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). The journalist, with six months at loose ends before he begins prison term for libel, had been hired to unravel the long-ago disappearance of a wealthy industrialist’s favorite niece. “You’ll experience that too,” the killer promises Blomkvist, who’s by now tightly bound, a noose around his neck.

All the carefully built details of Nyqvist’s quiet performance come together here and pay off. We’ve spent much of this film so far watching Blomkvist’s own laser-like watchfulness – as he assembles shreds of evidence on the wall in an ever-spreading collage and stands before it immersed, visits crime scenes and imagines anew the bodies discovered there, and peers into every interaction as if into darkness. Now he watches the killer, struggling to restrain his own animal fear lest it switch off that attention. In really well-done films of this kind, our own suddenly blossoming discovery of crucial secrets – which has been working underground, so to speak – occurs just as the character sees them too, perhaps a magnifying millisecond before. That’s what sent me back to Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) a second time, wanting to see how he did that. While I confess that, among the string of secrets driving this film, I figured out pretty early where that niece went, few films that clock in this long – 152 minutes US, 180 at home in Sweden – are this relentlessly satisfying.

April has been quite a month already for serial killers in the arts, with films like Red Riding Trilogy and The White Ribbon, and Stephen Chalmers’ photo project on mass murderers’ “dump sites” at Light Work Gallery, Unmarked. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo comes widely to Central New York, with Nyqvist as the disgraced Swedish reporter and, in the title role, Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker with a taste for Goth who joins his effort. Niels Arden Oplev directed this film, based on the first of Stieg Larsson’s three crime novels about Salandar and Blomkvist.

A good and decent man, the cultured family patriarch hiring Blomkvist in this trilogy’s launch tale – Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) – is nonetheless beset by a nest of viperous relatives, greedy, cruel, some of them with deep-rooted and persisting Nazi ties and other, more private weaknesses. He’s survived these intervening years since the disappearance of his niece Harriet (played in flashback as a sixteen-year-old by Julia Sporre) by his unflagging search to uncover what became of her. As a character, Blomkvist is close to Larsson, also a crusading anti-fascist journalist whose life was often in danger and who wrote these novels to “relax.” In 1995, Swedish neo-Nazis killed eight people, something that Larsson’s investigation uncovered and prompted his founding of the Expo Foundation and its magazine of the same name. Like Red Riding and The White Ribbon (echoed too in Chalmers’ Unmarked project), this film meditates on the ways that power, once corrupt and unleashed – the doing of violence simply because it’s “so easy,” as the killer tells Blomkvist – seeps into every layer of life, large and small.

Larsson’s novels are sometimes called “the Salandar novels” because the figure of Lisbeth is so unlikely and so striking, but also because – as happens perhaps even more vividly on-screen – in the course of the story the weight shifts from Blomkvist to her. It’s Salandar whose background investigation vets Blomkvist for the Vanger job in the first place. It’s Salandar’s own past that comes to illuminate and deepen the mystery of Harriet Vanger, and Salandar’s stance in the world serves as counterpoint to Harriet’s. Noomi Rapace makes a wonderful Salandar and an equal in many intriguing ways to Blomkvist.

In Syracuse last October for a talk about crime procedurals, Washington Post and NPR book reviewer Maureen Corrigan called them “guilty pleasures.” Despite high-brow dismissals, the popular detective novel, she said, “introduced a new subject to literature – they are about thinking.” I think Corrigan’s arguments for these novels as explorations of epistemology – a working out of how we know what we think we know – as well as broader social troubles, apply as well to their robust on-screen incarnations too. It’s no surprise to learn that Corrigan liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In her 2008 review of the novel, which could certainly describe the film equally well, Corrigan wrote that the book was “super-smart, witty, wrenchingly violent in a few isolated passages, and unflinching in its commonsense feminist social commentary.”

All three of the Millennium Trilogy novels (named after Blomkvist’s magazine) are heading our way on-screen. Daniel Alfredson directs the next two (The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest), keeping Nyqvist and Rapace in the lead roles. The novels, first published in 1999, have been tremendously popular and translated into 37 languages. (There’s also an unfinished fourth Millennium novel if Larsson’s still-unsettled estate – he died suddenly in 2004 – lets it loose.) Meanwhile, Oplev’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, released here in mid-March, has opened in 20 other countries too. David Fincher also starts shooting an English-language version of The Girl with Dragon Tattoo in October.

Judging from last Friday night’s opening night crowd, Larsson has quite a Central New York following. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as taut a thriller as you’ll find and, after 152 minutes, you’ll understand a little Swedish too.

*******
This review appeared in the regular film column “Make it Snappy” in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the April 22, 2010 issue. See my review of Stephen Chalmers’ “Unmarked” at www.cnylink.com - click A&E.

2010-04-10T20:23:00.004-04:00

Film Review #223: Red Riding Trilogy
2009
Directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Warren Clarke, Davd Morrissey, Rebecca Hall, Sean Bean, Paddy Considine, Maxine Peake, Robert Sheehan

Even with advance planning, it’s a pain to schedule the screenings of three linked, full-length feature films so that audiences can choose whether to see all five hours’ worth of viewing on the same day or one installment at a time. Last week Cinemapolis, Ithaca’s downtown indie multiplex on East Green St., rose to the challenge of opening the British Red Riding Trilogy two weeks earlier than its long-scheduled April 16th start-date. While no one has said so, U.S distributor IFC Films may have pushed up theatre bookings here in reaction to last week’s release of the DVD set in England, which became available to us almost immediately at amazon.com. Red Riding Trilogy is one of the latest in the ever-more respectable genre of “long form television” (think Prime Suspect, Rome and, still my personal favorite, Deadwood). Red Riding premiered on U.K.’s Channel 4 in March 2009 and then was introduced to US audiences first via five film festivals including last October’s New York Film Festival. But the trilogy only opened theatrically state-side in February, beginning in Manhattan with a week at IFC and additional on-demand availability in a few regions before making its slow trek to the kinds of theatre that can offer both the right audience and enough screens to let you – as Cinemapolis said – “map out your strategy” for seeing the set.

Even if all the kinks aren’t worked out for distributing this sort of hybrid work, Red Riding lives up to its sterling pedigree. Set in and around the West Yorkshire city of Leeds in northern England, Red Riding is based on David Peace’s 1999 quartet of cult “Northern noir” novels. There is a shared cast, three interlocking scripts written by Tony Grisoni, and three directors – Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker – who got to hand-pick their own DPs, editors and crews, and who say they never felt particularly constrained by limited resources. England’s Channel 4 commissioned the adaptation of the Red Riding novels by Grisoni, whose scripts were then produced by Michael Winterbottom’s partner in Revolution Films, Andrew Eaton. All the directors and many in the cast say that the scripts so excited them that they lobbied hard to be part of the project.

Set in 1974, 1980 and 1983 – the third novel in the quartet has been left out except for some scenes that furnish flashbacks in the final film – the stories are based on real events in the region: the first, on the “Moors murders” of five children over 1963-65; the second, on the “Yorkshire Ripper” murders of thirteen women in 1975-80 by one Peter Sutcliffe; and the third on case of Stefan Kiszko, who served sixteen years for a 1975 murder he didn’t commit.

Red Riding Trilogy uses these elements as plot scaffolding, but the films are much more concerned with how character unfolds among those trying to untangle events than your usual procedural. Perhaps for this reason, though Grisoni reportedly did make charts to keep the storylines straight as part of his writing process, we probably find remarkably little need for that as sets of characters return or fade, come into close-up focus or recede for a time. All this occurs in the context of police corruption and greed, the region’s simmering resentment against outside governance, and larger political events of the time – the mining strikes, unrest related to IRA activities in the North of Ireland and social conditions that spurred the rise of Margaret Thatcher. Though best seen in order, the films are meant to also stand alone, and the first two could. The third one depends too much, I suspect, on the device of flashback for that to really work.

So for example, the first film – Julian Jarrold’s Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974 – begins with a scene – which all three contain in some variation very early on – of someone driving, traversing the vast bleak, often rain-soaked or fog-blurred hills of the North, establishing the region’s remoteness from the buzzing metropolis of the nation’s hub. By the time we zoom in, any marks of global connection – national TV news or the hulking nuclear stacks that loom above the stubby public housing known as “estates” – seem as blunted in effect here as the outsider behind the steering wheel. In Jarrold’s film that’s Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a cub reporter who’s come back home “from the South” and whom his older colleagues quickly dismiss on that basis as a “young Turk” who won't last a month.

In Dunford’s effort to cover breaking news of a third gruesome local child mutilation and murder, he gets fatally involved with the mother of one girl, Paula Garfield (Rebecca Hall). This cannot end well; once they decide to flee to the sunny South, he promises to return in two hours to pick her up. But spotting this convention doesn’t diminish the fascination of watching it play out one jot. Before his own demise, Dunford uncovers much of what unravels years later about the connection between local police Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke) and Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), and the nouveau riche construction magnate John Dawson (Sean Bean, who provides a gauche, perversely fascinating Brit version of Josh Brolin’s lip-smacking George Bush the younger). Dawson, possessor of what he calls a “private weakness,” meets a bloody end in the bar of his Karachi Club, a shoot-out that echoes down the years to come.

Here we first meet characters who seem minor but emerge in later films for their own spotlight turns – the young hustler BJ (Robert Sheehan), the priest Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), the sociopathic henchmen Bob Craven (Sean Harris) and Tommy Douglas (Tony Mooney). The second film introduces additional ensemble characters, as does the third.

James Marsh’s Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980, the tightest of the three, begins again with an outsider's arrival, Manchester police detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), who's sent to investigate the investigators when a separate string of serial murders – rapes and tortures of adult women – yields another victim. Hunter in one of Considine’s best performances ever, restrained, decent, anguished by his life’s narrowing choices. As Eddie Dunford was tagged right away for his youthful disloyalty in moving South, Hunter’s appearance coincides with news reports of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and Yorkshire police’s offer derisive jibes about his passing up dinner as a sympathetic gesture toward another “Roman” (Catholic, that is). Hunter’s joined by detective Helen Marshall (Maxine Peake) – the two comprise this film’s doomed romance – and the turn-coat detective (we see how thoroughly in the last film) John Nolan (Tony Pitts). The priest Martin Laws and the detective Maurice Jobson reappear and inch further into prominance.

Anand Tucker’s Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1983 shifts from outsiders to those who must wrestle with their loyalties as insiders and the consequences of choices that label them disloyal. Attorney John Piggott (Mark Addy), visting his mother's old apartment after her death, is pressured by her elderly neighbor to help a mentally challenged son, locked up for the child murders; she appeals to Piggott’s shared roots in the estates with the plea, “It’s us!” Paired with this, the detective Maurice Jobson, so often his superiors' water-carrier over the years, awakens to the fact that he sent the wrong man is prison. A bit older and just out of prison, BJ returns too, making his way by train and foot toward the estates, his voice-over, "BJ's coming!" promising a reckoning.

Red Riding Trilogy is a study in the greed, corruption and extremity of lusts that can fester unchecked in out of the way places – the phrase, “To the North, where we do what we want!” becomes a kind of incantation – but it also carries the metaphorical theme of redemption that emerges through images of angels. BJ is an avenging angel; others are horribly mutilated aproximations, Frankenstein-like, the flesh of injured swans' wings stitched to the shoulders of dead children. In the third film John Dawson explains that his ultra-modern monstrosity of a house - he is chiefly proud of its cost - was designed on the shape of a swan's wings. When John Piggott emerges, in a cloud of pigeon down shot through with light, from the darkness of what we can only call a kind of hell, with the last victim in his arms, the story needs only the final, surprisingly lyrical voice-over of BJ. This is spoken from the sea shore, far to the South, sunny as West Yorkshire seems never to have been. Like Ismael, he's survived to tell the tale.

Red Riding Trilogy is exhausting, harrowing and completely worth the time. Some may apply the term "Dickensian" - after that most cinematic of novelists - to Red Riding Trilogy. Four years ago, Deadwood creator David Milch told me during an interview that he thought if Dickens were alive today, he'd be writing serials for HBO. We have some glitches to work out in how we market, distribute and screen these kinds of films, and that will be worth it too.

*******
This review appears in the April 8, 2010 Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Though “Red Riding Trilogy” on the big screen closed that night in Ithaca, check out other screenings at Cinemapolis online at www.Cinemapolis.org, for show times, directions and sign-up for Cinemapolis’ weekly e-list announcements. The just-released British DVD set of “Red Riding Trilogy” is available at amazon.com (though only on PAL-format disc for now).

2010-03-27T13:34:00.003-04:00

Film Review #222: The Ghost Writer
2009
Director: Roman Polanski
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan,Olivia Williams, Kim Catrall, Timothy Hutton, Tom Wilkenson, Eli Wallach

“I’m your ghost,” says Ewen McGregor’s unnamed ghost writer to ex-British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) when they meet on the tarmac at the Edgartown Airport on Martha’s Vineyard. Lang, who has just arrived by private jet and is later described as having "never had a thought in his pretty head,” looks like he’s just emerged from a night’s sleep and a shower. McGregor’s writer – weary, rumpled, fading fast from his own jet-lag, easy to underestimate and actually looking a bit insubstantial – has been dragged along to meet Lang on this appropriately dark and stormy night by Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams). Lang pauses a beat, doesn’t quite grasp his meaning. Ruth Lang rescues the moment, deftly unsnags Lang’s puzzlement by re-casting the writer’s fairly straightforward self-introduction, at his expense, as a lame attempt at humor – “He’s not usually so humorous” – allowing them all to move on.

Of course it turns out she’s been managing such moments throughout Lang’s whole career in public life, since their mid-70s student days at Cambridge. Now he’s ensconced in his publisher’s beachfront vacation compound, trying to finish an overdue memoir between sorties out on a lecture tour and a just-unfolding crisis of war crimes accusations that brings angry protesters and media frenzy to the compound’s gate. McGregor’s writer steps into this situation to replace the first ghost, a long-time loyal aide who’s washed up on the beach.

More than a few reviewers have noted that Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island and Roman Polanksi’s The Ghost Writer opened on the same weekend in US commercial release last month, and a couple have admitted they even wished they could say Scorcese’s was the better film. One went so far as to call The Ghost Writer – reluctantly, grudgingly – “even, at moments, wise.” Shutter Island got here right away – reminding me of the younger Scorcese whom I suspected had an evil twin who directed the clunker scenes sandwiched in between the brilliant ones – but Polanksi’s film has just pulled into Carousel's multiplex this past Friday. And perhaps because The Ghost Writer is what Roger Ebert calls “a Well-Made Film,” the notion that it might be “about” something surfaces quietly and later. Beyond being an exceptionally well-executed and stylish political thriller, an obvious what-if speculation on former British PM Tony Blair’s connections with the CIA and the Bush White House torture policies, and quite possibly also a comment on Polanski’s own legal troubles and exile from US soil, The Ghost Writer is a film of ideas. Polanski directs from a script he wrote with Robert Harris that adapts Harris’ own novel – and makes more of “the ghost in the machine” than the ready catch-phrase that term has has lately been reduced to.

Sara Vikomerson used that phrase upon The Ghost Writer's release last month to title her New York Observer review of the film, but she used it there as it’s often used, having seeped into the culture, detached from its source – a ready, somehow familiar phrase, a multi-purpose and archly allusive near-pun that, depending on placement and inflection, evokes sarcasm, dismissal or jaded disbelief. Thus have Toyota’s efforts to account for the Prius’ sudden acceleration problems been dubbed derisively as the car-maker’s search for the “ghost in the machine.” It provides a title for a new book just coming out on the stock market’s unexplained swerves. The phrase appears in films like Brazil and I, Robot, and titles episodes in television series over the past few years as diverse of Inspector Morse, X-Files, Medium, Stargate Atlantis, Ghost Whisperer, and the new Caprica.

If we think of its source much as all, we probably go back only about half-way, to 1981 and the British rock group The Police, whose fourth album was a bleak commentary on modern political and technological culture. The Police’s Sting was an avid reader of the writer Arthur Koestler. In 1967 Koestler used the term to title his 1967 book and explore the idea that modern consciousness and higher brain functions are built atop more primitive, still working parts of the brain, parts that our “higher” selves can’t fully regulate and contain, which accounts for our self-destructive impulses and behavior, and these for rampant violence and paranoia, which Polanski often makes the subject of his films. Koestler himself – and if you pick up the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, there’s a lengthy review of a new biography – took the term from Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind, in which he rejected the persistent and often trouble-provoking Western idea of a mind-body split arising from Rene Descartes’ conviction that only the mind animated the otherwise merely mechanical body.

You absolutely do not need this information to take great pleasure from Polanski’s film. The riveting scene near the end where a note from the ghost writer to Ruth Lang passes from hand to hand across a crowded scene has gotten much attention, but that patiently, precisely built tension is evident throughout and has been much commented upon. There is the mordant Polanski wit; Lang's former foreign secretary tells the ghost writer at one point, "They can't drown two ghost writers - you're not kittens!" There are the excellent performances that Polanski coaxes from even middling actors, from McGregor’s writer turned sleuth, to Brosnan as the wind-up politician that many have sought to animate, to Kim Cattral as his executive assistant, to the cameos – Tim Hutton as Lang’s lawyer, Tom Wilkinson as the shady US academic Paul Emmett, and even a small but striking cameo from a nearly unrecognizable 94-year-old Eli Wallach. Olivia Williams’ Ruth Lang is the most complex portrayal and hopefully we’ll see much more of her.

But “the ghost in the machine” as a set of persisting ideas fills in the brooding form of Polanksi’s film and provides its most resonant and variant images, making it more than a well-made thriller. These range from the stark gray of the rainy weather and the chilly modernist house that itself performs like a machine – during a security check the house locks itself down, metal doors plunging over the floor-to-ceiling windows and sirens blaring – to the BMW’s GPS system whose disembodied voice provides the ghost writer with directions that unlock the story's secret, to the machines that Lang’s very persona and by extension his organization and the networks that envelop him have become.

*******
This appeared in the March 25, 2010 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle.

2010-02-22T22:12:00.004-05:00

Film Review #221: Imbued
2009
Director: Rob Nilsson
Cast: Stacy Keach, Liz Sklar, Michelle Anton Allen, Nancy Bower

San Francisco-based indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson has admired actor Stacy Keach since seeing him in John Huston’s classic 1972 film Fat City, where Keach played aging boxer Billy Tully, a washed-up boozer whose brush with a younger boxer (Jeff Bridges) prompts an ill-fated attempt at come-back in both the ring and the bedroom. As a story whose plotline is more valued for its enduring resonance than originality, the latest variation takes aim of this year’s Oscars – as it happens, with Jeff Bridges now in the senior role, this time engaging his demons on a slightly different stage with guitar and mic instead of gloves – as Crazy Heart. In another neat bit of irony, Keach – who remains one of our best actors – is about to start work on a forthcoming TV series, playing a boxer’s father.

The gambler and the showgirl-prostitute, plying their respective trades out on the wild edges of America’s unfinished frontier, is another familiar fable (though Imbued wears that cloak lightly and with some ambivalence – there’s one bit with the national anthem that steers us away from over-reliance on symbolism.) This time, Nilsson sets the action in today, from sunset to sunrise on the 32nd floor of a sleek and soaring but pointedly unfinished skyscraper, San Francisco’s Infinity Tower. We should not be too fooled by the modernity of this glass-walled apartment where a man and woman camp for the night – it’s still littered with step-ladders, paint trays, outsized unframed canvases on stretchers, a broken desk chair and a mattress on the floor, all of which Nilsson makes us notice right away. For all the distant sparkling lights of the city’s skyline, the balcony overlooks an exit ramp off a deserted stretch of freeway. Though wired to the ether of the outside world via cell phones and laptop – and via something more primitive too, in the form of a good-luck Mama Effa statue – Donatello and Lydia surely occupy as remote and isolated an outpost as any in American cinema.

For Imbued – there’s a dictionary definition of the word not long into the movie – Nilsson casts Stacy Keach as Donatello, a football bookie with a fear of heights, his own addiction to the ponies and his own set of ethics for “coming out clean.” Liz Sklar is Lydia, a high-end call-girl who apparently arrives at the wrong door. She’s looking for Brent – Donatello’s just had him on the phone but still playing close to the vest, doesn’t help her out with that – and she has a “problem,” a matter of $2500 she needs to repay by morning.

Donatello doesn’t want sex. “I’ve had sex,” he says. “What have you got that I haven’t had?” But he’s just won a bundle on a Cincinnati race and so offers her the money. We see later that such generosity on his part is usually his standard prelude to skipping out. And Lydia takes it, but not before a protracted kind of strip poker occurs between them, each seeking and offering something other than these encounters usually bring. And not before we see the failures that each can’t shake – Donatello’s fourth, much younger wife (Michelle Anton Allen), his quite lost daughter Tammy (Nancy Bower) and Lydia’s Greg. Donatello’s obsessive fear of heights keeps him from the horizon’s bigger picture – something Lydia introduces him to in a moment of wonderment the like of which I’ve rarely seen pulled off on any screen. These are brave performances – edgy, completely unsentimental and deeply affecting.

But don’t mistake Imbued for one of those emotively intense but formless psychodramas wandering the world. What Nilsson does here with his co-writer Denny Dey, frequent DP Mickey Freeman and cast regulars from previous Citizen Cinema productions – six besides Keach and Sklar, entering the story via phone conversations – is something else. After making primarily cast-workshopped movies for years that he shaped in post-production – early on, this Cassavetes fan found “excessive story” a barrier – Nilsson returns to a script this time. It’s more highly structured than you think, with the phone calls offering pacing and history that counter-weight its present-moment time frame and closed setting. For example, shortly after Lydia arrives she’s on the phone with the insistent madam who set up her date, while Donatello’s on another phone with a Mrs. Baker, an elderly novice bettor of whom he doesn’t wish to take advantage. You find you can attend to both at once, your own capacity for attention enlarged.

Nilsson visited Syracuse last spring as the guest of the Syracuse International Film Festival, which screened four of his films and had him on a couple panels. He’s had a busy eight months since then, with a trip to Trotsky’s birthplace in Eastern Europe for a film project, a first invitation-only screening in January of a new feature titled Sand, and the shopping of other projects. Last month Nilsson enjoyed recognition in New York City with a major retrospective at Anthology Film Archives of the 1970’s San Francisco film collective Cine Manifest, of which he was a founding member.

SYRFILM brings Nilsson back this week, along with Michelle Anton Allen, who's appeared in several of his films and is now producing for Citizen Cinema. There’s a visit to a class at LeMoyne College on Friday morning and then Friday evening Nilsson introduces the East Coast premiere of Imbued at the Palace Theatre. Nilsson also brings a taped interview with Sklar and Keach, and Stacy Keach – who also did the film's spare, surgically targeted jazz score – joins the event live by Skype onscreen for Q&A along with the filmmaker.

******* Nilsson’s “Imbued” screens at the Palace, 2384 James St. on Friday, Feb. 26th at 7:30 PM. Read more about the Cine Manifest retrospective at Anthology Fil Archives by scrolling down here or going to www.thefanzine.com.

2010-01-29T11:51:00.004-05:00

Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest
Anthology Film Archives retrospective highlights still-working filmmaker

Re-posted from www.thefanzine.com, 1/22/2010

In releasing the DVD of his Winter Oranges in 2000, a film set on Sagi Island just off the coast of Hiroshima and concerning encounters between the islanders and a group of tourists, filmmaker Rob Nilsson wrote on the liner, “Only when art is non-political can it be radical. Only when it transcends all political systems and stands for the human heart, the rights of the individual, the reality of human contradiction…and that highly charged, chaotic, largely misunderstood mystery we choose to call love, can it fulfill its cathartic responsibility.”

This might seem an odd introduction to the early work of indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson, three of whose films are part of a Cine Manifest retrospective this month at Anthology Film Archives. Nilsson was an original member of Cine Manifest, San Francisco’s 1970s Marxist film collective. He is still making films at quite a brisk pace, working collaboratively and wrestling with the place of politics in art. Winter Oranges came about from an invitation to Nilsson from Sagi Poiesis II, a filmmaking workshop that brought him together with young Japanese actors and artists to create a film by what Nilsson calls “direct action cinema.”

“Direct action” owes as much to John Cassavetes’ cast improvisations, the 60s-era hire-wire jazz of Sonny Rollins and Coltrane, the production mobility and expanded editing made possible by digital filmmaking and to cinema vérité as it does to Marx. And it owes directors like Bergman, to whom reviewers compared Nilsson’s first feature visually for its bleak winter landscapes. More important for Nilsson, Bergman imposed upon himself the discipline of filmmakers from unfree societies who, constrained from portraying politics openly, have made compelling and perhaps their most deeply subversive stories about human beings. As early as Signal 7 (begun in 1983), despite subplots about a union vote and a union-themed stage play, Nilsson was articulating his aversion to “excessive plot” and his desire for “film [that] could be made from the inside instead of external story hovering over it.”

Winter Oranges is also clearly a direct descendant of Cine Manifest, a group comprising Eugene Corr, Peter Gessner, John Hanson, Judy Irola, Stephen Lighthill, Nilsson, and Steve Wax – and most enduringly for Nilsson, composer/filmmaker David Schickele, who didn’t actually join the collective but worked on many of their films. Except for Gessner, who left the group before its dissolution and became a private investigator, all the original members still work in some aspect of cinema – in film studies, PBS and network television, as filmmakers on both coasts and in the Wisconsin heartland.

II.

The Anthology Film Archives (AFA) retrospective of Cine Manifest runs January 21 through the 28th. Of the nine films included – each screens twice – the centerpiece screenings are the collective’s own two major features (Over-Under, Sideways-Down, 1977, and Northern Lights, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1979 for best first feature) and a sampling of their shorter documentary work (Western Coal, 1973, and Prairie Trilogy, 1978-80). The AFA program brackets these selections with five more films that elaborate how the collective came to be and shed light on how they functioned and the subsequent directions some of them took.

Jerry Stoll’s 1967 film Sons and Daughters (which Lighthill worked on) documents the Bay area’s anti-Vietnam War movement and influenced the collective’s formation. Irola, who now heads cinematography at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, developed her 2006 “true story” documentary, Cine Manifest, from a reunion held in 2002 for the purpose of reflecting on the personal and professional consequences of the collective and, the following year, the 25th anniversary celebration of Northern Lights. (The screening schedule is mum on whether AFA will also show the four Cine Manifest “birthday movie” shorts included as extras on the DVD of Irola’s film, but it looks like there would be time.) There are also three post-Cine Manifest films: Nilsson’s tale of two aspiring actors moonlighting as cabbies, Signal 7 (1986), Hanson’s portrait of a woman mine-worker’s conflicts between job and relationship in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range strip-mines, Wildrose (1985), and the Oscar-nominated film Corr partnered on about the McCarthy-era blacklist, Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (1990).

Cine Manifest’s original nucleus came together around the formation of an independent trade union. They wanted to live and make films collectively; their pooled and distributed salaries from other jobs – Lighthill worked for CBS and provided about half – supported about a dozen people and allowed them to do their own projects. Their subjects were those left out of mainstream narratives – for example, farmers, factory workers, women – and they understood all cinema as occurring in some political context. But, although they did immerse themselves in Chinese commune-style self-criticism that eventually led to ruptures, they were not to occupy themselves as filmmakers with simple agit prop. As Hanson later recalled, “We spent the entire time trying to figure out what ‘political’ meant.” To Steve Wax, it meant, “Our films should have a message – and an audience too. People inspire people. Facts don’t.”

As part of a “self-history” of the collective in the media journal Jump Cut (1974, no. 3), Corr and Gessner wrote that attempts like Godard’s were “elitist,” adding, “We won’t concede popular films to Hollywood.”

Speaking in Irola’s 2006 documentary, Nilsson said, “We were pretentious as hell. I read things I wrote and I blanch, but I forgive us because we were all really trying.”

Besides hiring local actors, the collective conducted open casting calls and actors’ workshops for non-professionals, a practice Nilsson kept and has developed extensively since then. The casting for the collective’s first completed feature, Over-Under, Sideways-Down, turned up Johnny Tidwell, who had never acted or gotten beyond the ninth grade. Tidwell – and that film’s male lead, Robert Viharo – continued to work with Nilsson right up to and through the 9@Night films (though Tidwell died before the cycle was completed). Gene Corr told Irola, “We found middle-class people had developed a persona they wanted to protect. Working class people were willing to gamble it all.”

III.

Northern Lights. Begun in 1975 with a two-week shoot in North Dakota, this feature took three years of additional interior shooting and editing back in California to finish and went on to win at Cannes for best first feature. A North Dakota native, John Hanson had originally invited Nilsson to join him in making a 20-minute documentary about the formation of the Nonpartisan League and its victory in the 1916 state elections. Both had roots in the state; Hanson’s father was a farmer and Nilsson’s grandfather had been state photographer and shot the first movie footage there in 1907 before moving the family west to Marin County above San Francisco.

An outgrowth of Socialist organizing and repulsion at the stranglehold on farmers by the Eastern-owned banks, railroads and grain elevators in a time of mass foreclosures and plunging prices for winter wheat, the Nonpartisan League enrolled some 10,000 farmers to sweep the state Republican primary in the spring and the governorship that fall in the general election. The League remained in power for six years in North Dakota, passing social safety-net legislation friendly to working people, creating state-owned banks and grain elevators, giving women the vote, and organizing in thirteen other states.

Hanson and Nilsson would indeed make a documentary on this topic later, but the Northern Lights project rather quickly became what Nilsson called a “hybrid” instead. With Nilsson and Hanson dividing the writing, directing and producing, Hanson focused on working with Irola, who was cinematographer, and Nilsson worked with the cast, largely North Dakota residents except for the Bay-area leads and Bill Ackeridge, who showed up in a number of their films and has one of the leads in Signal 7. The locale was the tiny real town of Crosby and the story centered on farmer-organizer Ray Sorenson (Robert Behling) and his fiancée Inga (Susan Lynch), as they plan to marry, watch their Norwegian families suffer loss and lose their farms, take part in the League’s efforts and try to sustain a relationship.

To structure the narrative like a set of nested boxes, the filmmakers enlisted 94-year-old Henry Martinson – himself a homesteader who lost his farm and joined the League’s efforts – to “discover” Ray’s diary and some old photos, and decide it would “make a good yarn about a time when we had the powers-that-be on the run.” So Henry pounds on an old upright typewriter and soon Ray’s voice takes over, beginning with a diary entry in the spring of 1915 about his plans to “get an answer out of Inga,” fading to a quietly lyrical scene among a stand of birch trees by a pond in which she agrees to marry him. As Inga had stalled on answering him, Ray starts out with little sympathy for the League – he remarks he never met an organizer with a sense of humor – whose local agents are trying to recruit him as the story unfolds. Through a series of diary entries that fade to flash-backs, hard times and wrenching losses – Ray finds his deeply depressed father in a field, frozen to death and still holding his bottle, sees his mother return to Ohio and Inga’s family turned off their land by a plump banker in a fur coat, suffers a break with his brother John (Joe Spano) – convince Ray. He goes on the road for the League to convince equally skeptical others. There’s a text scroll at the end that sums up the League’s history, and Martinson returns, treating us to a tune on his cello, some calisthenics and ruminations about history eventually vindicating the League’s efforts.

“One of these days, they’ll go too far,” predicts Henry of the powers-that-be. “And – well, you know what I’m talking about. I’m an optimist. I can wait.”

Repeated watching doesn’t dim what Cannes judges cited as Irola’s “dazzling” cinematography – fluid, spare yet elegant, keenly and gracefully attuned to the depth with which movement endows image, evocative of the bigness of the land and sky that homesteaders labored within, and to the sheer physicality of their lives. Sometimes shot from barely above ground level – though this magnifies the horizon, Ray’s Uncle Thor also has an oft-repeated joke about hearing the grass grow – and shot through with light piercing vast darkness, here is a film about reaching for and illuminating particular lives long past in a shared place. Just as Henry tramps through woods and drives across the land, so do Ray and Inga. Nilsson was already forty when he made this film, and there’s remarkably little naïve romanticism or arrogance about the power of theory here. When it comes to organizing, Ray doesn’t want to; he and Inga grapple with her real and persistent fears that these efforts and separations will come to nothing and leave them both with no less lonely a life than she watched her mother endure. The power in Ray’s organizing really is rooted in relationship, in group conversations that one senses had to convince this cast as well as the audience – and the occasional “wrassling” match as a means of persuasion.

The AFA retrospective offers Northern Lights in a newly restored 35 mm print.

Prairie Trilogy. This retrospective provides a chance to see films that are now quite rare. Over-Under, Sideways-Down, which examines the travails of a worker who yearns for a break in baseball to escape a water-heater factory with racial tensions, still plays fresh and strong; you come away hoping it could find its way to a DVD incarnation. Likewise, it seems that Waldo Salt should rightfully join the cluster of more recent film projects about artists like Dalton Trumbo and Gertrude Berg who suffered under the blacklists.

But the most striking resurrection may be that of Prairie Trilogy, the three linked short docs of which Hanson and Nilsson make Henry Martinson the star. Prairie Fire (1978, 30 minutes) is Martinson’s telling of the history of the Nonpartisan League, and includes archival footage by Nilsson’s grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe. Martinson recalls his own homesteading some miles outside Crosby, North Dakota – he’d left Sacred Heart, Minnesota, staked by his dad with $65 – and there’s an expanded narration about the national context in those years leading up to World War I and beyond, including the increasingly checkered career of League co-founder A. C. Townley, the recall campaigns of 1921, the sometimes violent harassment of League members, and the smears against them in The Red Flame (a publication that certainly anticipated the Red Channels bulletins of the McCarthy years that poisoned the broadcasting industry).

Rebel Earth and Survivor (both 1980, 60 minutes and 30 minutes respectively) progressively narrow the focus. Rebel Earth follows Martinson on a trek across the state, accompanied by young farmer Jon Ness (Ness and both his parents have small parts in Northern Lights). He searches for his old homestead, also finding an elderly couple who homesteaded near him. He visits the 92-year-old publisher of the Daily News in Minot, Hal Davies, and they recall the years Martinson ran the Socialist paper in town, The Iconoclast. He recalls his later-in-life marriage to a musician who “took a dim view of my organizing.” Ness takes Martinson home to his parents where a gathering of neighbors make music and Martinson reads his poems.

Survivor is a closer-up portrait of Martinson’s history, from his work on a threshing crew that one farmer didn’t want to let sleep in his barn during a blizzard, to his years in the capital with the Departments of Labor and Agriculture, to more poetry (until he died in 1981, Martinson was state poet laureate), to his job as the AFL-CIO’s state recording secretary (the oldest working labor official in the country).

In 1987 Nilsson and Hanson issued all three docs as Prairie Trilogy on a single VHS that’s long out of print. It’s not surprising to discover that Trilogy shares footage with Northern Lights, or that it illuminates the sources of some of the feature film’s plotting and incidents. There’s an historic introduction of the League’s candidate for governor, Lynn Frasier, and Martinson gives a speech in the empty state legislature’s chamber, to the delight of the film crew – these surely inform the scene in which Ray Sorenson practices his introduction of Frasier in the empty church. But, if possible, Prairie Trilogy contains an abundance of footage even more beautiful than that in Northern Lights, a tip-off that the Trilogy is not simply left-over scraps patched together but an intentional portrait that fills a gap in conventional history.

Martinson was a highly quotable, personally accomplished eye-witness, a sort of Renaissance man of his time – and we should wonder if we’re surprised to find him in the middle of the prairie. In Rebel Earth, he and Ness stop at some bars along the way, where young Ness gets in arguments – which you come to see Martinson slyly instigates. And at another point he patiently explains, reinforcing a position not unlike that Cine Manifest had come to regarding their work, “Most of the organizers had songs. It’s not enough to approach people through intellect alone. There must be something that appeals to the emotions.”

The making of Northern Lights was itself an act of rebellion, initiated in a year of critical shifts and battles within Cine Manifest. When Hanson and Nilsson already had their crew in North Dakota, colleagues back in San Francisco tried to veto the project. David Schickele, who did edit the film, thought it was a bad idea too. Nilsson and Hanson simply went ahead anyway, forming New Front Films along with attorney John Stout (who remains active in Nilsson’s ventures to this day) to manage the production. Secondly, that summer Judy Irola had gone to Copenhagen to work on a feminist film. Afterward she kept working with Cine Manifest, and overall gave the collective good marks from her new horizons, but wanted to shoot films herself. And disputes within the collective about the making of Over-Under, Sideways-Down – actually finished in advance of Northern Lights – led to the group firing Peter Gessner from both the film and the collective. Cine Manifest continued until 1978 or ’79 – depending on accounts – with some additions, and certainly with a constellation of people who repeatedly worked together over the years.

IV.

Signal 7. Nilsson made a trio of films in the mid-80s, projects he picked up, set down, alternated raising funds for and editing, as he is wont to do – very often his films come out some time after the initial shoot, and not always in order of production. These three were all released on DVD in 2005 by Koch Lorber: Signal 7 (the cabbie tale, dedicated to John Cassavetes and drawn from his own Boston cabbie days), Heat and Light (which drew on his African years, first in the Peace Corps in Nigeria and later in Biafra, and addressed the narcissism of the lead character, a obsessively jealous photojournalist whom Nilsson played himself), and the cross-country running cult classic with Bruce Dern, On the Edge.

Signal 7 seems an astute choice as an example of Nilsson’s early post-Cine Manifest work, a demonstration of both his roots and the directions in which he would go. From early on, Nilsson has said he regarded Cassavetes’ work as “not an anomaly, but a way.” Cassavetes had already made Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968) when Cine Manifest formed; during the 70s he also made such films as A Woman Under the influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and the bravura performance film Opening Night (1977). What Nilsson is now calling “direct action” has roots in both which has he refined and expanded over the years, making extensive use of cast rehearsal and work-shopping of characters’ back-stories, but not of the scenes to be filmed. (He says he “lost” a scene once, from Heat and Sunlight, that never measured up in the actual filming to its workshop improv “and I decided that was an omen"). Though he has sometimes worked from a script, the direct action films develop their dialogue and storyline in collaboration with the cast from an outline he, and often a co-writer, provide.

Last spring Nilsson told me in an interview, “I’m trying to get away from theater. With the exception of certain avant-garde styles, theatre is a way of coming up with something to do and then rehearsing it and rehearsing it until it’s entirely a re-creation. I’m trying to have the whole thing be creation. To me that’s what cinema does so much better. You can be right there in the moment. It’s the one time that interests me, the one time that this particular phrase is spoken. And is that it? No. Now I take it into what I call the alchemical lab and I start to edit.”

Beginning in near dark and jazz-fueled, Signal 7 concerns two aging cabbies, Marty and Speed (Dan Leegant and Bill Ackeridge, both Nilsson regulars), over a single night shift at DeSoto Cabs in San Francisco. There is a subtext of labor issues, to be sure – city cabbies have just rejected a bid to unionize, and both men break for late night auditions for Odets’ labor drama Waiting for Lefty. But the weight falls on their own relationship and how each provides the other with a listening ear for secret aspirations – their long-planned trip to L.A. to take up acting seriously – as well as ready-made reasons not to go in the form of other obligations. During the night a cabbie is murdered (“signal 7” is the cabbie distress call), both join their colleagues for cards and bawdy jokes, Speed picks up an Israeli woman whom he scares with his attempt to impress her and he gets a rather pretentious acting exercise that proves as harrowing to watch as it is for him. Really an inventory of the ways men try to get right the roles they think they should play, Signal 7 comes to rest in an unexpected scene of wholly unsentimental tenderness between Speed and his wife. A number of Nilsson films end at dawn with similar exhausted intimacy, a caution this may be all we have when the masks come off.

V.

In the decades since Cine Manifest, Nilsson has continued to work collaboratively. Besides workshop projects in Japan (which resulted in Winter Oranges), Jordan (Samt/Silence, 2004) and South Africa (Frank Dead Souls, 2008), he’s gone to Kansas City (Opening, 2006). In 1989 he travelled with musicians John Cale and Brian Eno to Amsterdam, Russia and Wales around the recording of The Falklands Suite, resulting in the documentary, Words for the Dying (1990). In 1991 he set up shop in San Francisco’s red-light district for the 14-year-long Tenderloin Action Group/Tenderloin yGroup, on-going workshops that produced first the billiards classic Chalk (1996) and then 9@Night (2002-07), a nine-film cycle with overlapping time frames, key scenes that recur across films, and some fifty characters that first screened in its entirety at Harvard Film Archives in the fall of 2007. His collaboration with the San Francisco Digital Film School resulted in Security (2005) and in 2007 the haunting Presque Isle (2007), set in his paper mill hometown of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. At his own outfit in Berkeley, Citizen Cinema, Nilsson continues to offer workshops and apprentice new filmmakers. Last spring he completed Imbued with Stacey Keach. In the past year, he’s been shopping a film idea about the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, shot footage during a pilgrimage to Trotsky’s birthplace (and, over Christmas, supplemented that with footage of the prairie outside Kansas City, the “American steppes”). Earlier this month another feature, Sand, had a first by-invitation screening in San Francisco.

From Northern Lights on, all of Nilsson’s films have had their official premiers at the Mill Valley Film Festival north of San Francisco (though Northern Lights had a first screening in Crosby, North Dakota), and he makes the festival circuit as well. Last spring he came to Syracuse, where I live, for a tribute mini-retrospective during the Syracuse International Film Festival. On that trip he left a screener here of Imbued, and next month he’ll return to Syracuse for the East Coast premiere on February 26th.

Imbued has screened at a number of other festivals since its premiere last fall at Mill Valley, and the prospect of its reaching a larger audience in the wake of AFA’s retrospective is exciting. Imbued had a script to work from and a smaller cast than usual in a Nilsson film. An aging football bookie with a fear of heights, whose fourth young, needy wife believes he’s an actuary, Donatello (Stacy Keach) sets up shop for a weekend in the upper reaches of an unfinished high-rise (Imbued was filmed in the Infinity Building, San Francisco), supplied with a couple cell phones, a quart of whiskey, his laptop, and the dictionary he’s systematically memorizing to fend off panic attacks. Arriving at the wrong address, a call-girl named Lydia (Liz Sklar) winds up staying the night. Donatello’s wife Sylvia calls (Michelle Anton Allen, from the 9@Night film, Go Together, and Presque Isle), as does his estranged crack addict daughter, Tammy (Nancy Bower), each seeking some connection with him. Both Donatello and Lydia imagine they understand the politics of gender and each is rudely albeit unmaliciously awakened, again by dawn.

Since the recent Westerns There Will Be Blood, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and Appaloosa, and even David Milch's Deadwood, all employed sets of framed-in, unfinished construction for pivotal scenes in such a way as to comment on American life, as the Western seems such a ready template to do – in those cases, that we are still living in that young, unfinished house – it’s hard not to hear an echo of that in this film with its gambler and saloon girl, despite the sleekness of the skyscraper.

Nilsson might demur. “Politics,” he told me, “is about choosing sides. But I can’t choose any sides, because I represent everybody in a particular context. Artists try to say, ‘Look, it’s okay. See, this is how we are. And this is the pain and this is the joy. This is the eighty years you get. You know, take a look. Take a look.’”

*******
This article appeared on 1/22/2010 in www.thefanzine.com, editor Casey McKinney.
Judy Irola’s "Cine Manifest" doc is also available at Netflix, as are Nilsson’s "Signal 7," "Heat and Light," "On the Edge," and a recent reissue of "Words for the Dying." Irola has a new film due out this fall entitled "Niger ’66: A Peace Corps Diary." "Northern Lights" is available again on DVD from Nilsson’s Citizen Cinema in Berkeley, California, as are the "9 @ Night" films and others. "Prairie Trilogy" is not yet available on DVD, and I thank the filmmaker for lending me his VHS copy.

2010-01-17T18:01:00.003-05:00

Film Review #220: Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders
2010
Stephen Talbot & David Davis for PBS
Cast: Marco Werman, Alexis Bloom, Arun Rath, Mirissa Neff

“Russians love tragic songs,” says former rock’n’roll dissident Alexander Yelin, creator of “A Man Like Putin,” the 2002 runaway hit music video that Vladimir Putin liked enough to use in his 2004 presidential run and still uses at rallies now. “At its core, this is about female tragedy. A woman lives in the provinces. She’s surrounded by dirt and drunkards. She wants the guy she sees on TV.”

Clad in his Pearl Jam tee-shirt and busy promoting an all-female heavy metal band now, Yelin tells reporter Alexis Bloom he has no regrets about writing the song – on a $300 bet – that has contributed to strong-man Putin’s cult of personality as Russia’s ideal man.

“I’m a professional,” he says. “I can write whatever you want. I could write an anti-Putin song, but right now there’s no market for it.”

Bloom grew up in apartheid South Africa and her resume includes an undercover investigative report about life under Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, so she may know a thing or two about media and politics. Her 18-minute story on the career of one supposedly innocent feel-good pop song is unexpectedly bracing and leads the pilot for a new PBS show.

Unusually well-made and combining astute cultural and political analysis with some terrific world music, the arrival next week of PBS’ music magazine Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders is good news indeed. Even better, WCNY Channel 24 will carry the program, whose pilot airs both here in Central New York and nationally next Monday evening at 10 o’clock.

Sound Tracks is a West Coast entity, the offspring of veteran documentary filmmaker and PBS FRONTLINE/World’s Stephen Talbot, long based in San Francisco, and Oregon Public Broadcasting’s multiple Emmy-winner David Davis. Besides Bloom, Talbot has recruited FRONTLINE/World reporters Marco Werman (who serves as host) and Arun Rath, as well as deejay/San Francisco Bay Guardian art director/journalist Mirissa Neff, for a three-feature format with a performance closer called “Global Hit.” The editing, semi-animated graphic design that bridges segments, music themes and sound design are all crisp, graceful and bright. But beyond that, Sound Tracks asks in each of its segments questions about music's purpose - and art's - that go well beyond the insular assumption of mere entertainment. How delightful that Sounds Tracks also manages to provide such first-rate entertainment. Sound Tracks also enjoys the input and participation of the Center for Asian American Media, Latino Public Broadcasters, National Black Programming Consortium, Native American Public Telecommunications, and Pacific Islanders in Communications.

After Bloom, Marco Werman goes to Lagos, Nigeria, to explore music’s purpose with the youngest son of legendary Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The current Broadway musical Fela! recounts how Kuti – inspired by the Black Panthers and Malcolm X – combined 1970s U.S. jazz and funk with West Africa juju to create what he called Afrobeat, railing against the military regime’s brutality and theft of oil profits in a mix of Pidgin English and Yoruba. Fela died in 1997 of AIDS; he had been arrested over 200 times and – after the release of his ’77 album Zombie – his home torched and his elderly mother thrown out an upper-story window. Seun Kuti was just 14 when his father died, but took over Fela’s band, the Egypt 80, and continues to carry on as cultural provocateur.

In the third segment, after landing by balloon in the Kazakh capital’s central marketplace and reminding us this culture dates back to Genghis Khan, reporter Arun Rath joins violinist Marat Bisengaliev – “Kazakhstan’s Itzhak Perlman” – and travels with him to Hollywood. Sasha Baron Cohen’s 2006 film Borat, actually filmed in Romania, offended Kazakhs in multiple ways. Bisengaliev focused on the fake national anthem – one line proudly hails the “cleanest prostitutes in the region” – written by the filmmaker’s brother, Erran. Bisengaliev invited the composer to write a symphony for Kazakhs as a way of making amends; Sound Tracks filmed its premiere performance and the Kazakh audience’s response.

The short closing segment centers on the mournful traditional Portuguese bar songs called fado – meaning fate or destiny – usually sung by women in black, accompanied by drums and classical guitar. The diva Mariza, European sensation and star of Carlos Saura’s film Fados – sings “Minh’ Alma/My Soul” at a massive outdoor Lisbon concert.

Publicity for Sound Tracks promises it’s good for a whole season and that subsequent shows will take us to bayou Louisiana, Havana, Paris, the desert music festivals of Mali, bluegrass country and Bollywood. But there’s no word on a regular time slot, so my guess is that audience feed-back will count for a lot in whether we see more installments.

*******
This article appears in the 1/21/2010 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Sound Tracks” debuts Monday, 1/25 at 10:00 PM PBS stations nationally, including here in CNY on WCNY Channel 24. See a trailer from “Sound Tracks” and read this article online, along with others arts and entertainment coverage from Eagle Newspapers, at cnylink.com – click A&E.

2010-01-07T10:08:00.003-05:00

Film Review #219: Séraphine
2008
Director: Martin Provost
Cast: Yolande Moreau, Ulrich Tukur, Anne Bennent

During the Renaissance, artists commonly took the name of their home village or city – for example, Leonardo da Vinci. Wilhelm Uhde, the German art critic who discovered Séraphine Louis in the French village of Senlis shortly before the outbreak of World War I, adopted this practice to distinguish the creator of ecstatic paintings of nature in the style he called “modern primitive.” As we see in French director Martin Provost’s 2008 film of the same name, the reticent, sometimes socially abrasive Séraphine (Yolande Moreau) at first believed that Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) was mocking her when he compared her work – rendered in home-made finger paints of stolen church candle wax, blood from the butcher shop, pond scum and other “secret ingredients” – to those of the old masters. In fact, when not traipsing through the countryside in her own version of pre-Avatar rapture, Séraphine is most often seen on her knees – scrubbing, painting in her locked room, or praying. The film’s other pervasive image is that of a door or window opening into startling light beyond the dark, cramped interiors of Senlis homes and shops – fitting for a portrait of this early “outsider” artist who found only meager sustenance from most social relations, and also suggestive of her access to transported spiritual states.

Provost’s dramatization of the relationship between the two – ruptured by war, madness and Uhde’s own vicissitudes of loyalty – won seven César Awards in France (including Best Actress for Yolande Moreau’s luminous performance in the title role) and in December was named Best Foreign Film By or About Women by the national Women Film Critics Circle here. Last Sunday, at their awards meeting in a Manhattan restaurant, the National Society of Film Critics also designated Yolande Moreau Best Actress in a 2009 film. (A friend and sometime collaborator of countrywoman Agnes Varda, the Belgian Moreau can also be seen in Varda’s currently running, much acclaimed The Beaches of Agnes – she also had a part in Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond – and her own The Sea Also Rises from 2004 is available at Netflix).

Séraphine premiered in Paris in October of 2008 and in New York last March at Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival. There was a DVD release in Canada last June, but the theatrical run in the States of this quiet, distinctly non-blockbuster film has been quite limited, so its appearance in Central New York at all makes it worth a short drive to Hamilton, where it’s currently got a five-day run.

Uhde had already been the first to buy work by Picasso and Braque and to write about Henri Rousseau when he sojourned in Senlis and there stumbled upon a painting of apples by the eccentric middle-aged woman who scrubbed his floors. Séraphine Louis, orphaned early, impoverished and fragile, began painting because her guardian angel commanded her to do so – she had spent twenty years working in the local convent – and she died in 1942 after spending the last decade of her life in the Clermont insane asylum. She met Uhde in 1912, during the period she kept a dingy room in town and picked up odd jobs at cleaning and laundry. The film compresses this first period of their acquaintance to just 1914, ending when Uhde – a Jew and a gay man – hastily left France with his sister Anne-Marie (Anne Bennent) as German troops advanced. Because he was German, the French government had already confiscated and sold off his art collection.

It was Séraphine, entering his ransacked rooms, who saved Uhde’s notebook and returned it to him in 1927, when he was again living in France at nearby Chantilly, and they resumed their association. Uhde then supported her with a small stipend and in 1929 organized an exhibition entitled “Painters of the Sacred Heart” that featured her work. Séraphine had extreme difficulty integrating such material support and recognition, and she became increasingly unstable. Uhde meant for her to be able to buy paint and canvas and stop scrubbing floors. She rented the entire upper floor of her building, decorated lavishly, tried to purchase a villa – Uhde put his foot down at this – and, inscrutably, ordered a bridal trousseau. When she went door to door in the white lace dress and veil, the neighbors had her locked up.

In the film, Uhde visits her just twice at the asylum. She does not respond to him the first time and – in a resonant reversal of image – he only observes her through a window the second. But he does pay for a private room at the asylum that allows her privacy and the freedom to take walks in the fields. The extent to which Uhde abandoned or exploited Séraphine personally or was a product of his times – in the film a doctor advises him against trying to see her again, insisting such contact would make her worse – remains enigmatic in Provost’s telling. Uhde also continued to exhibit her work in Paris and elsewhere, and announced her death some years in advance of the fact. But Uhde served Séraphine’s work itself well, which has endured and enjoyed its own renaissance; the exhibition of her paintings at the Musée Maillol in Paris that began in October 2008, coinciding with the film’s opening, ran until mid-September of 2009.

*******
An abbreviated form of this review appears in the 1/7/10 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Séraphine” is well worth a drive to Hamilton – closer than Ithaca – where it opened Wednesday for a five-day run at Hamilton Theater, 7 Lebanon St., 315.824.2724. Screens daily at 5:30 PM through Sunday, 1/10. Take Route 20 east through Caz and Morrisville, turn south on Route 46 (which becomes 12B). About 40 miles, though winter weather may add time.

2009-12-28T15:25:00.003-05:00

Film Review #218: A Christmas Sampler
Thumbnail Reviews of James Cameron’s Avatar, Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated, Rob Marshall’s Nine, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air

It turns out that The Young Victoria, subject of last week’s preview column – it opened Christmas Day at Manlius Art Cinema and would still be a perfect reason to make that short, snowy drive east of the city – is only the tip of the late December movie iceberg. This is a good thing, because overall it’s been a scantier film year than 2008. Awards season cranks up as the year winds down, so some of us have been on targeted missions into the multiplexes – and not for Uncle Joe’s Christmas tie. This week we offer something a little different – not a Top Ten list but a holiday sampler.

First at the box office comes Avatar – in its first ten days it grossed, in the U.S alone, almost half the $430 million spent on its production and marketing – James Cameron’s fable about a crippled U.S. Marine who goes undercover on the planet Pandora, joins with the native Navi people and leads an insurrection to save their sacred lands. Like last year’s WALL-e, Avatar has a message, and Cameron has imbued it with additional Native American myth. Sam Worthington stars as Jake Sully, with Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, the Navi woman who takes him in and teaches him her people’s ways, and Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. This is a particularly fitting role for Weaver, who brings inevitable echoes of her own Ellen Ripley from the Alien quartet, the second of which Cameron directed in 1986. (Michelle Rodriguez, who plays the helicopter pilot here and whom you may recognize from TV’s Lost, is not the same actress from that film – who can forget Pvt. Vazquez’ “Let’s rock and roll”? – but she looks enough like her to make the casting intentional). Avatar is almost three hours long, tight as a drum, visually breath-taking and moving as all get-out. Make sure to see it in 3-D.

One of three films that opened here Christmas Day, Nancy Meyers’ light comedy It’s Complicated is the latest from national treasure Meryl Streep as Jane Adler, torn between her re-married ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin, a very good sport here) and her shy architect Adam (Steve Martin). I confess that possibly only Meryl Streep could lure me into a Steve Martin movie. In this confection, Jane has three young adult kids, a delightful set of women friends (Rita Wilson and Mary Kay Place among them), and a see-all son-in-law-to-be (very well-played by John Krasinski). The cast had as good a time making this large-hearted, very funny movie as you will watching it – especially the lap-top scene.

“Pastiche,” says the British film writer Richard Dyer, is best defined as knowing imitation. I admit I found the prospect of Daniel Day-Lewis in the role created by Marcello Mastroianni for Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½ intriguing, and the cast of women – Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren – delectable. Nine is Rob Marshall’s film version of the musical based on Fellini’s film, staged in 1982 and then again in 2002. Nine is meant as a tribute to Italian cinema and some of the echoes are there. Loren’s cameo as the mother of 1960s-era director Guido Contini (Day-Lewis), creatively blocked on the eve of a new shoot, is of course close to perfect on several levels. The flash-backs of Guido as a boy running with his pack of buddies along the horizon through the wheat fields wonderfully echo Rossellini’s boys in Rome, Open City – and a number of others. And as Contini’s aggrieved wife, Cotillard delivers the smash performance of the film (with Dench coming in a close second). But Nine is bloated, uneven, and jarring in spots. It’s telling that American actress Kate Hudson’s musical number is what gets the spotlight reprise as the end credits roll, and I hope U.S audiences will not be fooled that this knock-off is the real thing.

Officially Jason Reitman's Up in the Air opened on the 25th too, but we got it here last Wednesday. It is not the best picture of the year by a long shot. But there is something brewing here worth looking at – about the toll that corporate culture has taken on us all in this recession and about the roles of men and women in the financial and social freedom that modern business culture creates for an elite class. Fine performances from George Clooney as Ryan, the ungrounded corporate hatchet man who fires people, Anna Kendrick as the young whippersnapper, and Vera Farmiga as Alex, whose secret twist should not be the jolt it is when it arrives. Alex is an especially troubling figure in her success in achieving all that a man might, complicated by very winning sequences as sympathetic older sounding board when Natalie’s boyfriend dumps her and as Ryan’s date at his younger sister’s wedding. But her turning the tables on Ryan is no victory for women. Up in the Air arrives at a seemingly perfect moment for its subject matter, with its book-end montages of people getting the news they’re fired, its aerial views and its characters' assumptions they know "the big picture," and its sleek industrial look. But adapted from a novel by Walter Kirn written earlier in the decade, its message is still older, so the film easily takes its place among a long line of films and novels deeply wary of modern business life. And the scene in which Ryan arrives onstage at the Mecca of motivational speakers’ conferences in Las Vegas – the symbol of all he is willing to walk away from for Alex – eerily reminded me of what Kevin Costner’s character wound up settling for, a kind of spiritual death after his loss of the Whitney Houston singer – in The Bodyguard. Now that was 1992, and we still didn’t get the message?

English director Guy Ritchie lost Madonna this year and he got yet another bad rap from the movie critics. But even if he is an acquired taste – see Snatch, Revolver, Rocknrolla for starters – Sherlock Holmes is much better than you’re hearing. Gloriously detailed in its look at London’s seamier side (see the January issue of Smithsonian magazine for a tour of Holmes’ London), this film has witty, sharply timed performances from Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, plus some terrific action staging. It’s a treat, and it lays the groundwork for sequel with the beginnings of a Professor Moriarty yarn.

It’s true that The Princess and the Frog is not on this list – some of my goddaughters and I are tackling that one later in the week.

*******
This review appears in the 12/31/09 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle. These movies are screening at area multiplexes. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column that’s also available online, usually with trailers, at www.cnylink.com – click A&E, where you can read other arts coverage from Eagle Newspapers.

2009-12-22T08:42:00.003-05:00

Film Review #217: The Young Victoria
2009
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Miranda Richardson

He has been instructed in every detail of her likes and dislikes in advance. Indeed this instruction has formed the core of his own education and defined his purpose in life, according to his uncle, the Belgian King Leopold, who has a very long-range plan for keeping the English on his side. But when Albert (Rupert Friend, the tousle-haired star of Cherie) dutifully walks in the garden with Victoria (Emily Blunt) for the first time, he finds he likes the English crown princess much more than he expected. This prompts him to blurt out the truth: he really prefers the composer Schubert, even though he knows she does not. Stronger and more astute than most adults around her suppose, Victoria grasps this burst of sincerity at once, allows she “doesn’t mind” Schubert, and something sparks between them. As will be the case at a number of pivotal moments, in this telling of history integrity proves to be very sexy.

When England’s Queen Victoria had her coronation in 1837 at the age of 18, among the more well-placed in the audience in Westminster Cathedral was an obscure, nearly penniless but well-born German prince named Albert, who was actually her first cousin. Albert was only a bit older than she and, despite the thicket of relentless intrigues surrounding them both, the two had found their way into a clearing of sorts and actually seem to have married for love. Victoria ruled until she was 81, though she lost Albert when he was only 42 to typhoid in 1861. They had nine children and their descendants eventually populated the royal families of eight other European nations. Albert and Victoria also championed reforms in education, welfare and industry, and supported the arts and sciences.

The Young Victoria focuses on a brief but crucial slice of this monarch’s long life, framed by her courtship and the early years of her marriage to Albert. There is a prologue – Victoria as a sheltered, lonely princess with little company other than her dog Dash and her governess, Baroness Lehzen (Jeanette Hain) to relieve the rigid regime imposed by her mother, the bitter, out-of-favor Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) at the instigation of her bullying advisor, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), whose scheme is to force Victoria to sign over her rights to the throne and name her mother Regent. And there is an epilogue of sorts, in which we see a forty-ish Victoria, just widowed, laying out Albert’s clothing in the morning, as she would do each day for the remainder of her life.

But the body of the film concerns how these two attractive young people escape together from a life-time as pawns of the power brokers around them and, each having the same impulse, address the idea – quite radical to their would-be keepers – that a sovereign’s job might be the well-being of their people. In another of those pivotal moments, Victoria – who has just told her advisor Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) that she has seen “suffering” among her people, which concern Melbourne rebuffs as tinkering with the natural place of the “rabble” – already fond of Albert, warms further to his ideas that workers might be housed more humanely than has happened in the midst of too-rapid industrial growth. Enboldened by her encouragement, he sketches out an architectural plan he has been thinking about for her and she asks if she may keep it.

Now this might seem about as romantic as getting a washing machine for Valentine’s Day. But part of this film’s achievement is making a distant era with what now seem like quite rigid and insular social interactions emotionally intelligible. Albert’s presence in Victoria’s life to begin with is nothing if not coldly calculated, but we share his – and her – growing delight and amazement at what he finds there.

The Young Victoria also manages to provide us with some basic history that goes down pretty easy. As Albert is instructed in who the players are in the English court – besides eventual Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, there’s Lord Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, and the Dowager Queen Adelaide (Harriet Walter) – who their allies are and the nature of their policy leanings, so are we. This is not intricate and detailed history here. But you come away knowing a fair bit more than you might have before and having learned it painlessly. For many of us, the Victorian era is interminably long, brocade-stiff, and associated with repression of every sort. Fittingly, that era is often dramatized in this film by one character putting another soundly in their place. But together, Albert and Victoria loosened some of those places up a bit, and watching that is a treat.

*******
This review appears in the 12/24/09 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle. “The Young Victoria” opens at Manlius Art Cinema on Christmas Day. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column in the Syracuse City Eagle, where Nancy's other arts coverage can be found at www.cnylink.com - click A&E. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

2009-12-22T08:34:00.003-05:00

Film Review #216: An Education
2008/9
Director: Lone Scherfig
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Carey Mulligan, Olivia Williams

Initially marketed as a vehicle for its male lead, Peter Sarsgaard as the aging playboy David Goldman, Lone Scherfig’s An Education has emerged instead as a showcase for its women. Set in the first stirrings of social ferment of early 1960s London and its suburbs, this fine ensemble film centers on a bright young woman’s detour from her path to Oxford University when she accepts a ride in the rain from a charming sleaze with secrets.

As Jenny, 24-year-old Carey Mulligan is generating Oscar buzz for her witty, nuanced performance as a 16-year-old sampling possible and widely divergent futures. As Jenny’s comrade-side kick in the clandestine adventures of their bad-boy boyfriends, Rosamund Pike as Helen strikes just the right balance between an older, worldlier and eventually tackier woman who fusses with Jenny’s hair and wardrobe now but would be implausible as an appropriate friend later. As the haughty head-mistress whose few short appearances embody distilled and blindered authority, the versatile Emma Thompson is as perfect here as she was in her recent cameo as “sexual legend” in another recent British import depicting roughly the same period, Pirate Radio. As Jenny’s mother, Cara Seymour is well-intended and a little swept-away by the times and her daughter’s slick suitor, but – crucially – never depicted as foolish. (One can say the same for Alfred Molina as Jenny’s dad and for Jenny’s young aspiring boyfriend, who may be a tad bumbling but knows when to make his exit gracefully.)

Then there is Miss Stubbs. As the plain teacher whose literary lessons about Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre should warn us and Jenny too of what’s coming, Olivia Williams just won the Invisible Woman Award from the national Women Film Critics Circle, given for the performance by a woman most ignored by critics. On the WFCC’s annual awards show, broadcast live from WBAI Pacifica in New York City on December 9th (with a patch-in from WAER 88.3 FM here in Syracuse by yours truly), Chicago film critic Jan Huttner called Williams’ performance as Miss Stubbs “the heart and conscience of the film.” Huttner wondered how come so many male reviewers felt blind-sided by the “sudden” change of tone in the movie’s third act, since Miss Stubbs’ telegraphs the outcome from virtually the first scene – certainly well before David’s partner in crime Danny (Dominic Cooper) rolls his eyes to Helen at David’s fabrications.

Despite being well-liked generally by film reviewers with a 94% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, the “consensus” on the film at that site is indeed a caution that “the latter part of the film may not appeal to all [despite being] a charming coming-of-age tale.” But WFCC doubly honored An Education with its annual Karen Morley Award for the film that best exemplifies a woman’s search for identity. For those who prefer An Education as a light romp in which opportunistic older men need see no particular damage done by their dalliances, and may assume that women look back on these events only fondly, the third act does take a dreary turn.

Here, Jenny discovers letters addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. David Goldman” in David’s sports car’s glove-box at the worst possible moment, just as David is driving Jenny and her parents to a restaurant to celebrate their engagement. By now, Jenny has watched David charm her parents in a series of escalating lies about himself and their outings, and she herself has been charmed out of her initial consternation at his business dealings, because – as she says forlornly at one point – before she met him nothing had ever happened in her life. In this moment and in what follows, Jenny discerns the point to this part of her “education” in the shock – so rude when we are at a certain age – that how someone treats others is a fairly reliable prediction of how they will treat us too. Only then is Jenny able to ask Miss Stubbs for help. One might say Jenny – clearly so bright in the film’s opening scene – comes back to her right mind, with a snap of clarity that I found frankly exhilarating.

Interestingly, Danish director Lone Scherfig, perhaps best know for her 2000 film Italian for Beginners, does not take this period piece too deeply into the decade’s rock music and social rebellion. Jenny is not listening to the music broadcast from pirate radio ships anchored in the North Sea, so emblematic of her own generation’s flowering. Jenny is still listening to the steamy older French singer Juliette Greco, her notion of sophistication in a still-out-of-reach, older world. But as the film ends, she’s in Oxford at last, and the Beatles can’t be far behind.

*******
An abbreviated version of this review appears in the 12/17/09 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle on page 12. Read the full roster of WFCC’s 2009 film awards at criticalwomen.net. Thanks to WAER Syracuse for the use of Studio A and continued support. “An Education” continues screening at Manlius Art Cinema through December 24. On Christmas Day, Manlius opens The Young Victoria, which we’ll review in next Thursday’s issue. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column in the Syracuse City Eagle. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

2009-11-23T21:16:00.006-05:00

Film Review #215: Precious
2009
Director: Lee Daniels
Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Lenny Kravitz

Several weeks ago an irate letter-writer worried in The Post-Standard that Syracuse might miss Precious altogether. Although that letter actually appeared the morning after Nat Tobin announced on his weekly e-list that he was bringing Precious to Manlius Art Cinema, there was a lag before Regal Theaters booked the film into Carousel. It took breaking all sorts of attendance records in the very limited initial theatrical release that Precious got from Lionsgate Films for the mall chains – here and in 100 markets nationwide – to get wind of its profitability. Precious – based, as its longer official title tells us, on the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire – opened last Friday at both Manlius and Carousel Mall, and it was satisfying to see some weekend showings sold out.

The first film ever to win the Audience Award at both the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, Precious is the second feature film directed by Lee Daniels, who has mainly worked as a producer on edgy films like Monster’s Ball. Set in 1987, the film tells the story of teen-aged Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), her sexual and physical abuse at the hands of both her father and her mother Mary (Mo’Nique), and how a teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), and a social services worker, Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), intervene. Let me say early on that if Lee Daniels and Mo’Nique don’t get Oscar nominations, there is no justice.

As the film opens, Precious is pregnant with her second child and has been suspended from her public school in Harlem. She’s referred to Each One Teach One, an alternative pre-GED program (if that sounds familiar to you, yes, the film uses a program of the Syracuse-based ProLiteracy, an item way at the tail end of the credits). Despite her own nearly paralyzing fears and her mother’s vigorous encouragement to get on welfare and stay home with her instead, Precious goes to school and, little by little, she and her classmates grow and bond. She also applies for her own welfare, which in this case would open the door to independence from her mother, who’s already running a scam involving Precious’ first child. Precious has her baby and decides to keep him, which provokes a brutal explosion when she tries to take the infant home. Coatless, Precious lands on the nighttime winter streets, narrowly avoiding the television thrown down the stairwell after her. Thanks to Ms. Rain, who pulls in all the chips on her considerable Rolodex file, there’s housing out there for Precious and little Abdul, and – I’m leaving out a lot here – Precious has a chance to decisively reject ever going home again.

Like Steven Spielberg’s 1985 screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, Precious has generated emotional and defensive controversy. Both films contain fathers who rape their daughters, and Precious adds a mother who continues to sexually abuse her daughter after that father has left (besides a dizzying range of other abuses). The harshest criticism so far has come from Armond White of The New York Press weekly in Manhattan. White accuses Daniels and executive co-producers Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry – all three have spoken publically about their own childhood abuse – of “pandering and opportunism,” creating a “sociological horror show,” and the most racist depiction of African Americans since Birth of a Nation. On the other hand, commentators like NYU-based journalist Cindy Rodriguez (who wrote for The Post-Standard some years ago), have written astutely and persuasively about how Precious lays out the persistent legacy of slavery and racism that surfaces in the self-worth of many of these characters. Lest we imagine that the 1987 setting safely distances this story, a host of commentary has focused on the present-day plight of similar girls. In the current issue of O Magazine, Winfrey remarks, “I see this girl every day, and I never saw her.”

There’s no doubt the story’s volatile, and even The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, who admires this film, calls it “florid” – which isn’t all that far from “lurid.” But while the subject matter is certainly florid, I want to distinguish that from the way the movie itself is made and talk instead about the film’s restraint. Because in fact Daniels and his cast and crew have refrained from many easy, slapdash things that ruin countless movies by shoving our emotions around. I noticed this first fairly early in the movie – steeling myself at a dramatic moment when I half-expected the music to swell manipulatively and, miraculously, it didn’t. Precious does have a lively soundtrack that’s already out on CD, but Daniels lets his actors do their work.

And what work they do! Besides the principal performances, this makes room for some fine ensemble acting – talk-show host Sherry Shepherd as Cornrows, the school’s receptionist, always on the phone over some boyfriend problem; singer Lenny Kravitz as the vegetarian male nurse whom Precious fixes up with her in one deft comical scene; singer Mariah Carey as the social services worker who anchors the final harrowing scene toward which the movie builds.

In particular, the middle section of the film comprises a series of brief, cleanly written and edited vignettes about Ms. Rain’s classroom itself. These depict time passing as these young women grow and learn and bond in a group setting that is as much therapeutic as educational. Ms. Rain’s interventions can be decisive and dramatic. She stops a fight after a girl sneers at Precious that “F is for fat” (dispensing a lesson in justice about which infraction is really more injurious, she throws the other girl out). But they’re also frequently delicate and nuanced, supremely appreciative of the smallest of victories. Girls who begin the class in stylized poses of indifference and surly defiance gradually discover their own curiosity and even affection for one another. Their participation becomes actively supportive, despite lapses and outbursts, even on the day when Ms. Rain tells them that “the oldest is in charge” and thus the Bahamian immigrant Ramona (a wonderful Chynna Laine) teaches the class.

So when Precious blurts out that she’s just learned she’s HIV+, the group has so progressed that the others can be still and listen – even the jittery girl who started out greeting every remotely serious topic with wild, derisive laughter. It’s worth noting that Daniels and his screenwriter have placed this dramatic development structurally so that it serves a purpose other than stereotyping. In a 1987 classroom, announcing an HIV+ diagnosis would be far more unsettling than today, and how the film handles that might serve as a clue to those who are so jittery about what Precious says out loud.

Perhaps the most telling restraint of all is that addiction – the usual kind anyway – is absent from this story. (The most we get is Ms. Rain having a decorous glass or two of holiday wine.) Now this is almost too good to pass up for any pandering filmmaker who’s into easy short-cuts and sensational stereotypes. Leaving out the booze and dope accomplishes several things, however. What intoxicated characters see is exaggerated, and allows audiences to view the way circumstances are portrayed as distorted. Instead, the film regards the landscape of Precious’ world – well, soberly, without any mind-altering chemical boost. Without that distraction, we see what else is really there. Paradoxically, this makes way to see the full range and force of the fantasies that both Precious and her mother engage in. These include dissociative moments common among those surviving and escaping trauma, fierce schoolgirl daydreams about fitting in and being popular and “looking right,” one intriguingly droll scene in which Precious imagines herself inside a TV screening of the Sophia Loren World War II epic Two Women (which I think precludes the quick, wry sense of humor she starts to display later), and her mother’s more extreme habit of zoning out before the TV that probably verges on the psychotic.

Her mother’s path is, after all, one that Precious could have taken. We see how this all could have happened, and where it might've wound up, most vividly in that final scene in Mrs. Weiss’ cubicle during Mary’s last bid to get Precious back. She’s lucky and so are we. And Mo’Nique has a whole lot more under her hat than “Skinny Women Are Evil.”

* * *
This review is part of the November 25, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle. “Precious” is playing at both Manlius Art Cinema and Carousel Mall Regal Theaters, and Lee Daniels’ first film, “Shadowboxer” (2005) is available for Instant Viewing or regular rental at Netflix. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film review column. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

2009-11-21T14:34:00.003-05:00

Film Review #214: Pirate Radio
2008
Director: Richard Curtis
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Emma Thompson

Maybe the surprise engagement softened us up, but I prefer to see it as further evidence of the enduring power of rock’n’roll. Local music fans will remember when WAER’s deejay Eric Cohen used the main stage at Jazz Fest to go down on one knee. Last Friday night another enterprising young man engineered the same thing during the closing credits at the early screening of Pirate Radio in Albany’s Spectrum Theatre. As snapshots of the couple flashed onscreen and the live Black gospel choir planted in the audience burst into the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” he popped the question. Coming up the aisle as the crowd for the next showing filtered in, their giant images still looming on the screen behind them, they looked pretty happy, and way too young to have been alive in 1966, when Pirate Radio takes place.

Pirate Radio opened nationwide last Friday with little advance notice. Except for the face of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the newspaper ads and a Friday afternoon feature on NPR about the history of 1960s-era offshore pirate radio stations that I caught on the drive to Albany, it wasn’t on my radar at all. My sister and I were thinking of Lorna’s Silence, the new one by the Belgian filmmaker Dardenne brothers, or maybe Paris, which we went back to see Saturday night. Pirate Radio was pretty much a Plan B. But – still softened up with lingering good cheer from that engagement or not – we cheered and clapped right along with everybody else when the end credits rolled.

About 20 minutes longer and titled The Boat that Rocked before its U.S. makeover, Pirate Radio hadn’t done all that well overseas. Many reviews here have been luke-warm too – grumpily calling it a “mess” and a “hodgepodge,” a poor imitation of Richard Lester’s madcap Beatles films (A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, 1964 and ‘65) and – ironically, considering the movie’s own personification of upper crust British culture police, Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh), who vows to crush the outlaw radio stations and the “sewer” they represent – nowhere near the in-depth treatment the subject or the era deserve. Excuse me, but this movie is a musical. How much “character development” does even The Sound of Music really have, folks? Pirate Radio was written and directed by Richard Curtis, from whom we’ve had Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually – affectionate entertainments, really, as this film is.

The year is 1966, when the UK’s state-owned BBC aired about two hours of rock music a week, compared to the United States’ 571 music-and-news format privately-owned commercial radio stations that provided Top 40 rock music 24 hours a day. State-owned radio monopolies actually pervaded most European broadcasting since the 1920s and, in England’s case, agreements with the musicians’ unions prevented more than minimal on-air “needle-time” as a way of tightly controlling competition with live performers. As the opening montage shows, about half of Britain’s population – 20 million people – listened to rock on U.S.-style pirate stations. That is, stations financed by advertizing (often U.S.-based) that aired commercials on shows run by popular deejays with nicknames, jingles, station ID’s and their own steadfast, infatuated fans. The first offshore pirate stations broadcast from ships in the 1950s off Denmark, Holland and Sweden. A London-based agent, Rohan O’Rahilly, launched Radio Caroline in March 1964, with another eight or nine stations following. Parliament did pass the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967, as the film depicts.

Pirate Radio only loosely adheres to this history, it’s true, leaving out many nuances of that day’s culture wars – save joyous resistance to authority – or our own day’s political correctness, and cobbling together a tale of the decrepit fictional ex-tanker Radio Rock anchored in the North Sea, with an assortment of odd birds and motley crew – including Hoffman as the American, Rhys Ifans as the Brit megastar deejay Gavin Cavanaugh, Bill Nighy as the ship’s captain Quentin, and the lone woman Felicity (Katherine Parker), allowed on board to cook only because she’s a lesbian. Into this comes Quentin’s godson Carl (Tom Sturridge), sent for some manning-up by his mother Charlotte (Emma Thompson), whom Quentin calls a “sexual legend.” Plot twists abound, including visits from giddy fans, games of chicken, finding Carl's long-lost father and a sudden swerve into Titanic-as-rock-opera midway through, with a box of beloved albums standing in for that sapphire necklace. And the soundtrack – close to 40 songs – well, it is glorious. No matter what age you are, you’re likely to know them all.

*******
This review appeared in the 11/19/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find Simon Frith’s fascinating and more complete history of the British pirate stations at the film’s official website. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column reviewing DVDs, special screenings and films of enduring worth. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

2009-11-21T14:25:00.003-05:00

Film Review #213: Tattooed Under Fire
2009
Director: Nancy Schiesari
Documentary

“The Vikings wore their shields on their backs when they went into battle, so it should be on the back,” says Josh, 22, a soft-faced boy with wide eyes and still a bit of baby fat around his middle. It’s April 2005, 1500 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, and Josh is deploying there in two months. In Nancy Schiesari’s documentary Tattooed Under Fire, Josh is explaining why the Viking shield tattoo he has worked to design with the artists at River City Tattoo in Killeen, Texas, incorporates the Norse “tree of life” into its design and will cover most of his back.

“I’m Norwegian on my mother’s side, so as a warrior, this is another link to my heritage,” he adds, his upper lip beaded with sweat as the needle bites into his back. I have a bit of ink, so I know this peculiar sensation. It doesn’t exactly hurt, because the needle’s never in one spot long enough, but it’s always just about to, so you can reach your limit for a session.

Diamond Glen, the senior tattoo artist in the shop, is familiar with tattoo’s rituals and lore. He elaborates that ancient warriors painted and tattooed themselves to intimidate the enemy, part and parcel with the fearsome pounding on shields and bellowing that we all know in movies from Stagecoach to Braveheart to Steve McQueen’s Hunger. “Tattoos are like permanent war-paint,” says Glen, who says he has two sons himself, that these Fort Hood soldiers are “good kids – babies, most of ‘em.”

Roxanne, who owns River City Tattoo and could easily pass for any of her soldier clientele’s mothers, says she grew up around the military and she respects their desire to do their duty.

“But I don’t like the duty this time,” she says. “These kids put their heart and soul into these designs. They’re saying, it’s my body, it’s my life, and I want to design it.”

Fort Hood, Texas, scene of last week’s horrific mass shooting and this week’s somber observances, is the largest U.S. military facility in the world. A major center for deployment of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, Fort Hood also houses the Army’s Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program for the treatment of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Increasingly, many U.S. men and women in uniform – one estimate, according to the film, is that 95% of those deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan – choose tattoo and other body art to express their complex reactions to combat both survived and anticipated.

This week, Schiesari’s documentary about the use of tattoo among U.S. troops begins airing across the nation on PBS stations. Its first Central New York airing was Monday night on WCNY Channel 24. Initially scheduled in honor of Veterans’ Day, the timing takes on added urgency after the Fort Hood tragedy. Tattooed Under Fire was filmed in Killeen, Texas, just outside Fort Hood, over about a three-year period. Schiesari is a native Brit who’s made documentaries about the photographer Hansel Mieth and filmmaker Martin Scorsese for the BBC, along with work for England’s Channel 4, ABC, National Geographic and PBS, and she’s served as cinematographer on films like Alice Walker’s 1993 Warrior Marks. Now she teaches filmmaking at the University of Texas/Austin, where Tattooed Under Fire premiered in September 2008. Before the awful coincidence of last week’s Fort Hood shootings, the film had already gained increased attention on this year’s festival circuit - deservedly so, for it leans in close with a group of young soldiers, mostly men but including three women, decent, sometimes unknowing, as they talk about their hopes and fears and anger and sometimes grief, make jokes, try to get ready.

In just 56 compact minutes, Schiesari profiles nearly a dozen of them, sometimes including reprise interviews when they return. A medic has an hour glass with wings flying through a thunderstorm across his upper chest – carefully below the collar line of his dress uniform. A soft-voiced young Latina says she’ll maybe buy her mother a house if she survives; an African American woman has grown increasingly bitter about the armed services. One rookie pushes a few envelopes when he designs a fetus in a blender design for his bicep and poses “making a muscle” with it before he ships out – he says any one of them could wind up “mush” – and then Schiesari catches him when he’s back from his hitch, chastened by real war’s proximity and amazed no one shot him for the excess of such an image.

Of course it’s really the war itself that has got under all our skins, marking the rest of us indelibly as these young soldiers.

*******
This review was part of the 11/12/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle. Look for additional screenings of “Tattooed Under Fire” on your local PBS station. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

2009-10-11T12:58:00.003-04:00

Film Review #212: Nigger
2009
Director: Thea St. Omer
Documentary

“I don’t audible-ize the word,” says one of the interviewees, a middle-aged white man and presumably a teacher. He says that he will write “nigger” and he will refer to it, just never “audible-ize” it.

I suppose he really means “say out loud.” Generally I take a dim view of the practice of interchanging parts of speech – using “impact” as a verb is just lazy – and now here is a further alarming foray into adjectival contortion. “Audible-ize” may exist somewhere, probably as a technological term, but this is the first time I’ve heard it used. And perhaps it shows up here to illustrate unwittingly the lengths to which we’ll go in seeking linguistic escape from the snares of another word. Thea St. Omer takes on the many-shaded malignancy of that word in her masterful documentary, Nigger.

An instructor at the Newhouse School of Syracuse University, St. Omer screened an earlier version of Nigger there last spring and later at New York University. Now she’s finished the film – 59 minutes and shot in digital video – and she hosts a premiere screening next Wednesday at ArtRage Gallery in the Hawley-Greene neighborhood, just a short hop north from the SU campus near James and Lodi.

St. Omer distills Nigger from over 100 interviews. The majority of her interviewees are of African descent, but there are also Latinos, a number of whites including a German mother whose school-age daughter uses the term “digger” as code for the forbidden “nigger,” and several Asians including a slender young man who says he’s never been called a “nigger” and adds wistfully, “I’m not that cool.” One thing that film as a visual medium accomplishes here, without making any fuss about it at all, is the accumulation of a pool of subjects who are astonishingly varied in their range of age, style, accent, dress, station and degree of worldliness, stance and hue. This of course makes its own point given the film’s consideration of blunt-force stereotype.

St. Omer’s set-up is simple and intimate: acting as her own cameraperson and shooting in closeup, she interviews subjects against a black backdrop. In letting me watch the film for review she extracted a for-my-eyes-only promise because the dvcam master was delayed, getting its final color correction elsewhere. She needn’t have worried. The film’s look is very nice indeed.

She has taken what are evidently lengthy conversations and edited to pull short clips which she then arranges in sections. One can imagine that these categories emerged from the interviews she filmed as well as from her questions, and the sections are simply titled with white text on black: “A look at the word.” “Where did the term nigger come from?” “Is there such a thing as a nigger?” (This section is particularly intriguing, as interviewees think through aloud about the distinctions involved between a word and what it represents.) “To be called a nigger.” “The cultural nuances of nigger.” “Is there a difference between nigger and nigga?” “Should we use the words nigger and nigga today?” and “Are you a nigger?”, which evokes perhaps deeper emotion than in any of the previous sections. It is my guess that none of the white interviewees asked this question will ever claim glibbly that they "know how you feel."

While we don’t hear her voice until a good ways into the film – she softly asks a young man how he reacted when someone called him a nigger (instead of answering directly, he says, “My Jewish friend Andy beat the crap out of the guy!”) – and only infrequently after that, it’s evident she’s an excellent interviewer. Her subjects are relaxed, expressive, thoughtful, sometimes witty and frequently eloquent. I said above that she “distilled” this film; that’s descriptive but also offers the temptation to draw that metaphor out, for what’s here is a kind of bootleg knowledge. Clearly these enormously quotable people feel safe with St. Omer getting them on record about, as the film’s tagline goes, “Arguably the most loaded word in our history.”

Actually, I suppose some would argue about that assertion, and several of St. Omer’s subjects do reference parallel struggles in passing. For example, one woman says that “for some people, the world is full of niggers and kikes and homosexuals.” Another woman responds to the issue of who may appropriately use the word “nigga,” either in solidarity or as a way of claiming affection, by noting that she understands the theory of “reclaiming” and thereby transforming negative language but she can’t imagine ever actually calling her women friends by the “C” word. It seems to me another of St. Omer’s quiet accomplishments in this film is that we understand she’s not adverse to including other oppressions, but this one is what we’re talking about right now and – like the good teacher that I imagine she is in a classroom – she deftly keeps us right on point.

******* This review appeared in the October 1, 2009 print issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Thea St. Omer hosted the premiere screening of her finished documentary, Nigger, on Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM at ArtRage Gallery, 505 Hawley Avenue, Syracuse.

2009-09-26T21:08:00.003-04:00

Film Review #211: The Passion of Joan of Arc
1928/DVD 1999
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Cast: Renee Maria Falconetti & others

The idea of what makes a woman hero dates back at least to female medieval mystics, among them Joan of Arc, the illiterate French peasant girl whose “divine voices” told her to unite France, assist in the crowning of the young Charles VII and expel the English invaders. For her trouble she was betrayed by French collaborators in 1431, turned over to a Church court, tried for heresy – there were 29 “examinations” combined with torture, during which she disavowed her voices but then recanted – and burned at the stake, all by the time she was 19 years old.

Every Catholic schoolgirl knows Joan’s story – as much frightening cautionary tale as feminist inspiration – though actually a number of cultures have legends or historical instances of young women who transgressed conventions of their time, dressed in men’s clothing and took up arms and leadership at moments of crisis, often to repel invaders. The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film about Joan’s trial and execution is by no means the first cinematic treatment of "the maid of Orleans" – at least seven movies preceded his, the earliest in 1895 – though the Catholic Church did not declare Joan a saint until 1920. Ingrid Bergman played Joan twice – in Victor Fleming’s 1948 adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play and again in 1954 for Rossellini. Otto Preminger launched Jean Seberg’s career by casting her in his 1957 film based on George Bernard Shaw’s play (the screenplay by that great novelist of Catholic doubt, Graham Greene). Director Robert Bresson’s Joan film came out in 1962, and in 1997 Luc Besson cast Milla Jovovich in The Messenger, still-popular on DVD and featuring Joan in battle. The most recent effort seems to be the riveting 2003 Hungarian film Joan of Arc on the Night Bus, best described as a post-modern opera, which incidentally screened here in Syracuse several years ago courtesy of the Syracuse International Film Festival. This list is not exhaustive, but illustrates an enduring fascination with Joan.

But Dreyer’s film has a certain mystique attached, even in terms of the film’s survival in the world. Fire destroyed the original negative. Then his second version – reconstructed from outtakes – was lost to fire too; Dreyer died in 1968 believing this work was gone, though boot-legged, truncated versions survived. In 1981, a print of Dreyer's original was found intact under circumstances either bizarre or miraculous, depending on your point of view: locked in a janitor’s metal cabinet in an Oslo psychiatric hospital. Restored in 1985, this has been available since 1999 on an excellent Criterion Collection DVD, which contains more of this history as well as options to play the film in its original silent form, with commentary, or with composer Richard Einhorn’s majestic Voices of Light. Einhorn himself encountered Dreyer’s film by accident at the Museum of Modern Art while considering whether to compose something about Joan. He comments on the Criterion DVD that first watching the Dreyer film was like “walking down an ordinary street, turning a corner and without warning, you find yourself staring at the Taj Mahal.”

Dreyer stripped his story down to Joan’s trial, with no panoramic shots of battlefields or Charles’ court or the Rheims cathedral, no lush scenery, no mystical moments of Joan with her heavenly confidantes, no fabulous costumes for Joan in armor astride her white horse. His camera came in at odd angles on a stripped down set, creating disorienting, unsettling visuals, literally askew perspectives that match the sensory perception of someone exhausted and under stress, and evidence of a harsh daily existence in details like Joan's ragged, dirty fingernails.

The film is relatively short – just 82 minutes – and he strips the narrative down too. Dreyer relied on the actual ecclesiastical trial transcripts for Joan’s exchanges with her tormentors. Joan’s was a show trial, so when vain, hair-splitting judges nonsensically ask her how she knew it was Saint Michael who visited her, whether he was naked and whether his hair was cut, she is not outwitted. When they inquire in another trick question whether God hates the English, she answers that she doesn’t know about that but she does know he will drive most of them out of France, except for those who die there. You may not think about this as you watch the film, but afterward it occurs how like the scriptural Jesus she is in Dreyer’s portrayal – both the boy found holding his own with the scholars in the temple and the later, angrier Jesus who drives the money-lenders out. And it’s no coincidence Dreyer titles his film The Passion of…. For some, Gethsemane – where Jesus is perhaps most fully human, doubting his salvation, wondering if he can avoid his painful death, wondering if he can do more good alive, asking please to get out of this, agonizing – is what makes his story worth its salt. And in this portion of Joan’s story – when she allows herself to be convinced to save herself, only to draw back from that spiritual calamity as from a dizzying brink – Dreyer’s film is most unforgettable.

Dreyer found his lead in Renée Maria Falconetti, a stage actress of light comedies. She found his methods so aversive that – much like the singer Björk’s experience with another Danish director, Lars von Trier – she never made another movie. The critic Pauline Kael called Falconetti’s performance the finest ever filmed. A ways off the beaten track from the multiplex, this one’s worth the trip.

*******
This review is from the 9/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find The Passion of Joan of Arc at Netflix.com.

2009-09-26T20:54:00.003-04:00

Betty y Pancho
1998
Director: Juan Mora Catlett
Cast: Elizabeth Catlett, Francisco Mora

In 1998, Mexican filmmaker Juan Mora Catlett unveiled Betty y Pancho, a video portrait of his artistic family that centers on his parents’ half-century marriage and collaboration. His father, who died in 2002 at age 79, was the Mexican painter, print-maker and muralist Francisco Mora. His mother is Elizabeth Catlett, the Washington, DC-born, African American sculptor, print-maker and painter, who went to Mexico City in 1946 to study print-making at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop), where she met Mora.

Their son the filmmaker will be in town Saturday afternoon for a single screening of Betty y Pancho at the Community Folk Art Center (CFAC) at 3:00 PM. This rare U.S. screening – though shown widely in Mexico including on television, the film has not been released in this country and is not commercially available on DVD – occurs in conjunction with the opening of Power and Pride: An Elizabeth Catlett Retrospective, which fills both the building’s main galleries and its hallway.

Catlett herself, now 94, travels from her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, for the opening reception Friday night from 6 – 8 PM. Central New Yorkers should take note that landing this show – and the artist with it – falls into the category of Genuine Major Coup for CFAC (though to tell the truth they have been making a habit of that lately). And although there exists fairly extensive other filmed interview material on Catlett, some of it readily available online, in just under an hour’s run-time Mora’s film provides an unusually accessible and close look at how two artists worked, supported one another and managed a bicultural marriage and family.

Betty y Pancho opens with a scene of gracious triumph: the sparkling opening reception in February 1998 at the Neuberger Museum of Art at State University of New York’s campus in Purchase of the fifty-year retrospective of Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture, which went on to tour the U.S and Mexico. (You may spy, as I did, some work from that show which is now on view at CFAC, although the two shows are not the same group of work.) Soon afterward, we hear Catlett recalling, “My father’s mother was a slave in Virginia and when Emancipation came, her free uncle who lived in Washington, went to bring her back. He had to pay for all the seats on one car in order to bring her on the train.”

After this section recounting Catlett’s family history – both her parents were teachers and her father taught for a time at Tuskegee – and the roots of her art, the film turns to a similar background introduction of Francisco Mora in what will be the film’s pattern of essentially alternating chapters on Catlett and Mora. An exceptionally bright, eager and talented student from a family that was at least comfortable, Mora abruptly found his circumstances sharply reduced by his parents’ divorce. He credits his recollection of hunger so severe that he could no longer think in school with a life-long identification with the poor and the dedication of much of his art to their interests.

Of the indigenous Purepecha people, Mora also found American racism – and its antidote through art and cultural awareness – readily intelligible. (The filmmaker son also made a feature film depicting one of the tribe’s major legends, entirely in the indigenous language, three years ago - Erendira Ikikunari is available at Netflix.) The section of the film devoted, for example, to the early aims and practices of the Taller de Gráfica Popular with its credo of “prints for the people” (it was just a decade old when it brought Catlett and Mora together) are as fascinating at that about Catlett’s engineering a trip to a whites-only exhibit in New Orleans of a Picasso show for her students when she taught at Dillard University; clearly moved, she recounts how her students – not a one had ever entered a museum or gallery to see art “in person” before – ran about excitedly, exclaiming and calling to one another to come and see.

Catlett settled in Mexico and eventually became a Mexican citizen (after Mora’s death she reclaimed dual citizenship in the U.S.) following harassment and arrest due to her political organizing and associations, as government forces sympathetic to the McCarthyism rampant to the north attempted to pressure her into leaving. Although the film does not address that, it does spend time on the three sons Catlett and Mora raised, all artists. Besides Juan the filmmaker, composer and jazz musician Francisco Mora Jr. did the film’s score – a pair of string quartets celebrating Harriet Tubman and indigenous Mexican women – and the youngest, David, is a painter in his own right as well as Catlett’s studio assistant.

Besides making the celebration of African American women and mothers a major theme in her art, Catlett says at one point, “I was always doing things that Mexican women just didn’t do.” While she gives enormous credit to Mora for the union’s success, what’s also obvious as the film progresses is how well matched this pair is as artists – in temperament, sympathies, aims and capacity to nourish each other’s work. You see the results of that in CFAC’s galleries “in person” – and you might feel like it’s the first time you’ve been in a gallery too.

*******
This review is from the 9/17/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Betty y Pancho screened on Saturday, September 19 at 3:00 PM in the PRPAC Black Box Theatre at Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St., with Juan Mora Catlett on hand for discussion afterward. Power and Pride: An Elizabeth Catlett Retrospective is on view at CFAC to December 12th; the opening artist’s reception was Friday, September 18, 6:00 – 8:00 PM. CFAC is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10 – 5, and Saturdays, 11 – 5. Also, through October 21st, in CFAC’s video alcove, two films by Carrie Mae Weems, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment and Afro Chic, in conjunction with Light Work’s city-wide collaboration focusing on photo and video by Barry Anderson.

2009-08-24T11:17:00.003-04:00

Film Review #209: District 9
2009
Director: Neill Blonkamp
Cast: Sharlto Copely, Vanessa Haywood, CGI

Midway through this story set in South Africa’s Johannesburg, the ingratiating corporate gopher charged with being the public face of a massive forced removal himself takes refuge within the sprawling, sordid shanty-town. Things have gone terribly wrong. Back at the shack of one Christopher Johnson, whom he’d tried to evict earlier, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely) notices his host’s young son chattering and peering at him. Already distraught, Wikus demands, “What’s he doing?”

“He likes you,” says Christopher.

“We are alike,” says the little one, fascinated. “We’re the same.”

“We are not the same!” shrieks Wikus, leaping to his feet.

Wikus is still mostly right in this horrified declaration. Christopher and his son (who are CGI-conjured instead of played by actors) are aliens, two among the growing thousands who’ve been corralled for 28 years – since their apparently disabled mothership stalled above the city where it still hangs mid-sky – in an inner-city camp, ringed by East Berlin-like guard towers, gates, warning signs, razor wire and Multi National United’s prowling, brutal, trigger-happy private security forces. The South Africans call the aliens “prawns,” an epithet descriptive of their appearance, and their language is a series of clicks, which Wikus understands but are subtitled for the audience.

Tensions and incidents of violence have risen during human and alien encounters, and the TV live-eye reports and interviews that provide much of the narrative thread and documentary-like ambiance include a pointed, bizarre parade of black South Africans voicing fearful hostility toward the aliens, resentment over the resources they consume, and vigorous support of an even greater Apartheid toward them. In their very public display of removing the aliens to a remote site with even fewer amenities than District 9 offers, MNU has carefully kept out of view their interest in accessing the aliens’ weapons, which are coded to work only via contact with alien biology, and the Mengele-like medical experiments. So smarmy to start with that you want to slap him, Wikus actually seems to believe MNU’s public relations line and is crudely racist – if that would be the term – in his officious condescension toward the aliens. Imagine his surprise when a chance encounter with a canister of alien fluid – its versatile powers will also fuel that mother-ship if Christopher can get back up there – first makes Wikus violently ill and then causes an alien hand and arm to sprout, replacing his own, just the beginning of his transformation.

To what lengths must we go to feel another’s pain and know we are alike? Only when “infected” with an alien life-form does Wikus become, well, fully human. Enduringly, we all want to go home. Each stranded in the world of the other, Wikus and Christopher share this yearning and its dilemmas and, from across a great chasm, come to be allies and even brothers. Quickly arriving at Central New York multiplexes after wide release on August 14th, District 9 is an exhilarating action film whose shooting, editing and narrative are way better crafted and more thoughtful than you’d ever expect. As executive producer, hit mogul Peter Jackson “presents” this first-time feature from South African director Neill Blomkamp. In the largely South African cast, Copely delivers a stunning, high energy performance as the MNU bureaucrat who actually does love his wife Tania (Vanessa Haywood) and has more gumption than anybody previously imagined. One by one, his father-in-law (MNU’s CEO), the mercenary chief and the gangster running District 9’s black market all get more than they bargained for out of this frightened, unhip little guy they were planning to swat aside.

District 9 also owes a great deal to other sci-fi movies. Part of the pleasure of watching it involves realizing that a certain vocabulary has evolved at this point that comments on more than the action at hand (satisfying as that may be). From Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), for example, we see the blue holographic computer functions that hover in mid-air (predicting your own smart phone’s finger-operated apps screen). The Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy (1999 – 2003) provided familiarity with the notion that new knowledge and abilities could be “plugged in” instead of acquired through laborious, old-fashioned step-by-step learning (see the part where Wikus, inside what we might best call an alien HumVee, finds himself understanding its operation and channeling Ellen Ripley).

In fact, District 9 especially owes a great deal to the Alien quartet (‘79, ‘86, ‘92 and ’97) – whether it’s memories of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) protecting the orphan Newt by using her space-age fork-lift to battle the alien mother in the second installment, Ripley’s chest bursting open as she dives into the flames in the third, or the cloned Ripley – now part-alien herself and discovering botched versions of earlier attempts to clone her stored in vats of formaldehyde – heading back to Earth, perhaps not with the same creature-loyalty. And whether it’s the many zombie films, New Line Cinema’s Blade trilogy with Wesley Snipes (variously directed, 1998, 2002 and 2004), or the progression of Ripley’s transformation over almost two decades and four directors, there also has emerged the idea that mixing species is at least tinged with infection. Setting District 9 specifically in South Africa, including “news clips” of vociferously anti-alien black South Africans and Wikus’ reaction to Christopher’s offspring thinking they’re “alike” makes explicit something of a trend in which mixing species frankly stands in for an old ideology that views race-mixing with horror and justifies treating those who are different as “non-human.”

Done with such seeming nonchalance that it takes you a while to realize it, District 9 actually offers an alternative history for South Africa: there is no government visible in this film, no Mandela, no end of Apartheid. Instead, "all that" is replaced by the 1981 arrival of the alien mothership which unites South African blacks and whites alike in repressing those yet lower on the food chain. (Given the parts assigned to Nigerians in this story, you have to wonder what the inside-Africa stereiotype is there.) In fact, I think surfacing this satirically is part of this film’s brilliance, though not everyone agrees; District 9 dwells in a queasy, ambiguous zone and some reviewers have found it literally, offensively racist.

Anyway, definitely don’t wait for the DVD.

*******
This review appears in the August 20, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular film column since 2006. “District 9” is playing in wide release.

2009-08-24T11:03:00.002-04:00

Film Review #208: Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
2009
Director: Aviva Kempner
Documentary

The film opens just as the first episode of the television show did on January 10, 1949. Ample-bosomed Jewish mother Molly Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) leans out the kitchen window that faces the air shaft of a brick tenement building in the Bronx and greets her neighbors across the way – what NPR correspondent Susan Stamberg calls the urban equivalent of neighbors talking across back fences – “Hello! Such a little word for such a big feeling! I want to say hello to you in all the letters of the alphabet. That would be a hello!”

Washington, DC-based Aviva Kempner’s richly detailed film about the life of Gertrude Berg isn’t currently scheduled to screen in Central New York, but let us hope that changes. Opening on just two screens July 10th, it’s up to a dozen theaters this week and has bookings through the end of the year. Intriguing in several ways, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg also has enough Syracuse connections to make it a natural here.

Before Oprah, Ellen, Martha, Rachel Ray, or I Love Lucy (which, incidentally, replaced “The Goldbergs” in 1956) there was Gertrude Berg’s creation, Molly Goldberg. Berg, a New Yorker who grew up at her father’s Catskills resort and married the Englishman who invented instant coffee, produced, wrote the scripts – in the end, some 12,000 – and played the starring role in both radio and TV versions. Before transitioning to television in 1949, Berg’s live 15-minute radio vignettes ran five days a week from 1929 – beginning three weeks after the Stock Market crash that launched the Great Depression – until 1945. The Yiddish-accented Goldberg family comprised Molly, her husband Jake, Molly’s Uncle David, and their first-generation American kids Sammy and Rosalie. Their stories provided solidarity and identification to Jewish listeners and to other Americans a window on how Jewish immigrants assimilated, found spots in US business and neighborhoods, navigated raising their kids in American culture while preserving their own, coped with a Depression economy laboring under 25% unemployment and lived through the rise of anti-Semitism both here and abroad and World War II.

Though often folksy and comedic, the show addressed political issues through the lens of a single family. During Hitler’s rise in 1933, radio audiences listened to the real rabbi that Berg invited onto her show as he performed a real Passover Seder. After the infamous Kristallnacht rampage in Germany in November 1938, during which wandering mobs killed Jews and burned their homes, shops and synagogues, Berg aired an episode for the next Passover in which a rock is thrown through the window during the Goldbergs’ Seder and Molly calms the family so the ceremony can proceed. Kempner includes archival footage and photos that recreate the social tensions on this side of the Atlantic during those years. The late 1930s saw Nazi clubs who marched on Long Island and in Detroit the popular radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin, whose broadcasts lionized Hitler and blamed the world’s problems on Jewish conspiracies.

Berg’s post-war transition to television was hugely successful and earned her the first Emmy Award given for Best Actress in 1950. Kempner includes interviews with many of the surviving actors from that cast as well as generous clips from episodes. But Molly’s husband Jake Goldberg was played initially by actor Phillip Loeb, who committed suicide in 1955 after he was forced off the show and black-listed as a Communist during the McCarthy era. This past spring, the Syracuse-based simply new theatre’s production of Trumbo, followed by ArtRage Gallery’s screening of Johnny Got His Gun, re-acquainted Syracuse audiences with black-listed Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, plus the unlikely part played by a Syracuse grocer named Laurence Johnson in strong-arming Madison Avenue ad agencies representing radio and TV sponsors to pull their support from shows who employed suspect cast and crew, or risk national product boycotts.

Kempner’s film (which also details the lengths Berg went to defend Loeb) features the Newhouse School’s television authority Robert Thompson, who relates how Johnson convinced General Mills that he and the American Legion could brand them as Communist sympathizers unless the show fired Loeb, a founder of Actors Equity and union activist.

As it happens in this city of sometimes surprising cultural extremes, Syracuse University Press also published Glen Smith’s 2007 biography of Berg, and SU Library’s Special Collections houses Berg’s papers. Kempner was here to research her film and she uses Smith as a major source as well. Now somebody needs to bring her movie here too.

*******
This review appeared in the August 13, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is screening in limited release. Thanks to mPRm Public Relations for providing a preview DVD screener.

2009-08-09T11:36:00.003-04:00

Film Review #207: HBO's Grey Gardens
2009
Diector: Michael Sucsy
Cast; Drew Barrymore, Jessica Lange, Jean Tripplehorne

Beginning in the fall of 1971, reports – first in the National Enquirer – began appearing in the New York City press about a dilapidated mansion in an exclusive oceanfront section of East Hampton, the Long Island enclave some 114 miles from New York City. Grey Gardens was the Beale family’s 28-room estate, then inhabited by Edith Bouvier Beale, Sr. (“Big Edie”) and her 55-year-old daughter Edith, Jr. (“Little Edie”), plus a large number of cats and raccoons. Because Big Edie owned the property, her estranged husband had been powerless to sell it, as had her two sons, although they administered the small trust left to her after his death, which had by then run out. The media sensation – first the tabloids, then the mainstream dailies and Gail Sheehy’s article “Paradise Lost” in New York Magazine – stemmed partly from the estate’s extreme disrepair and its inhabitants’ bizarre theatricality.

Neighbors complaining of the stench had led the Suffolk County Health Department to threaten eviction. Without running water or heat, the house had many windows broken, was overgrown with vines and underbrush, filthy and trash-filled. Big Edie was John “Blackjack” Bouvier’s sister; his daughters, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, were Little Edie’s first cousins. In the summer of 1972, Mrs. Onassis (Jean Trippelhorne in the HBO version) visited Grey Gardens, where she had spent much time as a child, while she was visiting her sister, who was visiting Andy Warhol in Montauk. When Big Edie insisted she would not leave, her two nieces arranged for a massive cleaning and refurbishing. During this project, Mrs. Radziwill brought the brothers Albert and David Maysles around. The Maysles, already acclaimed for their Rolling Stones cinema vérité documentary Gimme Shelter, hoped to film Lee and Jackie. A year later they showed up again – Mrs. Onassis had “lost interest” in their movie – asking to film Big and Little Edie.

Little Edie had discovered that first National Inquirer photographer shooting from the bushes and invited him in – she hoped publicity would revive her old dream of a dancing career – and she welcomed the Maysles and insisted her contract contain a clause that she could appear in other films. Big Edie had aspired to a singing career herself; she spends a fair amount of time on-screen in the ensuing film – when not bickering and making up with Little Edie – vamping and singing 30s and 40s pop tunes from beneath enormous old hats, ensconced in her bed with her cats, newspapers, hand mirror, empty pâté tins and ice cream cartons.

The Maysles’ 1975 film has been an enduring classic in its own right. Re-released in 2006 on a two-disc Criterion set, its copious extras contain an audio clip of Little Edie telephoning Albert Maysles after the Bush-Gore election. Big Edie had died in 1977; two years later Little Edie sold Grey Gardens, had a farewell two-night sold-out cabaret engagement in Greenwich Village, traveled and settled in Bal Harbour, Florida, where she died in 2002.

The Maysles’ riveting film is now also worth seeing along with Michael Sucsy’s new dramatized version. The HBO film premiered in April and came out on DVD several weeks ago; it has a whopping 17 Emmy nominations, including one each for Best Lead Actress in a Mini-series or Film for Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. For one thing, it makes clear (as the Maysles really didn’t) to what extent, in a single intervening year, most of Jackie and Lee’s improvements vanished.

The Maysles also hadn’t tried to account for Grey Gardens’ decline over the quarter century or so the two women lived there alone. Sucsy asked himself a dozen questions about what might have occurred and then attempted to fill in those gaps. So we see Little Edie at her New Year’s Eve 1936 debutante ball at the Pierre Hotel, see her mother’s narcissism and sabotage of her confidence, her brief Manhattan period when trying to break into dancing, her affair with Truman’s former Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug, her mother’s maneuvers to get her home after her own affair with a live-in “singing teacher” fell apart. Little Edie was witty, unstable, bright, surprisingly generous, gracious, blunt, ill-equipped to strike out on her own, stricken. Sucsy alternates these vignettes with often remarkable, verbatim recreations of scenes from the Maysles film. I watched these two films together last week. Like Helen Mirren reincarnating Queen Elizabeth, Barrymore and Lange astonish.

*******
This review appeared in the August 6, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. HBO’s Grey Gardens and Criterion’s 2006 DVD of the Maysles Brothers’ 1975 documentary are both available at Netflix. The Emmy Awards air 9/20 on CBS.

2009-07-30T15:17:00.004-04:00

Film Review #206: The Hurt Locker
2009
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty

“I probably wasn’t injured because I was way in the back of the vehicle. I was on top of all the bottled water, because I was little,” my friend had explained, recounting how the troop convoy in Afghanistan encountered on IED on the road beyond the city. My friend paused a beat, then added before going on, “Well. I still am little.”

The capacity to compress yawning gaps between the before and after of life-shaking violence to a simple, quiet change of tense is similar to the kind of detail you’ll find in Kathryn Bigelow’s film, set in the pre-Surge days of 2004 Iraq, which opens this week at Manlius Art Cinema. That is what sets it apart from most action thrillers and what drives its surprising capacity to comment on war in intimate and domestic as well as surreal and dislocating ways.

The Hurt Locker is billed as an action thriller and it certainly has both parts of that phrase in spades. Its exhausting two hours and eleven minutes fly by, but its pedigree predicts an authenticity beyond Hollywood style and pyrotechnics. Mark Boal based his script on his experience as an embedded journalist with a US military specialist bomb squad in Iraq and in fact the film opens with words from another journalist, Central New York native Chris Hedges, asserting that “war is a drug.” This is from Hedges’ 2002 book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, one of the best of a rich crop of efforts by war reporters since, say, the break-up of Yugoslavia, in which Hedges writes about why he left combat and genocide coverage. As well, the actor Jeremy Renner – there is an excellent interview with him at NPR from earlier this week – spent time training with such a team to get ready to play Staff Sgt. Will James, the audacious leader of the film’s lead trio. Bigelow shot the film in the summer of 2007, just over the Iraqi border in Jordan and at the height of the Surge. Actual Iraqi refugees played most of the Iraqi roles and we may presume informed the film’s progress. Renner says further that the conditions of the “set” were sometimes so hostile that the cast and crew had shots fired at them during filming; there’s one passage in the film, apparently unscripted, when a gang of young boys pelt James’ vehicle with stones.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Bravo Company’s year-long active duty rotation has 38 days left and our bomb squad’s staff sergeant (Guy Pearce) dies during the opening scene when an insurgent in a nearby shop detonates an IED with a cell phone. In a prelude to his own development, although he’s visibly the most gripped in stomach-twisting panic of the three-man crew, Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is the first to glimpse that tell-tale cell phone. The third squad member is former intelligence officer Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). By the next day they’re out again with their new Staff Sgt. James, who alarms them right away with his risk-taking. The film then ticks down Bravo’s remaining time – Day 23, 16, and 2 – followed by an epilogue in which one of the three re-ups, returning to Iraq to begin Delta Company’s rotation at Day 364.

These episodes – acts, if you will – are structured around variations on what such a squad might typically encounter – a cluster of bombs connected by a spider-web of buried wires, an unevenly sagging car with the detonator hidden in the windshield wipers, an ambush in the countryside in which the crew is pinned down all day, a dead child’s body rigged with explosives, a man in a suicide bomber’s vest begging for help. At Day 16, time – along with some other boundaries – starts to break down as days and nights flow together. James’ attachment to an Iraqi boy selling boot-legged DVDs takes him first outside Camp Victory alone at night and then finally to lead his team into danger that almost loses one member.

The Hurt Locker was filmed with four hand-held cameras going at once, so there’s an immediacy and sense of being inside the action. But over a whole film, you see that Bigelow also takes her time and is less concerned with the bang than what it surrounds. (The only thing recently on screen to rival The Hurt Locker in this regard would be Anthony Mann’s Public Enemies, especially that admirably-shot second prison break.) Bigelow has concerned herself with what the she calls “the seductiveness of violence in cinematic form” from the start. Regardless of who has served on any given film as her editor or cinematographer, her masterful pacing of extended action sequences and provocative use of point of view have been reliable over a career dating to The Loveless (Willem Dafoe’s feature debut as Vance), a 1982 biker film after which the terms “languid” and “explosive” no longer seem contradictory. Watching her other films, readily available at Netflix, repays the effort. The jolting zombie flick set in the Southwest, Near Dark (1987), has actually more stupendously fiery explosions than Hurt Locker. The 1990 cop drama Blue Steel wrings you out with that final chase up from the subway into the street (and makes me wonder if Michael Winterbottom had it in mind when he made The Brave One). Strange Days, made in 1995, looked forward to addictive, technologically-supported vicarious violence and a racist LAPD on the eve of the Millennium; it’s considerably smarter than similarly themed movies like Total Recall, and considerably more violent than almost anything in The Hurt Locker. A year later Bigelow made Point Break, ostensibly about an FBI agent infiltrating some surfer bank robbers but inserting some nifty chuteless sky-diving too. The Weight of Water (2000) didn’t do well, with its parallel stories set centuries apart, but Bigelow does a great shipwreck and she brilliantly directed Sarah Polley as a Lizzie Borden-style colonial wife. K-19: The Widowmaker of course put Harrison Ford aboard an endangered Russian nuclear submarine in 2002. Some of these films are arguably gory and spectacular enough to make The Hurt Locker seem positively contemplative by comparison, but Bigelow’s films also have human – often redemptive – dimensions beyond the regular wild ride.

The Hurt Locker, for example, uses the relationships among its trio of bomb specialists to explore what fatherhood means to these young men in rich but spare detail. James has an infant son, with whom the film briefly reunites him near its end. By then it’s no surprise that he is an affectionate and tender father, because we’ve watched him throughout the film look out for his men. Well, that’s what staff sergeants do, yes, but Bigelow focuses much attention on the depth of this care with details like the juice box he gets for Sanborn when they’re pinned down. Or the extended tutoring in the finer points of soldiering he gives the talented but frightened Eldridge, the times he talks him through dangerous moments and refocuses him exactly as a father might. Virtually the first personal conversation the three men have concerns fatherhood, in which Sanborn says his girlfriend is always pestering him about babies; his turning point occurs on nearly the last day when he sums up his desire to leave the war with, “I want a son. I want a son.”

Although nobody in the film literally calls James a “cowboy” – I listened carefully for this word – that’s what all of us, on screen and off, know he is as an American type. This unspoken common reaction drives several powerful cameo performances – implicitly the decidedly un-cowboy staff sergeant he replaces, then Ralph Fiennes as the private British contractor in the desert, and David Morse as a colonel whose congratulations after one close call might or might not be infuriated sarcasm – as well as Eldridge’s eventual (and very son-like) rebellion against James’ “adrenalin fix.” Curiously, so far only Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor calls this film a Western. Rainer cites the cowboy’s classic unease with the homestead. Then there’s the requisite pinned-down-by-savages-in-the wilderness scene. And James’ walks into the “kill-zone” are nothing if not high-noon showdowns on dusty frontier main drags. But I think Bigelow calls up something older too with her filmmaking too, like “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.”

*******
This review was announced in the July 30, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle. Opening on Friday at Manlius Art Cinema, “The Hurt Locker” screens daily at 7:30 PM with weekend matinees at 2:00 and 4:45 PM as well. Carousel Mall has also added some screenings. See other Kathryn Bigelow films listed in this review at Netflix.com.

2009-07-19T14:00:00.004-04:00

Film Review #205: Chéri
2009
Director: Stephen Frears
Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathy Bates, Rupert Friend

Here is that unusual film that is worth seeing as much for its flaws as for its considerable accomplishments. In order to do that around here you’ll have to be quick, because it’s playing for one week only right now at Manlius Art Cinema.

Chéri reunites its star, Michelle Pfeiffer (as the aging Parisian courtesan Lea de Lonval on the eve of World War I), with director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, 21 years after their collaboration on Dangerous Liaisons. Based on Colette’s 1920 novel Chéri and its sequel, this film is the latest of a string of adaptations – a film in 1950, television plays in 1962 and 1973, and a stage musical in 1980 – which suggest the enduring tug of its story. On the verge of deciding she’ll “retire” and live on her investments after her last patron has departed for Russia, Lea impulsively enters what she assumes will be a two or three week dalliance with Chéri (English actor Rupert Friend), the spoiled and moody 19-year-old son of her colleague, Madame Charlotte Peloux (a boisterous Kathy Bates). Some years later, Charlotte intervenes and arranges a marriage for Chéri with young Edmee (Felicity Jones), daughter of another woman in their circle. (One of the best moments between these two occurs as they voice having grown up as feeling like “orphans” amidst the entrepreneurial excess of their mothers’ households.) Initially he assumes this marriage won’t upset his arrangement with Lea. Ever worldly-wise, she sends him packing after a last shopping trip, this time for his wedding present, a pearl stick pin. But neither does well with this separation, despite parallel lavish trips to the Italian lakes district and the French Riviera and the intended consolations of other partners. There are reversals, tearful declarations of love, more reversals and in a voice-over by Frears himself – old English majors take note – a kind of “Richard Corey” ending.

Michelle Pfeiffer is wonderful and quite moving as Lea and, in enough of the moments where it really counts – especially their last scene together when each is finally able to say what their love consists in and then live up to that – Rupert Friend matches her. Just after the film opened in late July, a still luminous Pfeiffer told Washington Post reporter Dan Zak that what she really fears is winding up like Norma Desmond (the character in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, a garish and deluded former star rattling around in a dilapidated mansion). Their interview as Zak reports it got off to a rocky start when he suggested that Pfeiffer’s own “golden age” had been the years 1987 to 1993. During that time she made the films Ladyhawke, The Witches of Eastwick, Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Batman Returns, Love Field and The Age of Innocence, a golden age by anybody’s standard. (Zak has since said admiringly of Pfeiffer’s Chéri performance, “Everybody’s got at least one golden age. I think she may be on the verge of another.”)

If Zak’s opening gambit left an overly long pause to get past, that Pfeiffer had Norma Desmond in the back of her mind explains a deeper bite to her performance and its commentary on aging and loss of youth. In fact, Lea and Charlotte stand out among some pretty Desmond-like contemporaries – one with raccoon eyes and horribly arthritic hands, another whose ropey throat and slack lips Chéri notices because she wears a string of pearls like Lea’s own (Harriet Walter and Anita Pallenberg, both unrecognizable) – who are really not simply comic relief figures.

Zak’s “golden age” reference originates in the fact that Chéri is set in the period known in Europe as the Belle Époque, covering roughly the last couple decades of the 19th century up until World War I. This corresponded with the “Gilded Age” in the US - a time of massive colonialism globally, robber barons, new fortunes by scandalous means, wild extravagance and the shifting social classes and gaps that led to the collapses of World War I and beyond. It was also a time of massive shifts in gender roles. It’s no coincidence that Charlotte and Lea, a couple of wily operators, talk over how their investments in oil futures are doing late in a film whose major male character favors pearls and white satin pajamas and complains he’s been kept as helpless as a 12-year-old. “Leave all the arrangements to me,” soothes Lea as readily as any sugar daddy. Colette’s novel opens with the scene where Chéri teases Lea to give him her string of pearls, immediately framing the story as one of skewed relations between the genders as a lens to comprehend broader shifts. Frears and Hampton put that scene further in, framing the story instead – at least in tone – as escapist fare, a kind of light farce about harmless May-December seduction among the rich and famous.

Or at least marketing it that way. The film’s trailer uses clips from the film that create the impression this is a comedy; these moments often stick out like sore thumbs in the course of the film itself. It’s hard to tell how much this is a marketing strategy for a summer release and how much it reflects the continued ambivalence among filmmakers and audiences alike with the film’s more serious themes. Chéri opened in limited release in 80 theaters to start here in the US. Despite a decent enough box office (up to 170 screens this week) and a cascade of initial coverage heralding the come-back of Michelle Pfeiffer, there was no advance press screening for the Manlius run (hence this review getting posted late and on-line only). Distributors pull press screenings when they don’t want to risk soft ticket sales. Critics have been lukewarm to this film – it’s gotten only a 50% favorable rating at the Rotten Tomatoes site – I suspect because it can’t quite own up to its own serious intent, and if there’s one thing we expect in our summer movies it’s clear, unambiguous intent. This movie more than repays the extra effort.

*******
This review was announced in the July 16, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Chéri plays at Manlius through this Thursday, with two matinees daily this weekend and a regular 7:30 PM showing weeknights. In a wry bit of serial scheduling, Manlius Cinema’s Nat Tobin will follow Cheri with Woody Allen’s Whatever Works (also for one week) which several critics have suggested would make an intriguing double feature if paired with Chéri. On July 31st, Manlius opens Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker – so far, an exclusive CNY engagement.

2009-07-10T21:12:00.004-04:00

Film Review #204: The Beaches of Agnès/Les Plages d’Agnès
2008
Director: Agnès Varda
Cast: Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, Jacques Demy; Anne-Laure Manceau as young Agnès
A Cinema Guild release. France/French with English subtitles, 108 minutes.

Of all the ways that French filmmaker Agnès Varda, just turned 81, might frame discussion of the French New Wave in this self-portrait documentary, she mirthfully chooses a giant orange-tiger cartoon cat with a droll, mechanically filtered voice to introduce the subject for posterity. The cat is actually long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Chris Marker, bobbing along disguised in cardboard cutout as his own character Guillaume-in-Egypt, inquiring “What about...?” off-handedly during a stroll through a crowded Paris street.

Well, she recounts just as casually, after Godard had gotten Georges de Beauregard to make Breathless in 1960, that the producer asked Godard if he had “any more pals who could make the same kind of cheap black and white films.” She tells Marker that Beauregard “wanted a stable” of filmmakers. Beauregard made other Godard films, some of Jean-Pierre Melville’s and in 1961 he produced Jacques Demy’s Lola. Getting the same recruitment query, Demy suggested his lover, Varda, whom he would marry the next year. Varda had made one feature in 1954 set in a coastal fishing village, La Pointe Courte, followed by a handful of shorts, and also worked as a photographer. So in this way Beauregard, with Carlo Ponti, came to produce Varda’s acclaimed Cléo from 5 to 7.

Since this occurs well into the film, we already know Marker’s been coming around Varda’s rue Daguerre compound in Paris since the days Varda convinced Alain Resnais to edit La Point Courte. So they have clearly colluded in staging this exchange as a kind of advisement against hoping for portentous announcements at the last minute. Instead, Varda now inserts a short clip from Cléo (Corinne Marchand as a glamorous singer trying to fill time before she learns whether she has cancer). She then comments on filming a story in real time and the inspiration of medieval painter Baldung Grein’s images of voluptuous women embraced by boney death figures, then briskly moves on to her 1962 trip to Cuba to photograph Fidel’s “revolution cha cha cha.”

Varda shot The Beaches of Agnès over two- and three-week stints between August 2006 and June 2008 with six camera people in all. Half, including Varda herself, used a Sony V1, the small high definition video camera that she began using a decade ago for The Gleaners and I; the others used a larger video camera. She takes as her major connecting image the series of beaches she’s known since childhood: La Panne beach in Belgium (her family lived in Brussels until they fled the Nazis to France in 1940), the Mediterranean port of Sète (where the family spent summers on a docked boat and the site of her first film), Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach in California (she followed Demy to Hollywood, a town she says “immediately seduced me,” where both made films before she returned to France without him during a separation), La Guérnière Beach on Noirmoutier Island (she and Demy made a retreat of an old mill), as well as along the banks of the Seine in Paris. For one sequence Varda has six truckloads of sand dumped in the street outside her Paris house and sets up her office there “to justify the film’s title.”

Additionally the film has two other powerful threads. One is the omnipresence of Demy, whose post-Hollywood reunion with Varda – they reconciled with the idea of growing old together – was cruelly interrupted by his AIDS diagnosis and his death in 1990 just ten days after Varda completed shooting her first of three films about him, Jacquot de Nantes. In Beaches, when it is clear that Demy will die, the screen fills wordlessly for a moment with what looks like a profusion of deep green palm fronds barely swaying in a soft wind. It’s an effective, surprisingly moving image on its own, whether or not you happen to even know or recall – Homer’s Odyssey is a touchstone for Varda – the moment that Ulysses’ heart is first pierced with an apprehension of beauty at the sight of a young palm tree.

Secondly, flowing out of just such rich moments as this and their power to summarize and connect to other such images, the notion of puzzles structures the film as much as the beach episodes. Years ago, Varda’s first “official self-portrait” was a tile mosaic; now Beaches works by juxtaposing excerpts from her films with her on-screen appearances, re-enactments, photos and the more recent installations (including Varda in the belly of a whale/boudoir among the dunes, specially for this film). Conventional film clips of well-known scenes as well as clips of music from the film-scores are excised from their context and used both to reference past work and anew as free-standing images. For Varda, memory works in this way rather than by historical time-line. This elaborates Varda’s entertaining opening piece with the mirrors on the beach set up by a troop of young assistants; yes, obviously the conceit of mirrors for a self-portrait, but also that life’s fragments reflect one another and so do efforts in one art form resonate in another. Thus what Varda calls “my musings, pretty close to the truth, are punctuated by sketches where I put on a bit of a show. Clowning around allowed me to take a step back.”

This also means that Beaches works for those at all degrees of familiarity with Varda’s work. It’s deeply satisfying when a fragment of a film you’ve seen before triggers your own memory of the whole, but it’s also credible that an entirely new and young audience – who seem to be showing up – may need no familiarity at all with her films to take in her approach to experience.

Varda’s exchange with Marker over the New Wave may even be redundant, except as a kind of footnote. I’m thinking of the spot early on where she recounts that she was conceived in Arles and named for that city, but changed her name at age 18, all the while writing her given name – Arlette – in the sand with a stick, only to have an incoming wave sweep over the letters and recede, leaving again a virgin field of sand washed clean.

Varda held her own with New Wave theorists, mostly men and many of them ex-film critics. Whether from her other films or this one alone, it’s plain she was extraordinarily literate, capable and at ease across art forms and social classes. From Beaches one does learn some particulars, that she was educated in art history at Ecole de Louvre, was a photojournalist and official photographer of Paris’ Théatre National Populaire, was intrigued by the narrative structure and experiments of novelists like Faulkner and Natalie Sarraute, is now still running the “family business” production company Ciné-Tamaris out of her Paris house and, starting with 2003’s Venice Biennale, has embarked upon multimedia art installations, some of which show are documented in this film or were created for it. She also logged three months of working on small fishing boats in Corsica and “unambiguous cohabitation” with their owners, a privately executed walk-about that bridged her student days and her decision to take up photojournalism. But Varda came to cinema unburdened by film theory (or even much viewing at age 25), at first simply wanting to try out words with images to extend her photographic practice.

Thirty-three films later – roughly half of them fiction, the rest documentary – she remains serenely centered in her clarity that “films always originate in emotions” and that technical and intellectual prowess should serve rather than drive the enterprise. For example, in Beaches Varda recalls her involvement with feminist organizing, especially in the period she and Demy were apart. “I tried to be a joyful feminist but I was very angry,” she says, listing of horrific abuses and offering archival footage of protests. But more persuasive – and in this context generating new flashes of revelation about why she created this character as apolitical – are the quick clips from 1985’s Vagabond that punctuate this section: Sandrine Bonnaire as the increasingly desperate drifter Mona, kicking a metal keg in a field, punching metal garage doors, furiously patching a boot with a ripped sole.

And Varda’s keen interest for reunions with old friends, casts and subjects alike from earlier films stretches back years, flowering in Beaches. To describe her satisfaction with her documentary about the time-honored French practice of scavenging harvest left-overs and city garbage, The Gleaners and I (2000), which she extended with follow-up visits to as many of the same people as she could find in The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002), Varda says, “I was able to approach them, to bring them out of their anonymity. I discovered their generosity.”

Cinematic technology’s service of the human reaches a most magic moment in Beaches when Varda returns to the village of Sète, site of La Pointe Courte, resurrecting test footage she’d shot of a local couple, Pierrot and Suzou, old friends of hers, long ago. The husband had died soon after, leaving two young sons, now middle-aged men. Mounting a projector on a hand-cart and rolling it through the old town, Varda ran the test footage for the sons, who had seen their father in photos “but never in motion.” Watching Blaise and Vincent’s faces as they watch their long-passed father’s image on that very thoroughfare and you’re reminded that in some places photo – still and motion alike – inspires fear of soul-stealing. Work like Varda’s may give souls back.

*******
Fanzine published this review on July 8, 2009 at www.thefanzine.com. The Beaches of Agnès won France’s Cesar Award for best documentary in February and had its official US theatrical opening on July 1 in New York City at Film Forum and in Los Angeles on the 3rd. But actually a number of screenings in North America already have prepared the ground – at Toronto’s film festival last fall right after its Venice IFF premiere, since February at film festivals in Portland (OR), Wisconsin and Seattle, and as sneak peeks in several Varda retrospectives: in Chicago and then at Harvard in March and, just winding up now, American Cinematheque’s week-long retrospective in Santa Monica. Varda has traveled to some of these to give talk-backs after screenings and in March visited New York for a number of interviews at Film Forum that are just hitting print now. The Criterion Collection’s January 2008 release of a new four-disc DVD set – her first three features (La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, and in 1964 Le Bonheur/Happiness) plus Vagabond (1985) – is available along with several other Varda titles at Netflix.

2009-07-06T13:32:00.003-04:00

Film Review #203: The Last Ridge
2007
Director: Abbie Kealy
Cast: 10th Mountain Division, Scott Simon

In 1946 Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini made a film called Paisá – criminally hard to find here – whose six episodes depict the Allied liberation of Fascist Italy between 1943-45 through the eyes of ordinary people interacting with, primarily, U.S. GIs. These vignettes often turn on misunderstandings due to language and O’Henry-like twists, but Paisá features pretty keenly observed portrayals by a non-American filmmaker – and it brims with a deeper, more serious appreciation for the Yanks that we are no longer so sure greets our troops abroad.

Certainly not in 1993 Somalia, when a one-hour helicopter mission to capture two aides to warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu’s Bakaara Market neighborhood turned into 15 hours, with 19 US troops and 1,000 Somalis killed. A convoy of the 10th Mountain Division rescued survivors. Ridley Scott put that onscreen in late 2001 in the utterly riveting Black Hawk Down, which you can see, along with Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr. Strangelove (1964), in 35 mm as part of Fort Drum Night at the Palace Theater on the 17th.

Fort Drum is home now to the 10th Mountain Division and there’s another movie screening to get the evening underway. Abbie Kealy’s documentary The Last Ridge (2007) harks back to World War II’s Italian campaign, the founding of the 10th Mountain Division and its current generation. Kealy, who lives outside Baltimore and often makes documentaries for PBS, inherited the letters and diaries of her uncle, Pfc. Stuart Abbott, a 10th Mountain soldier from Chicago who died at 18 on Italy’s Mt. Belvedere the day after writing a last letter to his mother in which he looked forward to “curling up with a good book and an entire pan of hot buttered popcorn.”

Kealy says she’s known about her uncle’s service in the 10th “since I could lace up my ski boots,” but it was a request for photos from historian McKay Jenkins for his own book that prompted Kealy to plan her film (and adopt his title).

Kealy is reticent about her connection to Abbott in the film itself but talks about him elsewhere. Just so, The Last Ridge includes footage of the 10th’s World War II vets revisiting Italy and being feted by their hosts – NBC noted the 61st anniversary of the taking of Riva Ridge during coverage of the Turin Winter Olympics – but it’s a quieter stray detail about the film’s making that illuminates the depth of gratitude similar to that found in Rossellini’s Paisá: before Kealy and her tiny crew could film the Riva Ridge wintertime re-enactment in the Apennines, miles of snow-choked paths were cleared by four Alpini (traditional mountain guides), three of them in their 70s - who would’ve been little boys when the Allies drove the Fascists north out of their country.

Narrated by NPR’s Scott Simon, The Last Ridge spends considerable time on the founding of the 10th. Charles Minot Dole of the National Ski Patrol proposed and recruited this elite division, inspired by the devastation the Germans suffered in Hitler’s first winter Russian campaign and by the Finnish “ski troops” who then repulsed the Soviets invading them. It appears that this civilian bright idea was initially “laughed out of Washington,” but Dole’s persistence and the huge response of volunteers – including many Ivy League graduates and champion sportsmen, even Norway’s world champion Olympic ski jumper Torger Tokle – won out. The 10th got underway two weeks before Pearl Harbor.

Trained under truly grueling conditions for almost four years on Washington’s Fort Lewis and Mt. Rainier, Colorado’s Camp Hale and briefly in Texas at Camp Swift, the 10th first saw action after Japan’s short-lived invasion of two Alaskan islands – landing in heavy fog, 18 were killed by friendly fire after the Japanese had already evacuated.

But in late 1944, the Allies had bogged down after 16 months of fighting, trying to take the northern Apennine Mountains near Bologna. The Allies needed to take Mt. Belvedere and the key to that was Riva Ridge, a series of peaks held as observation points that protected Belvedere and in turn kept a crucial highway out of play for the Allies. Previous frontal assaults on Riva Ridge had cost the Allies 15,000 casualties. When the Allied command turned to the 10th Mountain Division, they expected up to 90 per cent casualties. Instead some 700 men from the 10th went up the back way at night, scaling a sheer 2,000 foot cliff that the Nazis left unguarded. The 10th went on to capture Belvedere in the following days, Mt. Della Torraccia and the village of Torre Iussi, and helped chase the Nazis to the Po River and the mountain tunnels at Lake Garda. On May 7th, the European war ended.

Besides pioneering mountain and winter warfare techniques and gear – Kealy says they “invented extreme sports” – the 10th, which initially disbanded after World War II, seeded a generation of sports and environmental leaders. Besides founding some 60 ski resorts – including Vail and Aspen in Colorado and Vermont’s Sugarbush – 10th vets shaped Outward Bound, Nike, the Sierra Club, and the National Outdoor Leadership School. The Last Ridge DVD contains another 45 minutes worth of extras including more interviews with a number of these vets – especially catch the vivid Tap Tapley - plus current 10th members and author McKay Jenkins, and additional training and making-of footage about the re-enactments shot in Colorado, Italy and Slovenia.

Some of those re-enactments were carried out by current 10th members. The 10th was reactivated in its present form in 1985 and now – 20, 000 strong – makes its home at Fort Drum in northern New York.

Kealy shot her film over three winters, conducted 100 interviews with World War II vets and some two dozen with current 10th members serving in Afghanistan (where she embedded with the 10th), and at Walter Reed Hospital, where older 10th vets are active in visiting the wounded. The Last Ridge also contains captured German military film plus US archival footage. There have been at least seven other books about the 10th – Flint Whitlock’s Soldiers on Skies came out in 1992 but most since 2003 – and two other films, but Kealy enjoyed the input of most of those authors as consultants on her film. The Last Ridge premiered in April 2007 in Vail, Colorado; the next month it screened at Fort Drum and on TV in Watertown and Rochester PBS stations.

The most deployed division in the US armed services, the 10th has served in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, the Persian Gulf and here at home in Hurricane Andrew Support.

And they’re right in our own back yard.

*******
This review appears in the July 9, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. See The Last Ridge, Black Hawk Down and Dr. Strangelove at Eastwood’s Palace Theater, 2384 James St. on Friday, July 17, part of Fort Drum Night, a Wounded Warriors benefit by Operation Homefront. Doors open at 1730 hours (5:30 PM). Under 17 must be accompanied by an adult. Copies of The Last Ridge DVD will be available at the event. Also check out lastridge.com and 10thmtndivassoc.org. Fort Drum Night is part of Jeff Meyer’s “Brew & View 35 mm Film Series” at the Palace.

2009-06-27T11:30:00.003-04:00

Film Review #202: Away We Go
2009
Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Maya Rudolph, John Krasinski, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Still peeved at Sam Mendes for last year’s disappointing and leaden Revolutionary Road and the waste of its two fine leads, many film critics have gone right on being cranky at him for his latest movie. Billed somewhat vaguely as a road-trip comedy about pregnancy – certainly a change of pace from his previous efforts – Away We Go opened in theaters on June 11 and comes to Central New York this weekend, trailing sour grapes.

In order to keep you reading, let me say I liked this little film a lot. It has some disadvantages, so let’s get them out of the way. The wrong poster can ruin a movie before you know what hit you. The ads for Away We Go feature Peter Max-style cartoons with wobbly sun rays, portentous arrows and log cabins drawn in cramped, faux-child perspective. These seem from an earlier era and suggest the movie might be about aging hippies. Then, the soundtrack comprises lyrics and guitar-strumming by Scottish musician Alexi Murdoch of the kind usually described as “evocative” and “folky.” It may be me, but increasingly I find such soundtracks grating and misguided. I think these two factors may be largely to blame for some usually better-tempered reviewers crossly calling this film “smug.”

Meanwhile, as Burt and Verona, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are anything but wasted. Together they manage the rather underrated feat of portraying an unmarried, earnest, genuinely loving though not particularly stylish couple in their early 30s who are expecting a child and aren’t sure where they fit, all the while without falling into parody, revealing themselves to be fools or revealing us to be rightfully cynical. These are roles that are deeply embarrassing when an actor falls short. But Burt and Verona are, as Roger Ebert says, nice people, and watching them figure out their next moves through a series of trials and toxic encounters provokes laughter that’s unexpectedly affectionate and expansive. Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, writers who happen to be married, wrote the script while they too were expecting, which may explain a lot.

As you know if you’ve heard anything about Away We Go, the story opens with Burt and Verona six months pregnant, living near Denver because that’s where his folks are. Massively narcissistic, Jerry and Gloria (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) suddenly decide they’ll move to Antwerp, Belgium for a couple years, just before Burt and Verona’s daughter arrives. There is the suggestion that Gloria might be overly focused on whether her granddaughter will be “dark” like Verona, the first of several seemingly off-hand zinger references to Verona’s mixed race. There is sometimes that rare movie in which you see a character transported to another age before your eyes. Stunned at his parents’ dinner table over their decision to leave him at his finest hour, Burt is suddenly that decent 14-year-old, a little gawky and serious, who can’t quite believe how the adults behave, caught in the act of deciding how he never wants to be. Later, watching Verona sing his brother’s daughter Camilla to sleep through a cracked doorway, you see Verona will be the mother Burt hopes for their daughter too, and that he knows that. A little while before this, when Burt erupts in madcap mayhem over a stroller, you see why Verona loves Burt steadily and doesn’t mind stapling their trip itinerary to the inside of his jacket.

Anyway, Burt and Verona embark on a sampler tour of cities where they might live. Although Mendes has shown himself prodigiously able to create distinctive American milieus before, there’s not much specific in any of these places except for some patched-on aerial footage – Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal and Miami. But Burt and Verona aren’t looking yet for a sense of place. This waits till the end, in her old family home. Instead these two, rather forlorn at their loss of parents, have to work through hitching their wagons to other stars for a while. Having sound instincts and clean hearts, work through this they do.

We should understand these encounters as set pieces – the brash alcoholic former boss and mother of two sullen kids who hits on Burt(Alison Janney), the wise sister-confidante, the insufferable PC cousin (a delicious Maggie Gyllenhaal), the unhappily diligent college buddies, the brother whose wife has left him with a young daughter to raise – as conventions in an Odyssey-like tale of young heroes who will be tested, tempted, distracted and finally reminded of finding their way home. Burt and Verona may never marry – she adamantly refuses, doubting the institution – but they do understand how to make and speak their commitments, even if it is on a backyard trampoline.

*******

This review is from the June 25, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Away We Go opens June 26 at Manlius Art Cinema with screenings on Friday at 7:30 and on Saturday and Sunday at 2, 5 and 7:30.

2009-06-25T15:39:00.004-04:00

Film Review #201: Vagabond

1985/2008

Director: Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Yolande Moreau, Macha Meril

From the start she has liked these tracking shots that seem to go rogue. Agnès Varda had no formal training in cinema when she made her first feature in 1954, but in the opening moments of La Point Courte she turns a seaside village’s sleepy summer ambiance to sudden visual exhilaration with one such shot. We are all settled on the figure of a man standing at a corner when another emerges casually from the background, walks up an alley and enters a house. Varda’s camera swerves to follow the second man, flying along outside in the street as he walks from room to room within, catching him briefly through successive windows before finally we’re allowed inside at the noon meal too.

In Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Varda tracks a glamorous singer awaiting a cancer diagnosis in real time through a series of encounters – sometimes following a little girl up the street and sometimes coming to rest on a bickering couple at the café table – as she circumnavigates the city of Paris (wonderfully re-created with a map and a motorcycle in the 2007 Criterion Collection DVD’s extras), much as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom circles the city of Dublin in Ulysses.

Before turning to film, Varda had worked as a photojournalist, a fact often remarked upon to explain her gorgeous framing. But surely these tracking shots are a further masterful adaptation of the demands of still, two-dimensional composition to the moving image’s additional realms of space and passing time. When Varda made Vagabond in 1985, she used a series of twelve linked tracking shots – each begins with an image that echoes how the previous one ended – combined with variations on the theme of Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz’s La Vita quartet, as a quiet scaffold for her story, the rapid disintegration of a young vagrant named Mona (17-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire) who freezes to death in the vineyards of southern France during one of the coldest winters on record.

Emerging from the near-freezing sea after an impromptu bath in the film’s first flashback after the discovery of her body – and even here she is spied upon by two guys on scooters who idly consider whether raping her in worth their trouble – Mona encounters a number of people in her last weeks, losing the accoutrements of hippie wandering as she goes. Some offer assistance and care, some have other ideas bordering on depraved indifference and worse. Their impressions of her – much as in Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane – piece together a sort of portrait, which Varda inserts documentary-like, with some individuals facing the camera, after a narrator (Varda herself) explains early in the film that she sought out their remarks upon the discovery of Mona’s body in a ditch, much as the police search Mona’s pockets.

Vagabond will screen to great fanfare this Saturday in Santa Monica, California, part of American Cinematheque’s major retrospective of Varda’s half-century-plus career (June 24 – July 1). Now 80, Varda has a heavy post-screening talk-back schedule and will also introduce a sneak preview on the retrospective’s last day of her new film. The Beaches of Agnès, which won France’s Cesar award for best documentary, then opens theatrically in Los Angeles on July 3rd (and in New York City on the 1st at Film Forum).

A look-back at her life and work with the through-line of beaches that have been important to her personally and figured in some of her films, The Beaches of Agnès is replete with clips from Varda’s many earlier films. Those from Vagabond are especially telling by their very judicious brevity – a series of moments when Mona kicks a metal door, punches a building and vigorously gives a lecherous truck-driver the universal sign for “Up yours!” as she departs his cab when he throws her out in the middle of nowhere. Sandrine Bonnaire’s Mona – a bravura performance that won awards then and remains fresh and gripping – was neither sentimentalized nor softened, even in her best moments. But the clips from Beaches suggest we should take another look at how deeply angry and alienated such a woman might actually be – whether a female drifter, apparently few in number in mid-80s France (though Varda did research their existence), or those for whom such a figure might stand even now – whether she has a thought-through philosophy to go with his destitution or not.

While containing some of Varda’s most masterful filmmaking innovations, Vagabond also has some of the heftiest performances she’s directed. Besides Bonnaire, there’s a very young Yolande Moreau as a gullible maid (the Belgian comedienne currently stars in the well-received drama Séraphine, just opened here in the US) and Macha Méril as the fastidiously manicured ecologist Mme. Landier, who befriends Mona during a field trip, recounts by phone from her own luxurious bathtub how much the girl stunk, and wakes in the night from tearful guilt at having left her alone in the woods.

Vagabond also displays Varda’s signature use of local non-actors in pivotal supporting roles, often essentially playing themselves. These include the rollicking elderly brandy-drinker Aunt Lydie (Marthe Jarnais), the soulful-eyed Tunisian farm worker Assoun (Assouna Yahiaoui), a drop-out scholar-turned-goat-herder and his wife (Sylvaine and Sabine Berger), a pair of father and son garage mechanics (Pierre and Richard Imbert), and Setina herself, the young drifter upon whom Mona was modeled.

It would be a good idea to get ready for Beaches, and Vagabond is not a bad place to start.

*******
This review is from the June 25, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find Vagabond at Netflix in the 2008 Criterion DVD release, along with several other Varda titles. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column reviewing DVDs both new and enduring as well as theatrical releases.

2009-06-18T07:50:00.003-04:00

Film Review #200: Our City Dreams

2009

Director: Chiara Clemente

Cast: Swoon, Ghada Amer, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero

“I needed to be in New York because it’s, like, the biggest, loudest, dirtiest, most intense city we had,” recalls the young Brooklyn-based printmaker and installation artist Swoon, “so that’s where I needed to be.”

Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1977, Swoon “landed” in New York two decades later for art school, and it’s been her home base ever since. In Chiara Clemente’s City of Dreams, we encounter Swoon as she’s transitioning from her “street pieces” – large-scale wood-block prints made as she crouches on the floor of her apartment, put up with wheat paste on the sides of gritty buildings next to graffiti – to preparing her first solo gallery exhibition at Deitch Projects in 2005. There is also footage of cross-country travels and, in the summer of 2006, collaboration on the construction a connected fleet of river boats in Minneapolis called the Miss Rockaway Armada. Appealingly down to earth, Swoon is just verging on serious success. She’s exhibited at PS1 and the Tate; MoMA has just bought six of her prints. And, while she’s wary of what might come with such attention and keen to keep some open space about herself, she also feels that “we’re actually in a moment when it’s actually encouraged to be a woman artist.”

Swoon is the first of five women artists that Clemente profiles in Our City Dreams. All are transplanted New Yorkers by choice, all captured at a recognizable juncture in quite accomplished – even rarified - careers, and all working representationally with the human form, crossing media when it suits them, and in various ways entirely willing to discard restraints imposed by traditional framing. We see just enough of the work of each to want to see more, and the subtle ways in which their work echoes each other’s ties their stories together as much as their choice of home base. This deceptively unassuming film enjoyed only a modest theatrical run earlier this year, but has an afterglow born in the web of associations among its subjects. Clemente clearly knows her terrain and has won an extraordinary degree of confidence from her subjects; my guess is this film will enjoy a steadily rising reputation as times goes on.

Clemente, whose father is the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, grew up in New York and left at 18, certain she’d never return. After eight years – divided largely between Rome and Los Angeles – Clemente returned in late 2005. She had already made short documentary films in Italy about a number of artists, among them Jim Dine and Frank Gehry. She decided, after a three-hour studio visit with the Cairo-born fabric-artist/painter Ghada Amer, that she could best return to her city by following other women artists who also chosen this spot as their anchor.

They range in age from Swoon, who is likely to remain elfin at 80, to Nancy Spero, who actually does celebrate her 80th birthday uproariously during the film, a witty, curious, sharp-as-a-whip, still-working artist despite quite advanced crippling arthritis in her hands. Each woman recounts how she decided to be in New York, though part of what emerges is the city’s cosmopolitanism and the ease with which its residents come and go. Perhaps it could be said of no other city that making a film about its artists provides the opportunity for trips as far-flung as Venice, Cairo, Serbia and Paris (well, via footage of early careers) and Thailand, not to mention heartland America (Minneapolis figures in more than one story).

Over roughly two years shooting, Clemente follows them, apparently crossing paths fairly often (besides Minneapolis, the Venice Biennale, the Deitch and Gagosian galleries appear with some regularity). After Swoon, there’s Ghada Amer (“born 1963, Cairo; landed in New York City, 1996”), who combines tapestry and paint with sewn drawings of women, often with their limbs entwined. Amer travels back to Cairo for a project born of rug-making and visits her parents, a diplomat father who encouraged her and a hesitant mother who likes to look at the work only “from a distance.” This furnishes one of several rich portraits about the complexity of parental support for artist off-spring.

Kiki Smith, daughter of painter Tony Smith (born 1963, Nuremburg, landed in New York City 1975 – by way of New Jersey and San Francisco), works in drawing, clay sculpture, print-making and painting. Besides filming Smith as she peddles around New York on her bike, gray hair streaming, Clemente follows her preparing for her retrospective, 1980-2005: A Gathering, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, musing on work some of which she herself has not seen in a quarter century, considering whether she’d have been an artist at all if her father had lived longer.

Marina Abramovic (born 1946, Belgrade, landed in New York, 2003) is a pioneering performance artist. All these artists do work that is representational and involves the female body, though Abramovic most directly makes her own body the medium. Abramovic, who cut her stomach with razors in 1975 (Clemente includes footage of this piece, Thomas Lips), is now 60, and has scarcely let up. Likening performance to ballet in the physical rigor, training and sensitivity required, Abramovic also coaches younger performance artists, and speaks about this as a medium with particular clarity. She also travels to Thailand after the Tsunami for God Punishing, a piece involving dozens of Thais who join her in wielding whips in the ocean surf.

Nancy Spero (born 1926, Cleveland, landed in New York, 1964) met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, at the Chicago Art Institute. They went first to Paris in the 50s, but in the midst of the Vietnam War, she recounts, “We finally decided that we had to face the music, that we were American painters.” Like all the artists here, she encounters Clemente at a certain turning point that summarizes her journey thus far and makes clear why she remains important.

Compact at 85 minutes, Our City Dreams is absorbing and satisfying. Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini provides an understated, effective score that serves the film especially well, right down to use of an older ballad of affectionate whimsy about “old Amsterdam” over the closing credits matches the film’s large spirit.

*******
Our City Dreams releases on DVD next Tuesday, June 23rd. It’s already listed at Netflix & is available at Firstrunfeatures.com. “Make it Snappy” is a regular column in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, reviewing both DVDs and films in theatrical release, new and enduring. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

2009-06-08T18:19:00.003-04:00

Film Review #199: Throw Down Your Heart

2009

Director: Saschia Paladino

Cast: Béla Fleck, Oumou Sangare, Anania Ngoliga

When violinist Itzhak Perlman decided to explore the roots of Eastern European Jewish music – that amalgam of dance, folk song and liturgy that we know broadly as klezmer, traced from Yiddish-speaking enclaves among the Rumanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Turkish and Rom communities between the Baltic and Black Seas, violently scattered by World War II, transplanted to the Lower East Side where it met swing, flowering in popularity well beyond the Catskills since the 70s – he took a camera crew. The resulting documentary was In the Fiddler’s House (1995). Along the way, Perlman learned from masters of this vernacular – at a festival in Poland, the Klezmatics advised him to play more “slinky” – and the classical concert virtuoso memorably came to realize that conventional Western notation could not begin to capture and convey the tonal richness and rhythmic nuances of that music.

In 2005 the banjo player Béla Fleck took a year off from his group The Flecktones and embarked on a similar journey to the African nations of Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia and through Senegal to Mali with his half-brother, filmmaker Saschia Paladino, and a small crew in a frequently over-heating van. Paladino had already made a short film in 2004 with Fleck and bassist Edgar Meyer (Obstinato: Making Music for Two), Fleck had done extensive international touring and just since 2002 has appeared in at least half a dozen concert DVDs.

But Fleck has long believed the banjo was originally a West African instrument that slaves brought to the US, developed because drumming was forbidden on plantations and then appropriated by white musicians. The film’s title comes from the exclamation – “Bwada moyo!” – that translator John Kitime tells Fleck captured Africans made when they saw the ships in slave ports and understood they would never go home.

Fleck wanted also to reintroduce the modern banjo to African musicians and he wanted, mightily, to make music with them. Many of this film’s most memorable moments concern these sessions. Whether in remote villages with musicians whom Paladino only allowed Fleck to meet when the camera was rolling, or with cosmopolitan recording artists, we watch patient and accomplished musicians instruct the diffident 11-time Grammy winner. In Tanzania he plays with Anania Ngoliga, a blind thumb pianist. In Mali, there’s kora master Toumani Diabate, and Lexus SUV-driving diva Oumou Sangare, with whom Fleck records a haunting track called “The Worried Songbird.” He jams with Madagascar's guitarist D’Gary. He encounters families of musicians like the Jattas – “I smell banjo,” he says before meeting this clan – and what seem like clear banjo forerunners. This sparingly subtitled film has six languages – besides English, there's Lusogan, Swahili, Jola, Bambarra and French – or perhaps, if you go by the moments most moving for audience and musicians alike, just the one.

Central New Yorkers know Fleck well. Besides the air time he gets on Eric Cohen’s WAER jazz show (88.3 FM), he’s performed at Syracuse Jazz Fest three times. With the Flecktones, he capped off the first night of the 25th anniversary fest in 2007. In 2005 he played with jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. And Russ Tarby, now the City Eagle’s music columnist, remembers introducing Fleck in 1996 when Jazz Fest was still held downtown in Clinton Square. With this year’s Jazz Fest just two weeks off, it’s a good time to see this film.

Next week you can do that in Ithaca, where the film screens three evenings at Cornell Cinema. Better yet, Laura Austin says Redhouse Arts Center might include the film in a series of music documentaries they will put together from a grant that’s just come through.

Throw Down Tour Heart, which first screened at San Francisco’s Roxy in March and has won a number of festival awards, had a conventional theatrical release on April 24th at IFC in New York City and last week in Los Angeles. But it’s also done a steady, under-the-radar business well outside the multiplexes, with almost 30 more short runs now booked across the country. Fleck and/or Paladino show up for talk-backs after some of these, and Fleck continues U.S. concerts all summer with combinations of half a dozen musicians from the film. (He’ll also be nearby in Utica on September 30th playing with Edgar Meyer and classical Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain).

Last weekend in Brooklyn, Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, about whom another documentary is forthcoming for US theatrical release this month (Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love), opened the ten-day Muslim Voices Festival with a sold-out concert. And in DC, Mali’s guitarist Amadou Bagayoko and singer Mariam Doumbia – they are married and perform together – this week told interviewers they are quite comfortable that New York’s white indie bands like Vampire Weekend, Yeasayers, Harlem Shakes and Dirty Projectors are influenced by African music because their own show, “Welcome to Mali,” is after all “globalist.” So Fleck is right on time.

*******

A version of this review appears in the June 11, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the regular film column "Make it Snappy." Syracuse Jazz Fest runs June 26-27 at Onondaga Community College. Throw Down Your Heart screens next week at Cornell Cinema, Willard Straight Hall in Ithaca (8:00 PM on Monday & Wednesday, June 15 & 17, 7:30 PM on Friday, June 19.) Rounder released the soundtrack CD in March; audio samples and MP3 downloads of all 18 tracks at amazon.com. The movie DVD releases next fall. Keep track of screenings for the movie at www.throwdownyourheart.com. Find In the Fiddler’s House on-line in VHS and since 2006 on DVD.

2009-06-01T19:16:00.003-04:00

Film Review #198: Deep Red

1975

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Clara Calamai

In the first scene after the opening titles of Italian horror master Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975), jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) stops the group of musicians he’s rehearsing and tells them they were great, maybe too great. He’d like it more “trashy,” since it’s music inspired by brothels. That they’re playing on the central altar of an ancient Roman church is a nice establishing touch.

Soon after, this ex-pat Englishman, who insists his hyper-alert “jumpiness” is only artistic temperament, becomes obsessed – like most Argento heroes – with an image he can’t quite recall or understand from the scene of a violent murder, in this case one he’s glimpsed through a window from the street below. (Hemmings, who starred as the photographer in Antonioni’s thematically similar but more well-behaved Blow-up a decade earlier, brings those rich echoes to this role.)

A little while later, the professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) – an associate of the initial victim, the “Lithuanian psychic” Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril) who was also Daly’s neighbor – surmises that the murderer must cue himself with a certain piece of child-like music, evidently on cassette, to create the conditions of psychic release necessary for killing. It’s with a certain witty pleasure that one realizes Argento cues us musically too before each murder, with the progressive rock group Goblin’s score, but first visually with silent montages of empty hallways and corners where a killer might lurk. For that matter, there in the seat of Old World European culture – with its brooding cathedrals, halls of learned scholars, streets crammed with massive Renaissance-era sculptured fountains, and ornate old mansions – one need only scratch a little way beneath nearly any crumbling surface to find what’s beastly and what modern life’s advances can only tenuously, intermittently manage.

As represented by the arm-wrestling feminist reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s frequent lead, co-writer and mother of their force-of-nature daughter Asia) and her clunky jalopy, modern life survives, though barely. Seeking knowledge is dangerous and arriving too quickly – say, through telepathy like the luckless Helga – deadly.

Some call Deep Red Argento’s best film. He is not terribly concerned with credible narrative. Besides the eye-rolling coincidences, you’ll lose track of how many times you tell these people, “Don’t go back up there!” Our own stereotypes as much as Argento’s unfolding plot keep the killer secret for so long. Nor are his films really character-driven in the usual way, though certainly concerned with the psyche. Instead, Argento’s movies take us straight to cinema’s wild and mesmerizing heart, the moving image and the search it incites within us for what’s illusion and what’s real. In Deep Red this plays out largely in terms of appearance – from the transvestite Ricci (Geraldine Hooper), to Daly’s sudden flash of memory that his friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) was with him in the street during the murder, to Carlo’s mother Martha (former diva Clara Calamai, star of Visconti’s steamy 1942 Ossessione) and her wall-full of photos from her by-gone acting career. Luigi Kuveiller’s cinematography matches this, full of disorienting angles, meticulously composed frames, heart-stopping pans and high contrast. It may be trashy, but it's not accidental.

Deep Red (also Profondo Rosso and, in its heavily censored version, The Hatchet Murders) was a box office hit when it first came out during the hey-day of Italian giallo film (based on erotic horror pulp fiction) and has enjoyed numerous resurrections here and abroad. Re-released theatrically in the US in 1980, it went to video in 1991 and – part the larger surge in horror cinema that’s followed the World Trade Center attacks – has had five separate DVD editions in the US just since 2001.

Central New York has a large and literate audience for horror films, which also occupy a sizable share of local filmmaking, so it’s no wonder the Shaun Luu Horror Fest is in its fifth year, now with a full day of films and a second day devoted to live bands. Deep Red was a wonderful choice.

*******

This review appears in the June 4, 2009 Syracuse City Eagle print edition & is posted on the paper's website at cnylink.com. See Deep Red on the big screen in 35 mm next Saturday evening, June 13th, at the Eastwood Palace, 2384 James St. The Shaun Luu Horror Fest is a two-day fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society and Golisano Children’s Hospital that includes a day of music on Sunday across town at the Westcott Theater. Deep Red screens in the evening segment of adult programming (16 years and over) that starts at 5:00 PM, after local shorts and the feature Black Devil Doll. For the full line-up go to cnylink.com – click Entertainment.

2009-06-01T19:01:00.003-04:00

Film Review #197: Johnny Got His Gun

1971/2009

Director Dalton Trumbo

Cast: Timothy Bottoms, Josan Robards, Donald Sutherland, Diane Varsi

In 1971, at the age of 65 and the height of the Vietnam War, screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo decided he would take up directing. He had talked with his friend the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel about the project and for a while was going to have him direct Johnny Got His Gun – apparently the shot where Donald Sutherland (as Jesus) leans out the cabin window of a troop train locomotive carrying new recruits off to war, crying into the wind with his long silk neck scarf blowing back, was Buñuel’s idea – but Trumbo wound up doing the job himself.

There are plenty of Trumbo films out there to sample – critical and box office successes alike – including a couple Oscar-winners (ironically both of those scripts credited to “fronts” during the 13 years Trumbo spent black-listed and couldn’t work openly in Hollywood films). But Johnny Got His Gun was part of Trumbo for a long time. Based on a news clip he’d seen about a British soldier with devastating injuries from the trenches of World War I, Trumbo’s 1939 novel kept the time frame but shifted young recruit Joe Bonham’s story to the US military. And after he’d published the novel, Trumbo saw combat intimately in the South Pacific as a war correspondent. Trumbo’s son Christopher – also a screenwriter and author of the simply new theatre’s current local stage production about his father’s black-listing (which contains an account of some of that war-time reporting) – says that making the film was “the best response he could manage to the carnage of the war in Vietnam.”

Long unavailable in the US on DVD despite the exposure given it by the metal band Metallica in their 1989 music video, One, the film has been popular in Europe since a 2004 DVD release there. Now Johnny Got His Gun has been digitally restored, released here just last month on a new DVD with an array of enticing extras. Whether due to the impending DVD release of a stage version of the novel or that of Christopher Trumbo’s work about his father, we should be glad we can now see this film.

Johnny Got His Gun presents the story of 18-year-old Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms), who brushes off the urgings of his girl-friend Kareen (Kathy Fields) to “just run away” rather than ship out. Once in the French trenches, he quickly loses his own company and throws in with some British troops. One fearsomely rainy night, he’s sent out to bury a German soldier who had died caught in the barbed wire above their trench and whose rotting body had begun to stink. A direct shell hit on the way back from this errand injures Bonham horribly and irreparably. A military doctor, Col. Tillery (Eduard Franz) declares Bonham “completely de-cerebrated” by his injuries but worth keeping alive, secretly, for research purposes. But Bonham’s in there, walled up in the remnants of his body. Tillery later reappears – white-haired now and a general – the only mark of how much time has passed before Bonham’s breakthrough Morse Code communication with the “fourth nurse” (Diane Varsi), who first inscribes a message on his chest with her finger as he frantically nods his head.

Except for the very graphic early passage necessary to tell the story and provide Bonham’s last direct apprehension of the world, there’s little dwelling on the extremity and horror of trench warfare, and little recollection of it from Bonham himself. There is a surrealistic poker game with Jesus on the way to the front for recruits who know the time and circumstances of their coming deaths. The best line here is Jesus’ own self-delighted aside after he manifests a stiff drink for one nervous boy – “I used to do that at weddings!” – which lays the groundwork for his later confession that he’s entirely a trick anyway.

Yet Johnny Got His Gun is deeply compassionate and, horrific as the trenches might be, suggests that yearning for what they take away is worse. Bonham doesn’t have many nightmares about the war itself. Instead, we hear his voice-over in the hospital scenes as he discovers his predicament – what remains of him is mostly shrouded – and we accompany his mind, unlatched from its anchor, during vividly detailed flashes of his past and Fellini-like imaginings of what’s ahead. As Bonham’s father, Jason Robards appears in both realms with a range to match. He’s gruffly tender when he enfolds Joe in a hug on their last camping trip together after Joe loses his prized fishing pole, braying as the carnival barker who hawks tickets for “Joe Bonham, Self-supporting Basket Case” from a dilapidated wagon that crosses what I presume to be Death Valley. Bonham’s last and only night with Kareen is equally affecting.

Trumbo was a young man when he wrote Johnny Got His Gun, just 33. It’s nice to have this film back at a time we still need it, along with the knowledge that he didn’t come to think better of his youthful excess.

Okay, how to see this? Onondaga County Library has two copies of the new DVD, one in the Fayetteville branch, the other in Solvay. No Blockbusters in the CNY region presently carry Johnny Got His Gun (nor plan to). Just the movie is available in Instant Play format from Netflix, but not the new DVD’s extras. These include a new interview with actor Timothy Bottoms, an hour-long profile of the filmmaker (Dalton Trumbo: Rebel in Hollywood), a 1940 radio adaptation with Jimmy Cagney as Joe Bonham, Metallica’s 1989 music video One, the original trailer and some making-of footage with commentary by the film’s DP, Jules Brenner.

A shorter version of this review appears in the May 28, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly & is posted on the paper's website, cnylink.com. Meanwhile, see the excellent stage production of Christopher Trumbo’s play, Trumbo, presented for the second performance by simply new theatre, inc., this Saturday, May 30 at 8:00 PM at the Civic Center’s Bevard Room downtown. Ticket information at simplynewtheatre.com. Read Nancy’s review from this week’s Syracuse City Eagle on http://www.cnylink.com/ – go to Entertainment.

2009-06-01T18:44:00.003-04:00

Film Review #196: The Souls of Black Girls

2006

Director: Daphne Valerius

Documentary

As part of its participation in Th3, the monthly city-wide arts night held on every third Thursday, the Community Folk Art Center (CFAC) often screens a film with a discussion afterward, in case gallery visitors wish to stop awhile. While these are sometimes movies you could rent or buy on DVD and just watch at home, CFAC programmers have demonstrated a talent for pairing their visual arts gallery shows with cinema in ways that engenders lively discussion.

This month’s film – which screens Thursday the 21st at 7:00 PM – is Daphne Valerius’ 2006 documentary, The Souls of Black Girls. This too is available in commercial DVD format. But in screening this film at the same time as the wonderful 37th Annual Teenage Art Competition Exhibition, CFAC makes an added point about the power of images to sway how the young feel about themselves – and indeed how we feel about them too – on the one hand with images imposed upon us and on the other, those we bring ourselves to create.

Souls examines how media images – both historic and current – have established and maintained standards of beauty, and the corrosive effects on women of color from an early age of the pull toward European standards of what’s desirable, or even acceptable, in terms of color, hair, features, body size and type.

Valerius is herself a rising young media professional, now based in Los Angeles – reporter, broadcast journalist, producer, filmmaker, TV host, actor and speaker – born in Brooklyn of Haitian immigrant parents. She says The Souls of Black Girls emerged from her own struggles with self-image as a woman of color growing up in the US, and she calls the damage that can result – if one cannot, as actress Regina King says in the film, “shake it off” – a self-image disorder.

Hence The Souls of Black Girls begins with retro images of little girls in beauty parlors, copying Mom and avidly discovering fashion magazines. Periodically we see montages of contemporary magazine covers, splashed with Ashley Judd, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jane Seymour. Valerius’ parents moved away from Brooklyn while she was still little, taking her and two younger siblings to Rhode Island, where she says, “I was always that one Black girl in the white neighborhood who liked the white guy and didn’t know why he didn’t like me.”

Like the Delaware artist Lori Crawford – whose Bag-It examined the old practice of measuring skin color by the “brown paper bag test” and came to CFAC in the summer of 2007, provoking lengthy audience response during her crowded gallery talk – Valeruis’ film was once a masters’ school project. In fact, it started earlier, with undergraduate research on self-image and media at St. John’s University in New York in 2003 that she then continued as a broadcast journalism masters student at Boston’s Emerson College.

Valerius first envisioned a short film of perhaps 15 minutes distilled from focus groups with teenage women, and some of the most powerful moments in the film occur in the clips she uses from this material. (One young woman elaborates on the simple dictum, “Suck in your stomach!” A white student talks about the case of Beyoncé, saying, “She’s got this long hair and that perfect color – nobody even thinks of Beyoncé as ‘Black.’”)

However, along the way, Valerius met Public Enemy’s Chuck D while still at St. John’s and the actor Regina King at a film festival; both became involved in the project’s development and Valerius added other interviews as she went. These include Pamela Edwards of Essence Magazine (a publication that has waged its own campaign to clean up the misogynist branch of Hip-Hop lyrics), cultural critic Michaela Angela Davis, actor Juanita Jennings (who was written out of TV’s As the World Turns when she refused to cut her dreads), BET producer Darlise Blount (TV is “where women get instructions,” she says), actor/producer/children’s author Jada Pinkett Smith, and PBS journalist and moderator Gwen Ifill (“My father told me to say thank you if anyone called me ‘black.’ It shut people up. Second, I internalized it.”), and a host of others. Chuck D’s inside views of the music industry culture and executives, Black and otherwise, are especially trenchant. Regina King (currently Det. Lydia Adams in the new cop series Southland) discusses seeking roles, from Shalika in John Singleton’s early Boyz n the Hood (1991) on, in which “there were a bunch of girls all across the country saying, ‘That’s me!’”

The Souls of Black Girls is accomplished, eloquent and vivid filmmaking. Valerius wrote, directed, produced, shot the interviews and background footage, and edited the film herself. Since then, she’s also completed another documentary about those caught in Rhode Island’s juvenile court and detention system, The Voices of Project Peer.

Daphne Valerius’ The Souls of Black Girls screens this Thursday at 7:00 PM at Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St., part of this month’s Th3 city-wide arts night.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the May 21, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle.