Film Culture

Step Brothers

TOM MEEK — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:15:40 GMT

Farting sets the standard of good taste
Step Brothers should answer any doubts as to whether Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are cinema’s reigning lovable losers.

Girls Rock!

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:12:14 GMT

An irresistable, haphazard jumble
The effort was valiant, but the documentary is often a jumble of haphazardly shot footage, with too many interview bites, and sketchy sequences.

CSNY Déjà Vu

MIKE MILIARD — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:08:49 GMT

Still rocking in the free world
If some think “four balding hippie millionaires” should just can the politics and play the hits, that’s not how Neil rolls.

Fearsome Otto

GERALD PEARY — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:30:13 GMT

Remembering Preminger
My one brush with the late Otto Preminger seems like a typical encounter.

ART AND THE MAN: Does Preminger’s behavior diminish the artistic achievement of a film like Laura?

My one brush with the late Otto Preminger seems like a typical encounter.

In 1980, the imperious 74-year-old Hollywood director came to Boston on a publicity tour for The Human Factor, a flawed adaptation of a Graham Greene novel that would prove his final film. I walked in to find Preminger screaming at a local radio reporter who had dared to request a five-minute interview without having first seen the movie. The reporter withered as Preminger blasted him. There would be no radio talk. A few minutes later, the famous filmmaker of Laura (1944), the formidable battler against the puritanical Hays Code, sat among reporters for a round-robin interview. Stephen Schiff, the Phoenix’s film editor, asked Preminger a somewhat challenging question. Preminger reached across the table and yanked Schiff’s beard. Hard! The Phoenix’s own yelled out: “OUCH!”

The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber & Faber), a studious, informative, often astutely argued new book by Phoenix contributor Chris Fujiwara, abounds with horror stories of Preminger’s sadistic ways. The bald, bony, arrogant Austrian Jew not only looked like a stereotype Nazi, he often played one in other people’s movies (memorably in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17). And he became a dictator when behind the camera.

Where to choose among a hundred well-documented tales in Fujiwara’s book? How about Otto keeping the 17-year-old Jean Seberg sequestered in a hotel room for days so she would feel properly claustrophobic as the imprisoned heroine of Saint Joan (1957)? (Did his mistreatment of the insecure Iowa girl contribute to her later suicide?) Or here’s a good one: Preminger insisting on repeated shots of star Tom Tryon being whipped by KKK hoodlums in The Cardinal (1963). Interviewed by Fujiwara, Tryon recalls, “Otto kept saying, ‘He’s got enough skin left. Ve do one more take.’ ”

According to many who were there, among them actor Keir Dullea, being a cooperative person or a powerless underling didn’t exempt you from Preminger’s vicious bullying. Does this behavior diminish his artistic achievement? For me, yes, just as my profound love of John Ford diminished after I read Joseph McBride’s biography, which details Ford’s cruelty to his performers. On this sticky point, Fujiwara and I disagree. He doesn’t shrink from recounting Preminger’s on-set misdeeds, but neither does he judge them. In fact, he leaps boldly from tainted biography to the purity of Preminger’s artistry, seeing mastery and even a moral vision in the filmmaker’s Hollywood œuvre.

Local culler

GERALD PEARY — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:49:54 GMT

Paul Sherman’s Big Screen Boston
For peddling some not-for-sale DVDs to a dubious Internet customer, local critic Paul Sherman found himself in the middle of an FBI sting, removed from his reviewing posts at the Boston Herald and the Improper Bostonian , and under voluntary house arrest.

GIRLTALK: Kate Davis’s fabulous teen-chick documentary is at the Brattle April 30.

For peddling some not-for-sale DVDs to a dubious Internet customer, local critic Paul Sherman found himself in the middle of an FBI sting, removed from his reviewing posts at the Boston Herald and the Improper Bostonian, and under voluntary house arrest. Down but not out, Sherman spent his incarceration compiling the Beantown book of books, Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond. Self-published (Black Bars Publishing, May 1), this is an indispensable history/dictionary/catalogue/critique of local feature filmmaking through the years. Dramas. Documentaries. Hollywood features and many indies.

Fie on Toronto standing in for the Hub! With Sherman as guide, we’re talking Boston as Boston, from All the Rage (1997), a gay melodrama set in the South End about “an A-list Boston lawyer with money, looks, and libido,” to With Honors (1994), “a socially conscious campus drama [in which] interiors that are supposed to be the Widener Library take place inside the Boston Athenaeum.”

The latter film faced the difficulty of many Ivy League scenarios — shooting is verboten within the Harvard gates. I’d always heard that a 1980 film, A Small Circle of Friends, had precipitated the ban, because the production company had made artificial snow in Harvard Yard and ruined the grass. According to Sherman, the anti–Vietnam War picture was ejected for a different reason: conservative Harvard profs objected to a anti-war banner hung by the filmmakers in Memorial Hall. In Big Screen Boston, Sherman has many such stories. He’s read through the period newspapers and magazines; he’s interviewed many of the participants.

Who else could distinguish between Mervyn LeRoy’s Home Before Dark (1958), a “partially successful” Hollywood soaper set among the Marblehead ritzy with a shopping trip to Bonwit Teller’s on Berkeley Street, and Home Before Dark (1997), “a well-observed, bittersweet, coming-of-age story” by Cambridge writer/director Maureen Foley? Who else has the scoop on Love Story (1970), pointing out that one of Ryan O’Neal’s Harvard roommates is played by real-life Al Gore roomie Tommy Lee Jones? Or that Jones would become, also in real life, the first manager of Cambridge’s legendary arthouse, the Orson Welles Cinema?

The Mystery Street in Sherman’s title? It’s John Sturges’s 1950 studio thriller and, in the author’s view, the first time that Hollywood ventured to Boston for location shooting. Thanks for the alert, because this noir sounds in need of discovery, with the great cinematographer John Alton unleashed on a Beacon Hill rooming house.

Guerrilla filmmaking

GERALD PEARY — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:00:44 GMT

This Is Nollywood opens the African Film Fest
Hollywood begat Bollywood, India’s extraordinary mass-market cinema.

THIS IS NOLLYWOOD Robert Caputo and Franco Sacchi explore the burgeoning Nigerian film industry.

Hollywood begat Bollywood, India’s extraordinary mass-market cinema. And Bollywood surely spawned Nollywood, the digital-based, populist moviemaking industry of Nigeria. In 1992, Nigeria was rescued from a mire of pirated American and Hong Kong action pictures at the marketplace and Mexican soap operas on TV. With $2000 in hand, visionaries in the capital of Lagos gambled their collateral on an issue-oriented film melodrama, Living in Bondage, utilizing Nigerian actors and crew. The response to African settings and topical African content? One million VHS cassettes were sold. Living in Bondage became the prototype for shooting fast and furious and local, with a quick sale of straight-to-video indigenous movies to the 55 million with video players.

Hooray for Nollywood! The average budget these days has escalated to about $20,000. And an eye-rolling, Guinness World Record 2000 films a year are produced in Nigeria, most of them keyed to Lagos, population 15 million. “Lagos is an incredibly dense, tense place. For the people to go home and pop in a VCD video compact disc is cultural relief,” explains Franco Sacchi, the Boston-based filmmaker whose documentary This Is Nollywood opens the Museum of Fine Arts’ Eighth African Film Festival this Friday, February 1, with an encore screening February 9. “The people relax with stories with which they can identify, and with everyday issues, in all genres: comedies, action, thrillers, horror movies, love stories. Topics include black magic, traditional medicine versus Western religion, cheating wives leaving their husbands. But there’s no nudity, no cursing, and films go through a censor board. That’s how we have statistics on the actual number of films produced.

This Is Nollywood is an amusing, informative chronicle of a trip to Nigeria by Sacchi and a skilled two-person Boston crew, Robert Caputo and Aimee Corrigan, to film the filming of Check Point, a Nollywood melodrama that’s being shot in English. The bare plot, as described by a participant: “Two young men attacked by bad cops. One escapes with gunshot wounds.” A nine-day shoot in the Nigerian countryside stretches to 11 because of all manner of bad luck. Rain. Actors who don’t show up. Electric failures. Sound problems: the shoot can’t compete with Ramadan, prayers to Allah droning for hours from a nearby mosque. “The Moslem faithful are doing their thing,” the good-natured (and Christian) Check Point ensemble shrug about the delay.

Lost and found

GERALD PEARY — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:56:35 GMT

Bruce Weber’s portrait of Chet Baker
Let’s Get Lost is getting a deserved second act, with a restored 35mm print screening at the Brattle Theatre January 25 through February 7.

LET’S GET LOST: Was it in Chet Baker’s style to jump out a window?

In February 1988, I took a break from the Berlin International Film Festival to hear the Chet Baker Quartet playing in a local club. The leather-skinned, hard-living trumpeter had his chops that night, but the cave-like basement club was in a fog from German cigarette smoke. Choking, I ankled before the second set.

I should have stayed on: several months later, on May 13, the 58-year-old Baker jumped, fell, or was pushed from a window in Amsterdam, landing dead on the sidewalk below. He had been active, playing jazz until the end but also appearing on camera in a documentary biography, Let’s Get Lost, that was made by Calvin-Klein-fashion-photographer-turned-filmmaker Bruce Weber. The posthumously released film was a smash, winning the Critics Prize at the 1988 Venice Film Festival. Twenty years later, Let’s Get Lost is getting a deserved second act, with a restored 35mm print screening at the Brattle Theatre January 25 through February 7.

I talked to Weber, a genial, roly-poly man wearing a Gypsy bandana, at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival, where he showed up with his cameraman, Jeff Preiss, and an entourage of quasi-actors from the surreal, fictional interludes of Let’s Get Lost. What was missing was Baker, four months gone. Did Weber have a theory about his protagonist’s Dutch demise?

“It’s typical of Chet to leave in this cloudy situation,” Weber said. “But it wasn’t really Chet’s style to jump. He was always getting into trouble with drug dealers. He called me in the editing room a month and a half before his death and said, ‘This cocaine dealer is after me.’ But I don’t know, because Chet was always hallucinating. People always ask me about the drugs. Chet took drugs to be normal. He was a rugged Oklahoma boy, and he had a great tolerance for them.”

Baker spent much time before Weber’s camera — blowing trumpet, singing, doing woozy soliloquies — in an unmistakably drug-induced state. When Let’s Get Lost came out, some journalists accused Weber of exploitation, of using Baker’s deteriorated mind and body to his own voyeuristic advantage.

“I don’t think it was a sadistic situation,” is the filmmaker’s version. “I have a responsibility to the person I’m making a film about, when he trusts you. Chet was proud of his knowledge of drugs. He once said he would not change the way he did things. I never felt that Chet was pathetic. He was very aware even in his worst state, without socks in the middle of winter.”

Rí!

GERALD PEARY — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:31:01 GMT

Kings in Gaelic, plus Brattle Staff Picks
In Kings , which is getting six screenings at the MFA, it’s 1977, and six spry Irish lads are sailing toward London, buoyed by grand expectations.

KINGS: Colm Meaney and the script’s Irish Gaelic hook save this film from blarney.

In Kings, which is getting six screenings at the MFA (January 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19), it’s 1977, and six spry Irish lads are sailing toward London, buoyed by grand expectations. Thirty soused, pub-crawling years later, most are underemployed or unemployed, and one of them, Jackie, has just fallen in front of a train in the tube. Now it’s the day of his wake and funeral, and the surviving five are meeting for an uncomfortably hard day and night of imbibing, feuding, and soul baring. What happened to their dreams, their hopes, their idealism? Was Jackie’s tumble an accident, or did he commit suicide? And what about Joe (Colm Meaney), the most financially successful of the bunch? Hasn’t he scorned them all by hiring only sober, non-Irish immigrants for his building projects? “No Paddy Need Apply.”

Kings is based on a play by Irish dramatist Jimmy Murphy that was a considerable London stage success. But it’s too familiar stuff. Who among us hasn’t spent an evening in the moviehouse or the theater with some version of these self-loathing losers turning on one another, accusations and recriminations? Eugene O’Neill, Boys in the Band, Cassavetes movies, etc. Kings still kind of works, partly because of the extraordinary ensemble of Irish actors led by the always reliable Meaney, but also because of the play’s winning hook. The Irish guys’ code of honor is to speak Gaelic when gathered together in London, their last hurrah against being swept into British culture, and into more-recent multiculturalism. They’ve spent more than half their lives in Britain, but you’re not going to know it by their boys-from-Connemara Irish chat.

A film mostly in Irish! Let’s raise a glass to that! At home, the movie has gotten rave, semi-patriotic reviews, both in Dublin and in Belfast. It’s Ireland’s official entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

Bookstores do it, video stores do it, but, to my knowledge, only one theater in America has been so adventurous: for the third year running, our venerable Brattle Theatre is devoting a week to Staff Picks. “The selections this year are uniformly terrific,” Ned Hinkle, the Brattle’s creative director, brags over the phone. “I gave an open call for submissions, and I got selections from 15 people. I combed through the lists and then pushed for films we don’t usually play.” Have there been surprise hits in former years? “As always with the Brattle,” Hinkle says, “I’m both surprised and confounded by what does well. Brandon Constant, one of our office staff, chose two earlier winners, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Airplane (1980).

Union dos

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 14:44:47 GMT

The Hollywood writers strike east
Film Culture wanted to check out Boston’s first rally supporting the Writers Guild of America strike to see which New England–based screenwriters would answer the call.

FAN BASE: The writers say they want only 2.5 percent — and real dragons.

Besides being a labor guy, Mr. Film Culture wanted to check out Boston’s first rally supporting the Writers Guild of America strike to see which New England–based screenwriters would answer the call. I’ll admit to being disappointed when I arrived December 14 at the First Unitarian Church in Cambridge: the speakers on the podium were all TV writers. Credit Cambridge’s Jamie Paglia of Eureka fame on the Sci Fi Channel for organizing the event. He imported from New York Rob Kutner, an Emmy Award–winning writer for The Daily Show and, most important for many in attendance, Joss Whedon, creator/writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What was far more of a jolt was the identity of the hundreds in the church pews. A storm of angry Guild activists? A show of hands revealed fewer than a dozen Guild members in the house. Instead, the church swarmed with late-teenage fan boys and girls who were there in solidarity with Whedon, their fantasy-writer superhero. Whatever he said made them chortle, so his stump speech proved an uncomfortable mix of union agitprop and pop-culture pandering.

Whedon said, with a straight face, that there are two major issues on the bargaining table, as the Guild (the WGA) faces off against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the AMPTP). “Number one: new media, the Internet, iPhones, etc. The people who created it should get a piece of it. Number two: DRAGONS SHOULD BE REAL!”

Mother Jones, Saul Alinsky, Walter Reuther. . . . Joss Whedon. He actually said, “Number two.” The crowd roared, so he added, “We’re reasonable people. They need three years to study dragon technology. We took it off the table.” Then Whedon looked out at his youthful admirers. “This strike has created a community, between us and you. The audience has a voice. You guys are that voice. . . . Go into iTunes, make a statement about this. You can start a virtual picket line!”

Rob Kutner explained the actual bargaining point concerning New Media. “We are asking 2.5 percent. They say our demand is shocking, it will destroy Hollywood.”

Jamie Paglia told the audience to check out www.unitedhollywood.com, where executive Sumner Redstone is lecturing about the huge profits possible from the Net. This is the same Redstone whose Viacom offices are being picketed by the WGA.

Auteur land?

GERALD PEARY — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:20:39 GMT

‘Film Culture’ in 2007
Granted, Sweeney Todd is a grim, violent, misanthropic musical.

INTO THE WILD: A grand, glorious, tragic road story.

Granted, Sweeney Todd is a grim, violent, misanthropic musical. But having seen it performed on stage doesn’t prepare you for a movie far more malevolent and unrelentingly despairing: a slasher noir, a devil’s dance of throat slitting and blood spurting. Don’t bring the kids! What’s amazing is that DreamWorks is the Hollywood production company financing it. Sugar-sprinkled Spielbergland! Nobody at the studio put a tootsie down and confronted Tim Burton: “This picture is far too depressing and violent! We can’t release it this way!”

In 2007, a year more like freaky 1978 than corporate 2006, Burton as director is, again, the king. He’s an auteur whose vision — no matter how risky and unusual, and, perhaps, poisonously noncommercial — is not only respected but greenlighted. It’s Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, with a nod to Stephen Sondheim. These are strange days at the moviehouse, with an abundance of uncompromising, director-dominated films: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, Julian Schnabel’s Le scaphandre et le papillon|The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Brian DePalma’s Redacted, Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth.

Will this auteurists-gone-wild trend continue into 2008? I’m skeptical. Wait till the box office is tallied. There’s not a Bee Movie in the bunch, and nothing anywhere to challenge the infantilized appeal of guy-on-guy Judd Apatow comedies. Can only advanced Dylanists appreciate I’m Not There? Will any regular folk get into the three-hours, one-note, oil-well obsessiveness of There Will Be Blood?

Still, it was a very good year.

BEST FILM OF 2007: Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. As I wrote last August after its world premiere at Telluride, this grand, glorious, tragic road story is the perfect film to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road.

REST OF THE TEN BEST:I’m Not There, The Savages, Starting Out in the Evening, 3:10 to Yuma, Rocket Science, Margot at the Wedding, Grindhouse, This Is England, Le scaphandre et le papillon|The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: Pavel Lungin’s The Island

RUNNERS-UP:The Host, Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois|Lady Chatterley, Climates, La faute à Fidel|Blame It on Fidel.

BEST DOCUMENTARY:Deep Water

REST OF THE TEN BEST:The King of Kong, Autism: The Musical, Crazy Love, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, The Devil on Horseback, The Cats of Mirikitani, No End in Sight, Lake of Fire

Good Evening

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:43:19 GMT

And Forever holds its peace
All those Oscar prognosticators, all those Best Picture wagers, and nobody has mentioned, or even noticed, Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening .

VIDEO: The trailer for Starting Out in the Evening

All those Oscar prognosticators, all those Best Picture wagers, and nobody has mentioned, or even noticed, Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening. This enchanting, civilized feature, based on a sublime 1998 novel by Brian Morton, is a practically note-perfect work, with miraculous performances from Frank Langella and Lili Taylor. (The Boston Jewish Festival showed last month; it opens this Friday at the West Newton Cinema.) Langella plays aging Jewish novelist Leonard Schiller, who’s making a valiant effort to finish one last book, even though his four previous novels are out of print. Then Heather (Lauren Ambrose), an insistent, precocious, somewhat sexy Brown graduate student, intrudes on his ascetic existence.

Heather, it turns out, is mad about Schiller’s first two novels, which she devoured at the library and which altered her life. Now, she’s writing her master’s thesis on his œuvre, and she wants to conduct a string of intense in-person interviews. At the end of their first talk, she grabs for his hands and kisses them hungrily. It’s gratitude for his body of work, but it’s also Schiller’s mortal body she’s grabbing for. In the years since his wife died, he’s banished eros from his life so that he can concentrate on his work. He’s frail and halting after several heart attacks. Is this more than he can handle?

As played with meticulous tenderness by Frank Langella, Schiller is anything but an arid old fart. He’s got dignity and old-school soul, this remnant from the New York intellectual 1950s, the school of Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin. He’s courtly, reticent, a gentleman’s gentleman, a writer who wears a jacket and tie even when he’s glued for hours to his manual typewriter. That’s something to celebrate: the main character in an American movie as an unapologetic intellectual, a man whose intelligence and book learning Wagner treats with respect. As for Langella, he breathes the thinker’s life. There’s but one gesture that is, perhaps, borrowed: a coy, bashful smile and downcast eyes when he’s charmed by Heather, something you might remember from watching Emil Jannings’s Professor Rath in the grasp of Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola in the 1930 film Der blaue Engel|The Blue Angel.

Moral minority

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:30:31 GMT

The Code, plus Strength and Honor
“It’s incorrect to assert that traditional Hollywood films always have happy endings,” film historian Thomas Doherty once noted on a panel I attended.

“It’s incorrect to assert that traditional Hollywood films always have happy endings,” film historian Thomas Doherty once noted on a panel I attended, puncturing an oft-repeated truism about American cinema. Added Doherty, a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University: “They don’t always end happily, they always end morally.” The more I considered it, the more I realized that Doherty was dead right — if he meant “morally” in the most conservative Christian sense. There are countless movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1930–1955, that conclude unhappily, even fatally, for the protagonists. But what’s operative is a hard-love Hollywood justice: those burdened by misery are shown to have earned such punishment for their crimes, their sins, their transgressions. In traditional studio films, bad things happen to bad-acting people: murderers, adulterers, and lascivious women (including those who dare have children out of wedlock).

Smacks of Catholic doctrine? Even though secular Jews ran almost all the studios? Whatever the Jewish moguls themselves believed, it was Catholic ethics that shaped and informed Hollywood cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. At least, that’s the contention of Doherty’s brilliant and absorbing new book, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration. It’s a tale of strange bedfellows: in 1934, bowing to combined pressure from the rightist Catholic Legion of Decency and the left-leaning FDR government, Hollywood agreed to clean up its act. The Production Code adopted in 1930 would finally have teeth. All scripts would be perused and all movies checked out to see that they complied with the Code.

As Doherty shows, the Code was written in 1929 by a cabal of Jesuits led by the Reverend Daniel A. Lord. What did it demand? No swear words. No toilet humor — no shots of toilets even. Married couples had to sleep in separate beds. No crime could go unpunished, and so on. When the Production Code became official Hollywood doctrine, the administrator, from 1934–1954, was Joseph Breen, a zealous, militant, church-going Catholic. Never heard of him? Doherty persuaded me, through his assiduous research, that Breen was the most important voice in the studios for two decades. For 12 hours a day, his office would sniff out movies to see whether they adhered to the prudish Code. Breen was the auteur of Hollywood-style morality, lording it over thousands of films.

King and Queens

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:09:46 GMT

Romance + Cigarettes , plus Salton Sea
In Romance & Cigarettes , which opens this Friday at the Kendall Square, Gandolfini has been dropped by writer/director John Turturro into drab, treeless, white-ethnic Queens.

VIDEO: A clip from Romance and Cigarettes

There’s James Gandolfini — balding, huffing, shuttling between wife and mistress, obsessed with his mortality, his tubby belly pushing out of his shirt, just as on The Sopranos. But there’s no gangster glamor this time.

In Romance & Cigarettes, which opens this Friday at the Kendall Square, Gandolfini has been dropped by writer/director John Turturro into drab, treeless, white-ethnic Queens. He’s Nick Murder, ironworker, and his in-heat affair with Tula, a toilet-mouthed, cockney-accented lingerie clerk (Kate Winslet), is a madcap attempt to move beyond his prescribed blue-collar life of carting home the bacon for his religious wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon), and their three demanding grown daughters (Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Aida Turturro).

For this lunchbox bozo, surely there’s more in store than that tiny house with the aluminum fence and the vinyl siding, the box of a backyard hemmed in by high high weeds where Jimmy Hoffa could be buried. And what about that air traffic droning overhead, landing and taking off all hours from La Guardia? You want Tom Wolfe’s anonymous, unglamorous “flyover” people? You got ’em with Nick and the Murder clan.

But Turturro gussies up this depressing tale of underclass claustrophobia, transforming it all into a funky, amusing, improbable musical. There’s dancing in the streets of Queens! When Nick is tossed out by the irate Kitty, this gloomy, cheating guy can’t help but lip-synch Engelbert Humperdinck’s three-Manhattan slurry 1968 ode to Dino, “A Man Without Love.” Trash collectors join in, and a chorus of hardhats: crooning and hoofing by the silent majority! Then Winslet’s bosomy harlot enters the picture by way of a big production number (the Buena Vista Social Club’s “Cuarto de Tula”) and her red-hot mama is rescued from a flaming building by a chorus of horny firemen with unwinding, swelling, squirting hoses. And Sarandon’s wronged spouse turns her Catholic church into a down-home revival meeting, with everyone on the hard benches chanting, clapping, and rocking the boat to Janis Joplin’s torchy recording of “Piece of My Heart.”

There’s an ingratiating levity to the musical numbers, as thespians we admire for their professional rigor have a lark cutting loose, belting out, as enthusiastic amateurs. (Turturro’s stated model is Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.) Other pleasures are acting moments. Gandolfini and Steve Buscemi, as his at-work pal, Angelo (Steve Buscemi), coming off as Ralph Kramden and Norton as they swap smutty Hollywood gossip stories on a high-rise scaffolding above the city. And Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet together for the first time in a movie scene, as the righteous wife marches to the mall to challenge the earthy shopgirl stealing her hubby. Isn’t this a cool reprise of proper spouse Norma Shearer stalking working-girl Joan Crawford in the 1939 classic The Women?

Noah’s arc

GERALD PEARY — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:13:15 GMT

Baumbach from Squid to Margot
William Faulkner conceived The Sound and the Fury from a mental picture of a pair of women’s underpants dangling on a clothesline.

NO UNDERPANTS: But the thought of Nicole Kidman on a train got Margot started.

Bride and prejudice: Margot has snob appeal. By Peter Keough.

William Faulkner conceived The Sound and the Fury from a mental picture of a pair of women’s underpants dangling on a clothesline. Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival, Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) said that what sparked Margot at the Wedding was “a mother and her son riding on a train — that was the image I had in my head. I had a feeling about it, but I didn’t know what it would turn into.” It became the film’s opening scene, with the tense, competitive, neurotic novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) traveling with her adolescent son, Claude (Zane Pais), to visit Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Margot’s younger sister, a teacher who is newly engaged.

“In the early part of writing, I work on characters,” Baumbach continued. “I don’t outline. I don’t like to know too much at too early a time. As I continue writing, I’m in the world of the characters, and it becomes infectious. I walk around with this world in my head. My father, Jonathan Baumbach, is a novelist; my mother, Georgia Brown, was a film critic for the Village Voice. I grew up around writers and teachers. I’m friends with them; and both in The Squid and in Margot, I find myself writing about people I know who are sophisticated and articulate and realize a lot about themselves, but that can hide chaos underneath.

“The Squid and the Whale was, in a way, a cozy family movie, easy to find your bearings. Margot is about not finding your bearings. The anxieties of the characters keep shifting. Margot is having a hard time being a mother, being married, dealing with expectations of herself and her expectations of people around her.”

The casting of Nicole Kidman? Baumbach laughed. “It’s safe to say that before Squid I would have been arrested trying to have coffee with her! But working with her was the easiest experience I’ve ever had in the movie business. She was my first choice for Margot. I did have coffee with her. We’re both shy, halting people. But the next day, she said yes. It was so nice! It took years to convince people to make The Squid.”

Heavy casualties

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:26:20 GMT

History repeats in De Palma’s Redacted
In 1989, filmmaker Brian De Palma directed the potent Hollywood feature Casualties of War , taking his audience back in time to a vile true-life incident from Vietnam.

VIDEO: The trailer for Redacted

In 1989, filmmaker Brian De Palma directed the potent Hollywood feature Casualties of War, taking his audience back in time to a vile true-life incident from Vietnam. A platoon of American soldiers raped and murdered a Vietnamese girl, then conspired to cover up the crime.

In 2007, it’s déjà vu all over again as De Palma induces his audience to confront, via fictional re-creation, the shameful 2006 incident in which American soldiers stationed in Iraq raped, killed, and burned the body of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmudiyah and also killed her sister and her parents.

Support our troops? Says De Palma: “I was watching the way they [in Washington] were selling the war and it was driving me crazy, me being a film director knowing how images can be manipulated.” Now 67, De Palma is old enough to have opposed both Vietnam and Iraq, and to hold the American military accountable when there is barbaric behavior. “If we’re causing this kind of suffering, we should be witness to it,” De Palma said at a press breakfast for Redacted at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September.

He acknowledged that the stories of Casualties of War and Redacted are depressingly similar. Was there a different way for him to approach the Iraq story? For inspiration, he reached back to his little-seen (mostly in France) Dionysus in ’69, a 1970 adaptation of an avant-garde Off Broadway play. Both the play and the movie featured a company of African-American actors in “whiteface,” more or less improvising an Artaud-influenced drama of violence, degradation, and rape.

For Redacted, De Palma replaced the star-driven Hollywood cast of Casualties of War (Sean Penn, Michael J. Fox, etc.) with young, raw unknowns. Embedded in military uniform, they operated as an alternative-theater ensemble, starting with a mock-Army rehearsal period. “There was boot camp for two weeks, and there was a real sergeant on the set. Whenever they got too ‘unsoldierly,’ he’d put them in line.”

After “boot camp,” the actors were transported for much of the shoot to Jordan, which stood in for Iraq. De Palma: “The most expensive thing was flying people out of the USA.” In Jordan, they were put to work replicating the duties of the accused American soldiers in Mahmudiyah: stopping Iraqi citizenry at checkpoint. (That’s where the real-life soldiers spotted the young girl whom they would rape and kill.) “They bonded like an actual Army unit” said De Palma of his cast. “They were all in their characters all of the time, like Dionysus in ’69. And as in Dionysus, you didn’t know what would happen every night. They could go wherever they wanted, the camera following, the cameraman as part of the ensemble.

Ordure in the court

GERALD PEARY — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:03:58 GMT

Barbet Schroeder’s L’avocat de la terreur
“He couldn’t be a terrorist, living in a cellar and eating canned food,” says a perceptive friend of the notorious French attorney Jacques Vergès.

THE FACE OF EVIL? Schroeder is fascinated, but is that all?

“He couldn’t be a terrorist, living in a cellar and eating canned food,” says a perceptive friend of the notorious French attorney Jacques Vergès. “He needs his books. He’s an egghead,” says another friend.

For decades, even as he’s led the zesty bourgeois life of a gourmand and a Parisian intellectual, Jacques Vergès has made a living defending bomb-wielding revolutionaries, from Algerian independence fighters to members of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group to Carlos the Jackal. As seen in Barbet Schroeder’s documentary L’avocat de la terreur|Terror’s Advocate, which plays this week (November 9-15) at the Brattle Theatre, Vergès makes no pretense of barristerial objectivity. Going to trial as mouthpiece for two unrepentant German terrorists, he announced, “I won’t hide the esteem I feel for both of them.”

Vergès’s ardent support for violent left-wingers isn’t even the most controversial thing about him. This is the same man who’s stood up in court for numerous African dictators, and for Yugoslavian strong guy Slobodan Milosevic. In 1984, he defended Gestapo commandant Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon.” Although the Nazi deported thousands of French Jews, Vergès smiles nostalgically about having been there for Barbie. “It was exhilarating. Thirty-nine lawyers on the other side, me alone. Each day, the others wondered, ‘What ploy will the bastard come up with?’ ”

His major strategy was a dilly: he did everything he could to steer the proceedings away from Barbie and toward France’s occupation of Algeria. If French soldiers tortured and murdered countless Algerian prisoners (and they did), what right did those who acted like Nazis have to accuse an actual Nazi of similar crimes? Barbie received a life sentence, dying later in prison. At one point in the documentary, Vergès brags that nobody he’s defended has ever been executed.

I wonder whether he’d have maintained his unblemished record if he’d been the advocate of his pal Pol Pot. In the early ’40s, they were college mates in France. In the ’70s, years when Vergès disappeared from view, he seems to have visited Pol Pot in Cambodia. This is the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for murdering two million of his citizens, the worst Holocaust since World War II. Not according to Vergès, who admits that some bad things did happen in the killing fields but holds that the Cambodian genocide, if there was a genocide, was “unintentional.”

Kael? Sarris?

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:07:09 GMT

The critics convene at the Coolidge
“Kael was a presence, a factor in how many of us do our jobs,” argued Salon.com ’s Stephanie Zacharek.

Pauline Kael

“Kael was a presence, a factor in how many of us do our jobs,” argued Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman agreed: “She was the Elvis, or the Beatles, of film criticism.”

When he was a student, Gleiberman added, he wrote a fan note to Kael, and she wrote back. “It was like God had sent me a letter.”

“I think the time is ripe for a guerrilla attack on Pauline,” answered David Sterritt, president of the National Society of Film Critics. This was the most argumentative anyone got. Sterritt went on, “I honestly think more people were influenced by Andy Sarris than Pauline Kael. He was always writing about interesting directors I’d never heard of, and ‘B’ movies, and spectacles.” The LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas nominated Manny Farber for Most Important Critic consideration, and Premiere magazine’s Glenn Kenny brought up Robin Wood, the British critic who has lived for decades in Toronto.

At its most fossilized, when nine voices droned on, unchecked, about some dimly interesting film-critic concern, “Beyond Thumbs Up” resembled that most deadening playing field of discourse, an academic conference. Yawn and snore! But that wasn’t often: critics are far wittier, and a hundred times less earnest, than most college profs I know. So much of the two days of discussion proved flavorful because film critics are interesting thinkers with insightful things to say about their profession. For instance:

Ty Burr of the Boston Globe: “I have to be cognizant at the Globe that I have all kinds of readership. Some like movies, some don’t, some take their kids. I try to address the consumer audience in the first couple of paragraphs of a review. Then I can go on to an audience who cares about culture and, in the back half, try to explain the film to myself.”

Phillip Lopate, author of American Movie Critics: “I want to speak against the notion of risk and edginess, [the idea] that the subversive, the transgressive, is always what’s important. If I put up Lubitsch, Ford, Mizoguchi versus the edginess of Altman and Scorsese, I’d take the first group. I want a film to show sublimity, to have wisdom, compassion, and a visual rigor. Not 10 styles, one style.”

Armond White of the New York Press: “I consider myself a pop-culture kid, always interested in what’s new. But I’m not always taken in by what’s new.”

Holy spirit

GERALD PEARY — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:58:47 GMT

Pavel Lungin’s The Island
The Russian-Jewish filmmaker Pavel Lungin made his reputation as a post-Soviet Scorsese.

SEA CHANGE: Skepticism is out, “God exists” is in in The Island.

The Russian-Jewish filmmaker Pavel Lungin made his reputation as a post-Soviet Scorsese, with hard-times urban tales (Taxi Blues, Luna Park, etc.) set in grubby, materialist Moscow, and often featuring skeptical, secular Jewish characters. What a sea change with The Island (2006), which is getting six screenings (October 26, 28, 31; November 1-3) at the MFA, a very weird and magnificently realized spiritual parable set mostly in a Russian Orthodox monastery on the isolated White Sea. “This is a film about the fact that God exists,” Lungin has said of The Island.

The narrative starts in 1942. A Nazi ship intercepts a Russian barge, whereupon sniveling coal stoker Anatoly (Pyotr Mamonov) squirms on his knees and begs for his life. No problem: all Anatoly has to do is shoot his Captain, a square-jawed stoic who calmly lights and drags on a cigarette. It’s a bit like Sophie’s choice, when novelist William Styron’s heroine was forced by the Nazis to decide which of her children would be gassed and which would live. Sophie’s “choice” led to a lifetime of guilt and, finally, suicide. Anatoly’s gun goes off and the Captain falls backward into the icy water. How will Anatoly live with his crime?

Flash ahead 34 years, to 1976. Anatoly is balding, unbathed, practically toothless, and still stoking coal. But in the interim, he has become a monk. Father Anatoly. His is the most ascetic, impoverished life in a crumbling shack at the edge of the cold sea. Each day he prays fervently, acknowledging his terrible betrayal and murder (“My sin is ever before you, O Lord”), and speaking up to God for the Captain’s wandering soul (“Grant him the kingdom of Heaven!”). Lungin is right: The Island is a deeply religious movie. The moments of prayer are beautifully, delicately lit, as the reverent Anatoly kneels before the most awe-inspiring Eastern Orthodox icons of Christ. Hushed, lovely long shots of the robed, bearded Anatoly rowing across the water are positively Biblical, like Jesus and his disciples at the Sea of Galilee.

But then there’s the Baroque stuff, the almost ghoulish comedy, which may — or may not — undercut The Island’s piety. Anatoly is not just a suffering Christian penitent — he’s a mad prankster, terrifying the other monks with his anarchist tricks, like setting fire to their boots. And he’s a nut job. Crazy, crazy! When peasants arrive from the mainland, he gives them the screwiest advice, like telling an old widow that her husband is still alive in France and that she should travel there and find him. Lungin keeps Anatoly a mystery. Is there a strange religious logic to his loony actions? Is he a wise fool, doing God’s bidding, or a foolish fool, undoing the Christian work of the Orthodox brethren?

Bravo Rivo!

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:27:33 GMT

Plus Flickipedia
September 30 was a delicious day for this secular Jew

September 30 was a delicious day for this secular Jew: corned beef and kishka at Joan & Ed’s Deli in Natick’s Sherwood Plaza followed by, at the Gann Academy in Waltham, a 300-person tribute to the achievements of Sharon Pucker Rivo, co-founder of the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University. It was the Boston Center for Jewish Heritage that presented Rivo the Zvi Cohen Leadership and Legacy Award. Since 1976, she, along with the National Center’s late co-director, Mimi Krant, has managed to locate, and find funding for the restoration of, 36 Yiddish-language films, all of which had been lost to the world, many during the Holocaust. The National Center has collected 10,000 cans of films about Jewish culture, the largest depository of Jewish filmic material outside Israel. What Rivo calls “a picture album of the Jewish people.”

At the Gann, Rivo offered a half-hour video presentation showcasing some of the National Center’s precious holdings. The first clip was from a 1903 documentary, an extended overhead shot looking down on Jewish vendors on New York’s Lower East Side, many of them women manning the outdoor counters, peddling rags, wrapping fish, etc. Rivo: “We’ve had scholars come to Brandeis to look at the clothes. Others study the gender roles.” She showed home movies shot in Eastern European shtetls in the 1930s, poor, unfortunate Jewish communities that were to be wiped out by the Nazis. And then, “the heart and soul of our collection,” scenes from Yiddish dramatic films starring actor immortals. There was Molly Picon, the Jewish Lillian Gish, breaking bread, stuffing herself with food in a 1923 film produced in Austria. And then Maurice Schwartz, the Yiddish Olivier, stumbling about in Tevye (1939), Job-like, cursing God’s silence as his beloved daughter scooted off to marry a goy.

Where did Rivo get her idea of preserving Jewish culture? She recalled an epiphanic moment in 1954, when a TV set entered her Kansas City home. “I was with my grandmother, who had come from Lithuania in 1903. We were watching, I think it was The Colgate Comedy Hour, which had comic Eddie Cantor, with his big turning eyes and his big nose, singing, ‘Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider!’ My grandmother remarked, ‘Only in America could a Jew do this before all the people!’ ” A half-century later: Rivo found the only extant film record of former president Harry Truman speaking at an Israel fundraiser on Eddie Cantor’s 65th birthday, in 1957. “We are making a copy,” she said, “for the Truman Presidential Library.”

The Ingmar imbroglio

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:37:21 GMT

Plus the Manhattan Short Film Fest
There hasn’t been such a stir among film critics for years.

SMILES OF THE SUMMER NIGHT: Mozart isn’t obsolete, and neither is Bergman.

There hasn’t been such a stir among film critics for years.

I’m talking about the blogging fury set off by Jonathan Rosenbaum’s August 4 New York Times op-ed article, “Scenes from an Overrated Career,” an assault on the reputation of Ingmar Bergman. Everyone in cyberspace was having a go at the veteran critic of the Chicago Reader for his scabrous essay about the recently deceased Swedish filmmaker.

Leading the pack was a Chicago colleague, Roger Ebert, who in his Sun-Times blog described Rosenbaum’s piece as “a bizarre departure from his usual sanity.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman labeled Rosenbaum’s words “staggeringly wrongheaded.” Internet writers chimed in from as far away as Cairo, where an Egypt Daily News reporter complained of Rosenbaum’s “unfounded argument.”

I follow Rosenbaum regularly in the Chicago Reader. He’s among the handful of American print critics whom I count on for an original, penetrating, and, often, political take on the cinema. His notorious Times essay sounded like someone else’s voice. Out of character for Rosenbaum, it was insulting to regular people who go to the movies. He referred, petulantly, to New York audiences who responded to “the mainly blond, blue-eyed casts” of Bergman films. As for Bergman’s œuvre, Rosenbaum’s criticisms were byzantine. Bergman possessed — a negative? — “the power to entertain,” and, coupled with it, “a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits.” Rosenbaum summarized his objections to Bergman: “His films aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film.” Huh? What does that mean?

As described by Rosenbaum, Bergman was an obsolescent artist whose movies, instead of looking forward like those of Godard and Resnais, reflect the 19th-century concerns of his drama heroes, Strindberg and Ibsen. No wonder, Rosenbaum claimed, he’s rarely taught in film courses.

Really? I taught a course in Bergman just last year. Some Bergman movies are influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg, but both dramatists resonate today, Ibsen with his political and feminist consciousness, Strindberg with his expressionism and his battle of the sexes. Anyway, many of Bergman’s films are totally forward-looking, high-modernist formalist classics, as cinematic as movies can be. Persona, for one. Is Bergman relevant in 2007? Let’s note such “God is dead” masterpieces as TheSeventh Seal and Winter Light. In a deluded era where God is in every football huddle and anti-abortion rally, how refreshing to have Bergman’s anguished characters faced with a silent void, where the good Lord hides his face. If there is a Lord.