The Sheila Variations

She asks, "What else do you do, besides shoot?"

He replies, "It's been enough so far."

A Thousand Women Like Me (2000); Director: Reza Karimi

Reza Karimi, director of the Iranian film A Thousand Women Like Me, wrote:

A Thousand Women Like Me was a personal assertion. Cinema is basically the product of experience, and A Thousand Women Like Me is the product of thought, experience and an index of my capabilities up to this moment. Maybe there are flaws in the film, but I have decidedly overcome the shortcomings of the previous film. If I were to make a film one day that did not represent a step forward, that day would surely signal the end of my career.

Starring Niki Karimi, an international star from Iran (and a director herself), A Thousand Women Like Me tells the story of Sharzad (Karimi), a divorce attorney in Tehran who loses custody of her son following her divorce. The film is an indictment of the patriarchal custody laws in Iran, and ups the ante by having the main female character be a divorce attorney herself. She spends her days in court, fighting for her women clients to get access to their children. She now finds herself in the same situation, and experiences, first-hand, the unfairness, the helplessness, the absurdity of what her clients go through. Her son is 8 years old and is a diabetic. The father (played by the wonderful fox-faced Fariburz Arabnia) is lackadaisical about giving their son insulin shots, and refuses to admit that he is ever at fault, even when the son collapses in the schoolyard. Sharzad is allowed to see her son once a week, and her relationship with her ex-husband is still prickly and full of resentment. She shows up at his house, and ends up doing laundry for him, as he follows her around, giving her a hard time.

Sharzad, familiar with the loopholes in the law, starts to fight her own case before judges and intermediaries. If a father can be declared "incompetent", then, and only then, will custody be granted to the mother. She documents her son's illness, the hospital visits, the emergency room runs ... to no avail. The court remains immovable. She becomes desperate. She fears for her son's well-being. Her ex-husband is angry that she divorced him in the first place. He wants her to come home. Her family puts the pressure on her. She starts to see no way out. She kidnaps her son. They then are on the run. Police are looking for them. They sleep in her car. They hang out aimlessly in playgrounds. Her son cries that he misses his father. There are no villains here. Or, perhaps the villain is the culture itself, that devalues women to such a degree that it leaves them no recourse but to take the law into their own hands.

This is serious business. This is a movie about people's lives. Sharzad is an angry woman, even more angry as she gets nowhere with the legal system, and she refuses to play by rules that she thinks are unfair or dangerous. Her family freak out. They cannot get behind her latest choice. She ends up crashing with a friend, while she is on the run, and there are long scenes of the two of them talking, trying to figure out what she should do. These are quiet human scenes, well-written and well-played.

Was she right to take her son? Probably not. Not really. She pays for that choice. Maybe she was right, in an idealistic way, but we cannot live our ideals, at least not without consequences. She is not alone in the world. She has an ex-husband, she has sisters and a mother, all of whom are worried about her. She has abandoned her lucrative and important business. Her son is traumatized by being kidnapped. He loves his mother, but he is the real victim here. He loves his father, too. Director Reza Karimi does not make the mistake of painting everyone with a black-and-white brush. Besides, when you're talking about cultural and social issues with Iran, there really is no such thing as melodrama. Even in a simple film about adultery like Hemlock (my review here - another movie with Fariburz Arabnia as the male lead), the pressures of the culture at large elevate the sometimes shlocky material with true horror. It is difficult to not try to imagine yourself in such a situation, and how you would handle it. The best of Iran's films show the price paid by all members of society living under such an authoritarian regime. The husband is baffled by the course his life has taken. He is not a bad man, although careless with his son. He punishes his ex-wife by refusing access to their son. And perhaps he has some resentment that their son is a bit high-maintenance, being diabetic. All of that is in the script and in the performances.

Karimi is riveting. She has a face the camera loves, with big glimmering eyes, but her performance goes deeper than that. She operates at an increasing fever pitch of desperation and fear throughout the film, and it is to Karimi's credit that none of it goes "over the top". Instead, it is harrowing. You ache for her, for what she has lost, and what she is willing to give up.

Arabnia, the husband, also manages to portray levels of subtlety here that a lesser actor would have missed. Watch the scene where the two make their son's bed together. Filmed with cut-away shots of their hands, tucking in corners of the sheets, it calls to mind all of the everyday domesticity that both of them have forfeited and perhaps now miss. He is a cold man, kind of uncaring, but when push comes to shove, he does not want to harm anyone. Not for good, anyway. Divorce sucks, in any culture. She left HIM. He is pissed off and ashamed. But watch the scenes where he plays with his son, or chats with him on the phone. His situation is heartbreaking as well.

It's a ruthless film, willing to follow events to their logical conclusions to put the final nail in the coffin to the conversation about divorce and custody in Iran. The fantastic 1998 documentary Divorce, Iranian Style was groundbreaking in that regard. Divorce is very easy to receive in Iran, if you are a man. Islamic law declares that a man can divorce his wife at any time, merely by declaring it. She has no equivalent rights. She cannot do the same. The burden of proof is all on the woman, should she want a divorce, and custody is almost never granted to the woman. A Thousand Women Like Me, from 2000, is a good companion piece to Divorce, Iranian Style, with its intimate look at what goes on in Iranian divorce courts.

The subtitles in A Thousand Women Like Me are extremely annoying and very poorly done. White subtitles against white background, completely unreadable. It gets a bit better as the film goes on, but the first 20 minutes are terrible. You have to pick up on what is going on from the behavior alone, because the subtitles are invisible. It actually was a little bit interesting, once I realized the subtitles were a lost cause. Yes, it was annoying, but I accepted the situation and stuck with it, thinking, "Okay. Let me see how much I can 'get' just from watching behavior and body language."

The acting is good enough, the story clear enough, with or without subtitles. I reiterate that the subtitle situation does improve about 20 minutes in, but you have to put up with that first 20 minutes.

A Thousand Women Like Me is worth it.

"Talk About the Movie: A Bug's Life and Up"

In honor of the opening of Toy Story 3 (I haven't seen it yet, loved Glenn Kenny's thoughts about it, and am very much looking forward), here is a link to the piece I wrote for Pixar Week last year about A Bug's Life and Up.

In October, when I wrote that Pixar piece, I was starting to come out of the maelstrom I had been in in the summer (and, honestly, for months before that as well), and that piece was the most personal thing I've written yet about last year. I was asked to contribute and I immediately knew what I wanted to do and say, and hoped a more personal essay would be welcome to the mix, instead of a straight review or an examination of Pixar as a company (nothing wrong with those things, I just knew the direction I, personally, wanted to go). Todd Van Der Werf, the organizer, was open to whatever I wanted to add, thank you, sir, and he started off the week with my essay.

All of the pieces from Pixar Week were fantastic, and I was proud to be a part of it. I took a risk with that piece. Any time you are open and honest, you are vulnerable to attack. I was also the only woman who contributed to Pixar Week. I knew, too, that that could leave me open for attack. "Here's a woman writing a drippy story about her life - why do I want to read this?" It was a tiny test for me. Yes, people may have thought that. Who knows. But it was the truth, and I had some serious shit to SAY about those two movies, and I was glad (and afraid) to put it out there. The comments over there are some of the warmest and most human I have ever received. I wrote about myself, and two movies, and in the comments section people started sharing about themselves. Amazing. A tribute to movies and what they can provide.

Here's the link: "Talk About the Movie!"

"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." - Ingmar Bergman

From a beautiful post about the Polaroids of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

He was inspired by European, American and Japanese directors, especially the Japanese filming scenes showing of the value of the everyday. And I think that that's something that comes out in these photos that I personally find so appealing. Tarkovsky has also expressed interest in the art of Haiku and its ability to create "images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves." These beautiful Polaroids are kind of like that, they create the illusion that stops flight of time, causing a kind of inner reflection and thoughtfulness.

Go read the whole thing.

To get the conversation going, here is my review of what I consider to be Tarkovsky's greatest film, Stalker.

In Clifford Odets' journal, he describes a conversation he had with Lee Strasberg, colleague, director, acting teacher:

[Strasberg] spoke of what he called "the blight of Ibsen", saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life -- he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.

The Russians are deeply concerned in their art about the state of a man's soul, and Strasberg's point (while a bit of a generalization) rings very true when you look at their greatest works. Dostoevsky, in the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov delineates the struggle of how to lead a moral life better than anyone has done before or since. That scene rivals Paradise Lost in its excavation of man's fear before God, and also his fear before himself. The psychological aspect of things like boredom, money, love, family, are seen through a very specific cultural filter, where man's spiritual life, his spiritual peace, is paramount. Yet nearly impossible to achieve in this lifetime. That's the Russian torment.

It is impossible to speak of Andrei Tarkovsky's films without talking about his philosophy of life. The two are inextricably linked. He did not make all that many films, and while he died quite young, he was able to formulate, through his art, an entire philosophical system that had to do with the struggle of modern man to have a meaningful existence. Tarkovsky is hopeful, as many religious people are, that there will be redemption, but he also seems skeptical about the possibilities of it occurring any time soon. Either way, he knows it will not be easy. Tarkovsky is worried, truly worried, about the spiritual state of modern man, and nowhere is that more clear than in his 1979 masterwork Stalker.

Tarkovsky is an interesting case. He came into his career in the post-Stalin years in Russia, but the Cold War was at its apex when he was making his greatest films. He was able to work with the authorities, to stay within the system, but they gave him a hard time over the years until it got so bad that he defected. He died a year or so later. I believe it broke his heart to leave Russia. He wasn't a provincial man, he read widely, one of his dreams was to film Hamlet (and what I wouldn't give to have seen that!), and he didn't feel that he needed to be in Russia to be an artist; however, Russia was his home. His wellspring. His life.

His film Andrei Rublev (my review here) catapulted him into worldwide fame, and it is a great film. I suppose you could see it as a metaphor for what it was like for the modern-day Soviet, but Tarkovsky didn't look at it that way. Andrei Rublev was a 15th century monk in Russia who did giant triptychs, most of which were destroyed. Only one remains intact. Nothing is known about him as a man. Tarkovsky wanted to examine what kind of man would devote his life to painting pictures of religious exaltation and eternal peace in the midst of a time of great chaos.

As we all know, the Bolsheviks "got rid of religion" (or so they thought, by turning cathedrals into pool halls and Museums of Atheism) but you would never know that from watching Tarkovsky's films, perhaps the most subversive thing about him. He is a deeply religious man. It is a rare talent who can put his feelings for God on the screen. It is also amazing that he was able to "get away with" as much as he did, in that environment. One of the reasons why I think Tarkovsky was able to operate freely for so long ("freely" being relative) is that he stayed away from politics entirely. You could read into his films, you could see them as grand allegories for current-day themes, but the films would suffer as a result. It's similar to many of the great films coming out of Iran right now. You could see in Children of Heaven a buried message, involving the hardships of life in Iran, the ridiculous pressures put on the citizenry (a brother and sister having to share a pair of shoes?), the class divide which is so intense in Tehran - that is definitely all there, but if you only see it as the allegory, you take away much of its magic. These directors, working under these conditions of censorship and oppression, have to be very very tricky, and the good ones always focus on story. The story they are actually telling. Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is a clarion call for spirituality, for what happens to a society when God is left out. His context there is 15th century Russia, but you can see the parallels.

Tarkovsky was a fan of science fiction, and his 1972 film Solyaris was his first foray into that area. He returns to that territory again in Stalker. He goes even deeper into his life-long concerns about the atrophy of man's spirit in the modern world. He was an anti-materialist, definitely, and his ultimate question about events always was: Will this make man happier? Better? Will this bring him closer to his spirit? Or will this separate him even further? Ironically, Tarkovsky ended his life as an exile - but his films all along, made within Russia, have to do with man being exiled from himself and from God.

Stalker was based on the novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, but Tarkovsky made it his own, as he explains here in a 1979 interview:

I had recommended a short novel Picnic on the Roadside, to my friend, the filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili, thinking he might adapt it to film. Afterwards, I don't know why, Giorgi could not obtain the rights from the authors of the novel, the Strugatsky brothers, and he abandoned the idea of this film. The idea began to turn in my head, at first from time to time, and then more and more often. It seemed to me that this novel could be made into a film with a unity of location, time, and action. This classic unity - Aristotelian in my view - permits us to approach truly authentic filmmaking, which for me is not action film, outwardly dynamic. I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel ... except for the two words, "Stalker" and "Zone". So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.

In Stalker, there has been some sort of apocalyptic event. It is thought that a meteorite had crashed into "our small country" (the country is never named), but the meteorite was never found. Troops were sent to investigate the destroyed area, and they never returned. It became clear to the nameless authorities that the area had to be cordoned off, and it is known as The Zone. A great mystery surrounds the Zone. Nobody knows the truth of it. What is it? There is a rumor that in the center of the Zone, there is a Room, and in that Room, man's greatest wish (whatever it may be) can come true. But how to get into the Zone, which is surrounded by electrical fences and barbed wire, and armed outposts?

This is where The Stalker comes in. The Stalker acts as a guide. People pay him money to take them into the Zone. It is a dangerous prospect. Not just getting past the guards, but once in the Zone, all bets are off. It is a place that changes, constantly - the laws of physics do not apply. It is as though the land itself is alive, and it recognizes when strangers have arrived, so it starts to shift, throwing traps and pitfalls in their way.

The Stalker lives in a dreary cottage with his unhappy wife and daughter, who has something wrong with her legs. She is "a child of the Zone", which suggests to me that some Chernobyl event may have occurred. The landscape outside the Stalker's cottage is terrifying and industrial. Huge nuclear power plants loom in the distance, and it appears that the entire world is an abandoned construction site.

At the beginning of the film, the Stalker meets up with two men who want to go to the Zone. Money changes hands. They stand in a dingy bar and talk over how it will go.

The two men who enlist the Stalker's help are known as "Writer" and "Professor". Everyone has their own reasons to want to go to the Zone. It is only what YOU think of it that matters. The Writer is cynical, and he feels he has lost his inspiration. When we first see him, he is having a conversation with a woman in a fur coat (who also wants to go to the Zone, but the Stalker sends her packing), and she is wondering about the mystery of it all, she references the Bermuda Triangle. The Writer scoffs at this. There is no mystery. There are no UFOs, no invisible forces - he is a realist. And yet here he is, about to embark on a journey into the unknown. The Professor teaches physics at a university, and because of his life's work examining things like atoms and protons he is more willing to accept that the invisible and mysterious are also real, but his desire to go to the Zone comes from his yearning to make tangible the intangible. He needs proof. The Stalker, a weary tormented man, has his doubts about both of these men, but they start on their journey.

The opening sequence, with the three men in a massive roofless jeep, driving around through decaying warehouses, is a masterpiece of style. The setting is extraordinary, and you wonder where the hell they were filming. These do not look like sets. The sound of dripping water is paramount (a very Tarkovskyian sound - it appears in most of his films), and the three men drive around in circles, hiding from the guards patrolling the main gate. It becomes clear that a train comes to the outpost, and this will be their way in. The gates open for the train, momentarily, and they will drive in behind the train. The Stalker explains to the other two that while it is dangerous, the guards do not want to go further into the Zone, everyone is afraid of it. The interlopers have that fear on their side.

Tarkovsky drives his point home by filming the early sections of the film in a saturated black-and-white. It looks like a daguerrotype. Like we are looking at a world long gone away. Tarkovsky preferred to film in black and white, he felt it was a more realistic cinematic language, but here he chose to film the scenes in the Zone itself in vibrant color, to perhaps suggest that the Zone is what everyone thinks it is: a magical place where dreams can come true.

The journey through the Zone is filmed methodically. I think Tarkovsky's point about Aristotelian unities is one of the strengths of this film which could, if you think about it, have seemed rather silly. A magical land where dreams come true? But the journey is shown, step by step, and as they travel, they talk. The philosophical differences of the men become clear. Arguments break out. Both the Writer and the Professor have a hard time just doing what the Stalker says, even though he begs them to follow his instructions exactly - the Zone is dangerous, like a predator, it will eat you up if you don't follow the rules. That is why they hired him.

Stalker is a dialogue-heavy script, unlike Andrei Rublev which is told mainly through images. I loved the dialogue. It wrestles with the issues, as opposed to presenting them clearly. It is obvious that these three men have different contexts and concerns, but above all else, you worry for them. The Zone, as filmed by Tarkovsky, calls to mind Planet of the Apes, an eerily familiar landscape, but it is a place where a civilization has died. Enormous telephone poles stand tipped over to the side. Buildings lie in ruin. In the earlier scenes, nature is almost nonexistent. There is no grass. The only water in the film appears in a glass on the bedside table, and dripping from the various ceilings, a sure sign of decay. But in the Zone, there is a rushing river. The sound of the water, roaring by, is a tumultuous sound of life - but it's also somewhat ominous, as the entire Zone is. Beneath the water (in a stunning tracking shot, my favorite shot of the film), you can see debris from the world gone by. Fragments of newspaper, syringes, old coins, a religious postcard ... Tarkovsky slowly trains the camera to pan over these objects, seen through the distorted waviness of water.

It is difficult to not see in all of this a criticism of the Soviet Union's rapacious attitude towards the environment. The world is one of the means of production, to be used as such. Used up and left behind. Tarkovsky and his crew were exposed to toxic chemicals during the shooting of the film, and Tarkovsky probably already had the cancer that would eventually kill him. His evocation of the environment (all environments) in Stalker has to be seen to be believed. The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor, walk cautiously through an overgrown field, towards some unknown destination, having to trust in fate, having to let their innermost wishes come to the surface, because that is the only reason they are there, and the only way they will survive.

As the three men get closer and closer to the mythical "Room" at the center of the Zone, they all start to grapple more openly with what it is they are seeking. What would it be like to have your dreams come true? Again, I go back to the anecdote I started this essay with: Lee Strasberg's conception of what was dramatic, and why Chekhov was the primary example. What is dramatic about a man losing his money and killing himself? Isn't that what we expect? But how about a man becoming rich and then killing himself?

Why I thought of this anecdote when I sat down to write this essay was not just that it seemed to have something to say about Russian artists, but also that the Stalker's predecessor, the one who trained him and taught him to be a Stalker, was known as the Porcupine. And he came back from the Zone one time and found himself fabulously rich. The next week he hung himself. The specter of this hangs over our current-day Stalker - because there is something terrible about dreams, and wishes ... and one of the things he tries to make clear about the Room, is that your wish must be something from your deepest heart - not a selfish or worldly short-term wish.

This is a true Tarkovskyian warning. Man has been made corrupt by money. Tarkovsky made no bones about his feelings about the West, and while he enjoyed time in Italy and England, etc., he felt that the West had abandoned spirituality in pursuit of worldly goods, and the toll of this cannot even be measured. By abandoning God, Man has abandoned himself. Tarkovsky worried about this (meaning, worked on it) in film after film. Man must look to God, to deeper and higher truths, for what he wants out of life. The Stalker repeatedly warns the Writer and the Professor about this, but it's one of the trials of the human condition. How many of us really can "let go" of the world like that? Tarkovsky insists that it is the only way.

An eerie frightening film, Stalker makes use of spectacular natural locations: empty dark tunnels, mossy overgrown buildings, a quiet reflective river - but there is also one fantastical sequence when they find themselves in a giant inner room in the Zone, with mounds of cylindrical sand on the floor, and two flying cawing birds, the only sign of life so far (except for an ominous black dog who seems to stalk the periphery of the three men's journey). This space is not the Room, but it is the threshold to the Room, and everything starts to break down there. The men, so close to the truth (the yearning of all mankind when looking up at the stars and wondering what the hell is up there?) begin to resist, begin to fight against what is to come.

The last scene of the film (which I wouldn't dream of revealing) packs such an enormous punch (visually, thematically - it is different from all that came before) - that it acts as a catalyst in the viewer. It tells us something we have not yet learned. It suggests that things really ARE not what they seem, that they are far more mysterious than anyone had ever dreamed. Not even the Stalker knows the real truth.

To quote Tarkovsky's favorite play:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Red Cliff (2008); Directed by John Woo

John Woo's epic Red Cliff was butchered for its American release, cut down from its over-four-hour length to two hours. I have read of what was cut, and it actually makes me wince. Things like character motivation, small moments (the tiger hunt for example), set-ups of the historical situation, a voiceover was added at the beginning ... Just a mess. It was released in Asia in two parts, and now, through Netflix, you can see the whole thing. I couldn't recommend it more highly if I tried. Superlatives won't even do. Only a cliche will express what I mean: Red Cliff, in its full version, is a must-see. A giant hit in Asia (one of the most successful highest-grossing films of all time), it is a universal epic, and yet one of its strengths is how rooted it remains in the culture of the land from which the movie sprung. Its eyes are not on the West, it doesn't care about us, it is not pandering to us, its eyes are in its own past. This is history writ large, the tale of the Battle of the Red Cliffs, in 208-209 A.D.

One of my side obsessions (I have to kind of pick and choose which I let become the major obsessions, because there are only so many hours in the day) is military strategy through the ages. I love John Keegan's work (what I've read of it anyway), and I tore through Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, trying to follow the moves of cavalry and flanking and pincer formations and all that jazz. I could tell you almost every strategic military move in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It's part of the history of the region where I grew up, and also my country. The Battle of Red Cliffs is unfamiliar to me, and part of the joys of the film is opening up my mind and my curiosity to that part of Chinese history. It was the end of the Han Dynasty, and alliances were formed to combat the Prime Minister Cao Cao, run amok on his own grandiose power-grab. As with most famous historical stories, there are many versions: the accepted version, the romantic version, the post-modern version, if you will. Wherein does truth lie? Remember: it is those who write the history books who have the final say. At least until someone comes along to examine it again and say, "Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute ..." For almost a century, John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's "version" of Alexander Hamilton was the accepted version. And Hamilton died young, so he wasn't around to defend himself, or exonerate himself. It has taken modern-day historians in the last couple of decades to re-examine this historical figure, strip away some of the accumulated prejudices (many of them unexamined) and look at him freshly. Here's how I like to think about it: To John Adams, Alexander Hamilton was a dangerous individual. He had to be stopped and destroyed. That's John Adams's view, and it was very true to him. There was a grandiose self-destructive tyrannical streak in Hamilton. So although I admire Alexander Hamilton immensely (uhm, obviously), I find it interesting to remove myself from partisanship, or a defensive stance and take in what everyone else had to say about him. The battle over Alexander Hamilton continues. Beware those who want to have the last word. They want conversations to END, not continue.

And with Red Cliff, I was in military strategy HEAVEN. Give me outnumbered troops, surrounded on all sides, and have them figure a way out of it, through cleverness, wilyness and sheer trickery (Washington having troops parade past a certain field, looping around to parade again, to give the illusion that there were more soldiers there than there really were) - and I am a happy camper. For example, my favorite scene in Master and Commander, in a film full of great scenes, is the one where they disguise their ship to be other than what it is, a feint, a camouflage, like the bugs who can disguise themselves as twigs. Imagine an entire movie with scenes like that. Imagine an entire movie that immerses you in the minutia of military strategy, in the 3rd century, and you'll get an idea of the sheer joy of Red Cliff.

But it doesn't skimp on character, either, which is why it is essential to see it in its unedited version, as John Woo meant it to be seen.

To be honest, I didn't get all of the names straight, but I'll do my best with what I have. Red Cliff takes place at the end of the Han Dynasty, when the young untried emperor Sun Quan (played by Zhao Wei, seen in the first stunner of a scene sitting in a giant room in front of his cranky advisors, wearing a fey dangley crown, and he seems soft, like a typical useless monarch, more interested in playing with birds than fighting war) finds himself in a confrontation with a general named Cao Cao (played by Zhang Fengyi in a fantastic performance) over suppressing the upstart warlords in the south. The king resists. But he is not respected by anyone. His word carries no weight (and his transformation from that soft oblivious bird-lover in the first scene to a ferocious and focused warrior is one of the pleasures of this movie). Cao Cao easily sees his chance, and goes off on his own, with a giant army in tow to "pacify" (a terrifying word in military parlance, along the lines of "cleanse") the South. The empire is thrown into chaos. Divide and conquer, right? A couple of far-seeing men realize that it would be far better to form an alliance than to continue to war with one another, which would weaken them in the face of Cao Cao's onslaught. Previously warring factions join together. It is tense. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that. But who to trust? How will the alliance last? They are outnumbered. Cao Cao has the force of the Empire behind him.

Takeshi Kaneshiro plays Zhuge Liang, a military advisor to the new alliance, a crucial player, who stares at clouds, and wind patterns, based on his experience as a farmer, and comes up with brilliant plans to conquer Cao Cao's army. It is a marvelous performance, moving and mysterious. Who is this man? We never know the whole story. Does he have a wife? It isn't known. He is a skilled military tactician, and yet he admits freely that he battles anxiety, which is why he carries a giant bird-feather fan at all times. It relaxes him to fan himself. What an amazing character detail. Never explained. I love a script that has confidence like that. We are left to imagine what it is he is anxious about. He is not pathologized. Nothing like that. On the contrary, we admire him tremendously. He stands by the river. Cao Cao's forces are massed across the river. It seems that all is lost. He notices that a small turtle is sweating. That means that fog is coming in the next day, which will give them a huge advantage. He is a marvelous character. I love his face. It is a kind and intelligent face.

Zhou Yu (played by Tony Leung) is a veteran warrior who has holed himself up with his ragtag band of men (many of whom are not more than boys), training them relentlessly. He is in service to the Emperor, and yet, what will that mean for him? It is complicated a bit for him because Cao Cao once upon a time fell in love with his wife (played ravishingly by Chi-Ling Lin), and Zhou Yu knows this, so all along the question persists: Did Cao Cao start this war to "capture" his wife? It turns out that this is not just a neurotic question.

Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang would be fierce foes in any other time, but in this specific time, they become important friends. It is a beautiful and complex portrait of male friendship. There is a scene where they meet, and, after dinner, they play music together, on two different instruments, an intense and competitive duet, the two of them looking to outdo the other, by the sheer virtuosity of their playing. It's a sexual scene. Sex is an important part of war, maybe the most important part, although rarely acknowledged. How much of war is one guy insisting that his dick is bigger than the other guy's? And here, in this sensitive and exciting scene, of duelling zithers (or whatever it is they are playing), you feel that these men, without language, have bonded, one to the other. They have said to each other: "You. You are the one. I trust no one. Remember that. But here, in this moment, I trust you. You. You are the one." It makes all other "buddy movies" pale in comparison, Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro playing with passion and also one-upmanship, glancing at each other through the scene, a clear sign of intent and desire. Their alliance is not formed with words or a binding contract. It is formed playing music together. Zhou Yu's wife says to her husband, after their guest leaves, "Zhuge Liang is ready for war." She could tell. From how he played music. Don't discount women's intuition, how it senses the subcurrent. She was right.

THAT is an "action script".

Preparations for war begin. One of the leaders of a Southern province has his own army (he's played by Sun Quan, a man of deep convictions, but caution as well), and they are seen early on fighting, and trying to protect the fleeing refugees at the same time. A choice is to be made. A faction of the army is devoted to protecting the refugees, and it becomes clear they will lose the battle if they do not remove those troops to go to the frontlines. But that will leave the refugees unprotected. Sun Quan says to Zhuge Liang, "These are Han people. If we do not protect them, then what is this war for?"

It is a deep and pertinent point, one of the backbones of the script. What is war for? I believe that sometimes you just have to fight. There is a greater good. Stand up and be counted. War is hell, as the saying goes, but so is tyranny. Tyranny is a life of living dead. Better to die for the cause than go down passively under the black boot of a despot. Jafar Panahi is an example of that. As is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ryzsard Kapusinski, Vaclav Havel, the men I consider to be my intellectual and spiritual idols. They knew how to fight. But is there such a thing as an honorable war? I believe there is, obviously, but these are not easy questions, especially not when you are on a battlefield. Red Cliff, in its length and scope, grapples with that issue. Honestly, I think, although obviously we are meant to sympathize with the Tony Leung side of the fight, Cao Cao is not a faceless sneering comic-book villain. John Woo is smart. Cao Cao, too, is operating from a set of assumptions, and his own belief in right and wrong. It is just that his version of right and wrong clashes with Zhou Yu's version. Who is right? Well, the history books tell us that the victor is right. Right? Not so fast. There are scenes when Cao Cao uses dirty tactics, to terrorize his enemy's morale. Typhoid is raging amongst his soldiers, hundreds of them have died. Instead of cremating them, as per the sanitary customs of the day, instead he sets the dead free on barges, to float over to the enemy camp, where they will then be handled and touched by Zhou Yu's forces, not knowing that the bodies are infected and contagious. To Zhou Yu, this is not in the rule-book. The rule-book of an "honorable" war. It is important to him to fight with honor. But make no mistake: he wants to crush his enemy. Red Cliff handles these complex issues of warfare with finesse. It's not so much that we see both sides. It's that we see that war is brutal. You do what you have to do. And it is best when warriors remember what it is they are fighting for. All of that can be lost in the chaos of the battle. A good commander knows that, and prepares his troops accordingly. Training is key. Watching these men fight, the organization, the shields all coming down, as one, to buttress against the flying arrows, is nothing less than absolutely thrilling. It is brilliant war-time filmmaking. Every scene tops the former. It's hard to believe that's true, in a 4-plus hour film, but it's true.

Zhao Wei (an awesome actress) plays the emperor's tomboy sister, an accomplished equestrienne and archer, and a woman unwilling to play her assigned role as a woman. She becomes an effective spy, infiltrating Cao Cao's forces, impersonating a boy, calling to mind Shakespeare's many heroines in drag, Viola, Rosalind, Portia. How many women have seen such a chance to make a difference, in history, and taken it? Their names are not known to us, but they existed. She is the first over the wall. She has no fear. She is a patriot. Yet John Woo gives her room to be a woman, too, susceptible to things like softness, connection, a possibility of love, in the wrong camp. I have to admit I was afraid for her character. Not so much in terms of what would happen to her, but in how the script would treat her. Would she be used as a gimmick? Would her femaleness be used as a plot point, something to garner cheap sympathy? By that I mean: I was afraid that her womanhood would be revealed, and she would be on the verge of being gang-raped, and she would then be saved by her special friend in the enemy camp. If you think I'm exaggerating, then just picture how such women are usually treated in action movies, from A to Z, and how their "courage" in being "manly" is usually punished in the most female of ways. Red Cliff did not disappoint me, and I take such things very very seriously. I care about how women are portrayed on film. I don't think they should be always good, or victorious, no. On the contrary. But when womanhood is used cheaply, to bring up primal protective patriarchal responses in the audience, that's when I get my back up. It's similar to filmmakers who use the Holocaust as a plot-point, a cheap shortcut to getting the audience on its side. I'm looking at you, Swing Kids. (As my friend Mitchell said, "Swing Kids appears to be about how, despite the Holocaust, a bunch of German teenagers managed to have a good time during the war.") But Red Cliff didn't go that way. It's a stronger film for it. It did not betray her character. It did not betray me, the audience member rooting for her. Things do not "work out" for her, but the film didn't go the typical route which most by-the-book films do, which can't seem to figure out how to deal with womanhood. They want to thrill the audience with a fierce female, fighting alongside the men, but then, they don't know what to do next with her, and, essentially, "put her in her place" by creating a situation of sexual violence from which she must be rescued. You can almost imagine the fevered all-male script conferences that go on: "I know! Let's have her take a bath in the enemy camp, all afraid she will be discovered - and then - I know! We'll have a shot of her breasts, close-up, make it really hot, and then we'll see a soldier peek in on her ... and then ... I know, let's have him be shocked, and then let's have her cover her breasts ... and oh, this'll be great, a bunch of guys will burst in on her, naked ... and then, her friend will bust in like Rambo and save her!" To the men who always say that women are being too sensitive about such issues, I reply: Be careful. Be careful what you defend. Especially if you care about art, art that is for all of us. In Red Cliff, Zhao Wei is a force to be reckoned with, even the men she fights alongside of have to admit that. Her maps are beyond brilliant. She helps them win the war. And yet, her heart opens to a friend she makes in the enemy camp. He thinks she's a boy, he punches her in the stomach at one point, in a fond way, shocking her, and her heart opens up. Tomboys across the world will understand her pain. "Yes ... I'm good at kickball ... but ... I'm also a girl ... I want love, too... Can't I have both??" I've rarely seen this strange dynamic portrayed so beautifully, outside of Shakespeare (who did it best).

There are so many scenes to treasure. Too many to count. A couple of my favorites:

-- A fight scene early on with a general from Sun Quan's army. Dammit, I wish I knew his character's name, and I am sure he is totally famous with Asian audiences, so please, Asian film fans, fill me in: This man saves a baby, a crucial baby, a baby who will continue on the line, and then this man fights off all of the opposing forces with the baby strapped to his back. He is fierce. He is unstoppable. He is an incredible athlete. And yet it never becomes just a stunt-scene. What it is is a fight to the death. The baby must live. That is what this actor is playing, in all of his unbelievable fight sequences. I am so sorry I do not know this man's name, or character's name, because this man is so phenomenal, so incredible in his martial arts ability, first of all, but second of all, in his ability to inject worlds of emotion into his fighting. He spars with swords and arrows, in a fight scene that will have you on the edge of your seats, and all you are thinking is DID THE BABY MAKE IT?? This is a testament to his power as an action star. UnbeLIEVable scene.

-- A show-stopping scene involving arrows and boats. Zhou Yu's forces are better on the water, but Cao Cao has more boats. However, Cao Cao's forces are nervous people, unused to the water. They don't understand naval strategy. It has already been set up that Zhou Yu's side don't have enough arrows. They have 20,000 arrows compared to the 100,000 arrows on the other side. Zhuge Liang comes up with a plan, involving scarecrows, and floating their boats up to within shooting range of the massive enemy, in a scene that has to be seen to be believed. I am not lying when I say that I started clapping when I realized what he was up to, saying out loud, "THIS IS BRILLIANT." It all dovetails with my obsession with military strategies. Absolutely unbelievable scene, from beginning to end.

-- Early on in the film, early in the alliance between Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, a horse is giving birth. It is a breech birth. A frightening situation, dangerous to both mother and child. Zhou Yu's wife lies over the horse, stroking it, commanding people to keep their voices down, because the panicked tones will disturb the birthing mother. It is this scene, and no other, that made me fall in love with the film. It brought tears to my eyes. I entered into THEIR world, and totally left my own.

-- Cao Cao's forces are drawn into a trap, laid for them by the opposition, who don't have the numbers to win, but who are tricky enough that it just might work. The commander shouts at one point: "FLIP THE SHIELDS." When they "flip the shields", well, all I can say is, goosebumps erupted over my flesh, and you'll just have to see it to see what I am talking about.

-- Tony Leung's first entrance, which is textbook "Entrance of Huge Honking Movie Star", and satisfies the audience at such a deep level, who have been waiting for him to appear for an hour or so. When we finally see his face (and it is prolonged, John Woo makes us wait), we feel a swansong of relief, "Ohhhh, there he is", and it is my favorite kind of star entrance.

-- The final battle with the fire-boats ramming the banked boats. If I described it, I wouldn't do it justice.

In the end, what makes Red Cliff special, is its willingness to let us sit in the philosophical implications of the business of war, in a way that calls to mind Apocalypse Now and Kurosawa's films. You may think that your "version" of history is correct. It must be nice to be so certain.

John Woo has been making flashy and important action films for decades. Red Cliff is his dream project. His most personal film. It shows.

The Big Combo (1955); Director: Joseph Lewis

Director Joseph Lewis, perhaps known mostly as "king of the Bs", worked at fast and furious paces on his films (not so out of the ordinary at the time), but the quality he managed to achieve in the midst of those breakneck cheaply-made productions, not just in the performances of his actors, but also in the look and feel of his films, is quite extraordinary. One of the things I love about Lewis as a director (in his finished products, and also how he comes across in interviews) is his obvious sheer love for the crazy pursuit, and the bravado it takes to get anything done, and how he seemed to relish the entire experience. Peter Bogdanovich interviewed him near the end of his life and Lewis's joy still comes across. He didn't take himself too seriously, but he sure took what he was doing seriously. I'm on a Joseph Lewis kick these days, and The Big Combo, from 1955, is one of his most well-loved film noirs. Gun Crazy is obviously his most famous (and rightly so - I'll talk about that later), but there's always something in all of his films to sink your teeth into, visually, or character-wise. The Big Combo looks awesome, every shot seething with atmosphere and emotion. Joseph Lewis got his start doing Westerns, and any time a scene was boring to him, he would shoot it through wagon wheels, to give the frame some interest, thereby garnering for himself the nickname "Wagon Wheel Joe". Producers would shout, "Oh Jesus, take those wagon wheels away from him, goddammit, not another wagon-wheel scene." You can see Lewis's intelligence and passion in how he frames each shot, the point being to keep things vital and good-looking, so that each scene is not just interesting because of its plot points, but because of how it looks. The acting is terrific, even down to characters who only have one line, and the script is great. What could have been your basic gangster film ends up being so much more. It's a psychological study of obsession. Everyone here is obsessed with something.

I think Joseph Lewis, like all the great directors (and he rarely is spoken in the same breath as people like John Ford, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, but I'm putting him in that lexicon for the moment) understood obsession. He made it his primary subject matter. Gun Crazy is a primal example of it, but Big Combo is there too. Mr. Brown, the gangster, (played by Richard Conte, in a suave slightly ominous performance that reminded me of some of Burt Lancaster's roles) is obsessed with status, and being at the top of the heap. Leonard Diamond, the cop (played by Cornel Wilde) is obsessed with Mr. Brown, first of all, and has thrown the entire police force into a manhunt, against the advice of the commissioners and everyone else. But he is like a man with a bone. Through his pursuit of Brown, he has come to fall in love with Brown's gun-moll girlfriend Susan (played by Wilde's real-life wife Jean Wallace). Susan used to be a society girl, and something of a prodigy at the piano, but she has given all that up, and thrown in her lot with her gangster boyfriend, much to the bafflement of the world she has left behind. Why would she leave polite society and hang around with this thug? Ahhhh, but that's because Susan is obsessed with something, too: the kind of sex she has with her gangster boyfriend. It's dirty, it's passionate, it's fierce. Like Stella Kowalski, another society-girl tied to a man beneath her station because she's addicted to how he fucks and how he gets those red lights flashing, Susan hates herself for being trapped, but she is putty in his hands. Mr. Brown knows how to push her buttons, and he does. Susan is a sour-faced girl by now, broken down by disappointment and loneliness, but when he touches her, even casually, she goes into a private realm of sex and pleasure that leaves her helpless. Mr. Diamond tries to lure Susan away from Mr. Brown, not only because he needs a witness against him, but because he has fallen in love with her. But could Cornel Wilde, with his slightly earnest look, serious and tense, ever please her the way her boyfriend pleases her? This is not spoken in the script, at least not overtly, but it's there - in every look, every touch, every glance.

Big Combo also has the honor of being the first American film to at least suggest that oral sex is occurring. Ecstasy did it before then, way before, and was much more graphic, Hedy Lemarr having her first orgasm onscreen, in closeup. But that wasn't an American film. Joseph Lewis said to Jean Wallace, trying to loosen her up for the scene (and Wilde was a producer on the film, which added to her insecurity): "Your boyfriend doesn't stop when he kisses your earlobe. He doesn't stop when he kisses your neck. He doesn't stop when he kisses your tummy. He covers you all." Wallace apparently said, "I cannot believe you are talking to me this way, but fine, I understand what you mean, I'll do it, just make sure Cornel isn't on the set that day, please?" Susan and Mr. Brown are having a fight, and he tries to calm her down. He kisses her roughly. She submits, then resists. He moves up behind her, she is facing us, and he starts kissing her on the neck, saying things like, "I want to give you everything ... I'll give you all ..." You can see her sexual helplessness all over her face in that moment, she's almost climaxing if you want to know the truth.

I loved how Joseph Lewis described this scene to Bogdanovich:

I actually wanted to show - again by impression only - a man making love to a girl in this delightfully unique fashion that we have all dreamt about or experienced. Now, how do you show it on film? Well, I had an idea: as you saw the two of them, mixed with kissing her on the lips and then on the ear, the camera moved closer and closer and closer and, as you came into a huge closeup of Nick Conte and Jean Wallace, gradually Nick's head disappeared: first kissing her neck, then lower and lower and then, at the precise moment, Jean, who was icy - I think she was afraid to betray herself for fear Cornel would raise hell with her - but at that precise moment I envisioned, I went 'uh-uh-uh' off-scene, and that was recorded. Cornel never forgave me for it.

The scene is as graphic as you can get, even more so because you don't see it actually happen. You don't need to.

Joseph Lewis got in trouble with the censors because of it. One of the things his movies do is push back at the Code, which had been in place since the 1930s. Gun Crazy breaks boundaries all over the place, and Big Combo does, too. Lewis told Bogdanovich that one of the censors said to him angrily, "I can't believe you have put this filth into the movie of a man going down on a woman." Lewis protested innocence. "That is entirely your projection. I didn't show it. You have supplied all of the emotion of the scene, as an audience is supposed to do. So don't tell me I'm a filthy director." The scene stayed.

Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman play two of Mr. Brown's goons. The heavies who do the dirty work. There isn't a scene that they aren't together. They are on stakeouts, they share salami sandwiches, they start to realize that they are being set up here, somehow, by their boss ... only they aren't sure how yet. Granted, they are not the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. But their dynamic is set up to such a strong degree, that you actually like these guys, as horrible as some of their actions are, and when they finally are ambushed, and one of them doesn't make it (Van Cleef), Holliman, lying on a stretcher, begins to weep with the loss of his friend, and the scene works, it works so well. His grief is real. He is nothing without his partner. He can barely speak coherently. Earl Holliman does a terrific job with a "nothing" part, realizing the opportunity here for creating a real character, with a backstory, and relationships. So many actors and scripts miss this. But here: everyone is allowed to be human.

The script sparks and glides, with lines like, "Joe, the man has reason to hate me. His salary is $96.50 a week. The busboys in my hotels make better money than that.”

Obsession drives the three leads forward. Other characters move into the action. There is a great cameo by Helen Walker, who plays Mr. Brown's wife, whom he has had incarcerated in a mental institution to get her out of the way. Mr. Diamond tracks her down, and she has been living in an asylum for 10 years, tending to the garden, and wants nothing to do with her past life. She is afraid. She tells Mr. Diamond: "I'd rather be insane and alive, than sane and dead." In Frances, Frances Farmer says, in the interview at the end of the film that if you are "treated as if you are sick ... well, I guess you can become sick." Helen Walker embodies that. She is a wreck of a woman. Her obsession is her flowers. It is the only thing that makes sense, and throughout her interrogation she keeps yearning to get back to them.

Obsession keeps us alive. Or it kills us. Either one. Let the chips fall where they may.

With a great climactic battle, involving Susan shining a spotlight on the side of the car into the dark warehouse to illuminate her trapped lover, and a final moment which is a complete steal from Casablanca, Big Combo is a great popcorn-movie, and shows what a movie looks like when it's made by a man who is obsessed with the process itself.

Crimson Gold (2003); Director: Jafar Panahi

Crimson Gold opens with a stick-up at a jewelry store. The camera is placed inside the dark store, and through its point of view we can see out onto the sunny street beyond. We see the little old jeweler come to unlock the door from the outside, we see the dark figure running up behind him, we see the flash of the gun as the jeweler is shoved inside, and then follows the stick-up, where the camera doesn't move once. The jeweler is pleading and fighting, the thief telling him to shut up and get the jewels, but half the time they are out of frame. They crash around, things fall down, we hear their dialogue, and occasionally they pass by the camera, but most often, they are not seen. As the theft plays out, a group of curious people gather outside on the sidewalk. A chic woman in a blue headscarf had tried to get into the jewelry store, found it locked, and, peeking in, saw what was going on and began to freak out, calling for help. People gather. A shot is fired from within. Chaos erupts on the street. Everyone knows the jeweler, they start to call out for him by name. The thief never says a word. He remains a dark lumbering presence, and it isn't until the final shot of the opening sequence when he, trapped in a situation he has started, stands with his back against the gate, his back against the crowd on the sidewalk, and holds the gun up to his temple.

It's an outstanding opening, and one of the best parts of it is that it sets up an expectation of what kind of movie we are about to see (jewelry heists, down-on-his-luck guy trying to make one big score, all the cliches), and while some of those cliches are in place, because it's Jafar Panahi directing (and the script is by Abbas Kiarostami) things don't quite look or feel the way they are "supposed" to. I love a movie that can do that, without being too clever or pleased with itself. Criminson Gold is not messing with convention. It has no opinion about the conventions of jewelry-heist movies. Or if it does, it's certainly not front and center.

One of the dangers in talking about Jafar Panahi's films is that you (the writer) can make it sound too earnest, missing entirely the feel and energy of the film. He's serious, sure, but not too serious. He's interested in other things entirely. So if I said: Crimson Gold is about the gap between the haves and have-nots in Tehran, you would be forgiven for suppressing a yawn and deciding to see another movie instead. But Panahi and Kiarostami, film geeks essentially, understand that cinema is a language, it is visual, and it is what one does with the pictures that tells the story.

And Crimson Gold is full of beautiful and strange pictures.

Hussein (the thief) is played by Hossain Emadeddin, a non-actor (this is his only credit), and Ebert mentions in his review that Emadeddin, in real life, is a paranoid schizophrenic. He doesn't play one here, but there is something dead and abstract about his face that is compelling, making you wonder all along if something might be wrong with this guy. He is mainly wordless. He rides around Tehran on his motorbike. He lives in a dingy one-room apartment. He delivers pizzas. And, on the side, he is a pickpocket with his friend Ali (played by Kamyar Sheisi), and they strategize on how to pick women who clearly have money in their purses. There is a whole psychology behind it. Not that Hussein seems interested in psychology. He is engaged to be married to Ali's sister. Ali is relieved. He was worried about his sister's chances of finding a husband.

All of this information is revealed in the early stages of the film, when it becomes clear that we are working backwards, to find out how it is that Hussein would end up with a gun to his head in a jewelry store. The two sit in a cafe talking, and an old man comes up to them and joins them. He gives them advice on thievery, a line he runs in too, and says that the best thiefs are the most honest. Don't knock someone over for pocket change, or the thrill of it. The motivation behind your robbery is what separates the men from the boys.

My expectations were still that we were about to see a movie about robbery. Maybe the old man will become a mentor ... maybe we will see the trial runs of big robberies ... maybe one will be busted ...

Crimson Gold doesn't go any of these predictable ways, and as the film meanders on, we submit to its pace, we submit to its journey. We give up our own. So much of life is about giving up your idea of what it should be, and accepting the reality before you. This is true of the characters in Crimson Gold (everyone: from the girlfriend, to the old guy in the cafe, to the people Hussein meets along the way) and it is true of the audience as well.

There are two standout scenes. They are long. They are complex, with many elements, many characters. Kiarostami's wicked wit and intelligence is here in spades. Throw out the rule-book. The opening jewelry-heist becomes a distant memory, and instead, we follow Hussein around on his delivery route, meeting different people along the way, and getting sucked into their various dramas.

The first standout scene takes place at a big fancy apartment building, and Hussein pulls up, with three pizzas to be delivered to the third floor. He is stopped at the front door by a cop, who tells him to go no further. Hussein lumpily argues. He is stubborn. "But I have pizzas to deliver." "That's none of your business. Just stand over there." It turns out there is a stakeout on the street, with plainclothes policemen and soldiers hanging out in all the bushes, and waiting in parked cars. There is a party going on on the third floor, you can hear the music pounding from above, and the cops are waiting for the partygoers to emerge, so they can haul them off to jail one by one. The cops won't let Hussein leave. He is now a witness, and may be important later. He is forced to stand against a wall and wait.

The scene unfolds, and each time you think it might be over, it unfolds some more. It takes surprising dips and alleys, it arrives at dead-ends, and then backs up and tried another way. The street is dark and shadowed, and the buildings have a greenish tinge from the streetlamps. It is beautifully shot, with Panahi's detailed eye for urban settings and strange beauty found in ordinary things. Kiarostami's script is incredible, too. A veiled woman drives up and tries to enter the building. The police stop her. She says that her daughter had called for her to come pick her up. The police try to make her phone up there on her cell phone and tell her daughter to come down. She refuses. She is told to sit in her car and wait. A couple drive up and get out, and the cops swarm around them. They haven't even said where they are going, perhaps they live on a different floor of the building, but the cops pull on them, demanding to know what they are doing. The couple fights back. (Everyone in the movie fights back, a little nod to the resilience of the Iranian people in the face of such nonsense.) "We haven't even gone in yet ..." The woman exclaims, "We're married!" A cop snorts, "What kind of a man goes out with his wife?" This is not said ironically, or as a joke. This is a serious sentiment, and opens up worlds of understanding of the sexual and moral culture of the place (explored in other Iranian films about marriage, like Hemlock, and Fireworks Wednesday, and The Day I Became a Woman.) These two HAVE to be up to no good, because what kind of a man goes out with his wife to a party? Kiarostami doesn't linger on this, though. All of this is shot from Hussein's point of view, waiting across the street, and looking on. Two young girls, chattering on their cell phones, emerge from the party and are hauled off to the waiting police van. The scene has to be about 20 minutes long.

Hussein doesn't have much to say during all of this, but he does strike up a conversation with a young soldier standing nearby. The soldier barely looks like he shaves yet. Hussein notices this and asks him how old he is. The soldier confesses he is 15. His brother died in "the war" (there's only one war to this generation of Iranians). We already know that Hussein is a veteran of that war, and he takes some kind of medication, it is never said what, but it has made him heavy and sluggish. The war hangs over this scene, its long memory, its reach. Hussein looks up at the window where the party is going on. The curtains are drawn, but you can see people dancing and whooping it up behind. The music is techno-pop with an Iranian flair. One woman who emerges and is immediately hauled off, protests: "There was a wedding - this is a family gathering." No matter. Men, women, dancing together? Alcohol probably? Hussein and the young soldier stare up at the gyrating silhouettes. Hussein asks the young boy, "Have you ever danced with a girl?" The young boy shakes his head no.

The streets are in shadow, long and green and murky, with one blinding red neon sign at the end of the alley. It is startlingly beautiful, yet disturbing as well. It has the feel of a hospital, or a prison, those institutional colors. Hussein knows he is going to be in trouble with his job, but he has three pizzas on the back of his motorbike, and it would be a shame to let them go to waste, so he offers a piece to the young soldier. The soldier refuses. Hussein thinks a bit, silently, and then walks over to the parked car where the police sergeant, walkie-talkie in hand, sits, and he offers him a piece of pizza. The sergeant tells him to go back against the wall like he is told. Hussein insists. "The pizza will go to waste. If you have a piece, then the others won't be afraid to have a piece. Come on." It is the most he has said in the entire film.

The sergeant gives in, he's hungry, and grabs some slices of pizza, which then embolden the others, who will probably be on this stakeout until dawn. Even the waiting veiled mother in the car takes a slice.

I have just described the action of the scene, but that can't begin to convey the slow creeping effectiveness of it, the dark colors, the sudden spurts of alarmed dialogue as the cops arrest yet another person, and above it all, the throbbing pounding Western music, seen as so threatening and yet so enticing.

The second standout scene is when Hussein delivers pizza to a penthouse apartment. A young slick guy in a tie answers the door. He is played by Pourang Nakhael, and it's rather amazing to me that this is his only credit, another testament to Jafar Panahi's well-known gift of working with non-actors. The slick guy is annoyed. He had ordered the pizzas because he had a girl over, he informed Hussein, but now the girl (and her tagalong friend) is gone, and he has no use for the pizzas anymore. He's more annoyed that he has been blown off by this girl. Hussein is impervious to such sophisticated problems. His character reminded me a lot of Victor, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince, in James Mangold's underrated film Heavy. Dominated and underestimated by others, mainly because of his weight, he has learned to suppress his desires, and his more unsavory feelings, like rage or insecurity. He seems passive. As Victor seems passive, overrun by his unbearable mother (played awesomely by Shelley Winters), and hopelessly in love with the beautiful new girl at the pizza place where he works (another interesting parallel with Crimson Gold). Both characters, Victor and Hussein, are in service jobs. They have to bite down their pride and their feeling that they deserve more ... because, perhaps, they have been mocked their whole lives. For being ugly, for being weird, whatever. And nobody wants to know that their pizza delivery guy has feelings, or a life.

Again, Kiarostami messes with our expectations of what the scene will be. We are led to think that it will be a short scene, a quick glimpse into an unheard-of world of echoey penthouses and guys with money to burn and girls who come over to ... do what, exactly? The slick rich guy doesn't want to pay for the pizzas, because it was the girls' idea anyway, but Hussein remains immovable, a dark stolid force, and so the rich guy goes to get the money. Hussein slowly peeks through the door. We see a wide white staircase, like the one in Notorious. We see gold leaf. We see Greek statues in little niches in the walls. Up until this point in the film, we are obviously aware that rich people exist, but since we are only in Hussein's small circle, we don't actually see how the better half lives. So the short glimpse we get, the wide black windows high high up, staring out at the glittering vast sprawl of Tehran, has a deep impact. It's devastating, actually.

One of the most boring things to do in life is to bitch and complain about not having enough money. It is not rich people's fault that they are fortunate. As a matter of fact, more often than not, their wealth comes from hard work and commitment. They have earned it. However, we are all only human, and by that point in the story of Crimson Gold, we feel that Hussein has perhaps earned the right to at least have a moment of thinking, "Dang. It's so unfair."

But that's just a projection. We don't know what Hussein thinks. We don't need to. Panahi, with the slow pan across that astounding room, tells us all we need to know.

Then: the scene takes a turn. The rich guy invites Hussein to come in and share the pizzas with him. Why not? The whole evening was a bust anyway. He had obviously hoped to get laid, or at least get something, and now what was he going to do? Hussein resists at first, but the rich guy is insistent, and finally, Hussein enters. What follows, a long scene between the two men, is not at all what you would imagine or conceive of - only Kiarostami could do it - and as they eat and talk, and the rich guy (who is about Hussein's age) complains about how "crazy" the country is (he grew up in the States and then got homesick, coming back to inhabit his parents' insanely palatial apartment), and offers Hussein liquor, and complains about the girl who came over, and complains about a lot of things, actually. There are many indictments of Iranian culture here, but since it is put into the mouth of this vaguely unsavory poor-little-rich-boy, the edge is taken off. Maybe he's complaining too much, I thought. But the knife of criticism is there, and yet another reason why Panahi so often gets into trouble.

The penthouse apartment that Panahi found is one of the most incredible sets I've ever seen in an Iranian film. It's three or four floors, with a huge roof-deck, a crazy swimming pool with posing black Greek statues, a grand piano, a strange empty room filled with red-and-white striped plush chairs (it looks like a conference room in a hotel), a full gym with weight machines and treadmills, a stainless steel giant refrigerator filled to the gills with liquor, a huge empty room containing only a Persian rug and a flat-screen TV as large as a cineplex movie screen ... It is a creepy empty house, screaming "nouveau riche", with no taste, no personality, just an accumulation of objects, unused, there for show.

It is alienating to the extreme. Hussein and the rich guy sit at the table, eating pizza, and smoking. The girl who had just left had apparently gotten her period in the rich guy's bathroom, leaving some blood splattered on the floor (calling to mind the horrifying scene from Neal Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors, with Jason Patrick freaking out on this girl because she dared to bleed on his sheets - awful. Awful.), and the rich guy is incensed at the blood on his pristine floor. It seems to him indicative of how "insane" Iran is. "You people don't know how to deal with a simple biological problem..." he fumes as he cleans it up.

Part of the joy of this film is, as I mentioned, succumbing to where IT wants to go, and letting go of the feeling that "shouldn't we be moving on now?" Sometimes, yes, it is good to "move on", but Crimson Gold is not about its plot. It is about the lonely people you meet in the night, the sudden moments of connection (or disconnection), and the vast abyss between what you want and what you have. The rich guy, naturally, has no respect for his wealth, although he uses it for all its worth. But he thinks Iran is crazy, and all the men there are crazy, and the women even crazier, and why can't people just relax and have a nice glass of wine without all this ... this ... craziness?

It reminded me of the section in Marjane Satrapi's graphic autobiographical novel Persepolis, when she returns to Iran in her late teens, after having lived abroad for a bit, and how strange it was, how alienating ... to have been free (even unsafely so, with sex and drugs and all of the "freedoms" of the West), and then to come back to a place that is obsessed with sex, to an unhealthy degree, OBSESSED ... which creates a warped culture where relationship and "ambiance" (as the rich guy says to Hussein) are impossible. "I don't drink to get drunk, like all you Iranian lunatics," says the rich guy - "I need ambiance, a sense of occasion ..."

Kiarostami is quite pointed here. It gives the scene real bite.

Hussein wanders through the house, touching things, staring at the excess, and even jumps in the pool at one point, fully clothed.

So how is it then that Hussein, lumpy pizza delivery guy, ends up in the jewelry store holding a gun to his own head?

The strange sneaking power of Crimson Gold is that its structure moves you quickly away from that violent opening, so that you are lulled into forgetting it. Panahi's signature shots of cars zipping through the freeways around Tehran, Hussein and Ali on his motorbike, careening in and out of traffic, carry us far far away, immediately, from what we know the outcome of the picture will be.

Context is key. By the end of the film, it is not that we know why he did it. We can guess why. The reasons and motivations are all there. It is that we have spent enough time with this man that we feel the loss. The loss of this good man. 3/4 of the way through, I remembered where we were going in Crimson Gold, I remembered that opener, and because the pace of the film, after that fevered beginning, is so slow and deliberate, we have time to mourn. We have time to realize a loss. This is Panahi's true gift. None of this is accidental.

I don't even know why I love Hussein, he is not a particularly lovable character, although I suspect it has something to do with the fact that he made the sergeant eat the piece of pizza first.

Don't Bother to Knock (1952); Director: Roy Ward Baker

Yesterday, June 1, was Marilyn Monroe's birthday. Here is a look at an under-rated performance, that of the babysitter in "Don't Bother to Knock", co-starring Richard Widmark.

"I rather think that had she endured, had she come ten years later, maybe it would have been different. But at that time - I mean, she came in at the height of the Hollywood system - and she was not alone feeling debased by the whole thing. It was a common complaint. Like [the way] John Garfield was a terrific actor - yet he did nothing but scream and howl. There was some demeaning aspect to the whole thing. So most of them went with it. They simply adopted the contempt with which they were treated. I think that's what happened. Pretty hard to withstand - a culture of contempt. I think it helped destroy her." -- Arthur Miller on Marilyn Monroe

Seeing Monroe's performance in 1952's Don't Bother to Knock, as Nell, the psychologically shattered and borderline psychotic babysitter in a plush hotel, makes you wonder about roads not traveled. It makes you think of her courage in putting up with contemptuous projects like Let's Make Love or The Seven Year Itch (one of the meanest spirited movies she was ever in) and wonder what might have happened if she had been allowed to experiment. Now I'm not saying that her work, as it exists, in comedic gems such as Some Like It Hot is somehow lesser, or somehow lacking. But Don't Bother to Knock hints at another kind of career that this woman could have had. Who knows, maybe she wouldn't have wanted it. She wanted the love of the audience, she needed that love, it had to happen. I still wonder, though.

Billy Wilder said this about Monroe (this is a transcription of a conversation he had with Cameron Crowe):

She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came up for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line. She could do a 3-page dialogue scene perfectly, and then get stuck on a line like, "It's me, Sugar"... But if she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good ... She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She was afraid of the camera, and that's why, I think, she muffed some lines. God knows how often. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.

We all have magic in us. But Marilyn Monroe had movie magic. And, like Wilder said, "...she automatically knew where the joke was." That kind of sensibility cannot be taught. And in the same way that it is rare to find a man as outrageously good-looking as Cary Grant who is also a comedic genius, it's rare to find a bombshell who can nail jokes in the way she does (even when she is the butt of them)! But she is always the one who comes off smelling like a rose, even in nasty pictures like The Seven Year Itch, which tries to make a joke out of her, and fails.

So I love Marilyn's funniness, it's one of the most spontaneous things about her. However, she always yearned to show more of herself, more of what she could do (especially as she got more serious about acting as a craft). Don't Bother to Knock is early Monroe. Her stardom hadn't "hit" yet.

Who knows what demons Monroe battled on a daily basis. All I know is that sadness and fear flickers across her face in Don't Bother to Knock in a neverending dance. She seems dangerous at times. She never seems to push the emotion, it seems to just happen to her. She (Nell) is not fully control of herself and neither is Marilyn. I don't know if Marilyn was "tapping into" her own wealth of miserable memories, or if it was her talent allowing her the ability to portray such fragility ... it doesn't matter "how" she got there. What matters is the end result. It's a stunning performance, and most often not even mentioned when Marilyn Monroe's career is brought up.

Marilyn Monroe often played either naive breathless girls, easily taken in, a bit dopey, or vaguely trashy showgirls, who somehow have managed to maintain their sweetness. She never played bitter. She never played a wisecracker. That was not her thing. And whatever "experiences" she had had in her life, it had not touched that diamond-bright innocence inside her. Nothing could kill it. But she never played - except in Don't Bother To Knock - a truly damaged woman. I suppose a woman with a body like that and a face like that was made to be a fantasy for audiences and audiences don't really want to see their sex goddesses as damaged. Marilyn knew that better than anyone. She had a love-hate relationship with her beauty. It was her ticket to fame, she knew that, and she was grateful for it, and she knew how to use it. She was a master at creating her persona (and she knew how to turn it on and off). But it was also what tormented her, and gave her such intense stage fright that she wouldn't come out of her dressing room for sometimes hours, staring at herself in the mirror. What was she looking for? How hard was it for her to drag up that sexy goddess on days when she didn't feel like it? There are those who respond to such questions with, "Oh, boo hoo, cry me a river, she was famous, we all should have such problems!" I think it represents a truly ungenerous and stingy attitude, not to mention a lack of understanding of "what it takes" to be "on". And not just "on", but the most beautiful woman in the world, etc. ad nauseum. Monroe would lock her dressing room door, and refuse to come out, knowing that within her was an abyss of sadness that nobody wanted to see. It had to have been horrible. I can only imagine. I don't have that kind of beauty. I have no idea what that must be like. She was often very afraid of directors, who could get impatient with her constant bungling of lines (most likely the result of undiagnosed dyslexia) ... but (and this is important) she absolutely loved the crew, who loved her right back. They were her audience. They were not stingy. She would walk out of her dressing room, all dolled up, after having made everyone wait for hours, and the crew - hanging off their scaffolds - would catcall and whistle, and she ate it up. It was friendly. Marilyn was loved by those guys; they represented her fan base. Directors loved her too, in spite of themselves. They loved her because, like Billy Wilder said, even if it took 80 takes for her to get a line, she was Marilyn Monroe, after all ... so that's why she was paid the big bucks, and that's why you sucked it up and tried not to mind having to wait around for her to get over her stage fright or whatever it was. I see both sides. I can see why a director would tear his hair out with her shenanigans. But this is a post about Marilyn Monroe, and there were certainly demons there, demons that sometimes took over. In Don't Bother to Knock, she was asked to reveal some of that stuff.

Monroe plays a resolutely unglamorous part. She lives with her parents. She is recently out of an institution (we learn this later). Her uncle has gotten her a job babysitting in the hotel where he is a doorman. She shows up on her first day, wearing a simple cotton dress, low heels, a little black beret - and when she gets on the elevator for the first time and we see her from behind, her dress is a little bit wrinkled, like it would be for any woman who had just taken a long subway ride. It's touching. Alex told me that she read in some Photoplay magazine she owns that Monroe had bought the dress herself at a five and dime for the movie. Monroe had seen it, and known that it was "Nell's dress". It shows her intelligence of her choice for the character, as well as a lack of vanity.

Nell's backstory unfolds slowly. When we first see her come through the revolving doors, we see a pretty woman, who seems unsure. Her step is hesitating. She looks like a raw nerve, everything making an impression on her, the air, the molecules leaving marks on her, as though she hasn't been out in public for a long long time. This turns out to be true but watch how Marilyn is playing it in the first scene, before we know anything about her. That's building a character.) If we know the rest of Marilyn Monroe's work, we may be forgiven for thinking that Nell is just another one of her naive breathless creations. She meets up with the elevator man, who turns out to be her uncle, who has gotten her a job babysitting for a child of guests in the hotel. The uncle seems solicitous, perhaps overly so. He says, "You won't have any trouble babysitting, will you, Nell?" A bottomless look of sadness battling with fear comes over Marilyn's face. It's startling. This was my first clue that Nell was going to be a little different than Marilyn's other characters. She says, "Of course not. Why would I?" She's not defensive, only unbelievably sad that his question even needs to be asked. It seems to suggest that there might be something ... wrong with her.

Nell is brought into the hotel room, and meets the parents of Bunny, the little girl she will be babysitting. The parents swirl out, leaving simple instructions. Nell reads Bunny a fairy story before she goes to bed. There is something touching here, and also not quite right. Marilyn reads the story in almost a monotone, a dreamy uninflected voice, as though she is trying to imagine herself into the story she is reading. She's cut off. From the sweetness of the experience, and also from her self. We can't even guess what she's thinking. Bunny, however, is riveted.

Once Bunny goes to bed, Nell is left alone in the apartment. She's aimless. When her face is in stasis, and when she is alone, all you see is the sadness. And, more than that, more disturbing, the restlessness. In the introduction to the parents, and in her dealings with her uncle, she tries to keep it together, and put on a social happy expression. But once alone, the mask is off.

Marilyn was so rarely without her mask, and so it's amazing to watch.

Another thing that is fascinating about this film, and also singular in Marilyn's career, is that she gets the opportunity to show anger. Real rage. I can't think of another film where she gets angry in a similar way, where she pushes back, where the helplessness suddenly pushes OUT, lashing out in fury at those who try to contain her. It's terrifying.

Meanwhile, another story goes on in the film. Richard Widmark plays Jed, a cynical pilot, who's been dating Lynn, played by Anne Bancroft. Lyn is a lounge singer in the hotel, Jed flies in on the weekends. It's obviously a "friends with benefits" type situation, and Lyn has been okay with that, up until now. She's portrayed by Bancroft as an intelligent and compassionate woman, who is not above having harmless fun, and she's not the type to put the pressure on him to commit. But there are qualities she senses in Jed that disturb her, and she finally has come to the decision that she can't be with him anymore. It's his coldness, the way he treats people. Jed sees through a cynical lens, and any act of kindness is assigned a base motive. You can see it in how he treats Eddie, the elevator man, who tries to joke with him. You can see it in the contemptuous way he treats the woman who wants to take their photograph. Richard Widmark (he's so sexy in this film) only has a couple of specific moments where these qualities can be displayed, and he nails them. We can see Lyn's point. Lyn says, "You lack what I need. You lack an understanding heart." They "wrangle" back and forth in the bar of the hotel, and she's pretty certain that she needs to walk away. He's the kind of guy who has a little black book of names, always in his back pocket, but there's something about this Lyn woman that has gotten under his skin. He can't admit it yet. He's too proud. But her calm and reasoned explanation leaves him restless, pissed.

Jed finds himself at loose ends back up in his hotel room, while he can hear the lovely strains of Lyn singing torch songs (or, to say it another way, Anne Bancroft lip syncing) through the radio on the wall, connected to the bar downstairs (a nice omnipresent touch). He pours a drink. He sprawls on the bed. He throws his black book on the floor. He's cranky. He thought he would be getting laid, and now he won't be. He then catches a glimpse in the window across the way, of Nell, dressed up in a gown, dancing around by herself. A private moment. Jed is struck dumb. Eventually she notices him, and they begin a conversation across the space in-between. He figures out her room number from the floor plan on the back of the door, and calls her. They sit and talk on the phone, staring at each other from window to window. It's hot. There's an ache to the scene, in their separation, the mystery of the connection.

Now one of the things that I really love about this film is Richard Widmark's journey through it, and how he treats Nell at first, and then watching him adjust to the reality before him.

Here's the thing: Marilyn had an aura about her that clued you in to the fact that inside, she was about 11 years old. She had a woman's body but a child's mind. I think that's one of the reasons why pairing her up with someone like John Wayne wouldn't have worked. Wayne required a grown-up, and his best romantic pairings were when he was somehow equally matched. No kid's stuff for Wayne. Only grown-up dames need apply. The thing about Marilyn, the captivating and also complicated thing, is that she was a little innocent girl in that sex-bomb of a body. And here, in Don't Bother to Knock, Richard Widmark's Jed, a guy out for a good time, a guy looking (in this moment anyway) to fuck his loneliness away, only sees the body at first. But don't we all? I can't judge him for that. It's quite a body. He looks at Nell, and sees ... well ... Marilyn Monroe ... and he thinks: I have hit the jackpot. There's also a certain passivity in Nell (at first), a certain willingness, that makes you think she would be "easy". Monroe had that. She was soft, she would yield. And so Jed, who's not in the mood for a fight, or even a seduction, thinks that it will be pretty easy to capture this woman for the night. And that's what he wants right now. No more problems, for God's sake.

But over the devastating course of their next couple of scenes, when he invites himself over to her room (not knowing, of course, that it is not her room at all), he begins to realize that something is not right. They flirt, they drink, they kiss ... and through their interactions, something opens up in Nell, a ferocious need is unleashed. She projects onto him all of her hopes and dreams, which is alarming, so early in the game, and calls to mind Fatal Attraction, except perhaps with more subtlety. She needs too much. She loves him immediately. She clutches and clings. But instead of ignoring the red flags and taking what he thinks he deserves anyway (after all, she invited him over, she's in a negligee, she knows exactly what he wants!), he turns her down. And in so doing, Jed becomes a better man. He shows his "understanding heart". He doesn't realize that that is what is happening in the moment, he just knows that seducing this woman would be wrong. Kim Morgan, in her wonderful review of the film, writes:

In real life, most men wouldn't so sensitively resist.

That, to me, is the most moving part of the film: Widmark's growing realization that Nell is sick, and his decision to help her, rather than just add to the hurts she's experienced. Marilyn Monroe is usually a friendly girlie bombshell, eager, open-eyed, innocent, and yet smokin' hot. There is never any concern for how she might feel, being treated like a walking-talking blow-up doll. It is assumed that she is on board with it - and, like I said, Marilyn, for the most part, was. She was a movie goddess. We don't want to know that movie goddesses might have contradictory opinions about being ogled over in film after film. Marilyn's power was in strolling through that kind of gantlet and coming out unscathed, and yet still glowing. She did it in film after film. But in Don't Bother To Knock, she is actually human, and Widmark, at first distracted by the boobs and the face, ends up seeing her as she really is: a damaged sad little girl, trapped in a pin-up model's body. It's incredibly moving to watch that transformation happen in Widmark's face. Marilyn has never been treated so kindly as she is in this film.

Don't Bother To Knock had a short shooting schedule, and Marilyn actually is not in a lot of it. It feels like she is, she dominates the film - but the scenes with Widmark and Bancroft take up quite a bit of time as well, and so Marilyn only really shot for 2 weeks. She was so enamored with Anne Bancroft's acting that she would show up on the set to watch Bancroft's scenes being filmed. Bancroft was a "real" actress, and this was at the point in Marilyn's life (with the encouragement of her good friend Shelley Winters) that Marilyn was starting to learn her craft, and taking acting classes at The Actors Studio. Bancroft represented the serious side of the business, the actresses, who got to act, rather than just show their awesome silhouettes, and giggle and simper and wear bathing suits, etc. Marilyn so wanted to be considered a real actress.

Like I said in the beginning, I love her comedic stuff ("Maybe somebody's name is Butler..." - her worried line from All About Eve that makes me laugh every time I see the movie). I love her musical numbers ("File my Claim" from River of No Return is my favorite). I'm a fan, regardless of the material. She's got "it". When Monroe was put in projects like Some Like It Hot, projects that were worthy of her talents, she was very happy. She hated some of the stuff she was forced to do (Let's Make Love, for example), and she hated that she wasn't able, most of the time, to show the full spectrum of her emotions. Her idols were not other bombshells. Her idols were real actresses.

We are a couple of years away, at the time of Don't Bother to Knock, from Monroe's famous disappearing act, when she dropped off the face of the earth, and wasn't heard from for a month or so until she re-emerged in New York, having moved there to study with Lee Strasberg, and to develop her own projects. She formed a production company. She wanted to do The Brothers Karamazov. It was a hugely rebellious act, and was treated with disdain by the powers-that-be, but it was her way of saying, "I do not like the movies I am being put in. I am taking control of my career." A reporter asked her at the press conference she held to announce her plans: "Do you know how to spell Dostoevsky, Marilyn?"

The guts that woman had. To tolerate such condescension. Monroe laughed at the question, however, and said, "Have you read the book? There's a wonderful part in it for me, a real seductress."

She was right, not only in her belief that there was a part for her in any version of Brothers Karamazov that would come to the screen (Grushenka, naturally), but also in how she handled the snotty remark from the reporter, who probably hadn't even read the book, or if he had, he certainly didn't remember it clearly.

Don't Bother to Knock, although a big flop at the time, and not well-remembered at all, is evidence of the many shades of Marilyn Monroe; it is a nuanced terrifying performance, and her crack-up at the end is excruciating to watch. She walks across the hotel lobby, and her arms look stiff and un-usable, she is vaguely unsteady on her feet, as though she is learning to walk for the first time, her face is wet with tears, and she blinks up at the lights of the lobby, alarmed, squinting at the glare. She goes down the steps, one step, two step, her body slack and yet also rigid, she cannot move easily. Her psychic pain emanates not just from her face, the ending of the film is not done in closeup anyway, it's a full-body shot ... and her physicality is eloquent. It tells the whole story.

The glass has shattered. The character is in pieces. Her psyche has fragmented, parts of herself trailing behind her as she crosses the lobby. Her sorrow and fear is in her pinky finger, her waist, her calves, her posture ... It surges through her and makes it difficult to even walk.

You know who plays a scene that well and with that much specificity as well as abandon?

A real actress does, that's who.

Shanghai Gesture (1941); Dir. Joseph von Sternberg

A very strange movie, corrupt and bleak and fantastical, with a glacial pace, and phenomenal crowd scenes in a giant Shanghai casino (with the awesome Marcel Dalio again playing a croupier, as he did in Casablanca), Shanghai Gesture features Ona Munson (a dead ringer for Marlene Dietrich here, von Sternberg's muse, and most familiar to modern-day audiences because of her role as Belle in Gone With the Wind) as "Mother Gin Sling", a Shanghai casino-owner, and goddess of the Chinese underworld. I adore her performance beyond measure, but more than that, I cannot get enough of her costumes and hair pieces. It's distracting at first, but then I got used to it; It's a deadly serious movie, with a big secret revealed at the end to rival the one in Chinatown, and the pace only adds to the feeling that all of this is serious business. However, there would still be moments when she was having big dramatic monologues (At one point, she spits, with great bitterness and pride, "I .... am Mother GIN SLING". Of course you are, Ona) and suddenly I would remember the damn get-up she was wearing and burst out laughing, and then have to rewind to catch the missed dialogue. Hazel Rogers was the wig-maker for the picture, and I can only imagine her glee in getting assigned to this project, where she could let herself go hog-wild. Victor Mature, Walter Huston, Gene Tierney, also star, and the chorus girl named Dixie is played by Phyllis Brooks, an adorable wise-cracking blonde I want to write more about ... but for now, I will leave you with ...

The hair-pieces of MOTHER. GIN SLING.

"But what about the OFFER?"

One of the best books about making movies is Steven Bach's Final Cut : Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists. It is an indispensable and sometimes frightening book about the decision-making process that brought about Michael Cimino's disastrous Heaven's Gate which, in turn, brought down United Artists, the production company started in 1919 by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Steven Bach was head of East Coast and European Production of United Artists at the time and a participant in the disaster. He was mainly responsible for making the Heaven's Gate deal, as he explains in this chilling paragraph:

David [Field] read [Stan Kamen] UA's terms for the picture, essentially what Kamen had asked, including preapproval of Christopher Walken, contingent on his deal's fitting the budget, raised that figure to [Lehman] Katz's still-leery $7.8 million, and aside from an excited slip of the tongue that offered [Kris] Kristofferson 10 percent of the gross instead of 10 percent of the profits - a slip that Kamen caught and graciously corrected - the deal was accepted. David and I made triumphant eye contact. We were now running production at United Artists with Danny [Rissner]'s blessing and Andy [Albeck]'s and Transamerica's, and our first official act, a fairly routine one at that, had been to make the deal that would destroy the company.

Hindsight's 20/20 and all that, but Bach is very honest about the signs he missed, the red flags no one heeded, and how many executives were actually just paying attention to the wrong things. This happens all the time in business. Everyone can see perfectly, after the fact, where things went wrong - but that's not an interesting or helpful perspective, at least not in terms of a book such as this one. Bach doesn't come off perfectly - and it's one of the reasons why the book is so effective. If he wrote it with an axe to grind, if he shoveled all the blame onto Field or Albeck or Cimino, or someone else ... the book would read as petty. The book would be an obvious ploy for sympathy, a biased self-righteous account of one of the biggest corporate disasters in Hollywood history (if not the biggest. Heaven's Gate is in the history books for all time.)

One of the best insider accounts of moviemaking that exists.

I also love Julia Salamon's The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, about the debacle of Brian De Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities, and while that book is shocking for the access Salamon got (she trailed around with the production), she was not PART of the production. She was strictly an observer. It is part of the incredible nature of that story that Salamon would be given the access she would, which makes her observations that much more devastating, but Final Cut stands out as an Industry-Insider's mea culpa, yes, but written with a practical yet emotional style that Bach manages to keep far far from the realms of self-pity, which would have been a despicable tone for this particular book. These people are all millionaire wheeler-dealers. What do they have to whine about? Whining is not present here. But an honest examination of the events leading up to Cimino's basically hijacking United Artists, and how these men and women, smart, cautious, and with lots of Hollywood experience, allowed it to happen.

While I never agree with the flat-out contempt many ordinary people have for artists and artistic executives (I hear envy masquerading as moral outrage half of the time with these people) who happen to be fortunate enough to make some money, what is fascinating about Final Cut is its step-by-step look at how decisions are made. Some of the decisions are cynical, some are idealistic. Some SEEM idealistic and then turn out to be cynical. Sometimes you strike it rich. Sometimes you come up empty. Decisions are made all day every day in Hollywood, and very few are of such import that they bring down a Hollywood institution like United Artists. What happened?

Final Cut is about just that. I've read it about 3 times, I think. If you want to know "how things work", this is the book to read.

Here's an excerpt from the start of the book. All of these characters worked for UA, and all of them would be casualties of Heaven's Gate (not to mention the re-shuffling of UA at parent company Transamerica's insistence - the book is a masterpiece of corporate culture at work). Here is a conference about a property that had come their way, one of those intellectual/artistic/practical debates that go on all the time, but here take on enormous import because of all that came after. Christpher Mankiewicz (son of Joseph Mankiewicz, and part of Hollywood royalty) worked in the West Coast division of UA, Daniel Rissner (head of production at UA, and soon to be forced to resign), Steven Bach (who would step into Rissner's shoes following his departure, sharing the post with David Field, a situation that was treacherous from the get-go), and Andy Albeck (president of United Artists, but new to the post, and not from an artistic background, which was a blessing and a curse here).

Here, they discuss the third book by an author whose first book was a smash, and the movie made from the book an even bigger smash, changing the Hollywood game entirely ... so they are considering the third book as a possible property. It becomes easy to guess who they are talking about. My favorite comeback is one by Mankiewicz, and it'll be pretty obvious which one I mean.

Michael Cimino has not yet entered the picture at the time of this conference. This is merely set-up of some of the main characters, and how deals are made (or not made), and UA's desire to seem like a heavy-hitting player in the new landscape of 1970s American cinema.

Great book.

"Fellas, this book is a piece of shit!"

Chris Mankiewicz's considerable bulk rolled behind the statement, imploring the rest of us to agree. He flung his palms outward toward the room, as if the evidence were smeared there to observe. After a moment he dropped one hand into the pile of sweet rolls on the coffee table before him, piled high with danish and dirty coffee cups.

"Everybody knows that, Chris," Rissner sighed. "It's not about whether it's a piece of shit or it's not a piece of shit. It's about whether we want to make a goddamn deal."

"On this unmitigated, irredeemable piece of shit?"

Rissner borrowed matches from someone, lit a cigarette, pointedly ignoring the redundancy. "What's the minimum bid we could make, you think?" he said to the room in general. "A million? A million five?" His voice seemed casual, but his manner suggested constraint as he bent and rebent the borrowed book of matches. He looked up at the circle seated in mismatched chairs around the glass and chrome coffee table in his Culver City office. There was the chairman of the board, down from San Francisco for the morning, looking on with a kibitzer's curiosity, his expression acknowledging nothing more than respectful interest; the president of the company, his mouth a tight line, owllike eyes swiveling from one face to another behind his huge spectacles, glinting in the early-morning sunlight like windshields; there were the heads of domestic and ancillary distribution, ignoring Mankiewicz's outburst and Rissner's question by burrowing into their synopses of the book in question, readers' reports they were supposed to have read the previous night or on the plane from New York but clearly hadn't. There was Mankiewicz, exasperated beyond belief that his opinion was having no apparent effect on anyone else; there was David Field, looking thoughtful and tactful; and I - I was confused. Who cared what the distribution guys thought? I wondered. Why? When? What did they know?

I knew, so I answered Rissner. "My guess is that the least they'll listen to is a million five and a gross percentage, and that won't make a deal. If we're not prepared to go that high, we shouldn't make an offer at all because the agent will decide he's been insulted and our relationship with the agency is weak enough as it is. This is the first major submission from them in months, right?"

"Right," Rissner nodded.

"The first major submission because they're trying to hype what even they know is a piece of illiterate shit!"

"Chris, please."

Albeck looked simultaneously alarmed and annoyed. Why didn't Mankiewicz shut up? He had clearly been given more than a cue by his superior. Or could the book really be all that bad? He asked the question of Rissner.

"Andy, the guy's last two books were huge best sellers. The movie of the first one became one of the top-grossing pictures of all time. The movie of the second one, which was only routine, did forty million dollars. It's not about quality; it's about money and track record."

"Don't talk to me about track record," retorted Mankiewicz. "My old man won four Academy Awards in two years and then went out and made The Honey Pot. I know all about track record."

Rissner ignored this and turned to me for an opinion. "How would I know?" I waffled. "I turned down the first book. I thought who in Nebraska knows from sharks?"

"But what about the offer?"

"Well," I said, grateful for a money discussion to get me off the hook of commenting on a book I didn't like any more than Mankiewicz did, "if you want to make an offer" -- I couched it in Rissner's direction with the second-person pronoun -- "it should be as preemptive as possible. Otherwise, we look like pikers. What's he want - an auction, what?"

"One offer, all terms, sealed bids. He's submitted the book five places--"

"He says," Mankiewicz now seemed to be talking to himself since no one else was apparently listening, except maybe Harvey, but it was hard to tell.

Rissner ignored him again. "--five places, expects five bids by the close of business today, and top bid takes it. So the offer has to be the best and farthest we're willing to go. If we go."

Andy looked up, puzzled and impatient. "Are we obligated to make an offer?"

"No," said Rissner, anticipating resistance.

He was rescued by the musings of domestic distribution. "Forty million?"

"Domestic or worldwide?" asked ancillary.

"Domestic, I think."

Albeck shot sharply: "That was because of big boobies in wet T-shirts. Does this book have boobies?"

Jim Harvey's placidity seemed suddenly jarred, by the subject matter or Andy's terminology one couldn't tell.

"It has boobies and rapes and S and M, and not one word of it has any resemblance to human behavior as we know it!" Mankiewicz chimed in.

Rissner looked bored. "Yes, Andy. It has boobies. Wet ones."

While Andy mulled this over, frowning, I asked where else the book had been submitted.

"You have to assume to the producers of the first picture and the second picture, if only as courtesy submissions. They would be buying for Universal or Columbia. Then there's us, probably Fox and ... maybe Paramount. Or Warner's."

"Danny, you're close to Warner's," said Andy. "Can you ask them what they think?"

"Why would I do that?" said Rissner, appalled. "What difference would it make? Who cares if they like it or hate it? The point is, what do we do? Do we make an offer or not, and if we do, what's the goddamn offer?"

"I got it," said Albeck, chastened, gloomy, but instructed.

We voted. Andy agreed; Harvey said nothing.

An offer was framed, approved, and made, as Mankiewicz fumed in uncharacteristic silence. The offer came to slightly more than $2 million for the movie rights, based on a floor price which escalated with performance of the book on best seller lists, in book clubs, and so on; a gross percentage of box-office receipts was added to make the offer unbeatable.

It was beaten.

The producers of the movie made from the author's first book secured the rights for something closer, it was believed, to $2.5 million. Losing the book was almost a relief. We had demonstrated we had the money, were willing to spend it, and it hadn't cost a penny.

Two and a half years later, when the movie based on the book was released and landing with a critical and financial thud, I had lunch with Mankiewicz, who had been long gone from UA.

"I told you it was a piece of shit." He laughed without a trace of a sneer.

"That was never the point, Chris," I said.

"It should have been." He smiled.

The Circle (2000); Director: Jafar Panahi

This is a re-post of a review I wrote a couple years ago. I post it today again to show my support of Mr. Jafar Panahi, currently in prison and on hunger strike in Tehran.

Jafar Panahi's 2000 film The Circle is a shattering piece of work portraying the restrictions on the lives of women in Iran. It won Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival that year. Panahi's most recent project was 2006's Offside, a comedic film about a group of tomboys in Tehran dressing up as boys and trying to get into a soccer game (my review here). In Offside, Panahi treats the restrictions (women not being allowed to go into a soccer stadium) with humor, pointing out how unbelievably absurd it all is, even laughable. The tone of Offside is light, frantic, and hilarious. Sometimes the best resistance to a stupid rule is to laugh at it. It may not change the rule, but it certainly takes the edge off.

In The Circle, that hilarious atmosphere is gone. Panahi pulls no punches, from the first devastating scene to the last devastating image. But, in true Panahi fashion, the issues are not presented in a maudlin manner. They don't need to be. The tendency to be "maudlin" is for the privileged, those who have space and freedom to feel self-pity. In Iran, there is no need for such indulgences. Panahi launches us into the chaotic loud streets of Tehran, using handheld cameras, which circle the participants in the drama (there are very few hard edges in the film, very few angles, something to take note of when you're watching it: look for all of the circles and curves in the camera movements and set-ups). It appears that the film crew is just grabbing shots, filming their actors in the midst of a real-life busy street, and indeed, as always, Panahi uses mostly non-professional actors for most of the roles. Panahi is not interested in detailed character analysis, he says as much himself. He is more interested in "types". Characters are drawn in bold primary color strokes, and we can recognize them within moments: the crybaby, the bitter one, the sassy one ... Panahi casts based on looks alone, a bold and courageous move, because often people who look right can't act for shit.

Panahi has great confidence in himself as a director. He does exhaustive casting sessions, casting a wide net, and he also has been known to just approach a woman he sees in the park, who has the perfect look - and asks if she would be willing to do a screen test. (This was how he found the wonderful Nargess Mamizadeh, one of the main characters in The Circle. She's the one in the poster. She's not an actress - at least not professionally, but her looks - her scrunched-up beautiful face, with thick eyebrows, was just what he was looking for for that character). She has a black eye throughout the entire film, and it is never explained. It gives an unspoken backstory to the character, and makes us wonder from the get-go: Where did she get that? What is she running from?) Panahi only used two professional actors in The Circle, the rest were people he found who had the right "look". It's quite amazing, because everyone is great in the film. There are no weak links. There isn't a huge gap between the non-professionals and the professionals. Granted, Panahi is not looking for big cathartic scenes or delicate character development - something that is best in the hands of professionals. He's going for the message, and for the hyper-realistic atmosphere. And also, the pace. As with most Panahi films, the pace is breakneck.

The women of The Circle tear their way through the streets of Tehran, hurtling up against obstacles, hiding in alleys, crouching behind cars: the sense of being hunted is palpable. The women are right to be afraid.

There is not just one narrative in The Circle, we get many. Sometimes they intersect: we're following one group, and then suddenly another woman walks by and we find ourselves following her, and she takes up the storyline. Panahi's points are clear: this is not just about one individual woman. It's about Women^(TM) and the circle of restrictions that make up all of their lives.

The film opens starkly. The screen is black, credits rolling. Throughout, we hear the sounds of a woman in labor. She's screaming and grunting and howling, and the nurse and doctor say encouraging things. In the last moment of the credits, there's a pause, and we then hear what we have been waiting to hear: the indignant yowls of a newborn baby.

Next thing we see is a blinding white wall, with the back of a woman's head standing there, she's draped in the full black chador. You can hear the screaming newborns behind the wall. There's a tiny slot in the door that can be opened by the nurses and our chador-ed figure knocks on the slot. A nurse's head peeks out. The black chador asks for the status of Solmaz's baby. The nurse says, "It's an adorable little girl!" Black chador has no response. Says again, "A girl?" Nurse says, "Yes!" and closes the slot. Black chador doesn't move. She stands there, still, a domed black figure.

She knocks on the window again. A different nurse opens it. "Yes?" Black chador says, "I'm here for Solmaz ... I know she had her baby but I don't know what kind ... could you check?"

A chill went through me at that moment. If you ask enough times eventually you'll get a different answer? Suddenly a girl will become a boy if you ask a different nurse?Apparently the ultrasound said it would be a boy, and everyone had heaved a sigh of relief in the family. Phew! A boy!! (I won't go into how despicable I find that attitude, in any culture.) But now, with the baby being a girl, it is valid grounds for divorce, the in-laws will be furious, the black chadored lady is the woman's mother, and for her, there is no joy at being a grandmother.

In one simple moment, Panahi indicts his entire culture. De-valuing women is a national concern.

As Panahi's film goes on, fast and furious, with girls in chadors running through bus stations, yearning for a smoke, huddled in doorways peeking out, hiding, terrified, trapped, you begin to see another side to the "Oh no, it's a girl" phenomenon. It is quite subversive, and really comes to fruition in the heartbreaking story of the single mother planning to abandon her 3-year-old daughter on the streets of Tehran. She says she hopes that her daughter will be adopted by a rich family who might take her away from Iran: "How can she have a future here? What is there for her in this life?" The woman had tried to abandon her child 3 times before getting up the guts. It rips her heart out. Watching her scenes made me go back in my mind to that first scene, with the open dismay at the baby being a girl. The critique is circular, as well as the structure of the film. With the world welcoming your birth with disappointment, what chance does a girl have? A baby absorbs love. Why wouldn't a baby absorb that other unwelcoming attitude as well? We may be horrified and pissed at the attitude, but by the time we get to the woman abandoning her daughter, we have to admit: we see her point.

The Circle is not a soap opera-ish litany of complaints, and the fact that I even have to make that clear is just evidence of how privileged I am. 5 or 6 women skulk through the streets of Tehran. They are unconnected (or so we think). It becomes clear that all of them have one thing in common: they have spent time in prison. The repercussions of such a stain on your life are long-lasting (in this country and in others!) Only in the world of The Circle, you can't be sure that these women didn't do hard time for, you know, hitchhiking, or letting their scarves fall off their heads, or driving in a car with a man who is not a relative. These aren't people who've murdered someone.

A couple of them have just got out. A couple of them broke out of prison with a larger group and are now on the run. One was in prison, but she is now a nurse, and married to a Pakistani man who has no idea of her past, and he can never know. He doesn't know why she won't go to Pakistan to visit his family, but she knows she will be stopped at the border.

These are women who are on their own, even when they are married, and the restrictions of their society makes it nearly impossible for them to survive and be self-sufficient. They need to travel with IDs at all times. They cannot travel alone. They cannot board a bus without a male companion who is also a relative. They cannot check into a hotel by themselves. It is outrageous. The Circle is titanically angry. The pace of the film is frantic. Nobody has time to reflect, or cry tears for themselves. Things are urgent. The police are everywhere.

One of the women comes home once she gets out of prison and it is clear that her brother means to do her harm because of the shame she has brought upon her family. She flees. But where can she go? She has no money. She can't check into a hotel. She can't jump on a bus and move to another town. To make matters worse, she is pregnant, and not married. She wants to have an abortion. This is presented with no euphemism, no judgment. Her lover was executed. What is this now-homeless woman supposed to do? Her family members are just as dangerous as the authorities. She has nowhere to turn. The baby must be gotten rid of.

One woman spent 2 years in prison and when she got out found that her husband had taken a second wife. She is grateful to the second wife, because the second wife took care of her kids while she was inside, and we meet the second wife, and she seems like a nice woman. But the betrayal is clear. NOWHERE is safe.

Meanwhile, it appears that everyone in Tehran is getting married on that particular day (Panahi's ironic sense of humor coming into play). Cars decorated with flowers and streamers meander by, in a long happy parade, we see a nervous groom spilling water on his nice shirt, we get a brief glimpse of a veiled bride in the back seat.

What is there in marriage that can offer sanctuary? This question is not asked overtly in the film, but it doesn't need to be asked. All we need to see is the procession of blushing veiled brides in the backseats of cars, viewed by women on the sidelines who have nowhere to turn. Even when they are married. Marriage is no protection.

One of the things that Panahi is so good at, (and I noticed this in Offisde as well), is that on an individual level - person to person - things aren't so bad all the time. Man and woman can greet one another without all of those restrictions between them. The sales guy in the shop in the bus station, who helps Nargessa with her purchase, teasing her about her boyfriend, and doesn't she know what size he is? The bantering is good-natured, easy, friendly. In Offside we had the characters of the guys hired to guard the girls, and we watch as the girls slowly break down the guards' authority, and finally the guys just succumb to the fact that this is a stupid rule, and we're all soccer fans, and Iran just won, hooray!! The girls did not cower in fear at the sight of the males. They basically thumbed their noses at them. Even the spectre of the morality police and their scary van doesn't dim the girls' spirits. Or if it does, it is just because now they can't hear what's happening in the game in the stadium.

So tyranny - and a "regime" - can never so atomize a population that human beings cannot connect. The regime may try, and boy, they do - and perhaps in extreme cases like North Korea, the totalitarian atmosphere has gone down into a cellular level, hard to know, but Panahi, in his subtle way, shows how the restrictions are not just bad for women, but bad for men, too. Because aren't we all just human beings? And aren't women our sisters, mothers, wives, sweethearts? Don't we, as men, love some women? How can we let them be treated like this? Women aren't a scary "other" - not face to face. They're just people we either like, want sexually, love, or are indifferent to. But the regime cannot let this freedom of thought stand, and so morality itself is policed. And of course morality means (in Iran, and elsewhere, like here and everywhere): "How Women Behave". That's it. That's all morality is when you get right down to it. If women would just act like LADIES, and keep their LEGS CLOSED, and did what they were TOLD, so that no man would ever EVER be confronted with his own animal instincts and have to actually negotiate them, and NAVIGATE them responsibly, as opposed to denying them outright, we wouldn't have such problems in our society! Because sex is at the heart of the morality issue, women are the focal point. It's been true since Eve took the fall. The "morality" of women is a national concern in Iran. Women can't be allowed to drive in cars with men they aren't related to. What would happen next? Open anarchy!

But like I said, Panahi is not a black and white kind of guy. He messes with our assumptions and preconceived notions. In this wonderful interview with Panahi (highly recommended), Stephen Teo writes:

Like the best Iranian directors who have won acclaim on the world stage, Panahi evokes humanitarianism in an unsentimental, realistic fashion, without necessarily overriding political and social messages. In essence, this has come to define the particular aesthetic of Iranian cinema. So powerful is this sensibility that we seem to have no other mode of looking at Iranian cinema other than to equate it with a universal concept of humanitarianism.

When a woman's hair tumbling out of her headscarf becomes a national problem, it concerns all of us. And so while the men in The Circle are few and far between, they also are omnipresent. The women are either running from men who want to trap them and punish them, or mourning men who have also been persecuted by the regime. The circle continues.

The evolution of the film's journey is clear. We begin with a black and white image: black chador against white wall. Quiet and still. No movement. But soon we are out on the streets, and then we have nothing but movement, for most of the film. People running and waiting anxiously and hiding and whispering and hugging. At the end of the film, we meet a girl who has been arrested for prostitution (probably), although it is made to sound like she was just hitchhiking. We have never seen her before. She's a brand-new character. She's been hauled out of the car and is made to wait for the morality van to show up. She's kind of a hottie, truth be told, with sassy red lipstick. She calls the cop "honey", in a contemptuous way.

The van arrives, and she takes a seat. She goes to light a cigarette and she is told there is no smoking in the van. The issue of smoking is an ongoing theme throughout the film. Everyone wants to smoke, but nobody can, for this or that reason, and she, at the very end, is the only one who actually gets to the point where she can light up. I saw an interview with Panahi and he was laughing, saying, "In the West, of course, smoking is seen as dangerous - but here, in this film, smoking is seen as the ultimate freedom." The one other prisoner in the van is a man, and he cajoles the guards to let him smoke. They cave, say "Sure". All the men light up. The girl glances around her (oh, so it's okay that they smoke, and it's not okay that I smoke?), and with a "Fuck this" expression, she lights up. For the rest of the drive, the camera is on her. The men all talk to each other, bantering, laughing, whatever, it's unimportant the topic or subject matter. She has a flowered headscarf on, her face is impassive, she stares out the window, and smokes. It's a long scene. It struck me, as I watched it this last time, how quiet and still the film got at the very end. As still as the scene that started it off. She's a statue in profile. Her situation is frozen. Stasis.

What will be next?

Panahi says in that interview:

Coming back to your first question: why is Iranian film so beautiful? When you want to say something like this and then you add an artistic form to it, you can see the circle in everything. Now our girl has become an idealistic person and thinks that she can reach for what she wants, so we open up a wide angle and we see the world through her eyes, wider, we carry the camera with the hand and we are moving just like her. When we get to the other person, the camera lens closes, the light becomes darker and it becomes slower. Then we reach the last person, there's no other movement; it's just still. If there's any movement, it's in the background. This way, the form and whatever you are saying becomes one: a circle both in the form and in the content.

An important film. Banned in Iran (naturally), but "it" got out. The Circle got out and found its audience worldwide. Because of bootleg DVDs and illegal satellite dishes, everyone in Iran has seen The Circle. In reference to one of Panahi's other films, Offside, there were protests outside of soccer stadiums last year, with women holding up signs saying "WE DON'T WANT TO BE OFFSIDE", demanding that they be allowed into the game.

Obviously the authorities are right, in their warped world view, to ban Panahi's films. The films are subversive, in the truest and best sense of the word. Movies like this have the potential to change the world. "How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

So perhaps The Circle is like a message in a bottle. A time-traveler. A flashlight in the darkness (a little candle throwing his beams far!), saying to future generations who hopefully will not have the same struggles, "Here is how we lived back then. Here is how it was for us." Panahi bears witness. He bears witness.

No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009); Dir: Bahman Ghobadi

Plucky kids in American movies have always rebelled against authority, whether they just want to dance, dammit, or put on a show ("My dad's got a barn!"), or love whoever they want to love. It's a rite of passage, made manifest in film after film. Who knows if we feel it is expected of us because once upon a time we saw Rebel Without a Cause, or if it's something ingrained in the hormonally surged time of adolescence. I know I was influenced by the films I saw. Either they validated my angst, they said, "I know how it is, I know how it is", or they showed me a better way, a way up and out of the muck and mire. Some of those films now seem rather silly to me, self-involved, but I still maintain affection for them because I saw them at that important time in my life when I needed an outside eye.

Rebellion in Iran necessarily takes on giant political consequences, even personal rebellion, as recent events have shown, and even something as innocent as first love is seen as a deep threat to the State (here's my review of The Girl in the Sneakers, an Iranian film that shows just such a situation), and a citizen's personal life is everyone's business. The new wave of Iranian filmmakers have a willingness to put their careers and sometimes their lives on the line to tell the stories they want to tell. These directors know that the chance of their films actually being seen in Iran are nil, and yet they press on regardless. Their reputations are giant worldwide, and yet, due to the regime's suppression of their work and their ability to work at all (not to mention canceling their visas and passports so they cannot attend festivals), they live under conditions that are fascistic and dangerous.

Bahman Ghobadi is a Kurdish director, engaged to Roxana Saberi, the American journalist who was arrested last year on espionage charges, causing worldwide protests (and tepid responses of outrage from so-called enlightened governments). Saberi is listed as a co-writer on Ghobadi's latest film, the wonderful No One Knows About Persian Cats, which received Un Certain Regard's Special Jury prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. There was a terrible irony in the timing: Saberi was imprisoned at the time, and the widely disputed Iranian elections of 2009 followed, bringing into sharp highlights all of the issues touched on in Ghobadi's film. Saberi was released in May of 2009, and now, a year later, No One Knows About Persian Cats has opened in America.

Ghobadi's film Half Moon (my review here) examined questions of Kurdish identity, as seen through the filter of music. Music is very important to Ghobadi, that is obvious, and in Half Moon, with its road trip-slash-requiem story of an old Kurdish singer trying to get back into Iraqi Kurdistan for one last concert, the music weaves through and around the film. It bonds people together. It is the voice of the exile. In No One Knows About Persian Cats, Ghobadi stays in Tehran, going underground (literally, at times), to explore the music scene in Iran. There is a story here, of two young singer-songwriters, Negar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad (their real names), who have just been released from prison. Their crime? They play music. Music without the stamp of approval from the Islamic Ministry of Culture. They have booked a gig in London, but now they need to figure out a way to leave Iran, which requires passports, visas, not easy in normal circumstances, but nearly impossible for those who have criminal records. They are hooked up with Nader (played with humor and ferocity by Hamed Behdad), a sort of manager, a guy who can get things done for you, who knows everyone, who constantly says things like, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it ... I'll handle it." He knows everyone in the music scene, and Ashkan and Negar are looking for a couple of musicians to fill out their band, so Nader starts taking them around on his motorcycle (the two of them piled on behind Nader) to visit different musicians.

He also tries to get them passports in a hurry. Nader is a guy with a finger in every pie. He makes his living selling bootleg CDs, and he, with his constant stream of enthusiastic chatter, is a born salesman. But he lives on the edge of the law. Any one of his various exploits could get him thrown into prison. But he maneuvers his way through the system in a wily manner, keeping a sense of humor, and groveling and begging the authorities if necessary (there is one terrific scene that shows just this thing). He, like many Iranians, has kept his soul, his spirit, intact by not internalizing the oppression of the regime. It hasn't "gotten" him. He plays by the rules, it's easier that way, but he is duplicitous, like most populations in totalitarian regimes. You do what you need to do to get by, but when the regime has turned its back, you do whatever the hell you want.

Ashkan and Negar may (or may not) be a couple. There is an easy intimacy between them that suggests romance, the two of them standing on the city rooftop, staring at the smog-glamorous sunset, and at one point, Ashkan moves closer to her, bending his head towards hers, and they rest there, in silent silhouette. They hang out, tooling around the city in her car (she drives), talking and arguing about music, what they are going to do, how they want to give one last show in Tehran ("I would love it if my parents could come," Negar says) before they leave for London. They both know that when they leave Iran, it will be for good. The situation has become unbearable for musicians.

The "underground" music scene in Tehran is often just that: The camera follows Ashkan, Negar and Nader as they descend narrow stairways into this or that basement, where someone has set up an illegal recording studio, or where musicians hang out and jam, soundproofing everything so the authorities won't hear from the street. There is an almost ritualistic feeling to these repetitive sections of handheld descents (and ascents, sometimes - musicians also hide out up on the roofs, creating soundproof sheds where they can rehearse): Music driven underground, you have to know where to seek it out, it is not allowed to flourish in the light of day.

Ghobadi's use of nonprofessional actors, with everyone basically playing themselves (he appears in the film as well, in the music studio in the beginning), makes the film feel like a documentary at times, a whirlwind tour of Tehran's hidden music scene, but the overriding sense of oppression (and the humor with which everyone treats it, everyone's been in jail for playing music, everyone sort of just accepts the situation with a shrug, then they close the door and start banging on the drums, regardless of the terrible consequences should they be caught) is always on the periphery, and there are times when I felt outraged. There is one scene where Ashkan and Negar are driving, and Ashkan is holding his dog. They are pulled over by the cops who demand to know why they have a dog. (Dogs are seen as unclean animals in Islam.) Negar is a fighter, and argues with the cops, "the dog has been vaccinated, he's fine" - but, in a horrifying moment, the cops reach in and yank the dog out of the window, and we are left with Negar's scream of "No" as she leaps out of the car. Cut to the next scene. The dog is never mentioned again. The film is not overtly political (although, as with most films in Iran, everything is political on some level), and it doesn't use a heavy hand, but that one scene tells you how random, how awful, life can be on the streets.

The bands Nader introduces the two leads to show the diversity of the music scene and also how creative artists have to be to just do their thing in Iran. A heavy metal band (I loved these guys) rehearse in a cow shed out in the middle of the country. The cows don't seem too happy about it, and the farm workers are all in cahoots with the band, piling bales of hay around the cow shed to blot out the sound. A rock band has constructed a metal shed on the rooftop of their building, and they have to wait for the neighbor to leave before rehearsing because the neighbor always calls the cops. The band mates, wearing CBGB T shirts and Joy Division T shirts, peer over the edge of the building, keeping an eye out for the telltale neighbor. A Persian rap band rehearse and film a music video on a construction site, in the open air, four stories up. They do not want to go to Europe, like Ashkan and Negar, because, as the lead rapper tells Nader, "We rap for Persia. We rap for Tehran. This is where we need to be." There is an added complication that any band with a female singer that gets a permit to play a show has to have female backup singers, or more females on stage. It is against the law for one woman to be on stage with a bunch of men. So, basically, No Doubt would be illegal in Iran. Ashkan and Negar go to a private house where two sisters are giving a concert, the small audience sitting in the dark, the women banging on the large translucent traditional drums (shown to such powerful effect in the scene of "exiled singers" in Half Moon).

There's a lot of music in No One Knows About Persian Cats, obviously, and each band plays a song for Ashkan, Negar and Nader, with Ghobadi providing what amounts to music videos for each song, with gorgeous caught footage from around Tehran, glimpses, fragments, beautifully realized: a little girl skipping down the sidewalk, two veiled women sitting on a bench eating ice cream and laughing, an old man glancing directly at the camera, people rushing in and out of subways, a montage, ongoing, of the faces of Iran, the populace just going about their lives, the haves and have-nots, with some startlingly beautiful images, things that show Ghobadi's piercing and specific vision. I mentioned in my review for Half Moon that sometimes, sometimes, a director actually gives you a vision of something you have never seen before. So many images in films, while beautiful, are just copycats of either something else, or depictions of something we have all seen a million times: sunsets, rainfall, a dark grey beach, whatever: beauty, yes, but not original. Half Moon was full of things I literally had never seen before. A strange journey through a borderland, filmed beautifully, but with some shots that caught the breath in my chest. He has an amazing eye. For landscapes, yes, he makes Tehran look like a vibrant strange place, but also for faces. Ghobadi captured most of this footage on the fly, with a digital camera, and it's haunting, beautiful, a counterpoint to the music, whether it be rock, rap, heavy metal, or traditional Persian. The full tapestry of artistic expression, going on below ground, as the world walks around above, trying to live their lives.

Ashkan and Negar, a singing duo in real life, are sweet and unselfconscious in their acting roles. You root for them. I wasn't wacky about their music, but that seems immaterial in the world being depicted in Persian Cats. Artists should be allowed to make art. Period. Most of the bands say things like, "We make sure our lyrics are in line with today's social codes - we don't want to offend anyone - we just want to make music." The two leads plan on giving their last show in Tehran (they still don't have passports, but Nader assures him everything will work out fine), in a basement in a private house. They get the word out on the streets. They decorate the room, pulling Persian rugs across the stage floor, and Negar buys 200 small candles to pass out to the crowd. It looks like any underground rock club in any city in the world. I was rooting for these kids. The odds are stacked against them. They work hard at what they do, they argue over lyrics, they discuss their music, and, inadvertently, without even making too fine a point of it, they seem totally innocent. Ghobadi is a master at that kind of subtle portrayal. They are not rebels without a cause, they have a cause, but the kids themselves seem like good kids, with a love for music, and a yearning to just play shows, wherever they can, however it comes about. They are innocent. They are doing nothing wrong.

But the regime, as it shows itself repeatedly, doesn't agree. And, if you think like a mullah, who can blame them. Music is powerful. People gathering together to listen to music is a powerful event. If you let that happen, then where will it stop?

The screws begin to tighten. Nader is arrested for selling bootleg CDs. He pleads his case in a beautiful scene (my favorite in the film), with Ashkan peering through the slightly open door at the police station. The old man who makes passports is also arrested. Another door closes. Interspersed with music, the film works slowly, it meanders, it is not a scream of pain or outrage, not outwardly, and that is part of its power.

Ghobadi has a great eye for detail. Nader lives in a tiny flat, and keeps parrots and finches as pets. The main parrot is named Monica Bellucci. Two finches are named Rhett and Scarlett. He loves them all to death. He speaks in English, occasionally, and everyone makes fun of him for this, but he scoffs at them. "What's wrong with speaking in English? Listen to this!" (then in English) "I see no problem. There is no problem." (back to Farsi) "What is wrong with that?" There's a scene where Negar lies in bed, reading, and jotting things down in her journal. At one point, we see what book she is reading. Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. A beautiful example of the soft subtle hand Ghobadi uses when telling this story. A man wakes up transformed into an insect. His destiny is out of his control. It is terrifying. He has transformed into something monstrous, against his will. Ashkan and Negar, who just want to play music, who just want to put on a show, in a barn, a shed, anywhere, who are willing to leave their homeland - for good - in order to pursue music - are faced with a similar nightmarish future. What will they be transformed into if they stay? None of this is said explicitly. We just see the book, Ghobadi making sure we know what it is, and the film moves on.

A couple of years ago, I read this article about a girl group in Saudi Arabia, and was blown away by these young women, trying to do their thing in an unbelievably oppressive atmosphere. Read that article and watch the stereotypes disappear. Their parents support them, although they fear the regime arresting their daughters. The girls, with piercings in lips, ears, noses, are just like any other group of young women who want to be cool, who want to participate in the culture of trends, who just want to make music. Here they are, in a country where they are not allowed to play in public, not allowed to play in public, and that hasn't stopped them. In a global world, with things like MySpace and iTunes, word has gotten out about these girls, and in their own way, they are participating. I wish them the best.

I showed that article to my brother, a huge music fan, and a songwriter himself.

His response? "Right now, those girls are the greatest rock band in the world."

The word "brave" is used so often to describe films that it has become almost meaningless. But here, with No One Knows About Persian Cats, "brave" actually means what it says it means. The act of filming this movie was brave. Every musician who appears in the film is brave. They understand the consequences. They make their art anyway. Watching it yesterday, I thought of my brother's comment, and his words floated through my mind like an echo:

"Right now, at this moment in time, these bands are the greatest bands in the world."

The complete Metropolis (1927); Dir: Fritz Lang

The philosophical thrust of Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis has all the earmarks of a frenzied moment of "enlightenment" that one gets while under the influence of a hallucinogenic: it seems so PROFOUND in the moment, yet once the drug wears off, you may find yourself thinking, "God, it was so brilliant ... why can't I remember the whole of it? Something about ... the heart needing to be the mediator ... If only I could share the message I received, the entire world would be different!" It's that damn Man from Porlock again. Why can't he leave the inspired alone?

That being said, Metropolis, with its portrayal of a dystopian mechanized future, is a masterpiece, terrifying and brutal, with set pieces that boggle the mind, and massive crowd scenes that pulse with energy and chaos. Part of the fun of the movie is wondering: "How on earth did Lang pull this off??" Fritz Lang told Peter Bogdanovich:

I first came to America briefly in 1924 and it made a great impression on me. The first evening, when we arrived, we were still enemy aliens, so we couldn't leave the ship. It was docked somewhere on the West Side of New York. I looked into the streets - the glaring lights and the tall buildings - and there I conceived Metropolis.

This is probably a bit of a white lie, or at least an exaggeration, and Lang probably already had the idea (if not the script) for Metropolis at that time, although, hey, he knows a better story when he makes one up.

Adolf Hitler loved Metropolis, and methinks he might have missed the point that Lang was making: that this was a BAD image of the future, this is NOT where we want to go. Kind of like my friend Beth, who was telling me about a guy she knew, and how he "felt validated by Archie Bunker - like, he doesn't understand irony." Leni Reifenstahl's stunningly beautiful-looking and creepy Triumph of the Will, from 1935, showing the events of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, owes much to Metropolis, with its scenes of athletic events in giant stadiums, a glorification of the body (as in the human body, as well as the body politic), and its message that strength and youth and "togetherness" were the only things valued by Germany at that time. There is a scene in Metropolis that takes place in an intimidating giant stadium, with high unbroken walls surrounding the track and field area, walls that seem to touch the sky, walls topped by giant statues hearkening back to the ancient times, bodies contorted into beautiful alienating poses of athletic prowess. This is an actual set. The camera sits far back, so that the athletes running the race are dwarfed by their surroundings. This type of energy is par for the course in totalitarian and fascist architecture, which is designed to tell the populace: "The State is bigger than you are. Submit."

The science fiction aspect of Metropolis is so imitated now as to hardly be detectable at all. The "doubling" of Maria, the creation of a perfect human who is an arm of the State, calls to mind the replicants in Blade Runner, the endless "dormitory" of sleeping humans in The Matrix, and the terrifying face-swap in John Woo's Face/Off. But again, the imitations run far and wide. The laboratory where "Maria" is created, with its cold clinical spaces, and buzzing neon, influenced the entire 20th century's cinematic representations of the future. In Fritz Lang's M, the terror is of the more human variety, with Peter Lorre's child-killer on the loose, but there, the city too takes on terrifying aspects, with looming shadows and yawning alleyways, German Expressionism at its high point.

Metropolis tells the story of two cities that exist parallel to one another, with zero crossover. The people in the shining city above ground, centered around the magnificent Tower of Babel, are completely unaware of the "worker's city" below ground, a land of slums and giant machines, the apparatus that keeps the city above working. Joh Federson (played by Alfred Abel) is the leader of the city aboveground, and he operates in a world high above the streets, his penthouses and giant offices staring out at the tops of the skyscrapers, with dirigibles and airplanes flying by, and giant causeways going between buildings, lined with moving cars. He has a vested interest in the status quo. His son, Freder, played with maniacal passion by Gustav Fröhlich, lives a life of ease and leisure time, running races at the stadium, and cavorting with naked girls in The Eternal Garden. Yet one fateful day, he gets a glimpse of Maria (played with startling power by Brigitte Helm), a schoolteacher from the worker's city, who brings a group of children aboveground to look around. These people have never seen the sky, felt the air.

They have no business being up there, it is a security breach of the highest order, and they are shuffled back belowground, but not before Freder gets a glimpse of Maria, and literally swoons with love-at-first-sight. He must find her. He descends into the worker's city below.

There he finds an astonishing world of machines as big as buildings, where men stand and work, all of them cogs in the giant wheel of production. There is an incredible shot (and I am so glad I saw this on the big screen yesterday - my first time with this particular film) of a wall of work stations (seen in first clip below jump), many-tiered, with men in black placed strategically all along it, and they are doing a synchronized dance of lever-pulling - to the left, to the right, back to the center, pulling all the way over to the right, back to the center, to the left - Each one is doing something different (some go to the right first, others to the left), yet the overall effect is one of dizzying synchronization. There are no individuals in this world. And yet, if one man steps away from his post for even a second, everything starts to fall apart, with drastic and apocalyptic consequences.

Turns out, Maria is a voice of the downtrodden. She gathers her followers in a decaying corner of the maze, and preaches of man's dignity, and of the hope that someone, The One, will come and save them one day, redeem them.

But Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who plays Rotwang, the evil inventor of the underworld, has other plans. Maria has influence. She has a following. And so Metropolis becomes a despairing chase, as Rotwang pursues her through the worker's city, hoping to experiment on her, and create the Robot of his dreams, someone who looks just like Maria, but who can influence her followers to evil, as opposed to good.

The plot is pretty standard, but I am saying that from my 21st century perspective, with things like Avatar and Blade Runner to look at, clear and open nods to the huge influence that was Metropolis. What is incredible here is not just how prescient Lang was, about the way things were going in Germany at that time, mechanization run riot (true of the wider world as well, but far more sinister in Germany), but also in the sheer scope of the movie, the hugeness of the scenes and set-pieces, the management of thousands (what look like thousands, anyway - apparently Lang used up to 30,000 people in some of the crowd scenes) of extras, and the creation of a futuristic world just close enough to our own to creep us out for all time. It is a cautionary tale. There is obviously no CGI here. What was created was either miniatures, or matte paintings used as backdrops, and they are obviously artificial, but that just adds to the power of what we are seeing. Of course the world looks a bit "off". It IS a bit "off". The buildings seem cold and empty, certainly not places where individuals actually live, with family pictures on the wall, and dirty dishes in the sink. The buildings ARE their surface, there to intimidate, impress, and dazzle. The "transformation" of Maria into her robot (or should I say avatar) is beautifully done, (see clip below), and devastating when you realize that it is too late, that Maria has been co-opted by the State. It is not just her I am sad for, it is the followers who huddled around her in the shadows, gaining hope and comfort from her words.

It's a stunning accomplishment and the fantastical scenes just pile on, one after the other after the other, with not one moment where the tension lets up, where the action sags.

The worker's city is flooded, when the reservoirs burst, and Maria climbs up on a statue in the middle of the slum buildings, and starts to bang on the gong, to alert the populace. Water starts to creep up through the sidewalks, at first a trickle, then a flood, and children come running from all directions, and try to clamber up onto the statue with Maria, their wet dirty hands grasping up at her. The scene goes on far longer than you would expert, there is no catharsis, no let-up, no deus ex machina, and slowly, we see the buildings collapse from water damage, the floods rising up so that the children are basically swimming, holding onto one another in an extended awful life-raft. It is an incredible sequence. What we are seeing is really happening. There are no tricks here. These actors and extras are really going through all of this. The coordination it took must have been insane. But there are so many more. Freder, looking for Maria, finds himself trapped in the Inventor's solitary house, a brilliantly conceived space, where doors have no knobs, and once they close, there is no way out - an Alice in Wonderland nod, as Freder looks around a room, with 5 or 6 closed doors, and desperately tries to bash his way through one, then another, then another. There is a frightening moment when the machine overheats and actually becomes a gaping-mawed monster, swallowing bald and naked anonymous men into its depths.

The acting is great, with powerful representations of the pantomime style at that time, Brigitte Helm committing to her gyrations of fear and passion in a crazy angular way that makes it seem she is made of rubber. As she is pursued by the wild-eyed inventor, she crouches in the shadows, cringing from his torch-light, with glimmering huge eyes, and a slanted back with angular arms, a true "portrait" of terror, recognizable to anyone of any culture anywhere. She's a master at that kind of gesturally-based acting and response. Her role is a double role: Maria and the Robot, and there is a scene where she, looking just like the gentle prophet from before, is now writhing about onstage, naked from the waistup, with glimmering stars over her breasts, as panting animalistic men crush in closer and closer, and it's a devastating commentary on the power wielded by sex, first of all, but also how dehumanized the world in Metropolis is, how vulnerable any individual is to corruption. The corruption of Maria is imposed from the outside, but it is no less important, or worthy of examination.

This is powerful stuff, highly prophetic of the cataclysm approaching Europe yet again in the late 1920s, something that Lang obviously sensed and internalized.

Fritz Lang's original version was butchered by the studios at the time, and there is still lost footage, even in this "complete" version. It is hard to know if it will ever be found. In the "complete Metropolis", the still-missing scenes are described briefly by title-cards with a different font (at first I was afraid I wouldn't notice the font-change, but no worries: it is completely obvious by that time in the viewing) - and the existence of said scenes is guessed at because of, along with other things, a novelization of the movie that came out around that time. The quality of the found footage is not nearly as pristine as the rest of the film, and the aspect ratio is different from the rest, but no matter: it is good to have it all back together now.

Metropolis is a work for the ages. I am pretty deadened to CGI now (was never a big fan in the first place, the effects often come off as cold, or lifeless) - and seeing Metropolis, and what Lang was able to create, is nothing short of breathtaking. The "heart is the mediator" theme is left to reverb, strangely, and perhaps we are meant to feel hopeful. I, however, do not. I have been shown too much horror in the film, I have seen children climbing up stairwells screaming in fear, I have seen men shuffle through a tunnel deadened and de-individuated, I have seen the dehumanization gleaming in the eyes of those who want to shatter civilization and humanism. It is all well and good to say that yes, we need the head, and yes, we need the hands but we need the heart as well, and we will be lost as a civilization if we do not find a place for the Heart. As mediator. However, Fritz Lang, a pessimistic man, and not surprising when you think of what he had seen and experienced, doesn't seem to hold out too much hope that the Heart can make any difference whatsoever.

New Yorkers: Metropolis runs at the Film Forum until May 20th. Information here.

Metropolis: "complete" as it will ever be

Cinephiles can get batty over "lost" footage. Legends just grow in the telling. Erich von Stroheim's Greed, based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, apparently ran for forty reels in its original version. Where did that footage go? Would it have improved the film as it stood, to run for 8 or 9 hours? Most probably not. Very few movies need to be 9 hours long. However: how awesome it would be to "find" that footage. People have spent their lives pursuing the original version of The Magnificent Ambersons, instead of the still-wonderful studio-butchered version we all have seen. But where did Welles's original cut go? There was a fascinating article in Vanity Fair by David Kamp about the "magnificent obsession" that the "lost" Magnificent Ambersons has become.

Fritz Lang's Metropolis has a similar (although not quite as dramatic) story. When we have seen Metropolis, as unforgettable as so much of it is, as visually startling, all that, what we have seen is a cobbled-together version, with titles in place of the lost footage, to explain the gaps. The lost footage has been found (not all of it, but most of it), and this week the "complete" Metropolis opens at the Film Forum here in New York City.

My friend Keith Uhlich has a piece in Time Out New York about the "treasure hunt" for the lost footage of Metropolis and how it all went down.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937); Director: Leo McCarey

Peter Bogdanovich, during one of his many conversations with Orson Welles, asked Welles if he had ever seen a little-known film that was a flop in its original release, Make Way For Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey. And Welles exploded, "My God, that is the saddest movie I have ever seen."

Having just seen Make Way For Tomorrow, which was just released on DVD with much fanfare by Criterion, (it was a film that was never even released on video so it has earned that moniker "forgotten film"), I can say that Orson Welles's assessment is my own. This brutal film about the elderly pulls no punches, and watching it, I started to feel a dawning sense of awe and respect, that it was really going to go there, it had the courage of its convictions. And up until the very final shot, it does not waver. A lesser film would have at least have the wonderful Beulah Bondi smile a bit, in nostalgia and remembrance, to let us off the hook. But Make Way For Tomorrow stays true to its theme, and does not betray itself. It is a devastating picture. One that puts many other "tragedies" to shame.

Leo McCarey, that master of relationships (he was the one who put Laurel and Hardy together),got the idea to do a film about the elderly. Bogdanovich interviewed him as well and asked him how it came about. McCarey replied:

I had just lost my father and we were real good friends; I admired him so much ... My wife suggested we get out of town till I get over this, so we went to Palm Springs. I remembered a fellow who ran a gambling joint on the outskirts of Palm Springs, and I decided I'd go out there to visit him. And there I saw a most attractive girl; I tried to start a conversation with her, and she snubbed me. Now, my wife had given me this very good Cosmopolitan story to read: it was about old folks, and because I'd just lost my father, my wife had said to read it. It was by a gal called Viña Delmar, and I called the studio and told them I'd like an appointment with her for an interview; they called back and said she's in Palm Springs. And I said, "Well, run her down in Palm Springs - that's where I am." So another exchange of phone calls and they said she'd be over to my hotel at such and such a time. The desk announced that "Miss Delmar is here" to see me, and you can imagine both our surprise when it turned out to be the girl I'd tried to get to know at the gambling place.

McCarey told Bogdanovich:

I prefer Make Way For Tomorrow to The Awful Truth - and I got a lot of telegrams saying I'd won [Best Director] for the lesser of the two films. It was the saddest story I ever shot; at the same time very funny. It's difficult for me to talk about, but I think it was very beautiful.

John Ford said it was one of his favorite pictures of all time. Jean Renoir was a huge fan. And yet for over 70 years, unless you got to catch it a local art-house that was doing a McCarey festival, you could not see this film. Now you can. All I can say is: Run. Don't walk. Rent it. Immediately.

But be prepared.

Be prepared.

Films about old age are not popular. Never have been. They weren't popular in 1937, and they aren't popular now. I have never before seen a film that tackles the problem of "what to do" with the elderly in such a forthright unblinkered manner as Make Way For Tomorrow. It does so with no sentimentality. The characters are all drawn with specificity and humanity. In the Criterion DVD, there is an interview with Peter Bogdanovich about the film, and he makes the point that while not everyone behaves well here, nobody is judged. You may not sympathize with them, but you understand. Every character, down to the maid, is a human being, with wants, needs, fears. The script is superb. Choices are made in life that seem temporary at the time, a stop-gap, which then becomes The Point of No Return. But rarely do the people involved realize it at the time. Denial is powerful. So is optimism. "It'll all work out ... Things will work out as we planned ... Our future is going to be what we imagined ..." Well, that is not always the case. We all know this in our bones, because we have lived it in one way or another, but it takes a courageous film to actually point that fact out, without softening the blow.

Make Way For Tomorrow starts with a family gathering at a beautiful snow-covered house. Parents Barkley and Lucy Cooper (played, respectively, by Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) have summoned four of their five adult children (the fifth lives far away in California) to break the bad news. The bank is taking back their house because they are unable to make the payments. They had hoped that something would come through, a miracle, but now they only have a couple of days before they have to move out. It is (without a line of dialogue) clear that Barkley and Lucy have not involved their children in their problems not just because they don't want to worry them and bother them, but that they also sense that perhaps their children will not be reliable in such a crisis. How McCarey and his actors suggest this, with cuts from face to face as they take in the news, is nothing short of amazing. The children are not painted as villainous or awful. McCarey does not take the easy route. Each one is living their own life, and has problems, problems that make it seem unthinkable that they could take in their aged parents for a bit. One is married to a grumpy unemployed man who does not get on well with his in-laws. One (played by Thomas Mitchell) has a high school age daughter, and is finding it hard to make ends meet, so his wife (the wonderful Fay Bainter) has to teach bridge classes for extra cash. No one is rich. No one has a spare room. After a tense family discussion, it is decided that just for a while, "Pa" will go live with his married daughter Cora, and "Ma" will go live with her son George and his family in Manhattan.

Ma and Pa accept this situation reluctantly. One of the most powerful elements of this amazing picture is how the love between this elderly couple is made potently clear, without the word "love" ever being said. I think it's said once, near the end, but the moment is rushed through, as though they cannot bear to even give voice to it, because by giving voice to it they must then face what they are losing. Ma and Pa are not portrayed as dear sweet elderly people, cliched and sentimentalized, but as human beings, with experience and wisdom, with flaws and foibles, who find themselves in a terrible situation. They haven't spent a night apart in their 50 years of marriage.

But tough times require tough choices, so Pa goes to live with his cranky bossy daughter, and Ma goes to live with George and his wife. The scenes of adjustment are both funny and awful. McCarey, obviously no slouch in the comedy department, finds just the right specific moments to show how tough it is. It's a tragic situation, but life goes on, and people manage, sometimes awkwardly, but they manage. Ma is a social woman, and likes to talk to people, but here, in the claustrophobic apartment, having to share a room with her running-wild 17-year-old granddaughter, she finds herself shunned. Her help is not welcome. She tries to help by sending her son's shirts to a cleaners around the corner, only to find that that means he won't have a shirt for an event that night, and also to find that George's wife resents the "help". George's wife says, "I take care of my husband just fine." She is not portrayed as an evil callous woman; it is the same issues that wives had had with mothers-in-law since the institution of marriage was invented. Is there room for two Ladies of the house? George is caught in the middle. Thomas Mitchell is (no surprise) wonderful in showing this problematic and painful situation. There are other issues. Their teenage daughter Rhoda no longer feels comfortable bringing her friends to the house, since her grandmother insists on hanging out with them and dominating the conversation, so she starts sneaking out at night. This leads her to trouble. She starts seeing a 35-year-old man (and we learn later, from a buried line of dialogue that you might miss if you weren't listening carefully, that he is married), and this would never have happened if she had still felt comfortable hanging out at her own house, bringing her friends there, so that her parents could chaperone.

These scenes are all played with a minimum of cliche. Ma is not perfect. She can be passive-aggressive ("No, that's all right, you go out and have a good time, I don't mind being alone"), but the woman is disoriented. She doesn't even know what end is up. She has a hard time getting her husband on the phone, and when she does get to talk to him, people are always around. There is one particularly terrible (and beautiful) scene when her husband calls during a night when George's wife is hosting her bridge class at the apartment. The living room is filled with card tables, and well-dressed couples, and Ma has already made a bit of a spectacle of herself, by rocking in her rocking chair in the corner, unaware that the loud squeaks made by the chair are distracting the players. This scene could have been played so wrongly. Either by demonizing those who give her odd looks, or simplifying her character, as the aged so often are simplified - to someone childlike and sweet. No. She just doesn't want to sit alone in her room, by herself, when there is a roomful of people just outside. She doesn't join in the game, but she wants to be amongst the people. What is wrong with that? One of the things not discussed often about the elderly is the loneliness: the loneliness of not having peers around, of having no one else "remember", of wanting to be a part of the larger world still, but feeling increasingly that nobody really wants you around.

Last year at Christmas, we went, en masse, to go visit my grandmother who has Alzheimer's and now lives with the Sisters of Charity at one of their Retirement Centers, with many others who have Alzheimer's, retired nuns and others, those too old to take care of themselves anymore. My mother goes to visit often, and so do her siblings who live in the area, but I hadn't been before. It took a while to find the right place for my grandmother, once it became clear that she could no longer live on her own. Nursing homes can be depressing. They are depressing when they are not well run, obviously, but they are depressing when they ARE well run, as in: you can feel that it is a money-making enterprise. It's off-putting. But when they are bleak with a hospital-setting, and people just sit in wheelchairs all day, zoning out - it's just heartwrenching, and yet it's not a popular issue, definitely not something that sets the world on fire to "do something" about how we treat our elderly citizens. I believe that part of it is because they represent what we fear. We are all going there, God willing, we are all going to be that old, and while that should engender compassion and sympathy, often the opposite is the case. We shun what we fear. "No, no, I can't deal with that, I can't deal with people who are 90 years old, it makes me uncomfortable, no no no no." This is a very human response, in our society as we know it today. The Sisters of Charity have created a wonderful peaceful and joyous community (no surprise there, if you know their history), and the staff were just fantastic. It was an incredibly moving experience. I love my grandmother. She has had Alzheimer's for 10 years now. I haven't had a conversation with her, not like we used to, in 10 years. But she is still alive. She is human, she is loved dearly, she is still the same person, and she deserves to be peaceful and happy. We owe it to her. We owe it to ourselves. Our entire family went, cousins and aunts- my aunt Katy played the piano, my tattoo-covered cousin Owen, in a Santa hat and a Red Sox sweatshirt, did an impromptu dance as his wife Kelly laughed so hard tears streamed down her face, and we all sang old songs that we grew up on, "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" and "In the Good Old Summertime", and one by one, staff members would roll in women in wheelchairs to join in the fun. This wasn't just for my grandmother. It was PEOPLE. VISITING THEM. Laughter and songs and little kids running around. This was not a depressed atmosphere, with harassed irritable staff feeling "put out" that they had to do some work. No, this was an impromptu party. One of the most beautiful things was that Jean and Pat brought Lucy with them, in her pretty little Christmas dress. Lucy was 7 months old at the time (is it possible she is going to be a year old in just a couple of weeks??). The women there were in love with her, reaching out for her to touch her. Lucy, innocent and guileless, reached out to touch them back. Lucy had no judgment, no fear. She took them in as fellow people, the way babies do, because she doesn't know better yet, and good for her. She wasn't afraid of their wrinkled hands reaching out for her, their gleeful and happy faces staring at her. She was curious about them. Open to them. In that moment, Lucy helped ME to see how to BE. Because I'm human. And I am afraid of growing old. And I wonder how I will bear it. And I wonder what will happen to me. And because I have those fears, I cringe from being too close to that which I fear. In earlier times in our society, the elderly were not shunted off to homes. They lived in the houses of their children, they were taken care of, but also, that meant that they were incorporated in the human family still. It was an inter-generational world, and it was understood that "that is what you do". You take care of your parents. Leo McCarey starts the film with a quote from the Bible: "Honor thy father and thy mother." It's really that simple. But we're all human. We don't always behave as we should. I got an amazing photograph that day of four generations of women in my family: my grandmother, my mother, Jean and Lucy.

Make Way For Tomorrow, made in 1937, shows what has become par-for-the-course even more today: the dispersal of the original family. One sister is never even seen. She lives in California. People are spread out. They go off. They make their own lives. And as long as Ma and Pa were all set in the snow-covered house where they raised their family, life maintained its equilibrium. But once things start going badly, there is no original family unit left to handle the problem. Dispersal becomes the only option.

There is an amazing scene which shows (for me) Leo McCarey's specific gift. During the aforementioned bridge-class scene, Pa calls for Ma, and she goes to the telephone, with a crowd of people sitting in the living room behind her. Ma, unused to the phone, shouts to be heard, a humorous moment, Beulah Bondi bellowing in the phone. But it's mixed with an uncomfortable energy, due to the public nature of the phone conversation, and how she is obviously disturbing the bridge class by shouting into the phone one foot away. McCarey, not really a stylish director, his shots don't call attention to themselves, not really, chooses which shots to use with surgical efficiency. For the most part, the camera stays on Beulah Bondi during her phone call. The bridge class tries to continue playing in the background but slowly, as the conversation goes on, you can feel all activity cease, and you can feel all of them start to listen. One woman in particular, in the foreground, behind Bondi, stares over at Ma during the phone call, with an expression on her face that I am still trying to explain and understand. Sympathy, yes. Her heart is breaking for this frumpy woman who, so far, has been kind of a pain in the ass, in terms of interrupting the bridge night. But here, listening to her shout to her husband to make sure he wears a warm scarf, to tell him "Oh, I miss you too, Pa", the woman gets a stillness to her, a stillness of listening and identification, and slowly, the entire room changes. There are one or two cutaways during the phone call, where you can see Thomas Mitchell staring over at his mother, and you can see people in the background either look away (due to being uncomfortable, or to being moved to their very core) or stare at Ma, as if fixated. It is a phenomenal scene, beautifully acted and rendered, and it puts the audience through the wringer, without demanding "GO THROUGH THE WRINGER." It does not manipulate. It shows.

That is why it is a brutal film. If I felt manipulated at even one moment of the proceedings, I would have gotten angry. It is such a powerful experience that it requires purity and clarity to work. Purity of motive, I mean. The story is the thing here, not the manipulation of emotions. McCarey focuses on story and character (as does Ms. Delmar, in her writing), and the film works on a level that I promise you have rarely seen. There are successful films about the elderly, but you can count them on one hand. Make Way for Tomorrow is at the top of the heap.

I loved how it embraced disobedience as a good thing, a thing we all should be able to enjoy and choose, as adults with free will. Being "obedient" is fine when you are a child, and your parents are training you how to behave. Then it makes sense. But a 70 year old man and woman, having to be "obedient", because it is expected that old people have no real needs, and should just be happy with the scraps that they get, and also: there is a huge forgetting in place here, forgetting that old people may have decaying bodies, but with all of that mileage, is experience, stories, things to share, pass on. We don't ever move beyond needing human companionship, even the most prickly of us. I speak from experience. You don't reach a point in your journey through life and suddenly say to yourself, "Well, that's it. I'm 75 years old now. I honestly shouldn't expect to have any more happiness."

Bogdanovich, in the interview on the DVD, tells a funny story about interviewing movie-pioneer Allan Dwan. When Bogdanovich interviewed Dwan, he was 92 years old, and Boganovich asked him what it was like to be 92. Dwan replied (and I have heard this from so many other people, friends and family members who are elderly), "I feel the same way I felt when I was 32, it's just that sometimes I walk by a mirror and I think, 'Who is that OLD GUY?'"

Leo McCarey understood that inside, inside, we remain the same. Our needs are the same. Love, companionship, humor, a little bit of fun, and also, that we get to live our lives as we see fit. Tough times require tough choices, as I said, and Make Way For Tomorrow is all about tough choices, and therefore it is a wrenching experience, unlike any other film I have ever seen. I felt helpless, I wanted to intervene. I wanted some rich donor to come along and wave a magic wand and say, "Here's money for a deposit on an apartment - let the old couple live together - I hereby declare it to be so." But life doesn't work like that. Not always. It does in movies sometimes, but rarely in real life.

I haven't even talked about the acting. It's beside the point, almost. I forgot I was watching actors. I was eavesdropping on a family crisis. I forgot that Victor Moore and Beaulah Bondi were both a good 20 years younger than the characters they were playing. It didn't even cross my mind. Every actor here, from the little kid buying gum in the store, to the Jewish immigrant merchant who befriends Pa, to the black maid who works for George and his wife, is completely believable, and three-dimensional. To single out one person would be to unravel the whole. This is a family. This is how this family operates. There are no "good" people, no "bad" people. Just people trying to survive, trying to do what is best for them, which of course then conflicts with the needs of someone else. Just like life. Here, the acting is just like life.

I will not discuss what happens in the final half-hour of the film. Not because there are any spoilers or anything like that, but because part of the miracle of Make Way For Tomorrow is watching it unfold for the first time. I will say this: Never, ever, has disobedience seemed like such a clarion call for the dignity of human beings, to choose their own destinies, to choose how they want to spend their time, and never before have I seen a simple act of disobedience seem like such a (the cliche totally applies) shining moment of triumph of the human spirit. It knocked the breath out of my chest.

I am so grateful to Criterion for finally, FINALLY, bringing this important film out on DVD, so that everyone can see it. Make Way For Tomorrow is (or at least, until recently, has been) a forgotten masterpiece. I do not use that term lightly. It is a masterpiece. Thankfully, it is "forgotten" no more.

Memos from David O. Selznick

Excerpts from the phenomenally interesting and addictive Memo from David O. Selznick, part of the Modern Library "The Movies" series, and an absolute must-read for any film fan (or history-of-Hollywood fan). Selznick grew up in the fledgling movie business and started to work for his father early on (he headed up a department while he was still a teenager). He then, of course, went on to work for Paramount, RKO, MGM (he married Irene Mayer - daughter of Louis B. Mayer - so that was a bit of a contentious job for him, since it seemed like he only got it because he "married into it", something he took very much to heart) - and created his own production company Selznick International. He's responsible for some of the most successful films ever made, films that are now considered classics. He was an old-school producer, of the kind that you rarely find today. Nothing was too small a detail to escape his notice. He wrote an entire memo about Marlene Dietrich's hair and the problems thereof. He handled casting, script development, hiring, advertising ... He was much hated for his meddlesome ways (Michael Powell, in particular, is quite damning about Selznick in his fantastic autobiography), and yet he was also much sought after, due to his keen eye, efficient nature, and the fact that he did believe (to some degree) in giving directors and actors space to be individuals. He thought it was important. He was not infallible. He thought Stagecoach, for example, was a bad idea. Ford, of course, then went on to do Stagecoach elsewhere which was a big success and, among other things, helped create John Wayne, one of the most important American stars of the 20th century. Nobody's perfect. David O. Selznick communicated with everyone via memo. Even if he was going to be meeting with them in half an hour. He got into the habit of writing everything down early on in his career (when he was self-conscious about how young he was, and how perhaps he wouldn't be taken seriously - he felt that a memo would carry more authority) and never stopped. Apparently, after his death, when it was time to go through his papers, there were two thousand - yes TWO THOUSAND - BOXES of memos. The book here has obviously edited much of it out - it probably represents only two or three boxes of memos, in terms of the numbers - and editing must have been an incredibly challenging job. Kudos. Gone With the Wind is famous for many reasons, the least of which is (perhaps) the final film. The filming itself was tumultuous, difficult, with hirings and firings coming too quickly to count. I am now in the Gone With the Wind section which makes up the bulk of the book.

One of the things I am quite struck by in these memos is how literate Selznick is. He has read everything. He can talk about story in a way that makes you realize he knows story not because he has worked in the movies - but because HE READS. He can sit down and talk about what should be kept in Anna Karenina and what they could afford to lose - because he had read the damn book. He had respect for written material (especially if it was successful) and hesitated to muck about with things, because he knew the audience would be expecting such-and-such, since the book was so popular.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I've been reading it non-stop since I've been out in Los Angeles, and it's fun to read such a Hollywood book while I'm out here. I highly recommend it.

Here are some excerpts.

To Mr. Harry Rapf
October 15, 1926

It was my privilege a few months ago to be present at two private screenings of what is unquestionably one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, The Armored Cruiser Potemkin, made in Russia under the supervision of the Soviet Government. I shall not here discuss the commerical or political aspects of the picture, but simply say that regardless of what they may be, the film is a superb piece of craftsmanship. It possesses a technique entirely new to the screen, and I therefore suggest that it might be very advantageous to have the organization view it in the same way that a group of artists might view and study a Rubens or a Raphael.

To Mr. B.P. Schulberg
July 2, 1928

THE MORE WE WORK ON "DIRIGIBLE" THE MORE CONVINCED WE ARE THAT THE COOPERATION OF THE NAVY DEPARTMENT IS WITHOUT VALUE TO US AND IS INDEED A DETRIMENT INSTEAD. THE NAVY DEPARTMENT DEMANDS A STORY DEMONSTRATING THE SAFETY OF DIRIGIBLES WHEN IT IS APPARENT THAT OUR STORY DEPENDS FOR ITS MELODRAMATIC VALUES UPON THE DANGER OF DIRIGIBLES. EVEN IF WE STRUGGLE WITH THE NAVY'S DEMANDS AND SATISFY THEM ON EVERY STORY POINT, I DO NOT SEE WHAT THEY CAN GIVE US. THEY CERTAINLY WILL NOT ENDANGER A NAVY DIRIGIBLE, AND ANY SCENES OF VALUE WILL HAVE TO BE TRICKED IN ANY EVENT ... WE HEAR THAT HOWARD HUGHES HAS OBTAINED UNBELIEVABLY MAGNIFICENT DIRIGIBLE SCENES WITH THE USE OF A TWENTY-FIVE FOOT MINIATURE DIRIGIBLE. HAVE HAD DISCUSSION WITH [O.W.] ROBERTS OF EFFECT DEPARTMENT WHO IS CONFIDENT HE CAN GIVE US EVERYTHING WE NEED WITH DIRIGIBLES FLIGHT, IN DANGER AT NIGHT, EXPLODING, ETC., WHICH WE SURELY CANNOT GET WITH REAL DIRIGIBLE ...

To: Mr. B.P. Schulberg
July 18, 1930

We have an opportunity to secure Dashiell Hammett to do one story for us before he goes abroad in about three months. Hammett has recently created quite a stir in literary circles by his creation of two books for Knopf, The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. I believe that he is another Van Dine - indeed, that he possesses more originality than Van Dine, and might very well prove to be the creator of something new and startlingly original for us.

To Mr. B.P. Schulberg
April 15, 1931
NOT SENT

I wish you would give another minute's thought to my suggestion that we do Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with [Emil] Jannings. Granted that Jannings is not the Englishman of the book, and granted also that he has not the beautiful physical appearance of Dr. Jekyll, there is certainly nobody else in the world that could give the magnificent dual performance that could be counted upon from Jannings. Any script of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would almost certainly be a pretty free adaptation - and certainly the character could be molded to fit the versatile Jannings. When one thinks of the variety of roles he has played so sensationally, from the kindly professor to the lascivious Nero, from Louis XV to the trapeze artist of Variety, one realizes that he is an artist without nationality and without limitation. I am certain that he could overcome even the limitations of dialect. For purposes of a horror picture no one, I am certain, would criticize us for having the artist Jannings play a Teutonic Dr. Jekyll.

To: Mr. [Daniel] O'Shea
September 9, 1932

I hear rumors that Miss [Katharine] Hepburn is under twenty-one, which we should take immediate steps to confirm, to find out whether it is necessary to get the approval of the courts. I understand she is prone to exaggerate her age and likes to be thought much older than she is.

To: Mr. Siff
January 26, 1933

Please arrange for the executives, including Brock, to see the test of Fred Astaire. I am a little uncertain about the man, but I feel, in spite of his enormous ears and bad chin line, that his charm is so tremendous that it comes through even in this wretched test, and I would be perfectly willing to go ahead with him for the lead in the Brock musical.

To. Mr. [L.B]Mayer
September 6, 1933

I have arranged with Ben Hecht to do the final script of Viva Villa! ... On the quality we are protected not merely by Hecht's ability but by the clause that the work must be to my satisfaction. It may seem like a short space of time for a man to do a complete new script, but Hecht is famous for his speed, and did the entire job on Scarface in eleven days. I do not think we should take into consideration the fact that we are paying him a seemingly large sum of money for two weeks' work, because this would merely be penalizing him for doing in two weeks what it would take a lesser man to do, with certainly infinitely poorer results, in six or eight weeks.

To: Miss Greta Garbo
January 7, 1935

Fredric March will only do Anna Karenina if he is forced to by his employers, Twentieth Century Pictures. He has told me repeatedly that he is fed up on doing costume pictures, that he thinks it a mistake to do another; that he knows he is much better in modern subjectsand that all these reasons are aggravated by the fact that Anna Karenina would come close on the heels of the [actress] Anna Sten-[director Rouben] Mamoulian-[producer Samuel] Goldwyn picture, We Live Again, from Resurrection, a picture which has been a failure and in which March appeared in a role similar to that in Karenina. Mr. March is most anxious to do a modern piture and I consider his judgment about himself very sound.

Selznick's Notes on Anna Karenina (this is just a short excerpt from a long and fascinating document)
September 1935

Our first blow was a flat refusal by the Hays office [the office that made sure films followed the "code" of self-censorship] to permit the entire section of the story dealing with Anna's illegitimate child. This decision was so heartrending, especially as it meant the elmination of the marvelous bedside scenes between Anna, her husband and her lover, that we were sorely tempted to abandon the whole project - but even what remained of the personal story of Anna seemed so far superior to such inventions of writers of today as could be considered possibilities for Miss Garbo, that we went on with the job. There is no point in detailing the censorship problems beyond this. We had to eliminate everything that could even remotely be classified as a passionate love scene, and we had to make it perfectly clear that not merely did Anna suffer but that Vronsky suffered. But enough about censorship ...

Our next step in the adaptation was to decide which of the several stories that are told in the book we could tell on the screen without diverting the audience's interest from one line to another ... We retained only such of the story of Kitty and Levin as crossed the story of Anna and Vronsky. We naturally eliminated most of the discussions about the agricultural and economic problems of Russia of the day, considering these of little interest to the large part of our audience who came to see Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina and Fredric March as Vronsky.

From this point on, it became a matter of the careful selection and editing of Tolstoi's scenes, with a surprising little amount of original writing necessary ... I like to think that we retained the literary quality and the greater part of the poignant story of a woman torn between two equal loves and doomed to tragedy whichever one she chose.

To: Mrs Kate Corbaley
June 3, 1935 (an interesting context for this letter is Selznick's lifelong love of Charles Dickens, books he devoured as a child. He said later on in life that he could point out punctuation errors in new editions of Dickens' novels, so well did he know all of those books.)

It is amazing that Dickens had so many brilliant characters in David Copperfield and practically none in A Tale of Two Cities, and herein lies the difficulty. The book is sheer melodrama and when the scenes are put on the screen, minus Dickens's brilliant narrative passages, the mechanics of melodramtic construction are inclined to be more than apparent, and, in fact, to creak. Don't think that I am for a minute trying to run down one of the greatest books in the English language. I am simply trying to point out to you the difficulties of getting the Dickens feeling, within our limitations of being able to put on the screen only action and dialogue scenes, without Dickens's comments as narrator. I am still trying my hardest and think that when I get all through, the picture will be a job of which I will be proud - but it is and will be entirely different from David Copperfield.

My study of the book led me to what may seem strange choices for the writing an direction, but these strange choices were deliberate. Since the picture is melodrama, it must have pace and it must "pack a wallop". These, I think, Conway can give us as well as almost anyone I knew - as witnessed by his work on Viva Villa! Furthermore, I think he has a knack of bringing people to life on the screen, while the dialogue is on the stilted side. (I fought for many months to get the actual phrases out of David Copperfield into the picture, and I have been fighting similarly on Two Cities, but the difference is that the dialogue of the latter, if you will read it aloud, is not filled with nearly the humanity, or nearly the naturalness.

As to Sam Behrman, I think he is one of the best of American dialogue writers. Futhermore, he is an extremely literate and cultured man, with an appreciation of fine things and a respect for the integrity of a classic - more than ninety per cent more than all the writers I know. He can be counted upon to give me literacy that wiol match. On top of this, he is especially equipped, in my opinion, to give us the rather sardonic note in [Sidney] Carton.

Mr. Nicholas M. Schenck
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
October 3, 1935

I should like also to call to your attention the danger of treating this picture [Tale of Two Cities] as just another [Ronald] Colman starring vehicle. Granted that Colman is a big star; that any picture with him achieves a good gross; A Tale of Two Cities, even badly produced, would completely dwarf the importance of any star ... The picture is beautifully produced. If I do not say this, no one else in the organization will. It has been splendidly directed by Jack Conway; and Colman is at his very top. Further, bear in mind that the book of A Tale of two Cities would without Colman have a potential drawing power equaled only by David Copperfield, Little Women, and The Count of Monte Cristo among the films of recent years because only these books have an even comparable place in the affections of the reading public. This is no modern best seller of which one hundred thousand copies have been published, but a book that is revered by millions - yes, and tens of millions of people here and abroad.

To: Mr. Richard Boleslawski
[Director of The Garden of Allah]
April 14, 1936

I told [Marlene Dietrich] that my one other worry was about her performance - that she had demonstrated to the world that she was a beautiful woman, but that she had failed to demonstrate to the world, undoubtedly through lack of opportunity, that she was an emotional actress; that she had demonstrated very nicely in Desire that she was capable of an excellent comedy performance, but she had yet to make audiences cry. She said she had been wanting to prove this for years and certainly was anxious to make the attempt to show her stuff in this respect. I told her also, frankly, that I thought she worried most unnecessarily about her camera angles - that she was not Helen Hayes or Norma Shearer who had to worry about their faces, and that from any angle, it was impossible for her to be photographed as anything but beautiful and for God's sake and her own, she should forget about camera angles when it came to the playing of an emotional scene. She agreed with this also. Maybe I am just naive!

However, here again, I think you should go right ahead as though you were directing some newcomer, and not worry about any legend of Dietrich difficulties.

To: Mr. Richard Boleslawski
June 17, 1936

Would you please speak to Marlene about the fact that her hair is getting so much attention, and is being coiffed to such a degree that all reality is lost. Her hair is so well placed that at all times - when the wind is blowing, for instance - or when Marlene is on a balcony or walking through the streets - it remains perfectly smooth and unruffled; in fact, is so well placed that it could be nothing but a wig. The extreme in ridiculousness is the scene in bed. No woman in the world has ever had her hair appear as Marlene's does in this scene, and the entire scene becomes practically unusable because everything is so exatly in place that the whole effect of a harassed and troubled woman is lost ... Surely a little reality can't do a great beauty any harm.

To: Mr. Lowell V. Calvert
cc: Mr. Ginsberg
December 19, 1936

Concerning the tragic ending [of A Star is Born], this is the sort of comment about pictures that dates back twenty years, and that I didn't think any body seriously advanced today. I will be satisfied with a long line of pictures that do as well as Anna Karenina, in which Garbo threw herself under a railroad train, or A Tale of Two Cities, in which Mr. Colman had his head chopped off; and if anybody wants further examples, I will sit down and list about fifty sensational successes with tragic endings.

I make the flat statement that pictures have reached the stage where audiences demand the proper ending to a story, whether it be happy or unhappy. If there is anybody in the business that hasn't learned this, it is high time they did.

To: Mr. Bill Wellman
cc: Miss Keon
January 25, 1937

I have been thinking about my new idea for the end [of A Star is Born], and I believe that we can retain [Janet] Gaynor's entire approach up the aisle in front of the Chinese [Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood], simply retaking the reaction to the footprints, more or less as is; with her then pulling herself together' the announcer asking her if she will say a few words; [Adolphe] Menjoy saying something to the effect of "No, no - Miss Lester will not speak!"; Gaynor saying she will, advancing with all the pride in the world, throwing her head back, with tears in her eyes, and saying, "This is Mrs. Norman Maine speaking" - with an alternate take on "This is Vicki Lester speaking" ...

To: Mr. Fredric March
April 28, 1937

You must have heard from any number of people the most laudatory sort of opinoins on your performance in A Star is Born. Yet I fear that many of these statements may have seemed to you automatic flattery of a type you must be used to, and that perhaps you wonder which congratulations are on the level. It is for this reason that I thought I should send you this note to tell you that on all sides I have seldom heard such praise of any actor in any picture. In New York, as here, people are saying that your job is one of the most able and honest that has ever been done for the screen. That it will do a great deal for you, as it has for the picture and therefore for us, is a certainty.

May I add my congratulations (as well as my thanks) to the others? As to whether this is on the level, I remind you of what I told you about certain other performances.

At long last I salute you as I have wanted to through these years, with complete admiration and unstinted admiration ...

To: Miss Katharine Brown
August 30, 1937

This was one of my long-standing arguments with Max [Steiner, composer], and his point in turn was based upon something else which was the root of our decision to get a divorce, which was my objection to what I term "Mickey Mouse" scoring: an interpretation of each line of dialogue and each movement musically, so that the score tells with music exactly what is being done by the actors on the screen. It has long been my contention that this is ridiculous and that the purpose of a score is to unobtrusively help the mood of each scene without the audience being even aware that they are listening to music - and if I am right in this contention, why can't the score be prepared from the script even though cuts and rearrangements may be necessary after the picture is edited - for the basic selection of music and general arrangement would not be affected by these cuts.

To: Norman Taurog
January 8, 1938

The only criticism that we had in the preview cards [for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] - and this appeared in a number of them - was that the cave sequence was somehow too horrible for children. This worried me, because we certainly want the picture to be for a family audience, and I made it my business both to study this criticism and to ask innumerable questions of many people. My conclusion was that this horror was not based upon the melodrama of this sequence, but upon two things: the bat sequence, because of the feeling of horror born of weird and flying animals, and upon what I had thought was your brilliant execution of my hysteria idea for Becky. I didn't like to lose the bat sequence entirely, so for tonight's preview I have left it in, simply trimming it - and if we get the same reaction we may have to cut it further.

Since I feel that the hysterical scene is one of the high spots of the picture, I studied this even more carefully and came to the conclusion that the offensive part was, hopefully, only the unusually horrible close-up of Becky in which she is laughing hysterically and in which her mind is obviously completely gone, and in which she looks like a little witch rather than like a little girl - her hysteria perhaps a shade too much that of a very ill woman, than that of a little girl. I found that all the women I spoke to about this close-up were of one mind on it, and hence I have dropped it with regrets.

To: Mr. Stradling
cc: Mr. Ratoff, Mr. Klune, Mr. Westmore
June 9, 1939

There is no single thing about the physical production of the picture [the American remake of the Swedish film Intermezzo, for which Selznick had brought Ingrid Bergman to America] including the photography, that even compares in importance with the photography of Miss [Ingrid] Bergman. Unlike Mr. Howard, and unlike almost any player of importance that I know of, the difference in her photography is the difference between great beauty and a complete lack of beauty. And unless we can bring off our photography so that she really looks divine, the whole picture can fall apart from a standpoint of audience effectiveness...

It is entirely possible that we haven't yet learned enough about her angles or about exactly how to light her.

(Selznick was not the only one to make this observation. Cameramen who understood Bergman's angles said that if you photographed her head on, she appeared plain - it has to do with the size of her forehead and how the planes of her face photographed. But at a slight profile, 3/4s or so, her beauty flowered forth. That is why you RARELY see a close-up of Bergman that is head-on, facing the camera. She is always turned slightly to the side. Of such details are great cameramen made. Movie actresses understand their faces better than anyone, and those cameramen who knew how to make them look "divine" were (and still are) in high demand.)

From the same letter, Selznick reiterates hisp oint:

I cannot tell you how strongly I feel about this matter or how important I feel it to be. I think it is the difference between a successful picture and an unsuccessful picture; the difference between a new star and a girl who will never make another picture here.... The curious charm that [Bergman] had in the Swedish version of Intermezzo - the cominbation of exciting beauty and fresh purity - certainly ought to be within our abilities to capture.

To: Mr. Gregory Ratoff
cc: Mr. Gregg Toland
June 22, 1939

The Toland tests of Miss Bergman prove indubitably what we have been saying since before the picture started - that more than with any other girl that I know of in pictures, the difference between a great photographic beauty and an ordinary girl with Miss Bergman lies in proper photography of her - and that this in turn depends not simply on avoiding the bad side of her face; keeping her head down as much as possible; giving her the proper hairdress, giving her the proper mouth make-up, avoiding long shots, so as not to make her look too big, and, even more importantly, but for the same reason, avoiding low cameras on her, as well as being careful to build people who work with her, such as Leslie Howard and Edna Best (as well, as of course, as the children, beside whom she looks titanic if the camera work isn't carefully studied); but most important of all, on shading her face and in invariably going for effect lightings on her. This means that there should not be a single sequence of the picture that is not staged for real effect lighting - whether it be morning, afternoon, or night. One might say with justification that almost any dramatic picture benefits from this sort of careful attention to lighting effects, but in the case of Intermezzo the mood of the picture is dependent upon it to an extent far greater than what is true of most pictures. Thus, in photographing Miss Bergman properly we will be benefiting the picture as a whole.

To: Mr. Birdwell
November 9, 1939

Ann Rutherford, whom I saw on the train, told me something which might be the basis of some excellent publicity [for Ingrid Bergman's American debut], which is that all the girls she knows are letting their eyebrows grow in as a result of Bergman's unplucked eyebrows, and that she herself now feels very strongly about unplucked eyebrows, not merely because of Miss Bergman but because of Miss [Vivien] Leigh, whom we also should have eyebrows au naturel. So apparently our decision about Miss Bergman's eyebrows, based upon this studio's feeling that the public was sick and tired of the monstrosities that had been inflicted on the public by most of Hollywood's glamour girls, is going to have a national reaction!

Out of the Past: the battle of the under-actors

Excerpt from Lee Server's Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care:

Director and star proved to be ideally matched. In [Robert] Mitchum, [Jacques] Tourneur had found the most expressive embodiment of his own cinematic aesthetic of eloquent, subversive resistance and oneiric sensuality. Tourneur loved Mitchum's physical grace, the gliding, pantherlike movements, and his underplaying and powerful silences, his expressive quiescence thrilled the director whose films were among the quietest in the history of talking pictures. He savored Mitchum's ability to listen in a scene. "There are a large number of players who don't know how to listen," said Tourneur. "While one of their partners speaks to them, they simply think, I don't have anything to do during this; let's try not to let the scene get stolen from me. Mitchum can be silent and listen to a five-minute speech. You'll never lose sight of him and you'll understand that he takes in what is said to him, even if he doesn't do anything. That's how one judges good actors."

In Mitchum's opposite, the sort who tried "not to let the scene get stolen", Tourneur might possibly have been thinking of Kirk Douglas. With his explosive starring roles - Champion, Ace in the Hole, Detective Story - still a few years off, Douglas was becoming typed for intelligent, urbane characters, supporting parts. As Whit Sterling, certainly among the most well-spoken and civilized of ruthless racketeers, Douglas gave a brilliantly controlled and charismatic performance, but he could not have been thrilled by another second fiddle part - especially second fiddle to Mitchum, who had already taken from him the lead in Pursued. The two got along well enough off the set, but the rivalry would flare as soon as the cameras began to turn. Since Tourneur was not about to accept any obvious histrionics in his diminuendo world, Douglas was left to try and out-underact Mitchum, an exercise in futility, he discovered. He tried adding distracting bits of business during Mitchum's lines and came up with a coin trick, running it quickly between the tops of his fingers. Bob started staring at the fingers until Kirk started staring at the fingers and dropped the coin on the rug. He put the coin away. In another scene, Douglas brought a gold watch fob out of his coat pocket and twirled it around like a propeller. This time everybody stared.

"It was a hoot to watch them go at it," said Jane Greer. "They were two such different types. Kirk was something of a method actor. And Bob was Bob. You weren't going to catch him acting. But they both tried to get the advantage. At one point they were actually trying to upstage each other by who could sit the lowest. The one sitting the lowest had the best camera angle, I guess - I don't know what they were thinking. Bob sat on the couch, so Kirk sat on the table, then one sat on the footstool, and by the end I think they were both on the floor."

Tourneur, no martinet, liked to give his performers a lot of freedom and waited out the one-upmanship antics with a weary grace. "Quoi qu'il arrive, restez calme," he liked to say.

Actors were actors. One night he was screening the rushes of a scene with Mitchum and Douglas talking to each other on either side of the frame, and he was startled to see how Paul Valentine - placed in the background and without a line of dialogue - had craftily picked up a magazine and was flipping the pages with an altogether distracting intensity, hijacking the scene.

"Oh, Paul," he said to the actor, "now I have to keep an eye on you, too?"

Heroes For Sale (1933); Dir. William Wellmann

"It takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick 120 million people."

So says Tom Holmes, played by Richard Barthelmess, in William Wellmann's pre-Code drama Heroes for Sale, a terrific film, and included in TCM's Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume Three, a volume dedicated to the early works of Wellmann. The Hays Code was created in 1930, but wasn't really enforced until 1934, and the difference is startling. Not so much in the quality of movies made. Many of my favorite films of all time were from the 1930s, POST Code. But in the treatment of subject matter, in the willingness to present certain issues in a realistic manner, the lack of euphemism ... all of these things really mark the pre-Code films. There are those who have a nostalgia for the Code, but I imagine that those people, like myself, love the films made during the Code - and yet are not aware of what is actually IN the Code, and how vile it is. This is not just about keeping films "clean" and not showing sex or violence. This is about a moral mandate, institutionalized bigotry. Authority figures must not be questioned, religion must not be mocked, any mention of childbirth must be handled with "good taste", the Code goes on forever, trying to leave no stone unturned. It's a creepy document. For example, # 7 on the list beneath the heading Sex:

Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.

Lovely, isn't it?

So you may indulge yourself in nostalgia for the Code, but please at least realize what you are being nostalgic for. I read the Code, and I actually feel like taking a bath. It's funny: the Production Code was trying to regulate the morals of the nation, but in so doing, revealed themselves to have the dirtiest minds of all. Isn't that always the way. The Code states:

The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.

Yeah, because all Americans at that time ONLY slept in their bedrooms. Nothing else went on there! Nothing that wasn't in "good taste".

I am not one to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I find all of this to be interesting, and, naturally, smart directors and writers found all kinds of pesky ways to get around the Code. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more "lustful" moment on film than the look on Cary Grant's face when he says to Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings: "Would you like to come up to my room?" You can't get more explicit than that.

But the pre-Code films continue to fascinate, giving a glimpse of that brief moment in time before the crack-down came, before it was decided what could and could not be shown, and also HOW things should be portrayed (dancing, crime, religion, alcohol, patriotism, etc.). Being so used to the post-Code movies with their artful sneakiness in handling certain issues can make some of these earlier films seem even more startling. Can they say that?? Is that allowed? A film without a clear moral? What is this world coming to? A film where the bad girl is not only NOT punished, but flourishes? And, uhm, a film where a woman is branded like a piece of cattle, and it's shown on film? (Interesting that the Code specifically mentions "branding" as off-limits ("Branding of people or animals" is listed under "REPELLENT SUBJECTS"). I wonder if that was a direct response to Tallulah Bankhead's horrifying animalistic shriek as the brand is pressed into her breast.

There will be spoilers here. I hope it doesn't deter you from seeing the film.

The original title for Heroes for Sale was Breadline, which takes a more documentary approach to the situation portrayed in the film, but look at the cynicism in the chosen title. These are WAR heroes. What happens when a soldier returns? It is not pretty. Heroes for Sale looks at the challenges facing these men, not only returning home wounded, or shattered psychologically (sometimes both), but also the upheaval of the society brought on by the Great Depression. Things are not black and white (one of the key features of the pre-Code films). Even a year later, Heroes For Sale would not have been possible.

Tom Holmes (played by the wonderful Richard Barthelmess) is a soldier fighting in WWI. The opening of the film shows war in a realistic chaotic way. The rain throttles down out of the sky. The trenches are terrifying. The enemy is faceless, but the sound they make roars through the air. The American soldiers know what they have to do, but they are scared. Their fear is showed openly, with no sneer at it (which would be par for the course later). Fear is human. It's certainly part of war. It doesn't mean the men are not heroic. Orders have come down, in the middle of a night-time battle, that their next mission is to advance forward, and this time, they are not expected to kill the enemy, but take him prisoner. A far more risky proposition. The men stand huddled in a tent. Wellmann films it with dark shadows, the sounds of explosions outside, the rain battering the tent. It's gloom placed on top of gloom. They all look at one another, and they know what this means. 9 out of 10 of them will die in the attempt. They know it. No one speaks it, but the knowledge is there, palpably. Men light their soggy cigarettes with shaking fingers. It's a tense scene, beautifully rendered by the actors, and the production design, which gives it all the sense of being a last (and perhaps) meaningless stand. It is the first scene in the movie. We don't even know who any of these people are yet. It throws us right into the middle of the action. The men begin their mission. The mud is like something out of a nightmare, it's dark, the rain pours down, and Wellmann shows the approach out of the trench, as one after the other is mowed down. It is slaughter. Beautiful work, by everyone.

Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott, in a terrific performance, he would be dead 2 years later after falling off his polo horse, exactly like Christopher Reeve) is the Sergeant. He and Tom are from the same town. They huddle in a trench, waiting for their turn to charge. They have the following exchange:

Tom: You scared, Roger?
Roger: Unofficially, yes.
Tom: Me too. Only you can make mine official.

Pretty honest. It is these subtleties that would be lost once the Code was enforced.

Yet, they do what they have to do. In a brutal scene, Tom comes face to face with a German soldier and shouts at him, through the rain, to surrender. The German does. At that moment, Tom is shot in the back and falls over the trench, screaming to Roger to "take him in, take him in". Roger, torn between helping his friend and completing his mission, takes the German soldier prisoner and struggles off through the mud, leaving Tom to die. But they knew this going in, that this was a possibility. Tough choices made by tough men.

Roger, back in the tent, is congratulated for his bravery. People crowd in to shake his hand. Roger, knowing that he did nothing but cower in the mud, that the heroism is all Tom's, out there dead in the mud, is devastated. Watch how Westcott shows this. He is a marvelous actor. He is truly pained. Ashamed. And yet, who wouldn't want to have everyone think you're a hero? He tries to come clean, but people keep interrupting him, telling him not to be modest. We learn later what kind of a world Roger comes from, he's a rich boy on a hill, his father is a prominent banker, status and image is very important to his family. It has weakened him, morally. Think of the radical notion of that. He knows he did wrong, he knows that Tom is probably dead out there, and he is now basking in someone else's glory, but he doesn't speak. This is not shown as a malicious or cunning choice. It is shown in all its complexity, accepting that men under pressure often do not behave in honorable ways. And they feel terrible about it. In a very serious way, the choice Roger makes in that wet tent in the middle of the trenches, ruins his life. He can never shake the haunting memory of what he has done, what he is capable of.

Because it turns out, that Tom did not die out there. He is seriously wounded, but he is rescued by a German Red Cross team. He spends the rest of the war in a German hospital, a prisoner of war essentially, but a very sick man. The Germans in the film are portrayed as realistically as the Americans. They are not some "other", they are not the enemy (TM). They're soldiers, just like the Americans. Another radical pre-Code touch, which would be lost in the intervening years. In the German hospital, Tom is given morphine for the pain.

By the time he leaves, he is a serious drug addict. There is only so much that can be done for his condition. He still has splinters of steel along his spine, which cannot be removed without serious injury or perhaps death. He will have to spend the rest of his life managing his pain. While Tom's morphine addiction is not presented as quite as harrowing as Mary's in Long Day's Journey Into Night (or, as an angry commenter recently informed me: a "DOWNER" - and that, for him, was a bad thing. People want to be entertained, he told me. So we always need to see the bright side, right? Even of morphine addiction? Maybe it shouldn't be shown at all! That would solve all the problems of these pesky artists writing all of these "downers". This commenter would have been a great official for the Hays Code!)

Speaking of the Code (and I'll try to stop beating that drum, but Heroes For Sale, not very well-known, certainly not as well-known as the films that really prompted the Code being enforced - Baby Face, Public Enemy, etc. - is a very good example of some of the subtlety that was legislated out of existence when that Code came down), the portrayal of drug addiction was strictly forbidden.

Illegal drug traffic must never be presented ... Because of its evil consequences, the drug traffic should not be presented in any form. The existence of the trade should not be brought to the attention of audiences.

Holmes's morphine addiction is treated with honesty. It happens. It's terrible. Not just for their loved ones, but for the person suffering. He returns home to America after the armistice is signed. On the boat back, he runs into Roger, who now is highly decorated because of his bravery. One of the best parts of Barthelmess' portrayal is that he is a realistic man, and also a compassionate man. It is Roger who suffers the consequences. It's almost worse that Tom is so understanding about the whole thing. It would be better if Tom hated him. Roger is a tormented man.

But Tom says to him, with a gentle sort of half-grin, "I am pretty sure I would have done the same thing." What a nice way to look at friendship. It's not simple all the time. And friends do forgive one another some pretty awful things.

Back in the States, things begin to play out in an inevitable fashion. Tom moves in with his mother. Roger is the toast of the town. Perhaps because of the guilt he feels, Roger gets Tom a job at his father's bank. We immediately can sense, however, that Tom is starting to fall apart. His need for morphine is running his life. He sits behind the bars at the bank (a perhaps too-obvious metaphor for the entrapment of drug addiction), drenched in sweat, worrying over the numbers he has to tally up, and he can't concentrate because he needs his fix. To address the Code and its idiocy: seeing a man in the throes of drug addiction does not make one want to become a drug addict. It has the opposite effect. Not only that, but it can actually intensify your compassion for those who suffer so. It would take a hard heart, indeed, to watch Barthelmess in these early scenes, and think scornfully of his weak character, how "bad" he is. That doesn't even come into play. All you can see is a man at the end of his rope. His doctor sympathizes but he warns Tom that he cannot fill any more prescriptions without reporting the case to the authorities. Tom stands at the door and shouts at the doctor, "What am I supposed to do?" There is true anguish in Barthelmess here. It's heart-rending. Tom goes to the streets. Tries to get drugs from shady characters in doorways, but they turn him down for this or that reason.

Finally, Tom is reported, and he is committed to the "Narcotic State Farm".

One of the problems with Heroes For Sale (and this is nitpicky, especially with a film as fine as this one, but I feel I should mention it) is that it has about eight full acts. It's too much. Wellmann keeps us on track, with calendar years flying by us, and effective editing (a sign showing "Narcotic State Farm", then a shot of a hand pulling out a file with Tom's name on it, and a doctor signing his name to admit Tom - then the next shot, same file pulled out, hand signing his name, and then stamping the file: CURED AND RELEASED - a year of time is handled in three shots. Ah, economy!) But it does try to do too much, and there are times when you feel like you are slogging from event to event, with no overarching purpose. However, this is not a fatal flaw, as it might have been with other films, because of the universal excellence of the acting (even the extras are fantastic), and the fact that everyone creates characters that are interesting, who have places to go, emotionally and otherwise. Heroes for Sale has scope. Maybe too much? I'll leave that for you to decide.

Tom moves to Chicago after being released from the hospital, to make a fresh start. He gets a room in a boarding house, run by Mary, a no-nonsense yet warm and funny human being, played by Aline MacMahon, in yet another exquisite performance from this wonderful character actress.

I love Heroes for Sale because it allows her to be human, too. She's not a caricature. She is allowed her own moments (including one absolutely killer closeup in a scene that moved me to tears the first time I saw it - when you see it, you'll know exactly the one I mean), her own personality. She's not just "support staff". There are only two other boarders in the boarding house - a German communist ("He's a Red," Mary tells Tom) named Mr. Brinker, played broadly (and rather annoyingly at times) by Robert Barrat, and a young working girl named Ruth, played by a glowingly beautiful Loretta Young. The second Tom lays eyes on Ruth, he's in love. His surroundings may be dreary, his room may look out on a brick wall, but suddenly he has hope. He might be able to make a life for himself, with this lovely girl at his side. In a touchingly old-school way, he asks her out immediately, letting his interest in her be known. She seems like a positive and warm person, and she likes him. A romance starts. She works in a laundry, and she gets him a job there as a driver.

Almost immediately, Tom shows an entrepreneurial ingenuity with his job, finding ways to increase the numbers of his laundry route. The higher-ups notice. Give him a promotion.

"The Red", Mr. Brinker, is an inventor. He is always emerging from his room in his long-johns, demanding of the other boarders if anyone has a chisel. The funniest thing about this portrayal is that Communism is seen as kind of amusing (see the fantastic Comrade X for another example), and ultimately corruptible - which, in this universe, is a HOPEFUL sign. No ideology is so rigid that it can resist the call of making money. Mr. Brinker rants and raves about the employers, and how the workers are "slaves", and sniffs at things like profit and bottom line, but when he invents a new kind of laundry-apparatus that would make things more efficient, and gets a patent for it, and suddenly starts raking in the dough, he becomes an unrepentant Capitalist. It doesn't have the paranoia about Communism that later films have. This is the early 30s, remember. Hitler was the enemy. Russia was the Great Unknown. I really liked that aspect of the character. He has no convictions, actually.

Tom teases him at one point: "You used to hate the capitalists!" Brinker replies emphatically, "Naturally! But that was before I had money!"

I love the observation of that, the social and political critique, leavened with humor.

The plot marches on. Tom and Ruth get married. They have a son. Tom has pitched the laundry-machine to his bosses, and says he will sell it to them ONLY IF it means actual human beings won't lose their jobs. They have an agreement. But then hard times come, and the laundry is bought by a larger consolidation. The agreement is broken, and 3/4s of the work force lose their jobs.

Wellmann uses two identical tracking shots to show the transformation: Early on in the film, the camera pans through the giant laundry, (and apparently many of the extras were actual employees at a laundry), showing people busy at work, folding and washing and drying, a hub of human activity. And then, later, same tracking shot, and we see the same space, empty of humans, with the machines busy at work. A bleak and realistic portrayal of what technology can do, a huge worry at that time. Will humans become obsolete?

Tom finds himself on the firing line for this. Angry mobs of men show up at his brownstone home, shouting at him about his betrayal. He tries to reason with them, tell them that he did his best, but they are having none of it. The mob decides to go to the laundry and break all the machines. Tom screams at them that this will do no good, they will only build more. But the mob charges off into the night.

The scenes of riot are filmed with a jagged sense of immediacy. You feel you are looking at a situation that is about to spin wildly out of control. It's frightening. Police advance on the crowd. Tear gas shots are fired. All hell breaks loose. Tom is in the middle of it, still trying to reason, but it's too late. Barthelmess's desperation here is heart-wrenching. Ruth, panicked, calls Mary to come watch her son, so she can run down to the laundry to be with her husband. In the riot, she is struck in the face with a rock, and she falls to the ground. Death, even a year later, would be cleaned up a lot in Hollywood movies, but here, her face is covered with blood, and her eyes are open, staring sightlessly up into the air. It is a memorable shot, unblinking in its willingness to show reality, and the moment is horrifying. Nothing up until this point has prepared us for THAT to happen. Barthelmess, being held down by two cops, is screaming, "THAT'S MY WIFE, THAT'S MY WIFE", but they won't release him to go to her. All around is the chaos of the mob.

There are at least two more acts to go in Heroes for Sale, gritty and terrible, but Wellmann does not tip his action over into melodrama. This is a drama, end-stop. It shows its characters, flaws and all, and follows them on their bumpy journey through life, and through a time of great upheaval in American history. 1918 to 1933 saw a lot of changes, and the worst was yet to come, but Heroes For Sale, while it could be seen as a piece of propaganda ("Can't we do better for ourselves? Can't we do better for our returning veterans? Can't we just treat people better?"), it is also an examination of the economics and transformations that went down during that time, all seen through the eyes of people we come to care about deeply.

Richard Barthelmess has a kind of stiffness to him at times, which works wonderfully when he is in the right material. It worked great in Only Angels Have Wings. He is a man who feels things intensely, but is quite embattled about letting those feelings show. Howard Hawks spoke of the difficulties Barthelmess had in crying onscreen, but there is a scene here, a goodbye scene with his young son (who is about 3 years old) which is heartbreaking, and Barthelmess is obviously moved, spontaneously. It's a beautiful moment of watching someone respond, in an organic way, to a completely imaginary situation, the definition of good acting. The son is portrayed in later scenes as a kid of 8 or 9, but he has more of the stilted child-actor precocity that is so annoying, and was even worse at that time in movies. Children are often appallingly sweet in "old" movies (see the little kid in Penny Serenade for a perfect example of how awful, how truly nauseating they were encouraged to be). But the little 3 year old in Heroes For Sale (he is not listed in the credits) gives an unbelievable performance in this one scene, totally uninhibited, even though he has some tough things to do. He has to scream and cry, "I don't want you to go, I don't want you to go" - and however this little boy was able to tap into those emotions (I don't even want to know), he nails it. Barthelmess holds him at one point, in tears, and the little boy sweetly reaches out and brushes his hand across his father's cheek, following the tracks of the tears. It's an extraordinary performance by a wee young thing. The scene would be maudlin otherwise. Here, in the hands of Wellmann, Barthelmess, and young unnamed boy, it is heartwrenching.

With moments of wit (so necessary with bleak material like this), Heroes For Sale attempts to examine the state of American life at that time, with "poor people" shuffling in a line outside soup kitchens, and huge signs on the edge of town stating:

This is how we lived then. Mr. Brinker, the Red turned capitalist, scoffs at the unemployed, calling them "moochers" and "loafers". We can see parallels to certain attitudes that persist today, in the portrayal of drug addiction (these people are seen as bad and weak, the boss at the bank rails at Tom for his "cowardly loathsome habit" and how disappointed his mother must be having raised her son to lead "a good Christian life") - and the contempt shown towards people who can't find work, they must be lazy, good-for-nothings, and they should be ashamed for accepting "handouts". (I am thinking of the recent moment at a rally where a man threw dollar bills at a guy suffering from Parkinson's. Disgusting.) Heroes For Sale pulls no punches in its portrayal of the lack of sympathy we so often show one another. But it makes its point: There are no "good" people, and there are no "bad" people. There are people who make choices. Choices that seem right at the time, and maybe are right, but there are always unintended consequences. How do we handle ourselves when the chips start to fall? How do we try to maintain human dignity when the world seems to be demanding of us that we fall to our knees?

Tom Holmes is an Everyman. He is not a "star", he's not extraordinary, he's like so many men at so many different times: he wants to have a good life, he wants to provide for his family, he wants to have work that doesn't demean him or anyone else. He does the best he can.

And so Tom's line, that opens this post, spoken at a moment when the Great Depression was at its most ravaging, becomes an optimistic patriotic message, a belief in the system, a belief in people in general, even when it has crushed him down to a powder.

The last scene of Heroes For Sale is unnecessary, and re-states its message too obviously, so Wellmann will be sure that we will "get it", in no uncertain terms, but it doesn't lessen the impact of the whole. We "got it" long before then, and that is a testament to Wellmann and, mainly, to Richard Barthelmess, whose impassioned, committed and specific performance represents the best that the industry has to offer.

Punch-Drunk Love in Japanese

I am in love with this poster. If you have seen the movie, you will understand the design elements, and I think it's perfect. The haunting bleeding melting colors that break up the "acts" of Punch-Drunk Love were created by Jeremy Blake, a successful artist, whose notorious recent suicide (a double-suicide apparently - he and his girlfriend both died) is a very strange story - he was being harassed by Scientologists, apparently? I haven't been following up with that story, but it sure was a strange one. More details here.

Thanks to The Auteur's Notebook for this image, and also other images in the same series.

It's a film I am not just fond of, but love intensely, so I was so interested to see other versions of the poster, that seemed to capture the emotionality and subjective dream-space that the film lives in.

Under-rated Movies #18: Murder by Numbers

So under-rated as to be almost completely invisible, and never mentioned in this past Oscar season, when Sandra Bullock was so much discussed - Murder by Numbers has some truly stupid elements, a boring title, and a terrible ending (badly shot, among other things which I will get into), but why I love it (and yes, I do love it), is its insistence on keeping focused on character, despite the bossy plot, and the "thriller" demands. At the center of this movie is a well-drawn specific portrait of a homicide detective, and how they do what they do. Bullock is terrific in the part, managing to suggest that the character is scarred somewhere, something is "wrong" with her socially, but she also gets to be really good at her job. She is driven by personal demons, as a lot of people are, but she keeps it all under a tightly-closed lid, which saves the character from the Freudian-slash-Oprah direction it keeps wanting to go in. It's a very controlled performance. You really believe she is an excellent cop. The character is not in the writing, which can be pretty on-the-nose, even annoyingly so, but in Bullock's performance. One of the most amazing things here is how consistently she dodges the bullets. Not from the criminals she is tracking, but from the pitfalls of the script. Bullock underplays, keeps her cool, stays hard, is willing to be unpleasant (she is not at all likeable, although you end up feeling for her), and doesn't care about protecting her character. By that I mean, she isn't telling the audience from the get-go: "I'm wounded, like me, feel sorry for me ... it'll pay off". Lesser actresses do this all the time. Not Bullock. She doesn't give a shit if you like her or not. Perfect for the role, and one of the reasons why the movie flat out works. Rent it to watch HER, and you'll see why this film is under-rated.

The acting is good all around (and sometimes actually great) with Michael Pitt and Ryan Gosling playing a modern-day Leopold and Loeb. They are teenagers, one is a brainiac, the other the class clown, and they make a big pretense of not knowing one another (all part of their dastardly plan), when in acutality they are enmeshed, and spend all their free time in a big abandoned house on a cliff, reading Nietzsche and drinking absinthe and playing Russian Roulette. They dream of the perfect murder. Just like Leopold and Loeb, they want to prove to themselves that they are real men, better men than others, because they could conceive of something so perfect, so airtight, that they would never be caught. They read forensic books, learning everything they can about DNA analysis and fiber analysis, so that they will not mess up. The best part is: the murder must be totally random. They must have no connection with the person. Only then, will it be perfect.

Pretty cliched stuff, I know, but what elevates Murder by Numbers is the quality of the acting. There is some top-notch stuff going on here. Michael Pitt is a gloomy puffy-faced kid who skulks around, but he is hiding something: he is hiding his own dreams of grandeur and domination. He plays the victim, because it is a perfect cover. And Ryan Gosling is fantastic as the "dumb" one. The rich kid who wears a red leather jacket, who seems to have everything fall into his lap, but who is missing something in his personality. Empathy, certainly, but maybe that just comes because he's never had to work for anything in his life. Gosling suggests all kinds of things going on, even though the character is never given an explanatory monologue about who he is. He keeps it in the air, and when the mask comes off in an interrogation room, it is, I am not ashamed to say, a brilliant moment. Unforced. Compulsively watchable. He works every moment as though it is a battle of the wills and he must come out on top. You can see how he would snow everyone: teachers, parents, guidance counselors. He turns on the charm, and people fall like ninepins. He is fully aware of himself at every moment, a true narcissist. He has grown up believing he is untouchable, due to his wealth, his good looks, and he has the cocky swagger of someone who has no idea what it means to want anything. But he has a secret, too. Their crime depends on them sticking together, following the plan. They must not be broken apart. They must get their stories straight. The plan has been in the works for a couple of years. It is not clear how these two met, but they have been keeping up the charade that they don't like each other (Gosling makes fun of Pitt in the hallways, snickers at Pitt in class), so that when the day comes that they commit their crime, nobody would ever dream of suspecting them, or even know that there was a connection between them in the first place.

Both of them are true sociopaths, and the young actors are chilling in portraying their roles.

But the star here is Sandra Bullock. She plays Cassie Mayweather (first of all: the name is a problem. That is not a real name, script writer.), a homicide detective. She has been assigned a new cop to train who has transferred over from Vice (he is played by Ben Chaplin, who is actually given quite a lot to do here, unlike many of his other parts - and he's great), and a murdered girl is found in a ravine, so she takes him with her to the crime scene, walking him through the process. Early on, this is the scene that lets us know what kind of thriller this is going to be. It's not a "gotcha" thriller, it's not going to be gory or violent: it is going to be an intellectual thriller, one that focuses on forensics, and also how crime scenes are analyzed and handled. How investigations move forward. How criminal profiles are used by police departments, and how they rule out certain aspects. Is the killer "organized" or "disorganized"? Having just read Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI , by Robert Ressler (a top FBI profiler), I had a lot of fun seeing Murder by Numbers again, watching cops standing at white-boards, with "characteristics" of specific profiles written out, and trying to decide if the killer here qualified. This is how it's done. At least according to Ressler. It's not a magic wand: check this box, and you'll find your killer - but the guideposts are there, and Murder by Numbers has done its homework.

Cassie and her new partner (Chaplin) argue about the profile. Chaplin says he's "disorganized", meaning he feels that, based on the evidence, the killing was random. Something doesn't sit right with Cassie about that. The body was found in a ravine, yes, but it was on the other side of a creek, far away from the road, and footprints were found in the mud, which meant, among other things, that the killer had to have picked this spot for its remoteness, and also had to have somehow dragged the body down the hill, through the creek, and across to the other side. A "disorganized" killer (thank you, Mr. Ressler) usually dumps bodies wherever they feel like it, they panic, they freak out, they don't cover their tracks. Arguments erupt between Bullock and her partner. "He's spontaneous AND he plans? Come on, guys, this doesn't make sense!"

Ressler talks about how important it is to learn how to analyze crime scenes, and that 9 times out of 10, everything you need to know will be at that primary site. Not just in terms of evidence left behind, but in subtler clues, clues which let you know who the person is. Is there blood everywhere? Are there missing limbs? Was an attempt made to cover the body up? All of these things are indicators (or, possible indicators).

I knew a homicide detective once, and I grilled him about all of this, because I feel like I missed my calling in many ways, although I would have a hard time being around murdered bodies all the time. But I asked him every question I could think of, and he was fascinating, I wish I had tape recorded it. He handled all of my questions with good humor, patience, and a deep animal intelligence, which actually bordered on something almost spiritual. Like a genius can't describe how he plays the violin like he does, or how he can calculate columns of numbers in his head with lightning speed, this homicide detective could not speak specifically (at first, but believe me, I wore him down) about how he did what he did. If you start to listen to these cops, (and I watch every forensic show known to man) many of them say stuff like, "I don't know, something didn't feel right." "I walked into that crime scene, and just knew something was off." "Something's not right about that guy."

Now you cannot convict someone on these vague "something's not right" feelings, but a good homicide detective always trusts his gut. He understands information, and he can process things very quickly. He knows what a random crime scene looks like, so he can instantly tell if one has been "staged". But often he cannot immediately point the finger at what is "wrong". It's a gut feeling. Hard to quantify.

Bullock plays a cop like that. She nails it. She and her partner kneel over the dead body and discuss what they see. The film has made him a trainee, which is a convenient way to "show" that she knows her job, because she is showing him the ropes, asking him to analyze the scene. It seems that the stab wounds on the victim's chest are tentative. They barely break the skin. That is information. The victim is missing a finger. Chaplin glances at Bullock and asks, "Trophy?" Bullock never takes her eyes off the victim. She murmurs, "Maybe ..."

Murder by Numbers has two separate stories: the two sociopath teenagers, and the local investigation closing in on them (even though they thought they had planned it perfectly) - and while it's perhaps not the tensest thriller of all time (we know from the start that the two boys did it), what I like about it is its patience with the boring nitty-gritty that is so much of cop-work. Filing paperwork, autopsies, waiting for fiber analysis, sitting around in the office and talking about the case ... In those scenes, Murder by Numbers knows exactly what it is, isn't trying to be anything else, and does it very very well. It's fun and engaging to watch people figure things out, especially when the plot is twisty enough to not reveal all right away. However (and this, for me, is key): the plot really comes down to personalities.

Who ARE these two boys? What is their dynamic? How did they do it? And above all, why?

Slowly, Cassie becomes obsessed with the case, and she seems especially obsessed by Ryan Gosling. She has a visceral dislike to the kid, and it seems over-the-top, it seems to be about something else. She is reprimanded repeatedly for this, but she continues to insist, "Something's not right with that kid ... something's not right."

To add to all of this, Murder by Numbers has given Sandra Bullock a really interesting person to play, outside of her important job and her skill at it. She lives in isolation on a houseboat. She sits around on her days off, in a bathrobe, watching Matlock. She is notorious for sleeping with everyone. The other cops call her "hyena" and her new partner wonders why. She says to him, casually, as she opens the gate to the dock leading to her houseboat, "Female hyenas have protruding mock penises." She doesn't seem particularly bothered by her own behavior. It's something to dull the pain. She sleeps with Chaplin almost instantly, before he realizes that she has done this to everyone in the department, as well as the assistant DA, and when they're done having sex, she kicks him out of bed. Literally. Shoves him off to the side. "I gotta get up in the morning. Go."

Bullock, who radiates niceness, I think, and humor, and good companionship - is bringing something else in her personality to the foreground here. The wounded coldness that can be the result of loneliness and fear. She plays none of this literally, however. Cassie Mayweather (sorry. Not a real name) is not particularly self-aware. She doesn't feel she needs to be, because her whole life is her job. And THERE, she knows who she is. Who cares if she sleeps with everybody? Who cares if she sits in a bathrobe for days at a time? Why on earth does it matter, as long as she shows up to work and kicks ass? Bullock, with brief flickers, lets us in on her sadness, which is even more heartbreaking because of the effort she has put in to hiding it. Pain hurts her more, because she resists it.

She has a secret, too.

The ending of the film is a betrayal of all that has come before, a showdown at the house on the cliff, which, unfortunately, puts Cassie Mayweather, the best cop on the force, into a damsel in distress situation, where she must be saved at the last minute. Too bad. The film didn't have the courage of its convictions, and it is difficult to imagine an ending of a film where the lead cop is male, and suddenly, when confronted with the killers face to face, crumples and must be saved by his female partner. Not to mention the fact that it's a very action-packed ending, with some giant occurrences involving architecture and falling bodies and the special effects look pretty shlocky. Silly, actually.

To see Cassie Mayweather (have I mentioned how I feel about her name), a woman we have come to know over the course of the film, as no-nonsense, fearless, willing to go in first to any frightening situation, ballsy, annoying, headstrong, suddenly reduced to a screaming female tied to the railroad tracks, is a bummer of the highest order.

Nevertheless: The acting here is why you should see it, and Bullocks' work throughout packs a strange punch for me. This is one of those movies where no matter when it is on, or what I am doing, I have to sit and watch the rest of it. The silliness is undeniable, but weed through that, and you have the four leads: Bullock, Chaplin, Gosling and PItt - creating really really interesting characters who all, cops and criminals, have flaws, fears and secrets, secrets from each other, of course, but also secrets they keep from themselves, and, in the end, the film is about intelligence. I love it for that reason alone. It is about watching people think. It is about watching Bullock look around her, at the ravine, the creek, the mud, the piles of leaves, and murmur to herself, "Something's not right here ..."

More in my Under-rated Movies Series:

This post covers 5: Ball of Fire, Only Angels Have Wings, Dogfight, Zero Effect and Manhattan Murder Mystery

Four Daughters

In a Lonely Place

Searching For Bobby Fischer

Joe vs. the Volcano

Something's Gotta Give

Truly, Madly, Deeply

Mr. Lucky

Eye of God

Love and Basketball

Kwik Stop

The Rapture

Waking the Dead

More of William Powell in Love Crazy

(I need it after getting my heart broken into a million pieces last night by In the Mood for Love.)

My review of Love Crazy (and other "marriage comedies") here.

Powell is hiding in the shower of his now-married ex-girlfriend (played awesomely by Gail Patrick). They are NOT guilty of infidelity but it would look very bad if he were found there. He is also escaped from a lunatic asylum and the police are after him. The ex-girlfriend's husband is going to take a shower, and the ex-girlfriend stalls him. They stand there, right outside the shower, talking about how he shouldn't take a shower right now. The husband is baffled. What is her problem? The fact that we know William Powell is right behind the curtain makes the scene hilarious. Without looking into the shower, the husband reaches in and turns on the water. The look on Gail Patrick's face, knowing what Powell is going through at that moment, is laugh-out-loud funny. The husband mutters how he likes the water to be "scalding", so he reaches in again and turns the knob. Steam blasts out of the shower, and poor William Powell is bombarded by scalding hot water, and he cannot scream, or make a sound. Tears streamed down my face as I watched him writhe, his mouth jammed open in a silent prolonged shriek, like Edvard Munch's painting.

Mother (2009); Dir. Bong Joon-Ho

Get rid of your expectations.

From the trailer, it looks like Mother is the story of a mother's quest to clear her son's name of murder. It is that. But it is so much more. This is one of those great and rare movies that has a byzantine plot full of surprises, but is also a powerful character study of a bizarre and driven woman. Any preconceived notions of martyr-mothers, and Eleni-style theatrics will be dashed here. Mothers can be awesome. They can also be monstrous. This one is both. She is played by Hye-ja Kim in what is, honestly, one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen. Certainly more raw and honest than any of the Best Actress nominees from this year. I struggle to come up with comparisons.

The only thing I came up with was when I saw Beauty Queen of Leenane, first on Broadway, and then in Chapel Hill, where my brother was in a production of it. When the Martin McDonagh juggernaut began, it was rather startling because while we have some wonderful writers here in America, many of them are not writing plays with big surprise elements or character excavations. I do not want to paint with too wide a brush. John Patrick Shanley continues to write plays with great characters and good stories, but many of our plays now are about their THEMES and IDEAS, which is all well and good, but if I want to read a pamphlet, then I'll, you know, read a pamphlet. How about some intrigue? How about some bombs being dropped in the second act, so we can watch the fall-out in the third? How about some good old-fashioned story-making? This is one of the reasons why God of Carnage (my review here) was so exhilarating. It was unafraid. Unafraid to go big. The Irish, at the time of Beauty Queen, were at the forefront, once again, in writing plays that weren't ABOUT anything, per se, no social consciousness or political agenda, but in-depth portrayals of the characters in those moments in time, giving us the chance to sits back and watch the horrible and wonderful things that they did. People with secrets and hatreds and losses that burned like fire. In Beauty Queen, McDonagh gives us Mag, the mother, a truly horrific personality, out of a Greek tragedy. She is hilariously funny, off her rocker, and truly cruel in a way that takes your breath away. You think you have a line on her, you think you will be allowed to pity her, but then she is so terrible you turn around and judge her. You, the audience, are in conflict about your own reactions. Great playwriting. The Greeks talked about catharsis. An event that brings about a "purging". Not of any random emotion, but of pity or terror. The Greeks knew what they were about. And so does Martin McDonagh, whose play owes much to the Greeks. Should we pity Mag? Or should be filled with terror? The play leaves this unresolved, as all great plays do, and she is a character that becomes rooted in your mind, like Blanche Dubois, or Macbeth. Our feelings about her are meant to remain unresolved, and you could argue about her with your friends after the production: was she a victim? A monster? How should we FEEL about this woman? Plays that always attempt to tell the audience how to feel (telegraphing: "this is a bad guy - hate him" or "this is an innocent victim - weep for him") are pandering, soulless. But in Beauty Queen of Leenane, we are given a character we can sink our teeth into. Something that is so much missing in today's drama. Character. How many modern-day playwrights give us characters that live on in the memory?

There is a bit of Mag in the "Mother" in Mother, and to say more would be to give it away.

Bong Joon-Ho (my review of his excellent Memories of Murder here) is working at full throttle in Mother, from the getgo, when we are thrust into the action. The film begins with a wide shot of a field of waving yellow grass, and we see Hye-ja Kim, in the distance, walking through the grass. She seems completely ordinary. She is an older woman, dressed modestly, and while she seems distracted, lost in thought, there is nothing extraordinary about her or the state she is in. She stands in the grass, in closeup, looking around her.

What happens next is so unexpected that I would never dream of giving it away, but within 30 seconds, Bong has launched us into a world where we should know, right off the bat, that we can't ever know everything. We think we know someone. Just from looking at them for the first time. And then they behave like THAT. Forget it. No more expectations. My primal response to that first 30 seconds of film was, quite literally, WHO. IS. THIS. WOMAN????

The best part of Mother is that I still do not have the answer.

Mother lives with her son Yoon Do-joon (played by Bin Won), a man in his 20s, and he is obviously mentally deficient in some indefinable way, he certainly cannot make it on his own. There is no father. Mother and son live in a bell jar of intimacy, even sleeping in the same bed.

Do-Joon hangs out primarily with Jin-Tae (played beautifully by Ku Jin), a guy who was probably his childhood friend, and now keeps hanging out with his friend, even though he's a bit "off". Jin-Tae is a cool dude, with a hot little girlfriend, and he is set up in the film, early on, as vaguely suspicious. You wonder what he's up to. Part of the fun of Mother (and I say "fun" meaning: "dawning horror and realization") is realizing that your first impressions of people are more often than not totally wrong. The entire film is from Mother's point of view. What she knows, we know. Nothing more. There is zero objectivity here. She fears for her son's well-being, and naturally Jin-Tae becomes her first target. But that is only because her intimacy with her son is so cloying that she cannot see the truth. The film is her journey, relentless and brutal, towards the truth.

Do-Joon and Jin-Tae are involved in a mild hit-and-run accident. A Mercedes clocks Do-Joon on the street and speeds away. Jin-Tae becomes hellbent on revenge, so they follow the car to a local golf course. Jin-Tae smashes the mirror of the Mercedes. They ambush the golf cart and have a brawling fight with the men in the sand. The police get involved. Mother is horrified.

This is one of the tricks of Mother, which manages to startle and surprise without feeling tricky or clever. It seems that the film may be about the boys getting their revenge on the guys who ran them down. Mother follows that path. Then takes a turn.

A local high school girl is murdered. Her body is hung over the railing on a roof, for the populace to find the next morning. It is a small community, not used to such violence, and everyone is shocked. Do-Joon was the last to see her (he has followed her through the narrow streets after a night out with Jin-Tae), and so he is arrested for murder.

Mother knows he didn't do it. The police are convinced they have their man. Mother launches her own investigation. She, at first, focuses on Jin-Tae, the "bad seed" influence on her innocent son. There is an absolute masterpiece of a sequence, reminiscent of Sudden Fear, when Mother goes to Jin-Tae's flimsy abode, and searches his closet for clues. She finds a golf club with a red stain on it that looks like blood. During her search, Jin-Tae returns home, with his girlfriend, and she hides in the closet. There are shots where you see Hye-ja Kim's terrified eyes peeking through the curtains, calling to mind every film noir ever made (or a shaft of light falling across Joan Crawford's face in Sudden Fear). Bong Joon-Ho knows how to build suspense. He chooses his shots very carefully. We see through the closet-curtains, getting glimpses of Jin-Tae and his girlfriend making love. We are then out in the apartment, and in the foreground we see the making love going on, but in the background, we can see the gleaming eyeballs peering out through the curtain. It is a nervewrackingly unbearable sequence. After sex, Jin-Tae and his girlfriend pass out, and Mother takes her chance to escape. She has the incriminating golf club in her hand, and she tiptoes through the room, at a deadly slow pace (the floor squeaks), and at any moment she could be discovered. At one point, her foot knocks over a bottle of water, and it spills, the gurgling sound filling the room. Jin-Tae does not wake up. We see Mother's face, looking down in horror, and we then see what she sees: a small pool of water, spreading outwards, moving towards Jin-Tae's dangling fingers. Bong Joon-Ho, in true Hitchcockian suspense style, closes in on the approach of that water to the fingers, which will most certainly wake him up. We are at ground-level, the fingers enormous in the frame, with a thin glimmering line of water approaching in the distance.

This is solid filmmaking. This is a director in charge of his effects, who understands what audiences need. There's fun in his shot-choices, creativity, but it is all means to an end. He doesn't set up shots to call attention to themselves unless it is necessary (similar to the giant crane shot in Notorious, with the camera coming down from the balcony into microscopic closeup on Ingrid Bergman's hand: a shot that demands to be noticed, a stunner - but it is only because the STORY demands it at that point, not that Hitchcock was psyched to show his own cleverness). The creep of the water in Mother, coming towards the giant fingers in the foreground, is an attention-getter, but is is also emotional: it shows the horror of Mother's point of view. What will happen if Jae Tin wakes up? All is lost, all is lost ... her panicked mindset is IN that shot. It is one of Bong's many gifts as a director.

Mother is a film about a private investigation (Bong Joon-Ho covering, as he did in Memories of Murder the territory of police procedures and forensic evidence), headed by a single citizen, and the majority of the film shows Mother interviewing people who knew the dead girl, putting together a timeline of the night before, trying to build up a character study of the dead girl - because (as all good homicide detectives know) it is often the personality and lifestyle of the victim that holds the clue to who killed her. Mother follows every lead. She pays the kids at the high school who knew the dead girl to gossip about her, giving them coins to continue. She finds an important ally in Jae-Tin (once she gets over her suspicion).

The deceptions in the plot are part of the great joy of Mother, and the sucker-punches it provides (which are never in the realm of cheap "Gotcha" moments) is indicative of the fact that Bong Joon-Ho not only respects his audience, and expects that we want to be surprised and challenged, but also that he wants, above all else, to give us a great great ride. He does not disappoint.

And Hye-ja Kim, relentless, fearless, a bludgeoning force against the injustices of the system (but to what end? that is the question), turns in a performance for the ages. I was so frightened during one scene that my natural instinct was to shut my eyes to spare myself having to see what was coming. But then there was a moment of conscious decision: No, Sheila. Keep your eyes open. You are not going to want to miss her acting here.

And you won't want to miss it either.

In that moment, or in the film entire.

Love Crazy (1941); Dir. John Conroy

I miss marriage comedies. The 30s and 40s were full of them, and they shimmer with light and fun and crazy shenanigans, as two people who once loved each other enough to MARRY, tailspin into misunderstanding and hijinx. The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, all of the Thin Man movies - These are not the movies of the 1950s, where marriage is captured in all its domestic claustrophobia (although it's presented as a given that it is GOOD). This is marriage on the verge of catastrophic collapse, yet it's handled always with humor and mania. These movies make marriage seem fun. It's totally not the trend now, at all, to focus on a married couple, at least not in the way these old films did. If the plot of a movie involves a married couple, it is more often than not dealing with serious issues of infidelity, long-buried secrets, a body in the basement - Marriage is now serious serious business. Leading UP to marriage isn't, which is why we still have "romantic comedies" by the truck-load (although I rarely find modern romantic comedies funny at all - they've lost the touch) - but once you get married, boom, things get serious.

Not so in the 30s and 40s when we had Cary Grant and Irene Dunne battling it out in movie after movie, and Myrna Loy and William Powell, shimmering and laughing at one another. These movies are true advertisements for marriage, actually. Who doesn't want to be part of those couples? With their fabulous apartments and Manhattans before dinner, and going out to crazy whirling nightclubs? A fantasy, yes, but there are times when I prefer the fantasy. This is not Tracy and Hepburn. Their marriage-movies often deal with the fact that Hepburn needs to be tamed in some way, tamped down. Tracy is usually right in those films, and Hepburn needs to be taught some lessons. Enjoyable as all of that may be, they stand apart from the other "marriage comedies" with a more screwball aspect. Irene Dunne showing up unannounced at her husband's family gathering? Pretending to be someone else, dressed in a flapper dress, and then accusing one of the snooty people there of stealing her purse? All of this just to embarrass her husband, Cary Grant? If Hepburn pulled a stunt like that with Tracy, it would backfire. But Cary Grant, so dignified, so proper, so soulless in the beginning of Awful Truth, is putty in her hands. He splutters with embarrassment and anger, and she laughs in his face. Human relationships are NUTS. "Calming down" and "settling down" may be a worthy goal, but try to make Carole Lombard or Cary Grant or Irene Dunne "settle down". Not an easy task.

That's the spark in marriage comedies. Because the couple are already together, we assume a level of intimacy between them, it's already present. They've slept together, fought, they brush teeth next to each other ... it is that casual everyday intimacy that creates the tension in these movies, a strange combo, but a killer one at that.

The modern Mr. and Mrs. Smith, famous now, I suppose, for breaking up Jennifer Aniston's happy home, is a bit of a throwback, one of the reasons why I think it's such a blast. The couple SPARS. Literally, but also linguistically. They love each other, are hot for each other, but they also drive each other insane. Typical 1930s married-couple behavior. Marriage is a sacred institution, my ass. That's part of the problem. Lighten up, Francis. Let's have some FUN with the institution. The couple, who drift apart in the marriage comedies, always come back together, usually in the very last SECOND of the film, so that we don't see the reconciliation, the credits roll, and our imaginations fly off the handle, gloriously. So yes, marriage is once again triumphant - (this is not always the case in the pre-Code movies which are much darker) - but you can feel the filmmakers and screenwriters putting off the inevitable as long as possible. Domestic bliss may be lovely for those who live it, but there's nothing more boring to WATCH onscreen.

A little-seen modern movie that is a "marriage comedy" of the true old school is Nadine, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger. Now if we lived in a righteous world where things happened as they are supposed to happen, then the Hollywood powers-that-be would have realized what they had in that pairing, and put them in movie after movie together. They finally worked again in Door in the Floor, a terrific film, and they are both great in it, but it's an example of a MODERN marriage movie - all unhappiness and torment and broken dreams. Not that there's anything wrong with that, in and of itself, but watch those two spar and kiss and break up and make up in Nadine, and you will realize what a lost opportunity it was. They are married, but separated. She is a bombshell in a red dress with a Southern accent. He is a vaguely dumb good ol' boy who doesn't want to grow up. She had some erotic photos taken of her, because she's an idiot, and they get into the wrong hands, and suddenly the two of them, enraged at their marriage breaking up, find themselves on the run. The plot is just an excuse, though. An excuse to revel in the chemistry and humor of the two leads. Because they once were married, it gives the film a different feeling - than if they were two single people thrown into these circumstances. Scenes are filled with more import and backstory automatically. They're basically hiding from criminals, and they can't stop bickering about "You ALWAYS do this ..." "Why do you ALWAYS do this ..." as bullets fly over their heads, and they escape from a dilapidated building by crawling across a ladder 5 stories up. Nadine may have come out in 1987, but it feels like it came out in 1939. Highly recommended.

The reigning King and Queen of marriage comedies were Myrna Loy and William Powell, and they were first paired in Manhattan Melodrama (so famously featured in Michael Mann's Public Enemies - it was the movie Dillinger went to before biting the dust in the alley next to the Biograph), which was exactly what it said it was: a melodrama, a three-hanky weepie (I dare you to watch that final scene without feeling a little something-something gathering in your eyeball), and while there was obviously chemistry between Loy and Powell, having Clark Gable there as the vibrant third guy complicated their essential bond.

Obviously, the studio knew what it had in Loy and Powell, so they were put in film after film after film together - it is one of the greatest acting teams of all time. They always play essentially the same people, but if it ain't broke, why fix it? One of the things I absolutely adore about watching them together (and this was present in Manhattan Melodrama as well) is how much they seem to enjoy each other. Not all men enjoy the company of women. They need to deal with them, because they are attracted to them, but they don't like hanging out with them. Clark Gable has a bit of that. It makes him a devastating leading man, because when he finally falls in love, it hits him harder than other men, because he resists it more. But Cary Grant, as gorgeous as he was, always seemed like a good companion - like he actually enjoyed women, even when they were driving him batshit crazy. He didn't have contempt for them, or if he did, he used it very subtly and specifically (his contempt in Only Angels Have Wings comes from having been hurt in the past - it's not generalized contempt, like Clark Gable often has - or Spencer Tracy). But William Powell is the pal to end all pals. The way he is with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama ... from the second they meet, you can feel him thinking, "Wow. This girl is a hoot. Who is she?" She cracks him up. He enjoys her presence. And yet he is not an un-sexual man. He's not neutered. Watch him in My Man Godfrey, and you'll see a valid and hot leading man.

He's not AS improbable a leading man (surface-wise) as Humphrey Bogart, who was short, balding, and LISPED, for God's sake, but Powell was not an obvious choice either for leads in romantic films. I mean, look at him. He's handsome in kind of a dapper way, but he looks strictly middle-aged (even as a young man he did), with phony teeth, and thinning hair, and maybe starting to get a bit portly round the middle. He's not Clark Gable. He's not Cary Grant. He got his start playing villains. Naturally. Because people who aren't classically good-looking are obviously evil to the core. Humphrey Bogart had the same trajectory, even though he came from a pretty chi-chi background, full of art and tennis courts and tea services. But he LOOKED kind of ... off. So he always played a bad guy. It would take a couple of imaginative casting choices to give these men the chance to show their stuff, as leading men. The risks clearly paid off tenfold.

These guys are valid leading men. Who knew? I love careers like theirs because there is an element of luck and accident to it. Someone had to look at them and think, "Hm. Wouldn't it be interesting to put Bogart with Ingrid Bergman in a romance?" Where he doesn't play a criminal or the Peter Lorre part - but the LEAD. That's a leap. It seems so obvious now, so inevitable, but it certainly wasn't at the time.

Same with William Powell. But watch his first encounter with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama, and you can see the sparks just flying. These are not just sexual sparks, but intellectual-kinship sparks, sense of humor sparks - They are so much fun to watch together because of this dynamic, which cannot be faked or pretended. William Powell, in his real life, had some pretty babealicious girlfriends (and wives) - Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard, to name a few - and he's one of those people who just gets more and more attractive the more you look at him. He was probably a blast. These were funny funny women, and he exudes the qualities of a man who loves funny women. Not every man does, you know.

Love Crazy, from 1941, is a marriage comedy that has, at its center, the craziness of marriage, its precarious nature, even when you love each other - and what do you do when circumstances beyond your control (a busybody mother, an old girlfriend, the cops, no less) enter into your marriage? What happens when trust is destroyed? It may all be based on a misunderstanding, but while you're in that maelstrom you can't see that. William Powell and Myrna Loy play Steve and Susan Ireland, a couple about to celebrate their 4th year of wedded bliss. They have a big ritual planned, something they do every year, where they re-live the night they got married, and it involves a 4 mile walk, and a row on the river, and then dinner at midnight, and then .... lights out. They plan everything down to the minute, and have their maid (because, you know, these two always have a maid) ready to serve them dinner at midnight on the dot. It's all a little bit OCD and their opening scene with one another, as they get ready for their night out, is so fun and whimsical. They are still hot for one another. She sits at her dressing table, getting ready, and he attacks her and they end up lying on the floor, laughing and kissing. It's beautiful, their dynamic is so fresh. At one point, she stands in the window, looking out, and he says to her, "It should be against the law for you to stand in the moonlight like that."

But the course of true love never runs smoothly, even when you've got wedding rings on your fingers. Susan's nosy annoying mother (played by the great Florence Bates, great-grandmother to my good friend Rachel) shows up, completely oblivious to the fact that they want to be alone on their anniversary. She sends Steve down to the lobby on a quick errand.

As he returns to the apartment via elevator, he runs into an old flame, Isabel Grayson (played by Gail Patrick, an actress I love, she who was so funny and good in My Man Godfrey), and she seems a bit, well, forward. She's married now too, to a painter, but her marriage doesn't seem to have "taken". She happens to have moved into the apartment just below Steve's. They ooh and ahh over the coincidence, and then tragedy strikes. The elevator jams between floors. The doorman struggles to fix it. Steve begins to panic. What will his wife think?

It all begins with that damn elevator getting stuck. The three of them (Steve, Isabel, and the doorman) climb up through the roof of the elevator, and attempt to pry open the door to the floor. Steve hangs there, his chin on the floor, and then suddenly, the door closes - and at the same moment, the elevator shifts back into gear and plummets down through the shaft, leaving him hanging there, as the doorman and Isabel crouch on the roof of the elevator. It's an incredible shot. You look down the shaft and see the elevator disappearing, with two figures standing on top of it, as William Powell hangs there, his HEAD caught between the door. So if you were on that floor, and you walked by, you would see a man's head ONLY, sticking out between the elevator doors. This is a visual gag, hard to describe, but it is so well-conceived, so well-done, that I was howling watching it. The elevator suddenly returns, and Steve, his head still caught, is moved up, and then back down, and up and then back down, his head careening up and down through the slot in the elevator doors. He is terrified. He has no idea what is happening. He is panicked. I am laughing out loud as I type this.

Love Crazy is so funny, so consistently, that I actually did a spit-take alone in my apartment last night, just THINKING about one of the moments.

So this begins the long journey of Steve's anniversary night. It is the first error. Steve's second error is that Isabel takes him into her apartment to recover from his terrible ordeal, hanging in the elevator shaft, and she turns on the hots for him. He resists, but he is already, to some degree, a broken man, due to the craziness of what had just happened. He tries to get away from her. She starts to tickle him. William Powell, a frayed mess of a man, rolls around on the couch, laughing uproariously as she tickles him, but it is a terrible and desperate sound. He finally gets away.

He returns to his apartment to find Myrna Loy dressed for dinner and wondering where the hell he has been.

To describe more of this hilarious movie would be to ruin it. Suffice it to say, there are some belly laughs of the kind you really don't see nowadays in modern movies. The elevator scene, for one - who the hell thought that up - and then to make it not only clear, it is totally obvious what is going on at all times, and it's a very complicated sequence, but also funny? It works so well. Then there is a new rug placed in the slippery foyer of their apartment, and one by one, people wipe out when they walk on it. Pratfalls. Give me more pratfalls in modern movies. People falling on their ass for no other reason than it is funny to watch people fall. I would find myself forgetting about the rug for a while, (and of course they never just say, "This is crazy", and roll up the dangerous rug) and then, once again, someone would step one foot onto it, and go flying into the air, and I would erupt into laughter yet again. A pratfall is not a tough sell. I would like more of them, please.

Myrna Loy finds herself truly distrusting her husband. It looks really really bad. It looks like he spent the evening in Isabel Grayson's apartment. It also looks like he is lying about it. This is devastating news for her. Powell pleads with her that this is all "circumstantial evidence" that doesn't tell the whole story, but his wife is firm. She won't be conned. She has no idea how she will ever trust him again.

Divorce proceedings begin. And Powell is advised that if he "acts crazy", the divorce settlement will have to be put off, because he is not in his right mind. So begins the second act of the film, just as hilarious as the first, with Powell behaving in a lunatic manner, eating his tie as though it is a piece of pizza, and at one point, he is wrapped in a sheet like a toga, trying to chase a cockatoo out onto a branch, and the sheet falls off and he plummets, stark naked, into the middle of a garden party below.

Most of these visual gags are handled with surgical specificity and perfect timing, which is just what is needed for this kind of stuff. Anything extraneous, or too messy, and you wouldn't get the joke.

Steve has an appointment with the "Lunacy Commission", hired to weigh in on his sanity. I loved the big sign on the door: LUNACY COMMISSION, which, to me, is a metaphor for the entire world portrayed in Love Crazy. The experts (who all have German accents, of course) decide, merely from the shape of his cranial lobes, that he is schizophrenic, so he is placed in a mental institution.

There is also a "world class bow and arrow man", named Ward Willoughby, played by Jack Carson, in a very very funny performance, who also lives in the Ireland's apartment building, and spends most of the film in his T-shirt because he "needs his torso free when he shoots his arrows". I mean, come on.

Through a very funny scene of mistaken identity and incorrect assumptions, Ward gets roped into the Ireland's marital mess. He has the funniest line in the film. "WERE THEY PYGMIES?" he shouts at William Powell (only he doesn't know it's William Powell, because by that point, William Powell is dressed in drag, and posing as his own "sister").

With a consistently laugh-out-loud funny script by William Ludwig, Charles Lederer and David Hertz, Love Crazy is not just its gags, although the gags come fast and furious, with people tangled up in nets hanging from trees, with people falling into swimming pools, and forgetting, repeatedly, that the rug in the foyer is slippery, so down they all keep going like ninepins - the script is also razor-sharp, smart, and witty. In an early scene, Steve is trying to reassure Susan about Isabel, that she is now married, and no threat to their marriage. But Susan knows about Isabel, and her wiles, and is having none of it. Steve says, "Susan, she has a husband!" and Susan coos, "Oh! Whose husband has she got?"

Of course, Myrna Loy and William Powell must end up together. It is the only thing that will right the world on its already wacko axis. As long as they are apart, nothing, but nothing, will make any sense.

Everyone in this movie starts out relatively normal, and everyone, by the end, is stark staring mad.

Because that's what love does to us all. That's what marriage is. A crazy-making proposition. It drives people out of their gourds.

And not one of us would pass a test given by the LUNACY COMMISSION when we are in the throes of love. Not one of us. And thank God for that.

The elevator scene (it comes at around the 4 minute mark):

Love Before Breakfast (1936); Dir. Walter Lang

Carole Lombard plays ditzy and impulsive, but she doesn't play dumb. One of her greatest gifts as a comedienne is her craftiness, how well she creates cunning selfish women, heedless, manipulative, who do not know their own minds (or, to put it more accurately, lead from the mind, and ignore the heart). It's most fun to watch her do battle with herself, expressions of annoyance and panic and "A-ha!" moments flicking across her beautiful face. She was un-tameable. Lombard was able to hit her stride in her short career, finding her rightful place in the world of screwball, but there were certainly some bumps along the way. She is so stunningly beautiful, a perfect face, really, blonde and porcelain skin and huge eyes ... But when she was cast as "the beautiful girl", as she inevitably was early on, her performances often feel artificial. She doesn't know who she is in conventional material. It put a lid on her. She suffers more under unimaginative direction than other actresses do. It was Howard Hawks (and others) who helped take that lid off and release that zany girl, who realized that she needed to be always on the verge of either a panic attack, a temper tantrum, or some horribly crafty scheme to get what she wants. Traditional female roles were not for her. One other thing about Lombard, and my only evidence for this is watching her performances: she is incapable of phoniness. When she's in a bad project, not right for her, she is bad too. She can't "pretend". She can't stoop down to bad material. She goes down with the ship. Either she was totally natural as her crazy self, or she was almost invisible, stilted, unsure of where to put her energy.

Garson Kanin in his gossipy book Hollywood writes:

Has there every been such a laugh? It had the joyous sound of pealing bells. She would bend over, slap her perfect calf, or the floor, or a piece of furniture. She would sink into a chair or to the ground. She would throw her head back. And you would be riveted by that neck. That throat.

Lombard, more than other actresses, really needed a vehicle. Her talent was very specific. Of course every actress needs a break of some kind, to be seen in a project that heightens her visibility, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. It could have gone one of two ways with Lombard: She could have been pigeonholed as a pretty young starlet, and she would have had a short career, placed in weepy melodramas, merely because she was so beautiful to look at. Or, it could have gone the way it actually went. There was no in-between with her. She could have been in the biggest picture in the world, but if it didn't "get" her, it wouldn't have been a "vehicle". Not every actress is so specific, so in NEED of the right type of part, and director, and script. It's really actually quite precarious when you think about it. I think Julia Roberts is a similar type of actress, in the fact that she needed a vehicle. She could not be strapped down in conventional parts. She needed to be let GO, which Garry Marshall did in the highly improvisational Pretty Woman. Think about it: Before Pretty Woman came out, she was making Sleeping With the Enemy, and before that, she had been in ensemble dramas, where she was fine, often good, but no doubt about it: she had to be a giant star. She just doesn't fit in otherwise. My impression of the difference is in someone like Gwyneth Paltrow, who had stardom thrust upon her, by the Weinstein Brothers, basically - but who had been in independent films up until then, and could have had a very satisfying career as a character actress, or even a stage actress (following in her mother's footsteps). As a matter of fact, I think Paltrow would be more suited to that kind of career, she would seem more comfortable in her own skin than she does now. But Roberts? No. If Pretty Woman hadn't happened, (or something similar), she would have been stuck in a nothing career. This is my sense of her, anyway. Carole Lombard is a similar case. Without the screwballs, nobody would remember her name, as talented and wonderful as she is. She is not limited. She could do dramatic parts as well. But she is a persona, a natural STAR, and she needed the vehicle, she needed to be steered into the limelight, and once she was there, it was so obvious that she should never leave.

Love Before Breakfast, from 1936, is quite uneven, with two uninteresting men in the lead roles (Preston Foster and Cesar Romero), who play rivals for Lombard's affections. Lombard was so feisty and strong, so individual, that she needed to be man-handled a bit, that's part of the fun of it, but these are not the guys to do it.

Preston Foster plays Scott Miller, a successful businessman (so successful that he can buy the oil company of his rival for Lombard's heart, just so he can send the rival off to Japan), who hangs out with a snooty silly Countess in his spare time, but really has the hots for Kay Colby (Carole Lombard). He pursues Lombard like crazy, even though she is already engaged to Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero, better than Foster here, in his part). Bill is sent off to Japan, leaving Kay unmoored, so Scott moves in for the kill, following her around town, buying her drinks, popping up everywhere. There's something missing in their dynamic, as actors, although Lombard does her best. She is torn between two loves, and very funny in how much WORK she puts in to her own denial. She loves BILL, not SCOTT, she is sure of it. She finds Bill amusing, but she is only interested in his money, or so she says, and she jumps through great fiery hoops to keep up her attitude of scorn and condescension. Preston Foster is a bit stuffy, he doesn't have the right arrogant attitude for Scott, a man with such grand presumptions that he moves people around like chess pieces, and expects to be thanked for it. Clark Gable would have been maddeningly good in the role. You would have wanted to wring his neck. It also would have been sizzling hot, as these screwballs always should be. You should be dying for the two to leap into the sack.

In one scene in a nightclub, a fight breaks out between every male patron there, and Lombard gets stuck in the middle of it. The lights are low, and the melee is insane, and in the midst of it all, Scott punches Lombard in the eye, giving her a shiner. Oh, the comedic possibilities in this, that sadly do not come to fruition. It is automatically amusing to see Lombard staring at herself in the mirror with an enormous black eye. It is also funny to think of the man she loves socking her one. But it's a thread that isn't really followed, or maxed to its potential. It's sort of left there. Obviously it's a good enough image that it made it to the poster (a poster I now have on my wall), but what a lost opportunity. She goes to the beauty parlor to have her eye covered up, she wears a hat tilted over her face, and that's the end of it. A true screwball would have realized what it had in that situation and milked the sucker until we were falling off the couch.

There are a couple of great scenes where Lombard gets to show her stuff. One is a costume ball (her costume below the jump. She does the entire scene in that get-up, and it gets funnier and funnier the more you look at it), where she sets up Scott to dance with a visiting Southern belle, and she tells both of them (secretly) that the other one is deaf and "you have to shout" at them to be heard. So poor Scott and the visiting Southern woman needlessly shout banalities at one another on the dance floor, as Lombard, in that crazy costume, laughs until she almost falls down on the sidelines. Kanin was right. She laughs, and we laugh. It is irresistible. Especially in that totally outrageous outfit.

Kay and her mother have a Japanese maid named Yuki, and there's a very funny scene when Yuki reads the tea leaves for Kay. Kay, still convinced she's in love with Bill, not Scott, hovers over Yuki, asking her anxious questions about who she sees, who is her date, is there a man beside her ... and Lombard, always funniest when she is most serious, listens with an urgency that is very comedic, her face showing the roller-coaster of her emotions, second by second. When she doesn't get the answer she wants to hear, she becomes dejected and cynical and Yuki tries to cheer her up. Yuki tells Kay that it is obvious she is "in love with Mr. Miller". Kay balks at this. Yuki says in her Japanese accent, "In Japan, when a Japanese girl loves a Japanese man, she says to him, 'I love you, Mr. Miller', and everything right away fine." Lombard says, disgruntled, "Yeah. Everything right away great. The Japanese girl is shoved around for the rest of her life." The comedy is in the disgruntled manner in which Lombard says "everything right away great", which is, for me, the funniest moment in the movie.

There's also a very well-written proposal scene, between Scott and Kay, where he presents her with three enormous engagement rings. Kay is beleaguered by now, beaten down, and she accepts the proposal, but listen to this dialogue:

Scott: You'll be sorry to hear my feelings haven't changed. I'm still going to marry you.
Kay: You'd better be careful. One of these days I might take you up on that.
Scott: Couldn't make it today, could you?
Kay: If I did it would only be for your money.
Scott: I never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Kay: You want me anyway?
Scott: Definitely.
Kay: All right. But this isn't going to be any Taming of the Shrew, you know. I'm not going to come crawling after you've broken my spirit.
Scott: I'll take my chance.
Kay: It's a long one.
Scott: I like 'em that way.
Kay: I guess that settles it.
Scott: Oh, no, there should be a kiss to seal the bargain.
Kay: Is that necessary?
Scott: It's pretty standard.
Kay: All right.
Scott: Can you spare it?
Kay: I think so.
They kiss.
Kay: Well, goodbye.
Scott: Oh, no, there's one more detail.
Kay: What happens now?
Scott: Come on, I'll show you.
Kay: I warn you, I won't sign anything without a lawyer.
Scott: You won't have to sign a thing. Just one minute.
He takes out a small box.
Kay: What's this?
Scott: The customary engagement ring.
Kay: Oh, you were all prepared.
Scott: Oh, yes, yes, indeed. Well prepared.
He takes out two more boxes.
Kay: When did you get these?
Scott: The day after you turned me down.
Kay: Sure of yourself, weren't you.
Scott: Just a gambler.
Kay: A gambler who knew he'd win. The fact that I don't love you doesn't spoil your victory. Well, I'm glad we understand each other. Which one of these little knick-knacks would you like me to wear?
Scott: Oh, they're all for you. I thought you might like to change off.
Kay: How romantic.
Scott: Now that we're engaged, I hope we'll see each other occasionally.
Kay: Whatever is customary, Mr. Miller.

Lombard plays that great dialogue with the perfect amount of exhaustion and annoyance, but imagining Scott's dialogue in the mouth of Clark Gable, as opposed to Preston Foster, makes me ache to see THAT scene. It falls a bit flat, as is. Again, she is funny, and specific, but without the right scene partner, she doesn't have anything to buck up against.

But her talent is always operating. She's on a sailboat with Bill, her ex-fiance who has returned from Japan, and she is annoyed because Scott is on a boat across the bay, and naturally, things are not going as she wants them to go. Lombard is perpetually cranky throughout this film, she feels dominated, and afraid of more domination - she senses that Scott would demand something more of her than she would have to give (like her heart, like love), and she wriggles out of those chains the second they are on her. Bill (Cesar Romero) is not a bad guy, but he's had it with being used as a pawn in the love-game between the other two. At one point, during the argument on the sailboat, Carole lies on a couch below-deck, annoyed, and he pops a cork out of a champagne bottle, and it startles her. It's one of those subtle sometimes unnoticed pieces of behavior that Lombard does like nobody else. It's not even made into a "bit" - she doesn't scream, there is no dialogue referencing it - it's just Lombard, her comedic sensibility tuned in, ALWAYS, to the potential in every moment - and the slight jump she gives, startling her out of her depression, is hysterical: it is these moments that I treasure most from Lombard. It never stops with her. She is a runaway freight train. Hurtling into the reality of every moment, all pistons going, and she vibrates with life and feeling and responsiveness.

Other actresses would have missed the cork-pop, it wouldn't even have occurred to them to decide to be scared of the sound - and that's what separates the men from the boys in an acting career. The women from the girls. Lombard from everyone else.

Angel Baby (1995); Dir. Michael Rymer

From the first moment Harry sets eyes on Kate, he is in love. She is intense, with dark eye-pencil lining her eyes, and strawberry blonde hair. Harry tells his brother later, "I worship her." But he hasn't spoken to her yet. He's shy. Also, small detail: they are both schizophrenics, and their first meeting is at one of the group sessions they have to attend at the clinic where they are both outpatients. Kate lives in a youth hostel, and Harry is staying with his brother and his brother's family.

One day, Kate gets on a bus, carrying a big bag. Harry follows her. Kate realizes she is being followed, and moves to the front of the bus. Harry follows her. The bus comes to a stop, and Kate suddenly flees out the back door. Harry races after her. He chases her through a park and she finally stops and confronts him, "What are you doing? Why are you following me?" He is too shy to answer. She urgently needs to get back on a bus. She races back to the sidewalk, and the bus has just left. She panics, dropping her bag, and screaming at Harry. "I needed to be on that bus. I need a television!!!" He, madly in love with this strange girl, grabs her hand and pulls her off with him. They run across a bridge towards the city. It is dusk. Harry has a plan. He takes her to a store with TVs on in the windows. Wheel of Fortune has just come on. Kate crouches on the sidewalk, taking out her journal, and she starts to watch the show, and write things down. She tells him that she gets messages from Wheel of Fortune from "Astral", her "guardian angel." Kate glances up at Harry and barks, "And don't you dare laugh at me." He shakes his head, he won't, he won't laugh. And he doesn't.

Movies about mental illness are very difficult to get right. Often I sense the ghoulish delight the actors have, in getting to play someone "crazy", and that's insulting and not at all what I want to watch. Or the problem is with the script. Scripts often choose mental illness as some kind of metaphor - for enlightenment, sensitivity, a poetic connection with the spheres of humanity - and that's equally as insulting, to anyone who has struggled with mental illness (enlightenment? are you cracked?) or who knows someone who has struggled. It's a sickness, not a poetic sensitivity, although I do realize the lines are sometimes blurred. Denial is very powerful, and nobody wants to admit they are sick. James Joyce's daughter was schizophrenic, and he was in denial for years about it. He tried to see her as "poetic", and "in touch", and truly gifted - but he finally had to admit that she was just a very very sick girl. Now that is an interesting phenomenon, and quite common when you are dealing with mental illness - denial, not wanting to believe, etc., and also confusion as in: How on earth do you fix what is happening in my head? What will happen to me when you put me on meds? Will I vanish? But far too often, scripts do not deal honestly with that dilemma. A Beautiful Mind tried to make John Nash's delusions manifest, so that we are in his world, we see everything through his eyes. That was the only part of that movie that worked for me. The rest was a manifesto on how love can cure schizophrenia. Uh-huh. Sure it can.

Angel Baby makes none of these errors, and the result is a beautiful and harrowing film about two people in love, who struggle openly with their illnesses, and who try to make a go of it as a couple, against the advice of everyone in their lives.

Written and directed by Michael Rymer, Angel Baby may sound, on the face of it, like a made-for-television movie, but it's not. It's a powerful film, featuring two spectacular performances by John Lynch (a favorite of mine) as Harry and Jacqueline McKenzie as Kate. Both actors won the plum prizes that year from the Australian Film Institute. The actors surrounding this couple is awesome as well, especially Colin Friels as Morris, Harry's brother, and Deborah-Lee Furness as Louise, Morris' wife. Angel Baby really gets the ravages of mental illness, and how it impacts entire families, the tragedy of it, the fear of it, how it tests everyone.

Harry was once a software programmer with IBM, but his illness has made him incapable of work. He has tried to commit suicide. He lives with his brother and his brother's family, and there are beautiful scenes of him interacting with Sam, his nephew who is about 5 years old. Sam is afraid of the monsters that are in his room. His parents try to talk him out of the reality of monsters, but Harry understands being afraid. He understands that monsters can SEEM so real that it doesn't matter if they are ACTUALLY real or not. He takes Sam up to bed, and writes a "magic circle" around Sam's bed with a piece of chalk, and tells Sam that as long as that circle is there, he will be safe from all monsters.

Harry and Kate's love affair heats up immediately. They devour one another in scenes passionate and raw. Harry has Kate over for dinner at his brother's house. She is overdressed, in a skimpy orange dress. She nervously smokes. She refuses to use a fork, and tries to cut her meat with a spoon. For reasons only known to her. McKenzie is so damn good, because she manages to portray an obsessive person, a person who must do things in a certain way, and in a certain order, in order to maintain her already fragile equilibrium. Morris' wife asks Kate how things are going with Harry, and Kate replies, freely, "He's the best lover I've ever had. He's got a sideways move that rocks my world."

Angel Baby is a love story, with a tragic underbelly to it, a ticking time bomb of illness, that gives the entire thing an almost unbearable tension, so even the happy scenes take on a fatalistic "this is how it once was" feeling. The colors in the early part of the film are warm and glowing, golds and reds and oranges, and slowly, as the film goes on, the colors start to bleach out. There are white-outs between scenes, not black dissolves, but the screen bleaching to white, which suggests, horribly, the fractured mentality of the two leads, as they begin to lose themselves in their delusions. None of this would work if the romance were portrayed as anything other than an intense love story. If Harry and Kate were played as an amalgamation of twitches and obsessions, it would be condescending. They cling to one another - literally and symbolically - knowing the sword of Damocles hangs over their union - but they are so happy together, so in sync ... shouldn't that make a difference?

It does and it doesn't.

They move in together, and there are funny scenes where they look through apartments at the realtors and add up the numbers of the addresses and apartment numbers, and reject places because they are not numerically calming. Lynch and McKenzie glance at one another, and you can see their eyes adding up columns of numbers silently. "Apartment 11 - so that's 2 - and what's the floor again? It's on the 6th floor? So that's not good ..." Their numerical system is not made explicit, but it works on them repeatedly, and causes much anxiety, limiting their movement. Bus numbers, dates, apartment numbers - there is a vast interconnected system out there, and if they can just align themselves correctly with the messages they are being given, from Astral, they will be safe.

Kate becomes pregnant. She decides to go off her anti-psychotics, for the safety of the baby. Harry, in an act of solidarity, goes off his as well, and they sit over the toilet, flushing them down, the bright green pills whirling down the drain, reminiscent of the image of the wheel of fortune on TV, incessantly spinning, colors over colors, telling them the future. The inevitable occurs. They both begin to lose it. Things begin to spiral.

John Lynch, always good, is outstanding here. His transformation, from shy bumbling ill man at the beginning, to passionate funny loving partner, is breathtaking. It gives him so far to fall, and you feel the loss of that happy self, the same way he must feel the loss in his lucid moments. He has one scene in a public bathroom that is so powerful it roars out of the middle of the film a howl of loss and pain so unforgettable and wrenching it will leave you out of breath. He pounds at the side of his head, screaming to the ceiling, wanting to kill that illness inside of him, wanting to kill it forever. It is an incredible moment, burned on my head in indelible ink. Acting as good as it gets.

Jacqueline McKenzie has been doing superb work for a couple of decades now, and this is the role of a lifetime. She is heartbreaking, a beautiful funny spirit, knowing in her bones how to cheer up her boyfriend (she stands on the edge of a bridge, flapping her arms in imitation of the gulls overhead, cawing at the top of her lungs), and she understands her own illness intimately. She knows what will happen when she goes off her meds. But the baby must be safe and free from complications. If it means she loses it for a bit, she is willing to take that risk. Illness of this sort, however, is a Leviathan from the deep, and it will take you DOWN. McKenzie charts this progression in a masterful way. There is a scene in a dark mall, when she has a bad episode, and she crouches in an abandoned restaurant. Harry finds her there, and takes her in his arms. She doesn't just hold him back. She clings, almost trying to climb up onto him, merge with him totally. However close he is holding her, it is not enough. She knows it. She knows what is coming. When the madness has finally overcome her like a tsunami, it is as though the very contours of her face have changed. The soul is no longer in the eyes. Only the madness. It has co-opted her completely.

Michael Rymer has created a beautiful romantic mood here, shot through with whimsy and humor - their apartment is like a big playpen, with collages of words and numbers pasted on the wall, little shrines, and banks of candles, and colorful clothes hanging up inside - and the omnipresent Wheel of Fortune on in the background of every scene. The movie is funny. There is hope. While the hope is mainly embodied by the two main characters, who know who they are, and know they are in love, Harry's brother (played by Colin Friels) is such an important element of the story. He knows how this will all probably end. He has lived with his brother for a long time. But he hopes. He hopes it will be okay. He is kind to Kate, even with her social awkwardness and sudden bursts of aggression. He is an old hand at dealing with a psychotic person. He is terrific, and his character here is a potent and poignant reminder of how much is lost with an illness such as schizophrenia. Harry and Kate do not (no matter how much they try) live in a bubble where only they exist. They have people who care for them, who hope for them too. The tension between Harry's brother and his wife comes from this sense of loyalty towards his brother. How much longer will they have to put their own lives on hold to deal with the tailspinning illness of his brother? But when do you say "No more"? How can you?

Love is about embracing the unknown, illness or no. It requires trust in the future, an acceptance of uncertainty. Are you the one? I don't know ... are YOU the one? Not knowing how it will all turn out, and yet acting anyway, is an essential part of falling in love. Harry and Kate already accept that much is out of their control. They did not choose to be mentally ill. They hate the drugs, but accept the domination, knowing the consequences. Here, falling in love is the wild card it is for all of us. How will it turn out? Will we be okay? Will my heart get broken? Are you the one? Are you the one? Angel Baby understands this on a level more intensely than other movies that cover the same territory.

Harry and Kate stand on the edge of the bridge, in the golden light of sunset, fearful of what will happen with their baby, fearful of how they will survive, afraid of the madness coming again ... knowing what that is, what that will mean ... and they flap their arms like the birds, cawing, cawing, cawing ... reaching out to one another to grasp hands, worried, you can see it in their eyes, but also laughing. Laughing not because they are happy. But laughing because all they have is the moment. The right now.

Everything else is a leap of faith.

Unfortunately, Angel Baby is not on DVD. I had to buy a used VHS copy off of Amazon. I saw it during its original theatrical release.

Angel Baby was one of the best films of 1995.

The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

The blonde dame carries a gun. And .... she carries something even more deadly.

See my review of The Killer That Stalked New York at the indispensable Noir of the Week.

Starman

"I firmly believe in trying out your supposed opposite not only because (as they say) 'opposites attract,' but because you never know if you've actually found your twin."

In honor of Bud Cort's birthday, Kim Morgan has a beautiful piece up celebrating Harold and Maude.

I came to Harold and Maude late (compared to other fans): I was in my mid-20s, although I do remember hearing my parents talking and laughing about it once. My father loved the opening sequence of attempted suicides, and would start to laugh every time he even started talking about it. I think he felt the movie went downhill after that point, but boy did he love that first scene, with the dangling legs, etc. But it was one of those movies I just never got around to seeing in my teens. I just missed it, somehow.

I arrived in Chicago, and right around that time Harold and Maude was playing in a double feature at the Music Box with Play It Again, Sam. Ted was a new acquaintance, a theatre director, and he heard I had never seen it, so we made plans to go. He was so excited to "show me" Harold and Maude (you will find that to be true about fans of this film - they ACHE that you haven't seen it). I have told the story of that night many times, in many different contexts. We went to go see the two films with a guy I was dating (full story here - with Harold and Maude section included). It was the three of us. What ended up happening, over the course of the night, was that Ted and I became friends (I actually date the night we went to see Harold and Maude together as the birth of our friendship), and somewhere inside of me, that same night, I made the realization I would have to break up with the dude I was with.

It all happened because of my response to Harold and Maude, which was enormous, and LOUD. Everyone at the theatre was a fanatic of the film. There was cult-like atmosphere, and I was clearly the only newbie. I started laughing so hard at one point (the soldier with the one arm) and it got so out of hand that I had to get up and leave the theatre. I could not breathe. At the same time, I remember tears streaming down my face through most of the film, pain, love, grief, regret, gratitude.... Unforgettable night. Unforgettable movie.

Yes, a romance ended that night (sorry, sir - you should never "shush" a grown adult when she is laughing spontaneously at something that gives her joy. Especially not if you want to be kissing her later.) - but a friendship was born (Ted and I are still great friends today) - and Harold and Maude wove itself into the fabric of my life, for good.

Please go read Kim's piece.

And happy (belated) birthday, Mr. Cort.

Offside at BAM; Dir. Jafar Panahi

Last night I met my friend Felicia at BAM to see Offside, directed by incarcerated Iranian director (there hasn't been word of him in a couple of weeks). It is part of their Muslim Voices: The Female Perspective. I have written of Offside before and how much I love it, and Felicia had never seen it, so it was going to be a fun night. Underneath it for me was a solemnity, because watching a work by a man who is now in prison, for no reason other than his being an artist (I don't care what the "police" say about his other "crimes"), is a sobering experience. But that was the only sober part about the night, adding to the tension of the film, because Offside is NOT solemn or sober, although it takes on a serious topic (women not being allowed to go to soccer games in Iran) - it is kinetic, very funny, very talk-y - that's all everyone does - talk, argue, scream, debate - and unlike Panahi's The Circle, which also takes on the position of women in Iran, but in a much more serious and blunt way , Offside is, in its way, even more subversive, because it dares to laugh at the stupidity of the rules. It MOCKS the rules. There's a reason why Offside was never shown officially in Iran (although, through bootleg DVDs smuggled in from basically everywhere, it became Panahi's biggest hit, and his most widely seen film in Iran) - and that's because it's even worse to have the populace laugh in your face over the moronic rules.

The lead girl, played by Shayesteh Irani, has a long scene where she chats up one of the guards holding all the girls in a makeshift pen behind the soccer stadium. She senses that somewhere he is weak, that he doesn't believe in what he is doing, so she sets about to crack through. She works him. She doesn't openly berate him. She says, "Remember when Iran played Japan? How come Japanese women were allowed in the stadium?" He replies, "They are Japanese." Her face lights up. "Oh, so it's only because I was born in Iran that I can't go in?" She's toying with him, setting him up like a good prosecuting attorney. He tries to scoff at this. "No - it's because men and women can't sit together." She says, "But they sit together at the movies." He is a country-boy, not from Tehran (one of the underlying class commentaries in the film), and does not believe her. "They do? Where?" She has actually visited his home town and mentions that she went to the movies in his hometown and saw men and women sitting together. "No! It cannot be! Were they dressed like you?" (She is dressed as a boy.) She laughs. "Of course not. They were dressed as ladies." "Well, they must have been with their brothers or fathers, then." Another chink in the armor, so her face lights up. "So it would be okay if our fathers or brothers took us to the game?" Every one of his lame excuses (and you get the sense that they are parroted out of his mouth, and by the end of the film, you can see that he flat out doesn't know why women aren't allowed in) she mocks, and also intellectually challenges. Like I said, Offside is full of dialogue, end to end. Panahi's script pulls no punches, but it resists being didactic, because of the sense of humor and excitement running through the whole thing.

It was filmed during the actual Iran-Bahrani game in 2006, where Iran qualified for the World Cup, so you can hear the surging screams of 100,000 people just inside the stadium, as the imprisoned girls, dressed up like boys, ache and yearn to see what is going on inside. While the issue of being arrested by the Vice Squad is nothing to sneeze at, the girls are undaunted, due to the circumstances of the moment. Yes, they are in trouble, but what the hell is going on with the game??

I murmured to Felicia in one of the early scenes, "Sports fans are the same everywhere," and we just started laughing. Everyone shouting, with the colors of the flag painted on their faces, breaking out into random fights, leaning out the minibus windows shouting at passing cars. The girls just want to participate in the national event.

One of Offside's defining characteristics is how funny it is. These girls are pistols, man, and there are very funny scenes where you can see the guards conferring with one another, and they are all serious and worried and frustrated, but in the background, in the pen, you can see all the girls dancing around, and blabbing, and re-enacting their favorite plays from such-and-such a game - they are completely and totally unconcerned with how much trouble they are in, and they laugh at the guards, sometimes in their faces. When the Vice Squad van comes to take them away, they are told to walk in single-file into the bus, and so they march off, and as they walk past the open gate where you can see inside the stadium, each one of them cranes her neck to the side, peering through the gate, to try to see the game. It is a very funny moment (the audience at BAM laughed uproariously - we pretty much laughed through the whole thing - a strangely ironic and beautiful experience), seeing the girls, being taken to some undisclosed location, not allowed to call their parents, but still ... still ... even in the middle of all of that ... as they are frog-marched to the bus, you can see each one, one after the other, turn her head to the side and squint into the distance to try to see the game.

Panahi is wonderful with details like this, you can feel his vibrant humorous personality running throughout. He has a daughter, a wife (both of whom were arrested in the original roundup at his home early this month - and were soon released), and his sense of injustice about their position in his country is obviously fierce. But at least with Offside, he took an absurdist tact - making the situation seem as ridiculous as possible - to have even the guards not know the reasons for the arrests of these girls - to drive his point home again and again and again.

There is a funny moment when one of the guards (and you can feel him grasping at straws) informs the girls that women are not allowed in the stadiums because it's all men in there, and men curse and use bad language. One of the girls replies to this, "Bullshit."

Ahh, Panahi, I love you so.

The girls refuse to accept the answers given to them. Why shouldn't they come see the game like everyone else? Why should they be forced to dress like men? (Panahi doesn't make a big deal of the veil. The VEIL is not the problem. His view is: Women should be able to dress as they would like to dress, and go where they would like to go. His criticism is that rules such as the soccer rule creates a division in the populace at large: if women want to go to a soccer game - a soccer game - they must dress up as men, denying their gender - and when you force women into a position where her gender becomes a detriment, then all of society suffers. He doesn't care about the veil. He said in one interview that if a woman is very religious, and wants to wear the full black chador, AND she also happens to be a soccer fan, then there is no reason that she should be forced to deny her gender and her religious feelings - in order to see a stupid soccer game.)

There wasn't a big crowd at the movie last night, but it was a fun audience. Dear people, whoever you are, I loved seeing Offside with you, especially the crowd of laughing boisterous girls in the back, who got all the jokes, and guffawed throughout. It's rather eerie, knowing that Panahi is in prison now, but I guess that going to see one of his biggest successes, and enjoying it in the full spirit of absurdity in which he created it, is a great tribute to him, even though ... how could he, sitting in a prison right now, know about us? And know that this is what we are doing at this very moment?

I can only hope that somehow, on some other plane, he does know.

He tells a great story in an interview about his inspiration for Offside. He was heading to a soccer game at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran. His 10 year old daughter wanted to come. He told her no, she couldn't, girls aren't allowed in, and that it is a stupid law but we must obey the law. She begged to come along and at least try. He relented, but told her if she was turned away at the gate, he was going to go on in to the game, and she had to head home. She agreed. They arrived at the stadium, and his daughter is stopped at the gate. "You can't come in here." (Yeah, because it's so threatening to have a 10 year old girl watch a soccer game. Stupid.) As agreed, Panahi and his daughter parted. Panahi went into the stadium and his daughter headed off for home. Panahi found his seat in the stadium and sat down. About 15 minutes later, he glanced up, and saw his daughter walking down the steps towards him. She sat next to him, quite pleased with herself. Panahi was amazed and asked her, "How did you get in?" She glanced at him, like that was almost a stupid question, and replied, "There is always a way."

Neo Ned (2005); Dir. Van Fischer

Neo Ned is a mess. A charming mess, but a mess nonetheless. Featuring two standout performances by Jeremy Renner (fresh off the heels of his breakout performance as Jeffrey Dahmer - my review here) and Gabrielle Union (she of eternal Bring It On fame, I will love her forever for that alone), Neo Ned doesn't know what it wants to be. Or, to be more accurate, it does know what it wants to be, and I suppose that that is my problem with it. It wants to be (and is) a sweet and moving love story. The two leads have real charm together, they make a very believable couple. So many romantic movies, with giant movie star leads, don't capture this very simple component, having to do with chemistry.

But I found myself playing Script Doctor repeatedly, as I watched it, and then I kept trying to tell myself to take it for what it is, Sheila, and to some degree, that is part of the battle. A realization of what a movie is, and that it's not about what you, the viewer, want it to be. However, if something doesn't work, then I do ask myself: "Why?" It becomes a puzzle. If THIS were in place, maybe it would work better ... if you took away this awkward flashback and got rid of the voiceover it might feel less clunky ... This is a constant inner-conversation that goes on with movies that aren't, you know, gripping from end to end (in other words: most films). "Hmmm, he's mis-cast ... that would be better with someone like John C. Reilly in the part ..." "Not wacky about that dissolve- seems like they're hiding something ..." "I think the end should be the beginning - that might solve this continuity problems..."

All of this makes me think of what the moderator at the Actors Studio says after two actors have presented a scene to the group. The moderator does not immediately launch into a critique when the scene is finished. Instead, he or she always asks: "So what were you working on?" If the actor says, "I was working on the drunkenness", then ideally all the comments should be about that. Did the actor succeed or fail in believably creating drunkenness? When critiques like that are handled well, it helps keep the session from devolving into people raising their hands and saying moronic things like, "If I were playing the scene ..." Yeah, but you're not. That's not helpful. Everyone's a genius when they're sitting in the seats. I like to think of this, from time to time, when I am watching a film, to try to align myself with what "they were working on", and then I can make my assessment on whether or not they succeeded. It's no use wishing a movie were other than what it was. If you wish Sophie's Choice were more like Annie Hall, then that is your problem. However, if you feel that a certain movie is not quite successful in being what it wants to be, then you have something to talk about.

To bring a perhaps ridiculous example into it: Blue Crush is (to my mind) a VERY successful movie, because it knows what it is, it doesn't pretend it's something else, and every single element in the film pours into the ultimate theme, story, feel, mood. I don't want Blue Crush to be anything other than what it gloriously proclaims itself to be, and so successfully. There are other more weighty films that also are successful in what they are trying to do, but I figured I'd throw Blue Crush in there to show that the theory works in ALL films, not just the great or serious ones.

While watching Neo Ned (and, admittedly, I was in it for Renner), I found myself asking the question: "What does this movie want to be?" It's difficult to come up with the right answer at first (and yes, there is a right answer), due to the title, and the fact that it is a love story between a NeoNazi skinhead and a black girl who thinks she is Adolf Hitler. How does one "get past" these elements to see the love story? Eventually, if you just focus in on Renner and Union, you'll get it, you'll get what the movie wants to be, but due to the awkwardness of the early scenes, the uncertainty of tone, and the vagueness at the heart of the script, the essential story is sometimes lost because the trappings are so distracting.

There are also some awkwardly-handled flashbacks, and an overuse of self-help terminology ("Ned just wanted attention because he didn't get it at home"), which threatened to tune me out entirely. Thankfully, I stayed with it, because Renner and Union are so good together, so solid, and while it may have seemed, from the start, that Neo Ned was going to tell another kind of story, it's actually a conventional little love story, about a young couple trying to deal with adversity, and stick together even though no one else understands. Pretty cliched stuff (but hey, it worked for Shakespeare, so let's not knock cliches).

The story is this, and this has to be the Meet-Cute to end all Meet-Cutes: Ned is in a mental hospital. He had been charged with second-degree murder of a black man, but his defense lawyer got him declared insane. He stalks around the mental institution, a twitchy bundle of nerves, with impulsive behavior, sudden Sieg Heils, and a stream of profanity and racial epithets, that he says with almost a sweet blunted innocence. Into the hospital comes Rachel, (Gabrielle Union) who suffers from post-partum psychosis and is also under the delusion that she is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. When we first see her, she is being dragged down a hall by two orderlies, and she is screaming at them in German. Ned, naturally, is drawn to her. He is a man with the SS symbol tattooed on his wrist, after all. Who is this chick? Only, naturally, he refers to her as a "nigger woman", sometimes to her face. That language runs rampant through the first half of the film, and Rachel somehow seems not to mind. She treats Ned with a sort of bemused condescension, knowing that she (as Adolf Hitler) has the upper hand.

This is all extremely bizarre and goes back to what I was saying early about trying to take a film for what it is. The image of Renner, hard body like a pit bull, shaved head, covered in tattooes, reminded me so much of Russell Crowe's electrifying performance in Romper Stomper.

But there the similarity ends. Hando (Crowe's character) is a true believer. A fanatic and a brute. It is a chilling and ruthless portrayal of a man whose mind has been taken over by the fantasies that stalk his night, until there is no person left in there. Ned in Neo Ned is a follower. A truly malleable and blank personality, which does make him scary in a way, but also makes him equally susceptible to kindness and encouragement. He reminds me a bit of some of the skinhead kids at my high school, I'm sure we all remember boys like him: misfits who just want to be noticed. Wearing a T shirt with a swastika on it is sure to get you noticed. It also gives you instant cache with a strong group, which is also most desired by a lonely person. It may be despicable, the group, but there are certainly definite levels. There are leaders and there are followers. It becomes clear, maybe 20 minutes into the film, that Ned, despite his vile language, isn't a racist at all, and he actually has a crush on this pretty black girl, who is just as messed up as he is.

A tricky balance, right? In general, the film is able to walk that balance, but that was true for me only after I stopped expecting to see Romper Stomper.

Another movie that came to mind as I watched Neo Ned was the haunting Australian film Angel Baby, about two schizophrenics who are in love, and who decide to go off their medication together when they discover the woman is pregnant. John Lynch (marvelous actor, he who was "Cal") plays the man in the couple and Jacqueline McKenzie (who was also unforgettable in Romper Stomper) plays the woman. It is a beautiful film, harrowing, I remember I saw it with my friend Rebecca in a little theatre in the Village, and we both were weeping into our popcorn. A realistic portrayal of mental illness, and the damage that these drugs can do (of course they are also life-savers, but it's a tremendously difficult choice), Angel Baby has stayed with me for years. There were elements in Neo Ned that reminded me of Angel Baby: the mental hospital setting, the falling-in-love-while-incarcerated plotline, the sense that it is these two against a hostile world who want to keep them apart.

But Angel Baby was a dead-end road for me as well, in terms of getting in sync with Neo Ned, because Neo Ned is not really interested in the reality of mental illness. Neither of these characters are truly mentally ill. Ned has been diagnosed with ADHD, sure, and Rachel seems to believe she is Hitler - but nobody really buys her act. It is not clear that she is truly in a delusion. It seems to be something she is "putting on", maybe to extend her time in the institution? In my fantasy, a romance between an unrepentant racist and a black girl who believes she is Hitler could, if it had the courage of its convictions, knock it out of the park. Neo Ned is a conventional movie, wrapped up in the trappings of gritty independent film, and that was a bit of a disappointment to me. It completely skirted the issue of racism (hard to believe, with Renner in a swastika-Tshirt the entire time), and seemed to treat it all with humor and carelessness.

Some of these moments work. They get out of the institution and go live in a trailer on Renner's mother's trailer park (Renner's mother is played by a delightfully ditzy Sally Kirkland - but perhaps that is redundant). Ned gets a job as a short-order cook. There's a scene where Ned and Rachel (only he calls her "Adolf" throughout the film) go to a grocery store. Rachel pushes the cart along, and Ned lies along on the top of it, being pushed by her. All dolled up in his jackboots, and Nazi regalia, rings on every finger, leather bracelets, and he's just chatting with her casually about how nice it will be to make some money and buy some groceries. He's a simple soul. But you can see the other customers of the supermarket glance at this oddball couple curiously, and one black woman, as she walks by, murmurs to Rachel, "Stay with your own, girl." It's a funny and specific moment, one of the only times that the inter-racial nature of their relationship really comes up, as surprising as that may seem.

Gabrielle Union plays Rachel as a damaged girl, almost damaged beyond repair, by the abuse she has suffered in her life, and becoming a mother was too much for her, and she cracked. Her insanity, however, does not mean she takes Ned for what he is. It's rather startling, at moments, how she sees through his surface to what is going on. They take shelter from the rain in an abandoned gas station. This is before anything romantic has gone down between them. They are soaking wet (a movie cliche that I wish would be put to rest), and laughing, and they suddenly realize how close they are standing to each other, and etc. and etc. Something is about to happen. Ned stares at her and says, in a whisper, "It's wrong to mix the races." Rachel looks at him for a long time and replies, calmly, "So what you're trying to say is you're attracted to me."

Tough stuff to play, obviously, but Union does a great job in keeping her character on track. She senses his tenderness towards her from the beginning. He's like a little kid with a schoolboy crush. He wants to sit next to her in the cafeteria. He makes her a drawing in his art therapy. He asks her questions about Hitler, lolling about the couch, staring at her. Union does not make her character a self-righteous person at all, which would obviously not have worked. She is not the "Angry Black Woman(TM)". She has been beaten down by life, and this strange restless man takes a shine to her, and even though he says the word "nigger" repeatedly (she sighs at one point and says, grinning at him, "Can't you wait till I leave the room before you say that word, like Good White People do?"), she senses he likes her. She's got a tough part to play here, and I know that Union met with Fischer (the director) quite a bit before filming, to be sure what his point was with all this, that it wouldn't be used against her, that the film wouldn't be getting OFF on its free use of that explosive word.

She gives a very smart performance.

In one of the awkward flashbacks, we see Ned's fellow skinheads shaving his head in a ritual, and pouring beer over it, and he seems happy and flushed with belonging. His language is violent and disgusting, and sometimes he throws tantrums, but really that's more because of his ADHD than any racist anger. He's an interesting character, mainly because he is played by Jeremy Renner, which I will get to in a second. Ned went through foster care as a kid, including being placed in a house where the parents tried to kill the whole family by carmon monoxide from the car. He's had it rough. His crazy mother capitalizes on her son's problems by going on any talk show that will take her, talk shows of the Montel/Maury Povich variety. Ned brings Rachel home to meet his mother, and 2 seconds later we see his mother on the phone saying, "Yes, my son is a skinhead convicted of second degree murder, and he is now dating a black girl ... Yes, the producers should have my number, thank you."

Jeremy Renner is an extraordinary actor. What he does here is take his particular brand of narcissistic anti-social personality (which could very well become his stock in trade, putting him in a continuum with Peter Lorre and Robert Mitchum), and soften it, muddy it up, make Ned a mush ball hiding under the muscle and the clothing. He resists sentiment, which is a Godsend, because there are times when the script wants to force him into it. He has a moment where he says to Rachel, during an argument, "You're my home", and it could be a nauseating treacly moment in the hands of a lesser actor. He sort of squinches up one side of his face when he says it, almost wincing as the words come out, and a less observant girlfriend than Rachel would not believe him. I look for moments like that. How actors survive a script that is not really worthy of them. Because that is the mark of a true talent. As I said in my big piece on Dean Stockwell, when I was discussing his work in the hilariously campy Werewolf in Washington:

One of the reasons I really love this performance is because of where Stockwell was at in his life when he filmed it. He was struggling, he had become anonymous again, he had lost his cache as a star. He was job to job to job; it's easy to be wonderful when you have the plum parts offered to you, when every decision in Hollywood somehow includes YOU. But when you are outside that charmed circle, when the material offered to you is not quite up to the level of your gifts, how do you survive then? How do you, to quote Tim Gunn, "make it work"?

Jeremy Renner had already done Dahmer by this point, so his name was already known. He was one of the up-and-coming actors (not young, though, he was mid-30s, which is relatively old to start getting important parts), but he obviously wasn't A list yet. He's A list now, so it will be interesting to see how he handles what comes next. I'm a little bit nervous for him. He's so good. But here, in Neo Ned, which was a really fun part for him, he had a couple of things he had to deal with which generally isn't a huge issue in giant plum projects directed by masters of the craft. Here he had stilted dialogue, forcing the actors into poses of sentimentality, some awkward transitions that he had to make sense of all on his own - he handles it all beautifully. An actor's talent helps him choose well, even in the midst of syrupy moments like "You're my home", and therein you can see the survivor of Jeremy Renner, the integrity of his talent that will not be forced into something that will embarrass him. He either plays under it, or skips around it, with expressions flitting across his face of embarrassment, grief, fear, which makes it seem as though the stilted dialogue comes from the character's inability to find the right words (as opposed to the screenwriter being too on the nose). Hard to do.

One of the things that I am getting to know about him (and there are a couple of notable exceptions) is that he has a way of making his eyelids heavy and flat, which is probably instinctual, but I've seen him in roles where he does NOT do this, which tells me that he is somehow in charge of it. He's choosing it, when appropriate. What happens with his eyes is that he begins to take on the visage of a psychopath (mental health care professionals and social workers, people used to working with psychopaths, all talk about their eyes - and the "flat affect" of their faces - I really must stop reading books about serial killers) - and Renner nails this, from the inside out. You could see it in Dahmer, of course, and you could see it in Hurt Locker too, although that came through a different filter: an essentially anti-social man who found work that was appropriate for him (a rare thing, indeed). Sgt. James was a star in his specialized field. He fit in nowhere else. He is not a savage warmonger, none of those cliches - he has not been "ruined" by war in the same way that, oh, Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse Now has been ruined - but he is a man who is able to focus very very narrowly on one task, under extremely dangerous conditions, and people who are able to do that are, shall we say, different from most other people.

Renner can play an un-self-aware man like nobody's business, that very few actors can pull off, since so many of them are overly self-aware and analyze everything. He can play a man uninterested in introspection - or, it's not that he's uninterested - it's just that he doesn't even know what people are TALKING about when they talk about their feelings. He'd make a hell of a Stanley Kowalski. He plays men you kind of worry about, actually. You hope he finds his place in the world. Because it's not a done deal, with someone like Renner. He's an outsider. He glances around him, with flat-lidded eyes, that can go quite dead from time to time, which makes him rather frightening, unpredictable. It's not a trick. To mention one of the exceptions, he doesn't use this quality at all in The Unusuals, which was a short-lived television series, where he plays a detective in the Lower East side of Manhattan. He's the lead. In that, he is very funny, sharp, good at what he does, short-tempered sometimes, and a good cop, a good team-player, a good boyfriend ... basically, a civilized man. If you only saw Dahmer, Neo Ned and Hurt Locker, you would think of him as specializing in UN-civilized men. And by "uncivilized" I don't mean bad table manners. I mean men who cannot fit in in society as it is set up.

Renner has said (he's a very insightful actor) that he knew, right off the bat, that Ned didn't really believe all that skinhead garbage. He was just desperate to belong. Renner did some research on skinheads (which is where he came up with the SS tattoo on his arm), but his main research was in people who have ADHD, and what it's like for them. And this is where his performance tilts off into something that is genius. I've seen his work before. I am getting to know his ticks. In no other film does he move or walk or talk or behave the way he does in Neo Ned. He races out of rooms when he's done with a conversation. He lies on a couch and can't keep still. He is suddenly tender and quiet when his meds kick in. None of this is attention-getting or seems belabored or actor-y. You get the sense of how hard it is for people who have this disability. His eyes always seem to float, in a disconnected way, above every conversation, because he is always flitting on to the next thing. He is nothing short of riveting in every single frame.

The psychological aspect of the film is a bit juvenile, in that it doesn't seem interested in what it would be like to really be a racist, or what it would be like to really believe you had Adolf Hitler inside of you. Dropping the Adolf plot was a big mistake. You can't introduce something as powerful and weird as that and then dodge the implications of it. It's like having a gun in the first act that doesn't go off in the third. It felt like a cop-out, because that potentially could have been so juicy, and very very disturbing.

But Neo Ned, in the end, doesn't want to disturb. It wants to please. And it does, but not without losing something in the transfer.

And here is where what I want the film to be and what it actually is cannot be reconciled. Rachel is set up as a woman who speaks German, shouts orders at people, and believes she is Hitler. To quote my acting teacher in college: "What does more for you?" Meaning, what does more for the film: that she's just ACTING that all of this is true? Or that it is REALLY true? In my opinion, it is the second that does more for you, and Neo Ned does not go that route, to the film's detriment. The Hitler persona is dropped pretty much once the relationship heats up, and that's a shame, because then Neo Ned becomes about the regular every-day business of romances: "where were you last night?" "we need to get jobs, we need to get money" "tell me about your past" - which both actors play very well, but it's something I've seen 100 times before. However: a skinhead making love to a black woman who speaks German because she thinks she's Hitler? That's something I want to see.

I guess I miss the film that wasn't made.

The "persona swap" of Mulholland Drive; Dir. David Lynch

Last night, I went downtown to the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca (after a debacle involving all trains on the A, C and E line being rerouted to Brooklyn, skipping entirely my stop at Canal, so I ended up sharing a cab downtown with two nice stranded ladies) to see Mulholland Drive, which was being played in the small screening room. Miriam Bale, film writer, and curator of film series (I have met her before - most notably at this memorable occasion) - gave a talk beforehand. This is part of a project she is working on that I find very intriguing: She calls it the small genre of "persona swap". She is working on a big article about it, and I very much look forward to it. "Persona swap" films involve two women, usually blonde and brunette, who switch roles, or merge into one over the course of the film. She had a fascinating list of other films in this sub-genre, the most notable being Ingmar Bergman's Persona, which is similar to Mulholland Drive in that they are both about actresses (my thoughts on Persona here). I really enjoyed Miriam's talk, I enjoyed the fact that she placed Mulholland Drive (one of my favorite films of all time) in a context, and it gave a grounding-point, something to think about as the film unfolded. That is what really good film criticism can do. I can enjoy something viscerally, and I also make my own connections, obviously, but I love to listen to someone who has thought deeply about films through their own particular filter, and can express that, convey that.

I remember seeing Mulholland Drive in the theatre, back when it first came out, and it is one of the most thrilling, unforgettable movie-going experiences I have ever had. I cannot even express why, I can't point to one thing, either in the film or in me, that generated such an intense response. The film operates with "dream logic" (thank you, Miriam), and so every scene, in and of itself, feels logical and true and connected, but what are the threads holding it together? Why the sense of dread? What the hell is it behind the dumpster at that diner? Well, you don't need the answers when you operate with dream-logic. Dreams have their own universes, they operate on a primal level, jumpstarting your fight-or-flight response, and that was what it felt like watching Mulholland Drive for the first time. There are a couple of stand-out scenes for me, ones that have lodged themselves into my brain stem, and will never ever leave. Even if I never saw the film again, I would remember the scene in the midnight vaudeville theatre. I would remember Naomi Watts's audition scene. I would remember that creepy cowboy in the corral. I would remember that final third of the movie, the sudden switch and switch-back, which is so disturbing it seems to wipe out all that you have seen before. There are some classic great scenes here. Not "great" as in the way people use that word casually to describe anything better-than-good. I mean "great" as in "one for the books". These are scenes that live on, after you see the film, taking on their own life in your imagination. One of the creepiest and best things about seeing Mulholland Drive for the first time was that I knew it as I was seeing it. I knew that I would never forget the movie, that I would never stop thinking about, pondering it, worrying over it ... no matter how much I tried to forget it, or tried to block it out.

It cuts to the very core of identity, and I so much liked Miriam's perceptions on this score, because it helped clarify my own vaguer thoughts about it. In the film, Betty (played by Naomi Watts) calls a number and whispers to her co-conspirator (played by Rita Hayworth lookalike Laura Harring), "It's strange calling yourself."

The creepiness of that line, made even more creepy at the end of the film, when you realize who it was she was actually calling, is at the center of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

A masterpiece in every sense of the word, Mulholland Drive still weaves its spell around me and I have seen it many times since that first time in the theatre. I have memorized certain sections of it, even the camera angles (Justin Theroux looking over his shoulder at Naomi Watts as he films the scene in the recording studio, the dark approach to the corral, Naomi Watts straddling Laura Harring and looking down at her, the camera from underneath, so that Watts looks truly demonic), and yet even with memorization, the film does not become stale or predictable. As a matter of fact, repetition helps. Not to get "clarity", or "meaning", because I think that is missing the point here. I have in my mind a murky sense of the "story", and what really happened, but - similar to Moby Dick, where if you focus on the meaning, you strip the book of its magic (or, to quote E.M. Forster, you "silence" the book)- Mulholland Drive lives on a plane where meaning is relative, where identity is fluid, where dreams become reality and vice versa, where the questions you most want to ask and most fear to ask ("Who am I?" "How do I fit in here?" "What is my 'role' in life? Am I playing that role well or should I be re-cast?") reverb through an echo chamber miles under the earth, buried in the subconscious minds of the characters. They come upon moments that seem startling, or frightening, but underneath the original fear, is a sense that I know this. I have been here before. The way deja vu works, when you think you are remembering something real, and then you just remember that you saw such things in your dreams. The amnesia of "Rita", played by Laura Harring, is a perfect metaphor. She doesn't even know her own name. She doesn't know where she was going the night of the car accident, she remembers nothing about her life before. She gets flashes, and they are always terrifying, as though what she is about to remember is far worse than the oblivion of amnesia. Her mind refuses to remember.

Both lead actresses give spectacular iconic performances.

Mulholland Drive is a mystery to be contemplated, a dream-space to be inhabited, and in the screening room, in downtown Manhattan, on a Saturday night, there was a small audience, maybe 50 people, and the sense of anticipation was palpable. I heard one man say to someone, as he sat down (and this was a stranger he was sitting next to), "I am so excited. This movie is a masterpiece." I feel the same way.

The 5 most-deserving Best Picture winners

(I don't like a lot of the Best Picture winners. I far prefer the "losers", in general - some true classics there. It was hard to leave off a couple but I gave myself the task to pick 5. So there you go. What are your faves?)

Reasons I love Three Kings:

(These are all reasons that other people seemed to hate it):

-- The filmmaking itself is obnoxious and in your face. I loved its kinetic energy. I loved its bombast. I loved the sheer obnoxiousness of it (closeup inside someone's body with the stomach filling up with bile. Awesome).

-- The script has a wit to it ("Can you let me look at my Iraqi ass map, please?") that is smart-alecky and too-cool-for-you, but it helps you know you're not looking at something that is supposed to be realistic. This is all about movie stars play-acting as soldiers. It should be enjoyed on that level. The details in the script (the Infinity convertible argument, the ring of Jesus fire, the quiet discussion about what they should call Arabs because "dune coon" is offensive - "Towel head is a perfectly acceptable substitute") help give it a snarky feel, which, again, saves it from being over-serious (or, hell, serious at all).

-- This is right around when George Clooney started finding his legs as a movie star. He had become famous on ER, but that brand of emotionally-distant hot guy won't get you too far in a long-lasting movie career. His earlier movies were not good - because he was cast as a leading man. Obviously, he was pegged that way because of his looks. What else is he gonna play? Goofy character-actor parts? But Clooney is darker than most leading men, he's un-gettable, truly un-gettable - and so I never bought him in straight romances. He seemed embarrassed for himself. He's not earnest. He doesn't do earnest well (although, when roused, he can do righteous anger. But that's different from earnest.) Right before Three Kings, he did Out of Sight, a surprise hit, directed by Steven Soderbergh (his collaboration with Clooney is now long-lasting) which capitalized on that Clooney THING that we all now know so well. Then came Three Kings, then came O Brother Where Art Thou, and suddenly, Clooney had a whole different kind of career. He took charge of it, it seems like. No more would he be lovey-gooey with another huge female movie star. He would be subordinate to no one. From now on, he would stand slightly apart - as he should. That's his thing, his true essence. Three Kings is an ensemble drama, this is not a Clooney vehicle, but you can see here, in his Special Forces guy Archie Gates that he is having fun with his persona (even though the shoot was notoriously un-fun - I don't think anyone has fun on a David O' Russell picture - just ask LIly Tomlin) - but Clooney here squints at the camera, growls, makes tough choices under fire, puts on his mirrored sunglasses, and it all borders on camp. This is perfect. Just right. Exactly what the picture needs, and also what Clooney needed in his career. There is an element of camp to the Clooney persona, the nostalgic aura of "ring a ding ding" around him, and I never saw his performance here as "straight". It's a parody. Which is made even more explicit by the last shot of him, when we see what Archie Gates has been up to after the war. Hysterical. It's fun to see Clooney come into his own. It happened late for him. It suits him.

-- The early section of the film, up until the point where they hatch their plan to go retrieve "Kuwaiti bullion", the movie has a pretty straightforward style. The colors look normal (albeit desert-monotonous), and while there are a couple of clues that this will be a different sort of movie (freezing each one of the characters in crazy moments, with text on the screen, telling us a little bit about them: "Troy Barlow - new father" "Conrad Rig - wants to be Troy Barlow"), it doesn't look any different from any old war movie. But once they set off to get the gold, things become distinctly surreal, even down to the vibrant (even psychedelic) colors of pretty much everything: the blazing lime-green milk truck, the bright blue delivery van, the orange and blue and green murals of Saddam on all the walls). We're leaving the real world and going into some fantasy land. Shadows appear stark and long (I think they must have filmed the entire movie during "magic hour"), and it just doesn't look realistic, in any way, shape or form. The music floats above the movie, never commenting on it, just adding to it - there isn't really a soundtrack, most of the music is either what they play on the cassette tape in their humvee, or eerie mood music when things start to get tense. The lack of a traditional score, mixed with the crazy colors crowding their way into every corner of the frame, makes it feel like the fantasy of adrenaline-surged men, as it is, as it should be.

-- There's one shot near the end of Mark Wahlberg (who plays Troy Barlow) and Ice Cube (who plays Chief Elgin). Barlow has been broken out of the interrogation room where he was being held, and one of their colleagues has been shot down. It finally is too much for him, and he breaks down in tears. Ice Cube comes over to him and puts his arm around him, holding him. I love that shot because I always think: Wow. Two hip hop rappers acting the SHIT out of their big emotional moment in a big Hollywood movie. In America, anything is possible.

-- The portrayal of the Iraqis is subtle and a welcome change to the stereotype. The uprising has begun, and the war is over. Saddam's army is turning on its own people. At one point, the "three kings" sit in a shelter with a bunch of Iraqis, hiding from tear gas that has gone off. Cliff Curtis (a wonderful actor from New Zealand - unforgotteable in Once Were Warriors - but here, he plays Amir, an Iraqi man, whose wife is killed before his eyes) holds his small daughter in his arms, and one of the American soldiers asks how she's doing. He looks at the Americans and says flatly, "She's traumatized. What do you expect." Then he says, "I went to Bowling Green University. Came back here to open up a couple of hotels near Karbala. You guys bombed all my cafes." What I love about that line is the sheer middle-class-ness of it, something that isn't often shown in American movies about places like Iran, Iraq, etc. The vibrant and important middle-class. Their women may be veiled, but come on, they aren't another species. I loved that line. Amir ends up emerging as a great character. He and Archie Gates look at one another and realize they need one another. So they strike a bargain. It is nice to see a movie that acknowledges that everyone wants something, and you cannot give something for nothing - because then it is uneven. Nobody THANKS you when you "give" them something, especially not if it feels like charity - it can breed resentment - but here: they go back and forth, bargaining, what's in it for me, what's in it for me? The way the world works. He's a great character, played beautifully by Chris Curtis (without a trace of his very strong New Zealand accent).

-- The scene where the milk truck explodes is really where the film moves into surreality. It's gorgeously shot, first of all, but it's such an absurd moment. A Republican Guard shoots at the incoming truck - it must be stopped! The driver is killed and the giant bright green truck skids out of control. The American soldiers step back, watching it spin around, horrified - and then the same Iraqi soldier shoots directly at the body of the truck. Everyone assumes it is oil or fuel in there, so they all leap out of the way, in exquisite (but, in retrospect, ridiculous) slo-mo. Out of the hole in the side of the truck pours a mountain of milk that floods the streets. People are pushed off their feet by the force of the milk, and there's an amazing overhead shot of the three soldiers swimming in milk, against the side of a building. The insanity - and also the tragedy - because milk is obviously something people need. Then we see dogs lapping up the spilled milk, women running out with buckets, people scooping it into their mouths with bare hands ... It's a great sequence, very complicated but beautifully realized from start to finish.

-- I love that the Kuwaiti gold is a true Macguffin. Yes, it gives rise to the title, the kings bearing gifts, etc., and it's the reason everything gets started, but then - poof - it's barely mentioned again. It's a device, totally artificial - and has nothing to do with the actual story being told.

-- Nora Dunn knocks her part out of the park. A kind of Christiane Amanpour wannabe, when she is frozen in the beginning, and her name is listed it says: "Adriana Cruz - 4-time Emmy award runner-up". It immediately sets her up: her ambition, her drive, her ferocity. Only she could make a completely humorless character hilarious. She gets in a shouting match early in the film with another female journalist, who has been found banging George Clooney. The two women go at it, the younger journalist standing there in her bra. Clooney's character is supposed to be Adriana's military escort, and here he is, fucking around when he should be taking HER around. The younger journalist is a snot, and says, "I'm different from you, Adriana--" and Nora Dunn interrupts, "YES. I'M DRESSED. I HAVE MY CLOTHES ON." Normally I don't like when war movies try to work a female into the story, if it's not called for, but here, it's perfect.

-- The banter between the four men (I suppose only the three leads are the "kings", and Spike Jonze, a borderline retarded soldier, is the tag-along) is fast, funny, and specific. Again, they're all chewing this stuff up and spitting it out - in a way that would seem ridiculous and over-the-top in a movie that wanted to seem serious. But here, they're all just utilizing their huge personae, and batting up against one another, for the sheer fun of it. Clooney glances at Wahlberg after Jonze says some stupid remark, and says quietly, "Are you able to control him?" There's a veneer here, somehow - the veneer of parody and satire - and it saves the film.

-- It is not without its moving moments (the standoff between Wahlberg and his Iraqi interrogator is especially good), but the main feeling here is energy, movement, snark, and desire. Everyone is operating on a selfish level, they have to, and it brings the whole conflict alive. An Iraqi soldier, a deserter from Saddam's army, now working with the rebellion stands in a bunker with all the gleaming cars stolen from Kuwait. Clooney wants to take the cars to go break Wahlberg out of the interrogation camp. Soldier shakes his head, "Cannot take." Clooney tries to rouse the men into patriotic fervor - hoping he can get the cars by manipulating their primal emotions - and gives a speech, like many other "St. Crispian's Day" speeches in war movies - meant to inspire men to action, and you wouldn't be surprised if Clooney suddenly started rhapsodizing about "we few, we happy few." He builds it up into a manic pace, "We're all together - America - Iraq - many races - one goal - we are all together - we all want a FREE IRAQ " But the way Clooney plays it, it feels sloppy and insincere, which makes it funny. How is TAKING these cars going to help free Iraq, Archie? Beneath his words (which he probably does believe on an abstract level) is desperation: I need those cars. The Iraqi soldiers (even the guy who refused him the cars in the first place) are whipped up into a frenzy by it. By the end, they are all screaming and cheering, "FREE IRAQ, FREE IRAQ FREE IRAQ" like the Revolution scenes in Reds. Clooney is SURE that this will do the trick, so he looks at his main adversary again. The soldier, with a big smile, says automatically, "Cannot take cars." Clooney immediately deflates, his eyes go flat, and he says, "Okay, fine. We'll buy them." NOW you're talking. It's a moving moment, because basically what it comes down to is two men, who both need something, who try to get what they want, and who finally just get down to bargaining, because that's the only way to move forward. It's deeply humanistic, actually. There's no do-gooding here.

-- Mark Wahlberg running across the desert in his longjohns. I'd pay the full admission price just to see that.

-- I saw Three Kings in the theatre, a matinee, with David and Mitchell, and we walked out of the theatre exhilarated and excited. It's a war movie ... but not. It's a buddy movie ... but not. It's a journey, a chase, a battle ... and when it needs to be sentimental, it doesn't linger on it. It skips quickly over it. There's one moment at the end where Clooney has tears in his eyes, and for me, the movie almost goes off the rails in that moment. It's a delicate balance they're trying to create here, as audacious as the movie is, and obnoxiously sure of itself. It is a transformative journey, of course it is, all of the men "go somewhere", that's the whole point of the movie, but the tears (and you only see them for a second) threaten, just a bit, to sink the movie into a cliche tarpit. But again, the restless camera moves on past. The movie is saved. Disaster averted.

-- I've seen it multiple times, now, and it still gives me a strange ridiculous pleasure. Like the video for Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" : it wants to make a splash. The pleasure is ridiculous because Three Kings seems so pleased with itself, it should be more obnoxious than it is. There are worse things than a movie being pleased with itself. It could bore me, condescend to me, try to teach me a lesson, moralize, pontificate, it could present me with the same cliches I have seen 100 times, it could underline every scene with a soundtrack that tells me how to feel, it could treat me like a moron, it could forget that the business of movies is to tell stories and entertain. Three Kings makes NONE of those errors. And no matter how many times I have seen it, I still love to see that milk come pouring out of the truck onto the sand. The image never gets old.

Inglourious Basterds: The Slate Reel

This is pretty amazing. The slate (or clapboard) is used to mark different takes, to aid in the editing process, and the sound syncing.

I came across this "slate reel" of Inglourious Basterds - showing how creative the slate-woman got, by giving names to the different letter-codes on the slate, and she becomes her own performance-art piece. (One take is called "39BJ", and she says, "39 Blowjobs, take 1.") Sometimes, she would call out something that would make the actors break up in laughter - which I suppose would be disruptive, if you're about to do a difficult scene - but this slate reel shows the general vibe Tarantino obviously created on the set, keep it loose, keep it funny, keep it moving - The whole crew gets involved (listen to them all chanting, 'Genius ... genius ... genius ...") This is so entertaining. I love the references she got in. "Clint Eastwood, Take 1." "DenIro, Take 1." "Akira Kurosawa, Take 1." "Fatty Arbuckle, Take 1." (The letter codes on the slate being, CE, DN, AK and FA ... ) Hard to explain: Just go watch it. What a brilliant idea!

"The balcony is closed."

At the Movies is now over. Forever.

Watching Siskel and Ebert was a ritual when I was a kid. I loved that show. Through those two critics, I realized at a very young age, that there was a big world out there, of movies I had never seen, names I had never heard of - and they would casually reference things like "Herzog" or "Barbara Stanwyck", in context of some other review, and I would wonder what they were talking about. And sometimes I would make it my business to find out. So that is how I discovered movies. Not just the ones playing at the local cineplex, but movies with a capital M. The entire industry and its history. Once Ebert started publishing his compilations of reviews - I think I bought my first one when I was 13 - and forget it: I read every single review, and half the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but I wanted to hear more. I was the same then as I am now. Present to me a world I know nothing about and make it seem appealing and fascinating and well worth your time - I'll dig into it. I can't even describe how influential those books were to me. Half the time, I couldn't even get my hands on the movies he discussed. This was before there was a VCR in every house. But I filed the names away in my head, for safekeeping, for later. John Cassavetes. Ingmar Bergman. John Ford. The list goes on and on. The most amazing thing about At the Movies was what sets it apart from other "reviews": They weren't just telling you about the latest blockbuster, although they covered those too. They reviewed foreign films, they reviewed smaller experimental films, they introduced their television audience to the wide scope of what was being made - and their reviews were thoughtful and personal.

Over the last couple of years, At the Movies has gone through a lot of upheaval, well-documented, I won't go through it.

All I can say is: a big part of my life - my childhood, yes, but my love of At the Movies lasted way after my childhood - has now ended, and that always gives one a strange melancholy feeling. It is a reminder of the passing of time, that I am not as young as I once was. One of the things I loved to do (back when movies weren't as easily accessible as they are now - you had to limit yourself to what you could rent at the local video store) was put stars next to movies Ebert had reviewed, reviews that seemed intriguing to me, and then see if the local store had it. I am sure so many people out there had similar experiences. I saw my first Fritz Lang movie when I was 15, 16, because of a comment Ebert made in a review - that wasn't even a review of a Fritz Lang movie. But he would throw references around like that, and I just wanted to know - know everything he was talking about - He cannot be allowed to just mention Fritz Lang without me understanding him!! Next time someone says "Fritz Lang", by God, I will understand!

Roger Ebert has some words to say on his blog about the ending of At the Movies, and highlights some exciting new prospects for a new show. I think he's right (at least in my experience hanging around with online film critics and film bloggers - not to mention the people who comment on such sites): People watch more movies now, due to the many different venues where you can get your hands on such films, even if you live in the boonies. You don't have to wait for there to be a German Expressionist film festival in the big city 2 hours away from your house to gorge yourself on Fritz Lang. It could be years. People in my generation who are film buffs know what that feels like. I would scour the TV Guide every single week, looking for any Elia Kazan movie that might be playing. This was when I was in high school. They were usually playing at 2 o'clock in the morning, or sometimes, excitingly, they'd play on the weekends. But that was how I got a chance to see those movies.

It's different now.

You want to watch every single film Kurosawa made? You don't need to rely on your mom-and-pop video store, or (God forbid) Blockbuster. Netflix has them. So while the situation may seem bleak if you look at your choices at the local movie house - it really isn't, because there are so many other ways now to see movies - the movies YOU want to see.

Regardless: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, sitting in that balcony, arguing and talking and basically educating me, were such a huge part of my life for so many years. It is sad that it is gone, although it was time to let it go. (Once they got rid of the balcony and created that new set which made it look like Entertainment Tonight, you could see which way the wind was blowing. There was a total identity crisis.)

Go read Roger Ebert's elegy for the show that introduced so many of us to the glorious enterprise that is "the movies".

Stalker (1979); Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

In Clifford Odets' journal, he describes a conversation he had with Lee Strasberg, colleague, director, acting teacher:

[Strasberg] spoke of what he called "the blight of Ibsen", saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life -- he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.

The Russians, at least in their art, are deeply concerned about the state of a man's soul, and Strasberg's point (while a bit of a generalization) rings very true when you look at their greatest works. Dostoevsky, in the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov delineates the struggle of how to lead a moral life better than anyone before or since. That scene rivals Paradise Lost in its excavation of man's fear before God, and also his fear before himself, his battles with his own demons. The psychological aspect of things like boredom, money, love, family, are seen through a very specific cultural filter, where man's spiritual life, his spiritual peace, is paramount. Yet nearly impossible to achieve in this lifetime. That's the Russian torment.

It is impossible to speak of Andrei Tarkovsky's films without talking about his philosophy of life. The two are inextricably linked. He did not make all that many films, but a couple of them I would classify as masterpieces, and while he died quite young, he was able to formulate, through his art, an entire philosophical system that had to do with the struggle of modern man to have a meaningful existence. Tarkovsky is hopeful, as many religious people are, that there will be redemption, but he also seems skeptical about the possibilities of it occurring any time soon. Either way, he knows it will not be easy. Tarkovsky is worried, truly worried, about the spiritual state of modern man, and nowhere is that more clear than in his 1979 masterwork Stalker.

Tarkovsky is an interesting case. He came into his career in the post-Stalin years in Russia, but the Cold War was at its apex when he was making his greatest films. He was able to work with the authorities, to stay within the system, but they gave him a hard time over the years, until it got so bad that he defected. He died a year or so after. I believe it broke his heart to leave Russia. He wasn't a provincial man, he read widely, one of his dreams was to film Hamlet (and what I wouldn't give to have seen that!), and he didn't feel that he needed to be in Russia to be an artist. His inspiration came from mankind itself. His film Andrei Rublev (my review here) catapulted him into worldwide fame, and it is a great film. I suppose you could see it as a metaphor for what it was like for the modern-day Soviet, but Tarkovsky didn't see it that way. Andrei Rublev was a 15th century monk in Russia who did giant triptychs, most of which were destroyed. As a matter of fact, only one remains intact. Nothing is known about him. Tarkovsky wanted to examine what kind of man would devote his life to painting pictures of religious exaltation and eternal peace in the midst of a time of great chaos. As we all know, the Bolsheviks "got rid of religion", apparently, but you would never know that from watching Tarkovsky's films. He is a deeply religious man. It is a rare talent who can put his feelings for God on the screen. It is also amazing that he was able to "get away with" as much as he did, in that environment. One of the reasons why I think Tarkovsky was able to operate freely for so long ("freely" being relative) is that he stayed away from politics entirely. You could read into his films, you could see them as grand allegories for current-day themes, but the films would suffer as a result. It's similar to many of the great films coming out of Iran right now. You could see in Children of Heaven a buried message, involving the hardships of life in Iran, the ridiculous pressures put on the citizenry (a brother and sister having to share a pair of shoes?), the class divide which is so intense in Tehran - that is definitely all there, but if you only see it as the allegory, you take away much of its magic. These directors, working under these conditions of censorship and oppression, have to be very very tricky, and the good ones always focus on story. The story they are actually telling. Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is a clarion call for spirituality, for what happens to a society when God is left out. His context there is 15th century Russia, but you can see the parallels.

Tarkovsky was a fan of science fiction, and his 1972 film Solyaris was his first foray into that area. He returns to that territory again in Stalker. He goes even deeper into his life-long concerns about the atrophy of man's spirit in the modern world. He was an anti-materialist, definitely, and his ultimate question about events always was: Will this make man happier? Better? Will this bring him closer to his spirit? Or will this separate him even further? Ironically, Tarkovsky ended his life as an exile - but his films all along, made within Russia, have to do with man being exiled from himself and from God.

Stalker was based on the novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, but Tarkovsky made it his own, as he explains here in a 1979 interview:

I had recommended a short novel Picnic on the Roadside, to my friend, the filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili, thinking he might adapt it to film. Afterwards, I don't know why, Giorgi could not obtain the rights from the authors of the novel, the Strugatsky brothers, and he abandoned the idea of this film. The idea began to turn in my head, at first from time to time, and then more and more often. It seemed to me that this novel could be made into a film with a unity of location, time, and action. This classic unity - Aristotelian in my view - permits us to approach truly authentic filmmaking, which for me is not action film, outwardly dynamic. I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel ... except for the two words, "Stalker" and "Zone". So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.

In Stalker, there has been some sort of apocalyptic event. It is thought that a meteorite had crashed into "our small country" (the country is never named), but the meteorite was never found. Troops were sent to investigate the destroyed area, and they never returned. It became clear to the nameless authorities that the area had to be cordoned off, and it is known as The Zone. A great mystery surrounds the Zone. Nobody knows the truth of it. What is it? There is a rumor that in the center of the Zone, there is a Room, and in that Room, man's greatest wish (whatever it may be) can come true. But how to get into the Zone, which is surrounded by electrical fences and barbed wire, and armed outposts?

This is where The Stalker comes in. The Stalker acts as a guide. People pay him money to take them into the Zone. It is a dangerous prospect. Not just getting past the guards, but once in the Zone, all bets are off. It is a place that changes, constantly - the laws of physics do not apply. It is as though the land itself is alive, and it recognizes when strangers have arrived, so it starts to shift, throwing traps and pitfalls in their way.

The Stalker lives in a dreary cottage with his unhappy wife and daughter, who has something wrong with her legs. She is "a child of the Zone", which suggests to me that some Chernobyl event may have occurred. The landscape outside the Stalker's cottage is terrifying and industrial. Huge nuclear power plants loom in the distance, and it appears that the entire world is an abandoned construction site.

At the beginning of the film, the Stalker meets up with two men who want to go to the Zone. Money changes hands. They stand in a dingy bar and talk over how it will go.

The two men who enlist the Stalker's hope are known as "Writer" and "Professor". Everyone has their own reasons to want to go to the Zone. It is only what YOU think of it that matters. The Writer is cynical, and he feels he has lost his inspiration. When we first see him, he is having a conversation with a woman in a fur coat (who also wants to go to the Zone, but the Stalker sends her packing), and she is wondering about the mystery of it all, she references the Bermuda Triangle. The Writer scoffs at this. There is no mystery. There are no UFOs, no invisible forces - he is a realist. And yet here he is, about to embark on a journey into the unknown. The Professor teaches physics at a university, and because of his life's work examining things like atoms and protons he is more willing to accept that the invisible and mysterious is also real, but his desire to go to the Zone comes from his yearning to make tangible the intangible. He needs proof. The Stalker, a weary tormented man, has his doubts about both of these men, but they start on their journey.

The opening sequence, with the three men in a massive roofless jeep, driving around through decaying warehouses, is a masterpiece of style. The setting is extraordinary, and you wonder where the hell they were filming. These do not look like sets. The sound of dripping water is paramount (a very Tarkovskyian sound - it appears in most of his films), and the three men drive around in circles, hiding from the guards patrolling the main gate. It becomes clear that a train comes to the outpost, and this will be their way in. The gates open for the train, momentarily, and they will drive in behind the train. The Stalker explains to the other two that while it is dangerous, the guards do not want to go further into the Zone, everyone is afraid of it, so they have that on their side.

Tarkovsky drives his point home by filming the early sections of the film in a saturated black-and-white. It looks like a daguerrotype. Like we are looking at a world long gone away. Tarkovsky preferred to film in black and white, he felt it was a more realistic cinematic language, but here he chose to film the scenes in the Zone itself in vibrant color, to perhaps suggest that the Zone is what everyone thinks it is: a magical place where dreams can come true.

The journey through the Zone is filmed methodically. I think Tarkovsky's point about Aristotelian unities is one of the strengths of this film which could, if you think about it, have seemed rather silly. A magical land where dreams come true? But the journey is shown, step by step, and as they travel, they talk. The philosophical differences of the men become clear. Arguments break out. Both the Writer and the Professor have a hard time just doing what the Stalker says, even though he begs them to follow his instructions exactly - the Zone is dangerous, like a predator, it will eat you up if you don't follow the rules. That is why they hired him.

Stalker is a dialogue-heavy script, unlike Andrei Rublev which is told mainly through images. I loved the dialogue. It wrestles with the issues, as opposed to presenting them clearly. It is obvious that these three men have different contexts and concerns, but above all else, you worry for them. The Zone, as filmed by Tarkovsky, calls to mind Planet of the Apes, an eerily familiar landscape, but it is a place where a civilization has died. Enormous telephone poles stand tipped over to the side. Buildings lie in ruin. In the earlier scenes, nature is almost nonexistent. There is no grass. The only water in the film appears in a glass on the bedside table, and dripping from the various ceilings, a sure sign of decay. But in the Zone, there is a rushing river. The sound of the water, roaring by, is a tumultuous sound of life - but it's also somewhat ominous, as the entire Zone is. Beneath the water (in a stunning tracking shot, my favorite shot of the film), you can see debris from the world gone by. Fragments of newspaper, syringes, old coins, a religious postcard ... Tarkovsky slowly trains the camera to pan over these objects, seen through the distorted waviness of water.

It is difficult to not see in all of this a criticism of the Soviet Union's rapacious attitude towards the environment. The world is one of the means of production, to be used as such. Used up and left behind. Tarkovsky and his crew were exposed to toxic chemicals during the shooting of the film, and Tarkovsky probably already had the cancer that would eventually kill him. His evocation of the environment (all environments) in Stalker has to be seen to be believed. The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor, walk cautiously through an overgrown field, towards some unknown destination, having to trust in fate, having to let their innermost wishes come to the surface, because that is the only reason they are there, and the only way they will survive.

As the three men get closer and closer to the mythical "Room" at the center of the Zone, they all start to grapple more openly with what it is they are seeking. What would it be like to have your dreams come true? Again, I go back to the anecdote I started this essay with: Lee Strasberg's conception of what was dramatic, and why Chekhov was the primary example. What is dramatic about a man losing his money and killing himself? Isn't that what we expect? But how about a man becoming rich and then killing himself?

Why I thought of this anecdote when I sat down to write this essay was not just that it seemed to have something to say about Russian artists, but also that the Stalker's predecessor, the one who trained him and taught him to be a Stalker, was known as the Porcupine. And he came back from the Zone one time and found himself fabulously rich. The next week he hung himself. The specter of this hangs over our current-day Stalker - because there is something terrible about dreams, and wishes ... and one of the things he tries to make clear about the Room, is that your wish must be something from your deepest heart - not a selfish or worldly short-term wish.

This is a true Tarkovskyian warning. Man has been made corrupt by money. Tarkovsky made no bones about his feelings about the West, and while he enjoyed time in Italy and England, etc., he felt that the West had abandoned spirituality in pursuit of worldly goods, and the toll of this cannot even be measured. By abandoning God, Man has abandoned himself. Tarkovsky worried about this (meaning, worked on it) in film after film. Man must look to God, to deeper and higher truths, for what he wants out of life. The Stalker repeatedly warns the Writer and the Professor about this, but it's one of the trials of the human condition. How many of us really can "let go" of the world like that? Tarkovsky insists that it is the only way.

An eerie frightening film, Stalker makes use of spectacular natural locations: empty dark tunnels, mossy overgrown buildings, a quiet reflective river - but there is also one fantastical sequence when they find themselves in a giant inner room in the Zone, with mounds of cylindrical sand on the floor, and two flying cawing birds, the only sign of life so far (except for an ominous black dog who seems to stalk the periphery of the three men's journey). This space is not the Room, but it is the threshold to the Room, and everything starts to break down there. The men, so close to the truth (the yearning of all mankind when looking up at the stars and wondering what the hell is up there?) begin to resist, begin to fight against what is to come.

The last scene of the film (which I wouldn't dream of revealing) packs such an enormous punch (visually, thematically - it is different from all that came before) - that it acts as a catalyst in the viewer. It tells us something we have not yet learned. It suggests that things really ARE not what they seem, that they are far more mysterious than anyone had ever dreamed. Not even the Stalker knows the real truth. To quote Tarkovsky's favorite play:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,. Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Stalker is a stunning accomplishment.

The Ghost Writer (2010); Dir. Roman Polanski

From the opening shot of The Ghost Writer, directed by 76 year old Roman Polanski, of an enormous ferry pulling into a pier at night, you know you are in the hands of a master. The score, by the awesome Alexandre Desplat, is tense and orchestral, an old-school score, making it apparent, from the get-go, that things are not as they seem. Slowly, the ferry pulls toward the screen, backing up to the dock, and it threatens to overwhelm the entire frame. It is not clear why it is such a frightening image, not yet, but that's Polanski. Nobody knows how to create mood and tone like he does.

One of my favorite Polanski stories is of an early screening of Rosemary's Baby, a film full of deeply destabilizing camera angles. You want to pull your hair out and just be allowed to look at something headon, thankyouverymuch. There's a scene where Rosemary is on the phone, sitting on the edge of the bed, and Polanski has placed his camera outside the room and around the corner a bit, so that you cannot see Rosemary. The phone call may be a benign one, but the camera angle tells a different story. And at the early screening, the entire audience leaned over to the side, as one, to try to see what was around the corner.

This is somewhat of a lost art today in cinema, especially in thrillers which seem to rely more on quick cuts and "gotcha" surprise moments, which may be satisfying in the short-term, but seem way too easy in the long-term. The good thrillers are successful because of the mood created, and it may be the quietest moments that are the most terrifying. I am thinking of Leopoldine Konstantine's slow descent down the stairs in Notorious, as she comes to meet Ingrid Bergman for the first time. She is seen in long-shot, through the doorway to the parlor, at the top of the stairs. She looks incredibly forbidding, but it is hard to pinpoint why, since we can't see her face yet. She descends, never taking her eyes off Bergman, and approaches - all in one shot, so she walks right into the closeup. Her eyes are enough to make you run fleeing into the night. That's tension.

There are a lot of Hitchcock references in The Ghost Writer, particularly one scene where a note with an explosive message on it is passed, hand by hand, through a crowd, the camera following the note's progression. It reminded me of the notorious key, in Notorious, and keeping track of the key, in her hand, Grant's hand, on the keychain, becomes one of the games of the film, including the famous tracking shot from high up on the balcony down to the middle of the party to a closeup of Ingrid Bergman's hand holding the key.

The Ghost Writer tells the story of a writer (played by Ewan McGregor) who is a bit unmoored in his life (no family, no dependents), and gets the job of being a ghost writer to Adam Lang, the former English Prime Minister (played by Pierce Brosnan). McGregor's character name is listed as "Ghost". His predecessor was found drowned on the shores of Martha's Vineyard, where Adam Lang has a forbidding private home, and there appears to be something sketchy about the death. But apparently he was drunk, that's the story, anyway, so McGregor is called in as a replacement.

From the get-go, there is something strange about the assignment. McGregor is given a manuscript to read, another manuscript, by Adam Lang's lawyer (played by Timothy Hutton), and on his way home, he is mugged, and the manuscript stolen, by two ninja-types on a motorcycle. Did they think it was the Lang manuscript? The one already written by the former ghost writer? The Ghost is freaked out, but the money he will be paid for this assignment ($250,000) is more money than he has ever seen in his life. He gets on a plane for Martha's Vineyard.

Lang lives in a fortress on the beach, a squat stone house that calls to mind a bunker, with the waves rolling in only feet away. The landscape is chilling and evocative (made me think of my time on Block Island and how bleak it can get on islands in the winter), and Polanski fills the wide screen with cold grey waves and lowering leaden sky. It's incredibly ominous. The Ghost is ushered through multiple security checks, and every face glimpsed by the slowly moving camera appears to have a secret.

The former ghost writer had written an entire manuscript, and it will be the new ghost's job to whip it into shape. The manuscript is kept under lock and key, and must never be shown to anyone. The Ghost has to sign a confidentiality agreement, and is not allowed to take the manuscript back to the small inn, where he will be staying for the duration of the assignment.

At the house of Adam Lang, the Ghost is introduced to a multitude of new characters: Kim Cattrall plays Amelia Bly, Adam Lang's administrator (and mistress). She is the one who shows the Ghost the ropes. Cattrall is quite eerie here, so different from Samantha in Sex and the City, and it's nice to hear her speak in what is her natural accent. She moves with poise and control, no extraneous movements, and always has a bright yet cold smile on her face. Olivia Williams is marvelous as Adam Lang's wife, a woman with secrets and complexity (as everyone has here), who suggests worlds of bitterness - which seem to be one thing (the normal long-suffering wife of a workaholic famous man) and then, by the end, is revealed to be something totally different. There's a terrific cameo by Eli Wallach, who plays an old man who lives down the road, and appears to have some new information about the drowned former ghost writer. And then there is Adam Lang himself, played with gusto by Pierce Brosnan. Based on Tony Blair, obviously, Lang had a reputation for being a party animal at Cambridge, and that quickly becomes clear to the Ghost that this is not to be talked about, or dwelled upon in the manuscript. Again, things are not what they seem. Is it that Lang doesn't want to be portrayed as a lightweight, or is there something really to hide back there in those Cambridge years?

The Ghost has no idea what he is getting into, but he gamely begins his assignment, reading through the manuscript, and conducting interviews with Lang. The room where he writes is a masterpiece of production design and imagination: a cold stone-walled study, with black leather chairs and couches, with one wall floor to ceiling glass, looking out on the whipping sand-dunes and big dark rollers coming in. McGregor sits at the desk, flipping through the pages, and the setting is so tightly coiled, so controlled, yet just outside is Mother Nature in all her wintry chaos.

There are political themes in The Ghost Writer, with some obvious parallels to current-day events (a defense company called "Hatherton" becomes crucial), but the film avoids being too on the nose. There's wit to the references, and pessimism (it's a deeply cynical film), but the main thrust of it is not Lang's shady political past but the ghost writer's stumble down a blind alleyway, looking for the truth. McGregor is our eyes. We are as disoreinted as he is. Lang, within a day of The Ghost's tenure, is indicted for war crimes by The Hague. All hell breaks loose. Protesters pile up outside the gates at Lang's Martha's Vineyard Home, the phones ring off the hook, and the Ghost, a non-political person, finds himself entangled in the situation, writing statements for Lang, which are then read on CNN, and he has mixed feelings about it. "You're now an accomplice," smiles Amelia Bly.

The Ghost isn't a particularly dare-devil personality, and isn't all that interested in politics - he doesn't care about the crusade, or the "talking points", but as he spends more time in the eerie house on the shore (even the maid seems ominous), he begins to ask questions, finding locked doors everywhere he goes (metaphorically and literally - another nod to Notorious, with that damn keychain). He discovers a folder left behind by the former ghost writer, with notes, and photographs with underlined names on the back - and McGregor wonders about it. It all has to do with Cambridge, with Lang's time there as an undergraduate. What is forbidden about this subject?

I suppose you could see all kinds of allegories in The Ghost Writer: a commentary on our times, and the war on terror, and the allegiance between Britain and the United States. Sure, that's there. There is also a sense of Polanski himself, both in the hunted and persecuted Adam Lang, as well as the "ghost writer", a man who has been unmoored, in a way, from normal life, has become a ghost. Hidden behind the scenes, still operating, but living in a deeply threatening universe that is hellbent on grinding him to a pulp. For me, the strength of The Ghost Writer does not come from these allegorical connections, although it adds to the ominous through-the-looking-glass feeling. The Ghost Writer is a fantastic thriller, period, with or without the true-to-life backstories, and Polanski, like no other, creates a mood and a world where above all, you just want to escape. The audience wants to escape the tension, and so does the ghost. But there always comes a point of no return. Even if you wanted to escape, you could not.

A better-looking film you won't see this year (although Shutter Island comes close), with a score that gets inside your head, inside your nervous system, The Ghost Writer is a must-see.

Across the Universe (2007); Dir. Julie Taymor

In the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, it was accepted that suddenly, in the middle of a scene of dialogue, a character would break into song. Another way to say it is: There was confidence in the genre. We've lost a lot of that in our more ironic age, which is even true in Broadway musicals themselves at the present moment, where the classic old-school musical is now out of style, and when it is done, more often than not it is done with a wink-wink at the audience, making the whole thing into kitsch. This is all fine - sensibilities change, and the musical then becomes a problem that must be solved. Good directors know how to handle this. They understand that they must create a context where the genre can live again, and it seems organic.

I was not an admirer of the movie Chicago, but one of the reasons it worked (I admit grudgingly) was that Rob Marshall dealt with this problem head-on. He made the songs into interior monologues, the characters going into psychological dream-spaces, where it would make sense that they would sing. Marshall realized it was an issue - that you can't go old-school with this stuff, not now, modern audiences don't tolerate it - and so each song occurred inside a character's mind. I didn't like the movie, but I liked how he handled the "problem" of the musical. It worked. Dreamgirls (the movie) did not deal with this issue well at all. When the scenes were flat-out performances, of the girls onstage, or rehearsing, it was fine. Then, the movie knew what it was: basically a concert movie. But when suddenly characters were singing in the middle of their lives, breaking into song, essentially, the movie totally lost its way. I felt that it was embarrassed for itself in those moments, especially in the number "Family". I winced through that scene, watching the actors try to pretend that a context had been provided for them where it would make sense that they would break into song. Jamie Foxx seemed mortified. Nobody knew what movie they were in. Like I said, when the movie showed actual performances, it was fine - but the problem of the musical had not at all been handled, and so the movie was very wobbly. If you're doing a musical, then you need to have confidence in the genre, and that's final. Dreamgirls didn't. They WANTED to be a biopic, they knew HOW to do a biopic, but that's not how the thing is written. It's a musical. Don't condescend to the genre. Figure out a way to make it palatable to a modern audience or don't do it. If the conversation-songs had been left out of the film, or somehow turned into onstage performances, perhaps the movie would have felt like it had more confidence in itself.

Julie Taymor, director of Across the Universe, knows a little bit about Broadway musicals, having created and directed The Lion King, although much of that project (the huge puppets, the handmade quality of the effects) breaks the mold. I saw it and it certainly doesn't look like anything else. Her film projects so far have been eclectic and fascinating (Frida, Titus, and her next project is The Tempest, which I cannot WAIT to see) and she is working at her full powers with Across the Universe, the "musical" made up only of Beatles songs. It is hard to express the joy and enthusiasm in this film, not to mention its wild creativity in lighting/production design/visual effects. How many worlds does Taymor create here? It's dazzling. Suburban Massachusetts, all golden light and green grass. Liverpool, England, cramped alleyways and dark muted tones. The lower East side of Manhattan, early 60s, with colored grafitti and crowded sidewalks. A drug trip in a psychedelic school bus. A dreamy gorgeous underwater sequence. Strawberries pinned to the wall of a bohemian apartment. The Detroit riots, with cars burning, and handheld cameras. Each world created with total confidence in the story being told, and also the genre itself. There is maybe half an hour of straight dialogue in the film. The rest is told through song.

The film opens with a shot of an empty beach, with a young man sitting in the sand by the shore. The color palette is muted, greys and browns, a bleak setting. The camera moves in slowly towards the boy. He stares out at the ocean. As the camera pulls in close to him, he turns and looks directly at the camera, and starts to sing. "Is there anybody going to listen to my story? All about a girl who came to stay. She's the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry. Still you don't regret a single day."

Taymor says in the director's commentary that they wanted to start off immediately with a song, and to make it even more explicit, have the young man sing directly to the camera. This works on multiple levels, but the main reason it works is because it tells the audience right away that This Is a Musical, no bones about it. He breaks the fourth wall, as people do all the time in musicals, and he sings. There will be no caginess about the genre. There is no embarrassment, like: "sorry, just going to break into song here, I know it's weird, bear with me ..." which is how I felt Jamie Foxx performed his numbers in Dreamgirls. He seemed embarrassed. Like: "Hey, I thought I was in a serious biopic - what is THIS shit you're making me do now??" Taymor was so smart in this choice, for the opening of the film, and also smart in the song she chose to start the movie. How perfect is it that the young man is saying, "Please listen to my story. I want to tell you a story ..." So the opening moment works on the genre level - it is a song, sung to an audience - and it also works on the story level. "I am going to tell you a story now." It is not realistic, and the film tells you right away what it is, and what you can expect.

Directly following this, the camera moves to the waves, with a change in music. The melancholy tones of "Girl" change, to the jarring screaming of "Helter Skelter", and in the curls of the waves we start to see black and white footage, newsreel-style, of the protests of the 1960s, with cops in riot gear, chaos, screaming, people being hauled away by the cops, with a couple of shots of gorgeous Evan Rachel Wood, screaming and fighting back.

The connection is made visually: this is "the girl" of whom he sings. Immediately clear, done with no dialogue. But yet another thing happens in this segue: Taymor lets us know that the style of the movie is going to be non-realistic, like a collage or mosaic. We will be moving through different worlds, and we should not expect things to unfold in a literal fashion. Music will be key to this. The Beatles are introduced head-on. That's the whole point of the movie.

In this short opening sequence, from the young man on the beach to the waves revealing scenes of protests and chaos, Taymor tells us, with total confidence, Here is what we will be doing, here is what you can expect.

That is confidence.

And because she (and her team) have confidence, I can relax. I know she knows where she's going, what she's doing, and while that does not always translate to a good or moving movie, in this case it does. There are scenes that have quickly become favorites of mine, things I will go back to again and again (the opening sequence with two versions of "Hold Me Tight" - American suburbia and Liverpool underground).

There is a whimsy here, yes, and a creativity with the song choices and their placement; they obviously had a lot of fun weaving the songs into the story. It doesn't sacrifice reality. The first time I saw it, there were literally moments that I found myself laughing out loud, not because it was funny, but because I was so overjoyed by what had been created, the ridiculousness of it, and how ... wow .... in many cases I was seeing something I had never seen before. There are references, certainly, to pop culture through the 60s, Hard Day's Night, of course, and the Monty Python animated sketches. It's fun to revel in it.

It's a rare movie that can provide that. Most visuals in movies are variations on a theme. Sunsets, dinner tables, horse stables, whatever - they can be quite beautiful but we have seen them all before. When a director can show me something I literally have never seen before, I fall in love. It's one of the reasons why I love foreign films so much, and especially films from Iran and Central Asia. The context is so different, the worlds so different, the perspective so different - that often I am confronted with a landscape or viewpoint that I have literally never seen before. Love! Julie Taymor gives me that over and over and over again in Across the Universe, which tells actually a rather conventional story (6 characters converge to New York City in the early 60s, their paths intersect, and the Vietnam War changes everything), but the WAY it is told, and how it LOOKS, is completely its own.

Some of the storytelling devices here annoyed some critics, and I see their point, but it all worked for me. The 6 lead characters are named Jude, Lucy, Prudence, Max, Jo Jo and Sadie. I loved that. Cutesy? Perhaps. But it also was practical: if you want to include "Hey Jude" in a movie-musical of Beatles numbers, then it certainly helps, in terms of story, if you have a character named Jude. If you want to have "Dear Prudence" act as a sort of "Cheer Up Charlie" number, then it helps that the character who needs the pep talk is named Prudence. Perhaps it's a bit literal of a choice, but I didn't mind that. I thought it was an effective device, and got us even deeper into the story. The entire context for these people is Beatles songs. There is no other music in the film, no other suggestion that other bands may exist. We are inside the songs. So in that world, of course all of the characters would have names from the songs themselves.

There were also many in-jokes, for anyone familiar with the Beatles songbook, and I loved that. It's a bit of a wink-wink, but it seemed appropriate with the non-literal material, where the entire world is a Beatles song. If you get it, you get it. If you don't, it doesn't exclude you. Back in Liverpool, Jude worked at the shipyards, and when he goes to pick up his paycheck, he makes a comment that tells us it will be his last paycheck, he's taking off. The guy behind the counter says kindly, "I felt the same way when I was your age. I told myself, 'When I'm 64, I'll be long gone from this place.'" In New York, Jude has hooked up with a bunch of bohemian characters and they all live in one apartment. One rainy night, a girl named Prudence crawls in through a window and stands there, she needs a place to stay. Sadie looks at her and says, "Where did she come from?" and Jude replies, "She came in through the bathroom window." I loved these in-jokes. Maybe they're a bit corny, but so are musicals. It fits. It's funny and irreverent and a little bit stupid. Perfect for the material and context.

Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a boy from Liverpool, working in the shipyards. He leaves his mother behind, and sails off to America, in search for his father, who had impregnated his mother while stationed in Liverpool and then left.

Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) is a young American teenager, whose boyfriend has just shipped off to Vietnam. It is the early 60s, so the turmoil and strife of the late 60s is yet to come. Lucy lives in a big sprawling house, goes to high school, and writes love letters to her boyfriend. She is conventional, perhaps, but there are clues that she is also a searcher, a questioner (she doesn't want to have kids, for example, she doesn't see the point). This will be important later in the story.

Max (Joe Anderson) is Lucy's wild brother. He is currently an undergraduate at Princeton, and he spends most of his time goofing off and getting drunk ("high with a little help from his friends"), not going to class, and rebelling. The spectre of the draft is just starting, but he really wants to drop out of Princeton, and hang out for a while, find out what he really wants to do. His parents are horrified.

Jo Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) is a guitarist, who moves to New York in the wake of the Detroit riots, to escape the carnage and get a new start. A kind of Jimi Hendrix character, he tries to find his own style of music, while also supporting others, but it soon becomes clear that he is a solo artist, end-stop.

Sadie (Dana Fuchs) is a singer of the Janis Joplin variety, and she lives in a sprawling apartment in the East Village, filled with other artists and bohemians. Jude and Max live there, and eventually Lucy moves in too. Sadie is a struggling artist, playing small venues, but she is being courted by a major label. A kind of den mother to the strays who come her way, she exemplifies the communal aspect of so much of 60s youth culture, yet also the need for the individual to assert herself. With a rocking raspy voice, she KILLS "Oh, Darling", and "Do It in the Road" and "Helter Skelter".

Prudence (TV Carpio) is a runaway from Ohio who also ends up in New York. An Asian American teenager, isolated, not only by her race but by the fact that she is attracted to other girls, she finds solace and comfort in the idiosyncratic world of Bohemian New York, where she doesn't have to try to fit in, but can be herself.

The acting is good. I cared about these people. I liked the sense of breath that was in the songs, the sense that the songs were just extensions of the scenes.

The film is a masterpiece of integration. There's an organic feel to the plot, despite all the artifice, and the story is involving. Jude finds his father who works as a janitor at Princeton University. During his time at Princeton, he befriends the wild good-hearted Max, who takes him home for Thanksgiving. This is where Jude meets Lucy for the first time. Love at first sight? Perhaps, but she has a boyfriend. Max drops out of Princeton and he and Jude travel to New York. They get rooms at Sadie's apartment. Jude gets a job as an illustrator at an underground magazine. Max gets his draft notice and burns it at the table. Things are starting to get serious, but at first nobody really notices. Lucy does, however, because her boyfriend is killed in Vietnam. Heartbroken, she moves to New York to be with her brother, to get away for a bit before she goes to college. Jude and Lucy start a romance, sweet and sincere. Max begins to spiral out of control. He gets drafted. He goes to Vietnam. Lucy becomes involved in the anti-war movement.

With cameos by Joe Cocker (who plays, in one song, "Come Together", a hobo, a pimp, and a hippie), Eddie Izzard (who plays a Mr. Kite, who runs an insane carnival in the middle of a field), and Bono, who plays Dr. Robert, a drug guru along the lines of Timothy Leary, the 6 leads are relative unknowns, which makes their singing and acting all the more potent, since we only know them in this context. The conversational quality of many of the songs (Jude whisper-singing in his girlfriend's ear as they make out, "Close your eyes and I'll kiss you ...") makes this world seem completely logical and true: These people sing Beatles songs and that's how this world operates. If that sense were not in place, if that context had not been created, then the entire thing would have seemed flimsy and pointless. (As in: what, you can't write your own script? You need to use Beatles songs to hang your hat on?) Taymor and her team (especially the musical arrangements, done by Eliot Goldenthal) are absolutely specific in every moment. Nothing repeats. The songs live and breathe, not just because they are classic songs, but because they live in this particular context, they help tell this very specific story. It's mind-boggling how successful this is, when you imagine how much it COULD have gone so wrong.

Another thing that really makes Across the Universe special is that it is (for the most part) live singing. Normally, with movie musicals, you record the songs beforehand, and then when you film the scene, you lip sync to the recording. It's a practical matter, a sound issue, all that, but Taymor is up to something different here. She wanted to create songs that feel like speech, choreography that feels like regular movement, but never to forget that this is, ultimately, an artificial universe, one where people sing their language. So most of the singing that you see in Across the Universe is live. This is amazingly rare.

Because Julie Taymor is the director, and her work with puppets and giant hand-made creations is her forte, there is a lot of that here, so what you see is real, as opposed to computer-generated effects. There is choreography, which adds to the effect, never taking away. Businessmen stomp around in midtown, moving as one. Max, in a VA hospital, is haunted by dancing sexy nurses holding syringes. Prostitutes writhe on fire escapes in the lower east side. What I loved so much in all of this was not just the acceptance of the musical format, but the wholehearted embrace of it.

What could have been a series of gimmicks turns into a heartfelt story about the last years of the 1960s and the upheaval, both political and social. It does not become didactic, it has a spirit to it, all held together by the vast songbook of the Beatles catalog - the early innocent rock and roll tunes like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", which here is upended by having Prudence sing it, in her cheerleader uniform in Ohio, staring longingly at another female cheerleader. Quite unbalancing. And the song is slowed down to a ballad. I loved Ebert's comment about the use of the song in Across the Universe:

When Prudence sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand," for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It's not happy if it's a hand you are never, never, never going to hold. The love that dare not express its name turns in sadness to song.

That flexibility inherent in most of the Beatles songs, and how they can "take" so much interpretation, is one of the reasons they are so extraordinary. The movie has a lot of fun with that.

And one of its strongest features is that despite its startling visuals and the fact that, you know, it's a musical, it keeps its eye on the ball, and never forgets that why we will invest, why we will enter into this magical world where people sing instead of speak, is that it presents to us characters who seem real to us, who we care about. It has some things to say, about the radicalization of American youth during the Vietnam years, and it's not what you would expect. There is a depersonalization that goes on when politics becomes the filter for all of human life. The symbol of having a television put into your living room so you can watch the war, instead of talk to each other, or make love, or art, or have a personal life, is made potent here. Ultimately, what Across the Universe is about is about the friendships we make along the way, the bonds we create. All you need is love. Love will not stop wars. But it sure makes our time here better, and if you forget that - if you abstract experience into just a political journey - you miss the whole point. Of course none of that is clear in times of upheaval when the stakes are high, but Across the Universe attempts to address that situation. Lucy begins to cut off from personal relationships. They seem trivial in the face of what is happening in Vietnam. Her boyfriend died over there. Her brother is over there. What does it matter that her boyfriend is angry that she works too much? But it does matter. Without love, we are nothing. There is a great scene where Jude bursts into the offices of the anti-war movement organization where Lucy works and sings "Revolution" right at her, mocking her commitment, mocking the earnestness, and mocking the cause above all else. This was a no-no in those days, and is certainly a no-no still, in some quarters. But Jude nails it. Not that there are not causes that are worth fighting for, but to what end? The humorlessness of activists is sneered at here, and it reminded me of the great scene in Reds when John Reed reprimands one of his colleagues for missing an important meeting, and Louise Bryant, his lover, looks on, disturbed, realizing that he has changed. He is no longer a journalist. He has a cause. The cause above all things. He crucifies his former friend, who couldn't make the meeting because his wife was hemorrhaging. In the world of high-stakes revolution, such events are trivial. Personal life must take a back seat. It's brutal. Inhuman. Across the Universe, in its own quirky way, captures the heartlessness of "community" when it insists on coming before the individual. Now that's radical.

A rich experience, fun and moving and connected, Across the Universe was one of my favorite films of the last decade. A true gem of creation. It made me clap my hands in glee at its sheer inventiveness and joy, and how often can one say that?

"It feels so right, now hold me tight ..."

"Tell me I'm the only one and then I might ..."

"Yeah you ... got that something ... I think you'll understand ..."

"I get by with a little help from my friends ..."

"Every night when everybody has fun, here am I, sitting all on my own ..."

"Falling, yes I am falling, and she keeps calling me back again ..."

"Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be ..."

"He shoot Coca Cola ..."