Cine-Journal

The NY Jewish Film Festival and Beyond

2012-01-18T15:04:00.007-05:00

As you can imagine, the New York Jewish Film Festival marks my busiest time of the year, three stories in as many weeks, with a large collection of films to see and write about. Here are the kinks to the stories, one, two and finally three. This year's event was a little disappointing overall, but there are several films that are well worth seeking out, either in the festival or afterwards. My personal recommendations would be: Restoration, My Father Evgeni and Daas. In a perfect world, all three would be picked up for US distribution. (Heck, in a perfect world I would be -- oh, never mind.)

Looking ahead, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art have announced seven selections for this year's New Directors/New Films. I thought it was worth passing along the titles because the geographical spread gives you an interesting picture of the state of cinema in the new year:

Representing nine countries from around the world, the initial seven selections are Karl Markovics' BREATHING (Austria), Anca Damian's CRULIC: THE PATH TO BEYOND (Romania), Julia Murat's FOUND MEMORIES (Brazil/Argentina/France), Pablo Giorgelli's LAS ACACIAS (Argentina/Spain), Joachim Trier's OSLO 31, AUGUST 31ST (Norway), Alejandro Landes's PORFIRIO (Colombia), and Angelina Nikonova's TWILIGHT PORTRAIT (Russia).

Finally, you may have noticed the presence of the Straub-Huillet film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach on my top 100 list a few weeks back. Unfortunately, the great Gustav Leonhardt, who played Bach -- in both senses of the phrase -- in the film, died yesterday. It's more of a loss for the music world than for film, but I thought it was worth noting.

Even Filmmakers Have to Eat

2012-01-10T12:48:00.003-05:00

A job is a job. Several of the nouvelle vague directors made commercials. I've some of Godard's and they look more like his films than they do like advertisements. (I believe you can find some of them on YouTube.)

Now, the excellent Open Culture website has soap commercials by Ingmar Bergman and several rather charming commercials made by Federico Fellini at the end of his career. The Bergmans are downright weird, featuring a Swedish actor who is a ringer for Cliff Arquette doing his Charley Weaver character. Makes you wonder why we never saw Ingmar on Hollywood Squares.

Village Voice Fires J. Hoberman

2012-01-05T03:20:00.002-05:00

When I was a young film critic and a student at Columbia the holy grail for me was having a byline in the Village Voice film section. I never did manage that feat, but the Voice remained my benchmark for mainstream film criticism for many, many years. Then the current owners, aptly described as the New Times syndicate, took over the paper and quickly put their stamp on it. Like when a thug stamps on your face.

They remade the paper by firing or forcing out as many of the regulars as possible. The Voice went from being on of the fearless progressive voices in my town to being a glorified shopper that was distinguished primarily by its utter irrelevance.

The one exception was their retention of Jim Hoberman as their lead film critic. And now, he is gone as well. (Read the story on IndieWire here.)

I don't know what idiotic master plan the syndicate had and has, although I'm sure that break the strong union presence at the paper was a big part of it. What I do know is this: the Village Voice ceased being a meaningful participant in the life of New York City six years ago when the carpetbagging bastards from New Times began to destroy it. With Hoberman gone, it is equally irrelevant to film culture in America, which it once defined. It's a free rag, so I can't tell you not to buy it, but you don't have to patronize its advertisers, and you can let them know why you are withdrawing your trade.

My Small Contribution to the Advancement of Documentary Film

2012-01-04T17:24:00.007-05:00

Several months ago, I was honored by being selected for the panel choosing films to receive funding from the the Foundation for Jewish Culture's Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film. Needless to say, it wasn't something I could discuss openly or publicize until the results of our work were released for publication. That has come to pass, to put it biblically, and I can now direct you to information about the grant-making process and the films that we are helping out. When the films are finished and/or released, I urge you to support them. Right now, go here for more information.

And a Happy New Year! At Least 100 Reasons to Be Happy

2011-12-30T13:27:00.006-05:00

Jewish Week has my interview with Michel Hazanavicius up on the website. I very much liked The Artist, especially if you put it in the context of his first two features, the OSS 117 reboots. If those were odes to dumb humor that isn't very funny, The Artist is a warm, humane and sweet-tempered blend of comedy and melodrama that reminded me more of Leo McCarey than Hazanavicius's beloved Billy Wilder. (Although one could argue that the late Wilder films fit that description quite well.) I'm not saying it will make my ten-best list; in fact, I can almost guarantee it won't. But sometimes you see a film and it just has "Honorable Mention" status written all over it. The Artist feels like that to me, and that's an entirely -- no pun intended, for once -- honorable thing.

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So the year is almost over, I'm already steaming ahead through the films from next year's New York Jewish Film Festival (and a promising lot they are). But the members of the New York Independent Film Critics Circle (better known as "the Ira voters") are busily compiling their 100-best lists, which I will be tabulating on New Year's Day or thereabouts. My list has been pretty much complete for many weeks. So in honor of the impending change of calendar, here it is for your perusal and amusement. (Listing is alphabetical. If you count them and find more than 100 films, let me know.)

An Autumn Afternoon -- Yasujiro Ozu

Advise and Consent -- Otto Preminger

Affair to Remember, An -- Leo McCarey

Aguirre, the Wrath of God -- Werner Herzog

Anatomy of a Murder -- Otto Preminger

Andrei Rublev -- Andrei Tarkovsky

Ballet -- Frederick Wiseman

Bend of the River -- Anthony Mann

Big Heat, The -- Fritz Lang

Big Red One, The (restored version) -- Samuel Fuller

Bigger Than Life -- Nicholas Ray

Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Blue -- Kzrstyof Kieslowski

Caro Diario -- Nanni Moretti

Casablanca -- Michael Curtiz

Celine and Julie Go Boating -- Jacques Rivette

Chimes at Midnight -- Orson Welles

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, The -- Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet

Cluny Brown -- Ernst Lubitsch

Contempt -- Jean-Luc Godard

Crime of M. Lange, The -- Jean Renoir

Day of Wrath -- Carl Dreyer

Detour -- Edgar G. Ulmer

Diary of a Country Priest -- Robert Bresson

Elena et les hommes -- Jean Renoir

Empress Yang Kwei Fei, The -- Kenji Mizoguchi

Floating Weeds -- Yasujiro Ozu

Flowers of St. Francis, The – Roberto Rossellini

Force of Evil – Abraham Polonsky

French Can-Can -- Jean Renoir

Great Dictator, The -- Charles Chaplin

Gun Crazy -- Joseph H. Lewis

Home from the Hill -- Vincente Minnelli

I Know Where I'm Going -- Michael Powell

Imitation of Life -- Douglas Sirk

It's a Wonderful Life -- Frank Capra

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles -- Chantal Akerman

Kings of the Road -- Wim Wenders

Kippur -- Amos Gitai

Kiss Me Deadly -- Robert Aldrich

Lancelot du Lac -- Robert Bresson

Le Samourai -- Jean-Pierre Melville

Leopard, The -- Luchino Visconti

Letter from an Unknown Woman -- Max Ophuls

Madame de . . . -- Max Ophuls

Magnificent Ambersons, The -- Orson Welles

Man Who Loved Women, The -- Blake Edwards

Man with a Movie Camera -- Dziga Vertov

Marnie -- Alfred Hitchcock

Mattei Affair, The -- Francesco Rosi

Memory of Justice, The -- Marcel Ophuls

Messiah, The – Roberto Rossellini

Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The -- Preston Sturges

Moses und Aron -- Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet

Mother and the Whore, The – Jean Eustache

My Darling Clementine -- John Ford

Naked Spur, The -- Anthony Mann

Near Death -- Frederick Wiseman

Night of the Hunter -- Charles Laughton

Numero Deux -- Jean-Luc Godard

Once Upon a Time In the West -- Sergio Leone

Ordet -- Carl Dreyer

Pandora's Box -- G.W. Pabst

Peeping Tom -- Michael Powell

Phantom of Liberty, The -- Luis Bunuel

Philadelphia Story, The -- George Cukor

Play Dirty -- Andre DeToth

Playtime -- Jacques Tati

Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The -- Billy Wilder

Providence -- Alain Resnais

Ride Lonesome -- Budd Boetticher

Ride the High Country – Sam Peckinpah

Rio Bravo -- Howard Hawks

Salvatore Giuiliano -- Francesco Rosi

Sans Soleil -- Chris Marker

Satantango – Bela Tarr

Scarface – Howard Hawks

Scarlet Empress, The -- Josef von Sternberg

Searchers, The -- John Ford

Senso -- Luchino Visconti

Shanghai Gesture, The -- Josef von Sternberg

Sherlock, Jr. -- Buster Keaton

Shoah -- Claude Lanzmann

Shock Corridor -- Samuel Fuller

Shop Around the Corner, The -- Ernst Lubitsch

Sunrise -- F.W. Murnau

The Lady Eve -- Preston Sturges

The Servant -- Joseph Losey

The Wedding March -- Erich von Stroheim

Travels with My Aunt -- George Cukor

Truck, The -- Marguerite Duras

True-Heart Susie -- D.W. Griffith

Utamaro and His Five Women -- Kenji Mizoguchi

Vertigo -- Alfred Hitchcock

Viaggio in Italia -- Roberto Rossellini

Viridiana -- Luis Bunuel

While the City Sleeps -- Fritz Lang

White Heat -- Raoul Walsh

Wild Bunch, The – Sam Peckinpah

Young Mr. Lincoln -- John Ford

A Slightly Bizarre Xmas Gift from Kino Lorber

2011-12-27T14:40:00.003-05:00

So a very charming FedEx deliverywoman came to my door this morning -- late enough that I was comparatively speaking awake -- and handed me a large package from Kino Lorber, always an exciting prospect. I opened it and was amused to find four films by the French erotic horror maven Jean Rollin, a reissue of the 1979 documentary Swastika and, to my great delight, the DVD of JLG's Filme Socialisme. When the Godard played the NY Film Festival last year, I was, like most of my colleagues, sort of stumped by the "navaho subtitles," as he called them. My aural French isn't good enough to follow much of the untranslated dialogue and the passages in German (among other languages) left me completely bewildered. (My German vocabulary was acquired from WWII movies and Fassbinder films, so I can say useful things like "Don't shoot" and "Filthy little whore.")

Given the enormous controversy over Godard's attitude to Jews, I decided to tread lightly in writing about the film. But here comes the good part: the new DVD release has both Godard's original, all-but-useless subtitles and a complete English translation as well. I don't know it that will put an end to my ambivalence, but it can't hurt.

Of course, I won't get to the film until I've made a thorough study of the Rollins. Gotta keep your priorities straight.

Everything That Degrades Culture . . . .

2011-12-24T12:15:00.002-05:00

Interesting, disturbing item in today's Independent of London about two Parisian art cinemas that are "on strike" for Christmas in protest against the overwhelming favoritism shown the large chain cinemas in that city. We're no longer looking at the refusal to let smaller houses book American blockbusters; one of these theaters was beat out for Kaurismaki's Le Havre. (Granted it's a French-language film -- and a very good one -- but it's Kaurismaki for crissake.) Although, as the story notes, Frédéric Mitterrand, the culture minister, once was the manager of one of the theaters in question, there isn't likely to be much help as long as Sarkozy, the vest-pocket edition of Blair and Bush, is PM.

Of course, what is needed is some variation on the Paramount consent decree, forcing the theater chains to break their cozy relationship with the distributors, but it appears to me that the relationship is more complex than it was in the US in the '30s and '40s where the chains were simply owned by the studios (an admirable piece of vertical integration if I ever saw one). It's almost unnecessary to add that the Paramount decree was whittled away in the years after it was issued until Ronald Reagan shitcanned it completely as a gesture of gratitude to the studios who had made his entire career possible. Somewhere in Hell, Jack Warner was smiling broadly, albeit briefly, that day.

It seems to this rather underinformed observer that the best approach to keeping your home-grown cinemas strong -- and I mean both producers and end-users -- is an arrangement like South Korea's, a quota system that requires a substantial percentage of the films shown theatrically to be Korean-made. South Korea has one of the most vital national cinemas in the world today, and it's not hard to see why.

However, that doesn't really address the concerns of the theater owners in the Independent article. I don't know exactly what they can do, but I don't expect them to get help from their old employee.

Adding Another Dimension

2011-12-23T07:48:00.005-05:00

It's tempting when watching Pina, Wim Wenders 3-D documentary and homage to Pina Bausch, to wonder what Wenders would have done with the format on some of his earlier excursions into non-fiction film. (The crags of Nick Ray's battered, weary face would probably translated rather well into 3-D for Lightning Over Water.) But you get what you get, and a dance film, which is what Pina is intermittently, should use space at least as satisfyingly as one on cave paintings. I say that as one who will almost certainly have Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams on his ten-best list when the Iras roll around (in late March, by the way).

And, in fact, the dance sequences in Pina are frequently among the most exhilarating moments in the film, as much for the flailing, atomic energy that drove Bausch's choreography and her core of longtime collaborators, as for anything Wenders does with the format. What he brings to the party is a series of candid, charming recollections by those dancers, all of whom speak of Bausch with real love, stuck in front of a blank, dark gray background that makes them pop out into "space" like animated figures. Taken in tandem with footage of Bausch working with her compnay, and the oddly fragmented contemporary dance footage -- Wenders seems as unwilling to give us a whole performance as Godard was in One P.M. -- the result is an inventive, quirky film that reflects its subject as much as its director. It's about two weeks since I saw Pina and to be absolutely honest, I still haven't made up my mind about it, but the fact that I've continued thinking on its merits suggests that it must be pretty good.

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One of the more pleasant resurrection acts in contemporary film criticism is the revival of Movie, the British film journal that was, for all intents and purposes, an English-language counterpart of Cahiers du Cinema, an outpost of committed auteurism in the sea of vaguely liberal-humanist dithering that was Anglophone film criticism in the '50s and early '60s. Ian Cameron, the founder, died a couple of years ago, and Robin Wood, who was one of its clearest thinkers and best writers, did likewise. But the University of Warwick has helped bring the magazine back to life as an open-source on-line publication. The latest issue of the new series is up on their website, devoted mostly to the American films of Fritz Lang, an eminently worthy topic for discussion. You can find it here. And well you should.

For Polanski, a Different Kind of Carnage

2011-12-16T10:56:00.002-05:00

I reviewed Carnage, the new Roman Polanski film, when it opened the NY Film Festival back in September. Of course, since this blog was in limbo, you may not have known about or seen that review. But with the film finally receiving its theatrical premiere, just in time for the Oscar noms, I think it's worth including it here:

There is a tiny detail in Carnage, the new Roman Polanski film which opened this year’s New York Film Festival, something small but telling in the excellent production design by Dean Tavoularis. The film, which is almost a verbatim rendering of Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage, is a sardonic reflection on how well-intentioned and soi-disant sophisticated New Yorkers deal with the intrusion of violence on a small scale into their lives. As part of Tavoularis’s living room set, in which most of the action takes place, there is a piano with music stand, complete with assorted sheet music. On the corner of an open page of music one spies what appears to be blood spatter. As the film works through its brief 80-minute duration, we see that image again but closer and eventually it comes to resemble a cartoon splotch like something out of the kids’ cable channel Nickelodeon.

That gradual transformation is a perfect visual metaphor for the trajectory of Polanski’s film. At the outset, it seems to be a somewhat barbed satire on class relations in New York, with the upper-class Cowans (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) visiting the middle-class Longstreets (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), to put to rest a playground incident in which their son Zachary hit Ethan Longstreet with a stick, knocking out a couple of teeth, the sort of altercation between ten-year-olds that used to be settled between the kids.

Reza’s play takes the two couples through all the possible stages of negotiation, from obsequiousness through belligerence and back again, with the women pairing off against the men, the couples against one another and everyone else against Penelope (Foster), the lone holdout voice for some mushy version of enlightened progressivism. Reza ruthlessly caricatures every possible point of view from left to right until the verbiage becomes just so much point-scoring silliness. It’s a feast for four actors looking for a play that reads like the result of one improv game too many, and Winslet, Waltz and Reilly are clearly having a ball switching sides for every possible permutation.

But it is Foster who is the revelation here. Playing a demented version of her touchy-feely mom act, she gradually transmutes into a character out of a Tex Avery cartoon. You keep waiting for her head to explode, her eyes to bug out on stalks, her tongue to wrap itself around her necking while stars burst out of her nose and smoke gushes from her ears. She and Polanski manage to find the next nearest thing and the result is simply hilarious.

Therein lies the basic problem with the film, or at any rate, the play. It’s a live-action Warner Brothers Merry Melodie run amok. Polanski plays against the text’s overload by parsing the visual tracking deftly, shifting power vectors between the characters with a deadpan precision that makes the whole thing tick over like a finely honed machine. For a guy whose childhood was spent running from the Nazis, this is a cakewalk, and the threat of violence, never very serious, is given as much weight as it deserves, which is very little.

As a result, Carnage is minor Polanski, deliciously well crafted and very, very funny, but rather inconsequential, a showcase for some very clever acting turns, bracketed a smart pair of bookend scenes that take the film briefly outdoors without doing violence to its essential structure.

After a Long Hard Summer . . . .

2011-12-14T08:38:00.003-05:00

Not dead yet, folks.

In fact, I'm adding a few new elements to my ever-expanding media empire. I'm now tweeting from @GRCommunicati13, and have become the artistic director (or whatever title you choose) of the Washington Heights Film Class. So if you want to hear me expound and expatiate in person, here's your chance. All joking aside, I think the class will be great fun for all and if you are in the NYC area, heartily recommend it. I can promise you that you will actually learn something and will see some very good films, and the price is absurdly reasonable, if you'll pardon the oxymoron.

I saw Wim Wenders's excursion into 3-D, Pina, last night, and will have more to say shortly. The film is utterly fascinating, although I haven't made up my mind on it just yet. Stay tuned.

Playing Catch-Up (Must Have Been the All-Star Break)

2011-07-21T18:42:00.002-04:00

It's turning out to be a splendid year for documentaries. I have several that I want to pull your coat to, most notably James Marshall's Project Nim, a splendid and, dare I say it, nimble return to the '70s for the director of Man on Wire; Errol Morris's Tabloid, a smart and funny film that makes me uneasy, much as his early work did; and a few films on which I have written at greater length in Jewish Week, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, by Joseph Dorman, and two extraordinary works opening shortly at Film Forum that draws startling links between the history of European arts and letters and the Shoah, The Woman With Five Elephants and Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow. I've been a bit more casual -- if one can put it that way -- about recent fiction films. (Gee, I guess I missed Green Lantern, among others.) Of course, I'm just a slave to my beat, so I have seen Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish and Sarah's Key, both of which have some virtues to recommend them.

I'll return to the Marshall and Morris films in a day or so to discuss them both at greater length, but I also want to draw your attention briefly to an amusing film-on-film documentary. American Grindhouse, a giddy but not disrespectful film by Elijah Drenner, traces the history of the exploitation film from the 'state's rights' theater chains of the '30s and '40s to the drive-ins of the '50s and the midtown/downtown fleapits of my film-going adolescence. Drenner pays homage to some of the expected folks -- Larry Cohen, Joe Dante, Herschel Gordon Lewis all get their fair share of attention -- but also lets us hear from some nearly forgotten figures from Blaxploitation and skinflick heavens. The film, which played briefly in theaters in NYC, is now available on DVD from Kino/Lorber with a heaping helping of extras, including more interviews and outtakes, some of them apparently never screened before, and a bumper crop of trailers. I have to admit that I'm a sucker for documentaries about filmmaking and, although I don't think it is likely to turn up on my year-end ballot, I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Sitting in the Docs by the Bay

2011-07-01T04:53:00.003-04:00

An interesting weekend for documentaries, with all three of the films I covered for Jewish Week falling into that slot. One, Crime After Crime, is exemplary and highly recommended. I chatted with the director and one of the central figure and you can read that here.

The other two, Between Two Worlds and Love Etc. are rather less thrilling, as you can read here.

I haven't had a chance to visit the new screens at Lincoln Center, but my inbox has filled rapidly with exciting goodies enjoying theatrical runs at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Given my usual gravitation towards the difficult, abstruse and downright perverse, I'm delighted to have yet another screen dedicated to independent film from around the globe. Where else could you have a theatrical run of Raul Ruiz's 257-minute Mysteries of Lisbon? I'm soooooo psyched!!!

Two New Links

2011-06-16T02:54:00.002-04:00

My review of the Dutch melodrama Bride Flight is up on the Jewish Week website here.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival kicks off at the Walter Reade on June 16. My review of one of the films in the Festival, This Is My Land . . . Hebron, is also up on the site. It's a mark of how unusual my remit is at the newspaper that these are the latest films to get the Robinson stare.

How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?

2011-06-14T03:26:00.004-04:00

The fascination that American culture has with farming comes close to defying rational explanation. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against farmers, I support legislation to protect the family farm and so on. It’s just that the ideological enshrinement of the ideal of the yeoman farmer as the heart and soul of America, an idea that goes back virtually to the country’s foundation, has been a pleasant myth for literally centuries. That said, it makes for wonderful opportunities for filmmakers with a strong pictorial bent, and if the only result of the apotheosis of farm life were movies like last year’s splendid Sweetgrass, I wouldn’t complain.

The reason all this leaps to mind at the moment is the theatrical run at Anthology Film Archives of a film that reminds me of Sweetgrass, the Thai documentary/drama Agrarian Utopia. Director and cinematographer Uruphong Raksasad is a son of farmers, and he brings that nearly in-born love of the land to his film. Except, of course, that the life of a small farmer in Thailand is even more parlous than it is in the United States. At the film’s outset, his protagonist Prayad is basically living like a homeless person in one of Thailand’s cities; land is so dear and so hard to acquire that he and another family merge their poverty to get through a season of rice farming by sharing one meager plot. The neighbors, who aren’t much better off, are as helpful and friendly as one can imagine, but there is very little they can do. By the time the film has ended, Prayad and his family are once more dispossessed, returning to the city where they hear the competing claims of the major political parties with grim dismay.

Raksasad is showing us subsistence farming at a level so low-tech that it probably isn’t too different from what the first agrarian communities must have been like when human began to shift out of the hunter-gatherer mode. The key difference is that in a globalized economy and a world of banks and loans, small-holders like Prayad have little chance. As he says at the outset of the film, “I’ve borrowed too much and have no way out.” And when his latest venture ends in failure, his only options are working for an eccentric neighbor with some interestingly progressive ideas about sustainability (that utterly baffle Prayad) or the city.

Raksasad shows us all of this with an eye for pastoral beauty that does, in fact, remind me of Sweetgrass, and a quiet, almost uninflected style that flows like the weather over the land. Agrarian Utopia is beautiful to look at, a highly intelligent piece of filmmaking, but devastating to contemplate, a bleak picture of what will happen to the emerging nations in the immediate future.

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Elsewhere in the world, someone is laughing. And that’s a good thing, I think. At any rate, it gives stand-up comics something to do, and you know they’d make lousy farmers. Okay, that isn’t the usual choice of career path facing them, but for some people, the idea of doing stand-up comedy is in itself rather alien, as one learns from Just Like Us, a new documentary that played Tribeca last year and is finally receiving it’s theatrical release in NYC. Last year I wrote about the film:

[Joan] Rivers might not entirely recognize Ahmed Ahmed as one of her professional offspring. He’s an Egyptian-American comic and, now, a filmmaker whose first feature is a documentary Just Like Us, which chronicles a comedy tour of the Middle East he led about a year ago. He put together a multicultural roster of comedians, including both men and women from a bewildering array of ethnicities, for what would be the first comedy tour of the region and, in several of the countries included, a first-ever evening of stand-up comedy.

“Nobody has a concept of stand-up comedy in these countries,” he says early in the film. But all their cultures have humor in abundance.

And ground rules. Although surprisingly few topics prove to be out-of-bounds, especially in Beirut, where the rules are definitely not in play, for Dubai and Riyadh the performers are cautioned to “treat it like a Tonight Show setting.” That warning is observed for about fifteen minutes until Anglo-Iranian comic Omid Djalili responds to a shout of “Take it off” in Dubai with what appears to be ten solid minutes of jokes about male genitals.

The comics are for the most part quite good – Ahmed and Tommy Davidson make a particularly strong impressions – but they seem as committed to the idea of using comedy to breakdown stereotypes and barriers as to working these houses for big laughs. In the course of the film, we see the first woman comic to play Dubai and the first Saudi woman comic, who appears briefly in the Riyadh sequence. The film ends with Ahmed and several other Arab and Muslim comics working a club in New York, where a different but no less powerful set of stereotypes need to be challenged. “Comedy provides a dialogue for social change,” Ahmed says bluntly.

Just Like Us is a pleasant and decidedly well-intentioned film, although it tries to do rather too many things at once, giving us a comedy concert documentary, social commentary, some lovely autobiographical passages and some amusing touristy stuff, particularly in the Cairo sequence. It is unfortunate that, for obvious reasons, Ahmed couldn’t include a Jewish comic on this trip and entirely logical that Israel wasn’t on the itinerary, since there is no shortage of stand-up comedy there, but a second excursion rectifying those omissions would be a great subject for another film.

Another Assault on Documentary Filmmakers

2011-06-04T16:28:00.002-04:00

You have got to hand it to the judges Dubya appointed. They really do the business or, more accurately, they do it for business. The latest example is really fascinating, with US Tax Court Judge Diane Kroupa striking a blow against the First Amendment by twisting the tax code to attack documentary filmmakers as hobbyists. You can find a quick-and-dirty summary of the case here. You can help filmmaker Lee Storey by purchasing a DVD of her film, Smile 'Til It Hurts at her website. And you can add your voice to battle at the International Documentary Association's website, where they have a page about their amicus brief in the case.

And if you are a documentary filmmaker, don't make movies about proto-fascist organizations like Moral Re-Armament, 'cause there are a lot more federal judges who were appointed by Bush, and I suspect they're looking for a reason to body-slam you.

That Godard Guy Is Back . . . .

2011-06-03T01:30:00.002-04:00

Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme played last fall’s New York Film Festival, where it sparked the usual Godardian storm of controversy, this time centering on whether the film is anti-Semitic. I didn’t think so when I saw it then, but was – and remain – reluctant to speak to the issue more directly because, as my review, which is below, said, my French isn’t good enough to be sure, and Godard chose to deliberately obfuscate matters with deliberately inadequate subtitles. I haven’t had a second chance to see the film, but until I see it again I’ll stand by what I wrote in the fall. Of course, you should go to the IFC Center and see the film and make up your own mind.

Jean-Luc Godard’s newest work Film Socialisme is something of an extended homage to Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 effort, A Talking Picture. Both are set on cruise liners working their way through the Old World’s great cities. Each features wildly multilingual casts discoursing to one another in their own languages regardless of who they are addressing, and both films are meditations on the wreckage of the 20th century. Of course, this last subject has been Godard’s focus, even compulsion, for many years, and at 80 he is no better disposed towards the modern world than he was at, say, 60.

He’s also none too fond of his audiences, if the evidence of Film Socialisme is to be believed. On the one hand, it is the most dazzlingly beautiful film Godard has made in a long time, perhaps in his entire career, a film that utilizes every conceivable cinematic and video palette with a profusion of super-saturated colors, inky blacks, solarizations and other visual tricks. On the other, the film is a dizzying 97 minutes of seemingly disconnected events, including a long entr’acte set in a gas station owned by a couple of local French politicians who opt out of their campaign to support that of their teenage daughter. It’s the kind of Godardian garage whose denizens include a burro and a cheerful-looking llama. (Leave it to Godard to find a llama that takes direction.)

But most dismaying to almost any audience, “Film Socialisme” is a film with almost no subtitles.

By design.

Godard has created his own set of subtitles for the film, using what he calls “Navajo subtitling,” cryptic, two- and three-word titles that pick out key words — and some not so key ones at times — rather than translating the dialogue. When added to a typically mysterious Godard scenario in which a character named Goldberg may or may not be a) Jewish, b) a Nazi hiding out, c) an international financier, d) a former Stalinist agent or e) all or none of the above; a missing cache of gold, possibly stolen by the Comintern at the end of the Spanish civil war; a profusion of historians-plotters-passengers, the result is a kind of mental mayhem. My French just isn’t good enough to decipher the Goldberg subplot on a single viewing, so the most I can say is that it is of a piece with Godard’s Jew-obsession, his anti-Zionism and his deep concern with various resistances to fascism and racism.

What one takes away from Film Socialisme even without a knowledge of French, Spanish, Afrikaans, German, Russian and Hebrew — to name some of the languages on the soundtrack — is the realization that Jean-Luc Godard is still deeply in love with the powers of cinema, with Sergei Eisenstein and Manoel de Oliveira and Chris Marker and John Ford, all of whom are quoted visually, and he is still mordantly funny as a critic of the conspicuous and dangerous over-consumption that has driven the world economy since World War II.

Is it a great film? It’s sumptuous to look at and great fun, if you don’t mind the feeling that you’ve just stepped into an empty elevator shaft. Is it anti-Semitic? I don’t know. All I can say is that without a lot more French or non-Navajo subtitles, I can’t be sure.

Maybe that’s the point.

The only thing I will add to the debate on JLG and the Jews is that, as A.O. Scott notes his review in today’s New York Times, Godard does have a character say that “the Jews invented Hollywood.” Given that he has never completely renounced his love of American film, I’ll take that as a compliment, however backhand

A Puzzle Well Worth Solving

2011-06-01T01:44:00.002-04:00

There is a wonderfully odd little moment in Natalia Smirnoff’s debut feature, Puzzle, currently playing at the IFC Center. The film’s protagonist, a 50-year-old housewife Maria (Maria Onetto) is on the telephone with one of the other characters. Smirnoff has her framed loosely in a medium shot, holding the phone and talking animatedly. She tells the unseen person on the other end of the phone that she needs to look up the answer to her interlocutor’s question; she walks out of frame, we can hear her faintly in an adjoining room but otherwise there is silence for several seconds, perhaps as many as 20 or 30, then she comes back into the frame and continues the conversation.

It’s a wonderfully casual moment that feels unscripted and unrehearsed, but lived in, and that underlines the great strength not only of Smirnoff’s delightful film, but of much of the Argentine New Wave of the past decade. Like the directors she has worked for – Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel, Alejandro Agresti, among others – Smirnoff’s film emphasizes a splendid combination of spontaneity, economy of means and energy. One could add Daniel Burman, Diego Lerman and Martin Rejtman for their quirky sense of humor, slightly off-kilter rhythms and gift for understatement. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in a country that has seen so much turbulence and insanity in the past fifty years . . . .

The premise of Puzzle is simple and at first glance unpromising. Having turned fifty at the outset of the film Maria is clearly the backbone of her family, the one who keeps the clocks ticking. Her husband and she seem to have a very loving relationship; their two college-age kids are amiable, if a trifle selfish, but one sense that is just a phase they will outgrow. But something is lacking. Among the many gifts she receives at the birthday party is a large jigsaw puzzle. Something about engages her and she sits down to assemble it. And she does so with remarkable alacrity. What can be done with this newly discovered talent? She answers a flier seeking a partner for puzzle contests and find herself working with a rather odd, reclusive man of wealth, Roberto (Arturo Goetz, a Burman regular).

One can easily imagine what an American filmmaker would make of this material today. We would have yet another treacly comedy-drama (i.e., a film that fails as both), with the tedious Sandra Bullock or some other supermarket-magazine bait finding her true vocation and – god help us – true love in the puzzle world. Happily, Smirnoff treats the material with a lovely balance of detachment and dry humor that allows it to breathe, and a formal elegance that fits the film’s title nicely. She shies away from unnecessary melodrama, but lets Maria's character explore possibilities in a very real sense. Puzzle is a charming film that never strains for feeling but finds it naturally in the everyday ordinariness of its characters. As a first feature it shows great promise but more important than that, it is a genuine low-key pleasure to watch.

Major Birthday Greetings

2011-05-25T22:46:00.002-04:00

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Amnesty International. I cannot imagine a more profoundly important milestone in human history in my lifetime. Forget about men walking on the moon or the Mets winning the 1969 World Series; in the larger scheme of things, one can honestly point to Amnesty as the direct spur to the pro-democracy revolutions of 1989 and of this spring, the entire shift towards greater attention to human rights as a factor in foreign policy, even if only as lip service. And I can't think of another group that so totally embodies the work of the NGO as a positive force for good in the world.

Over the years, I have come to believe that the basic rights enunciated in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the bedrock on which any decent political system must be built. When all the other certainties in my political thinking eroded with time, those principles still stand. And Amnesty has been working for them for almost my entire life.

Go here and join the celebration.

A Little Quick Housekeeping

2011-05-25T18:00:00.004-04:00

Two items that may be of interest:

First, my piece on the Gold Coast International Film Festival is here, as previously promised.

Second, the latest on Jafar Panahi -- he's not just a very talented filmmaker, he's also a damned clever one. His new film, This Is Not a Movie, made its debut at Cannes under most unusual circumstances. You can read about it in The Guardian here.

Another Film Festival?

2011-05-23T10:21:00.002-04:00

Does the New York area really need another film festival? Personally, my first instinct would be to answer in the negative, but when my editor at Jewish Week asked me to do a little looking into the 1st annual Gold Coast International Film Festival, which opens on June 1 on the North Shore of Long Island, not all that far from where I wrote my first published film criticism 40 years ago, I felt at the very least an atavistic need to check it out. If there had been a film festival within easy driving distance when I was in high school . . . I might still be in high school.

I filed the story a couple of hours ago and will link to it when it's up on the JWeek website, but let me say a few things in defense of this new festival, as I'm sure that most of you will be as skeptical as I was. First, keep in mind that although Long Island already hosts several film festivals but, as my wife -- an Island native herself -- observes, it's called Long Island for a reason. It's 150 miles long. I can't picture driving from New York City to Albany to see a movie (unless someone was paying me an exorbitant sum). Second, the demographics of the area around Great Neck and North Hempstead are very different from the target audiences of the other LI festivals anyway.

But the real defense of this festival is its programming, which is highly intelligent, featuring a deft mixture of documentary and fiction, foreign and American independent.They have stayed away from the really obvious, nausea-inducing "audience" movies, but there are numerous films on their schedule that are genuinely entertaining, and more than a few that are challenging. Of the four they are showing that I have written about, three are excellent -- Dover Kosashvili's Infiltration, Yoav Potash's Crime After Crime and the criminally over-looked Iranian film Tehroun, by Nader T. Homayoun -- and the fourth, Just Like Us by Ahmed Ahmed, is decidedly amiable. And although several of the films on the schedule have played in other New York festivals and other venues, there is nothing here that could remotely be called over-exposed.

I'm told that the organizers of the festival have some fairly detailed transportation arrangements worked out and, as someone who commuted on the Long Island Rail Road for four years of college, I can tell you that it's not that hard to get out to this part of the island. Check out their website (the link above will take you there), and give it a thought.

Holding Pattern

2011-05-22T15:17:00.003-04:00

Yes, I have little to say about movies this week. Or, more truthfully, most of the stuff I've seen hasn't opened yet.

Some folks, however, get to immerse themselves by going to Cannes (Cinema? You're soaking in it.) Michael Giltz, friend, colleague and fellow Ira voter, is one such happy fellow. He covered the big festival by the beach for the Huffington Post, and you can read his wrap-up, which includes a list of all the prizes (including best canine -- who knew?) and links to all his columns from the event, right here.

One film that I did see and can comment on is actually 69 years old. Alberto Cavalcanti, who surely had one of the most unusual career paths in film history, made a truly bizarre thriller during his lengthy stop in England. Although he is best known for Dead of Night, you could make a strong case for his anti-Nazi film Went the Day Well?, currently in revival in a new 35mm print at Film Forum. After a brief framing device that is, in its own casual, understated way, rather unsettling, the film quickly moves from being one of those Ealing village comedies, filled to the brim with lovable eccentrics, to a dark and violent wartime thriller with that remote village suddenly under siege from Nazi paratroopers disguised as English soldiers on manuevers. Adapted from an obscure Graham Greene story, the film is loaded with stalwart English character players on both sides of the battle (David Farrar, a personal favorite of mine, is impressively nasty as the German second-in-command, a dry run for his equally sinister good guys in Powell/Pressburger classics). Cavalcanti creates a genuinely unnerving tension between the bland surface of the community and its seething underside, and when that tension bursts out in real violence, it feels more like Peckinpah than Ealing. A fascinating piece of history that transcends mere nostalgia through sheer blunt force. It will be there through June 2.

Taiwan: The Future Secured

2011-05-12T08:03:00.000-04:00

With Edward Yang's death in 2007 and the comparative silence of Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (although in Tsai's case, it's not so much silence as the lack of interest by US distributors), it was inevitable that we should start wondering where the next great Taiwanese director is coming from. National film cultures go through lulls and streaks, like home-run hitters and EPL strikers. Of course, since so few foreign films find their way to the States (okay, it's a lot better in NYC, among other places), there is no accurate way of gauging the actual state of a film industry, short of moving there, or spending many, many hours in the region's film festivals. For those of us who actually have to work for a living, those are not viable options.

Happily -- again, in NYC -- we have the Film Society of Lincoln Center, BAM Cinemathek and so on, and in the case of Taiwan, the FSLC is doing yeoman service with an excellent series, currently in midstream, that offers not only a few of the obvious names like Yang, Hou and Tsai, but also some all-but-forgotten delights, from the acrobatic martial arts cinema of King Hu (A Touch of Zen), to the politically tinged farce of Stan Lai's The Peach Blossom Land, an unjustly neglected work that played ND/NF in the early '90s but never found a distributor.

But what about contemporary filmmakers? On the strength of his second feature, The Fourth Portrait, I'd say that Chung Mong-Hong has a good chance to be the next major voice from the little island. This tale of an 10-year-old boy who suddenly loses his father and must return to the ome of his estranged ex-hooker mother is a sober piece of neo-realism reminiscent of early Hou, but with a mathematical precision that undercuts the film's potential for treacly melodrama. Chung's approach to the material is satisfyingly cerebral, but the heat generated by his actors, especially the preternaturally self-possessed Bi Xiao-hai as the boy, brings the film's emotional temperature up a few notches. It's an excellent formula, cool director meets hot cast, to put it in McCluhanesque terms. The film is a bit langorous in the middle, but that doesn't hurt it one bit. Indeed, there are moments when one wishes Chung had taken his time even more. At any rate, if he's an example of what is going on in the Taiwanese film industry, the future of this small but powerful film culture is in good hands.

The Tragedy in Iran Goes On

2011-05-07T16:22:00.002-04:00

Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulof are both in prison in their native Iran for opposing the Ahmedinejad regime, but their work continues. Each of the pair has a new film playing at the Cannes Film Festival this month. The titles are depressingly suggestive, "Goodbye" from Rasoulof and "This Is Not a Film" from Panahi. I cannot stress enough the necessity for anyone concerned with cinema -- or humanity -- to publicly express their support for these men. In the meantime, you can read a bit more about the new films here. And there are petitions available on-line, and Facebook pages for each of them. Panahi's is here, Rasoulof's here.

Families, Caves and Israeli Natural Wonders

2011-05-06T15:35:00.005-04:00

Before I write another word, I want to urge you to haul your tired butt down to the Quad Cinemas (if you're in NYC) and quickly catch a family drama that opened there today, Marc Meyers's second feature film, Harvest. American indie films that open in small venues in this town tend to vanish quickly and I fear that this one will not be an exception. It's not the greatest film since Griffith, but it is a lovely and accomplished work that will reward your time and patience. My full review is here.

There are also some interesting offerings in this year's Israel Film Festival. I've already given a link to my first of two articles on the event in Jewish Week. Here's the second one. Incidentally, for anyone who is interested, I'll be moderating a panel discussion with several of the directors represented at this year's festival on Saturday night, following the 7:15 p.m. screening of Avi Nesher's The Matchmaker (at the AMC Loew's 84th St., 84th and Broadway).

Finally, and this probably should have been first, but you know how I am, here's my candidate for film of the year, so far, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I am not well disposed towards 3-D movies as a rule. I've seen a lot of them and most directors use the format as a gimmick. But Herzog found a subject that is uniquely well-suited to 3-D, a cave in France that features the oldest known cave paintings, much older than its famous brothers in Lascaux and elsewhere. The locale is precarious, so access is extremely limited. The works are quite extraordinary and ought to be seen. Herzog was given unprecedented access and the result is a wonderful and typically idiosyncratic blend of Herzogian free-associating and beauty. Because of the ways in which the unknown artist(s) used the undulations of the cave walls as part of the paintings themselves, these images cry out for 3-D. Herzog uses the process brilliantly, and I must admit that, except for a little wobble of motion sickness at the very beginning, I was utterly enchanted with the latest incarnation of three-dimensional cinema. Don't waste your time seeing this film flat; it absolutely must be seen in 3-D. And it absolutely must be seen.

Catching Up -- Tavernier, Capotondi and Tribeca

2011-04-24T11:38:00.005-04:00

Lots of new films to talk about, what with the Tribeca Film Festival in town, the Israel Film Festival right around the corner and the usual steady flow of product all over the place. Let's be quick about it.

La Princesse de Montpensier -- Bertrand Tavernier
Bertrand Tavernier was always rather more of a publicist than a film critic, and that difference has frequently been reflected in the glossy surfaces of his sedate films. If ever there was a filmmaker who seemed a direct descendant of the "tradition of quality" much derided by Truffaut and others at Cahiers de Cinema he's clearly the one. Although he seems to consciously alternate period films with contemporary subjects, his films all have the slightly stuffy air of an obscure museum. When emotions break through in a film like A Sunday in the Country, the result can be quite satisfying but I have generally found his films better mounted than directed.

Regrettably, La Princesse is of the latter group. Drawn from a story by Madame de la Fayette, the film bears a strange, faint resemblance to Kobayashi's magnificent Samurai Rebellion, with the husband in an arranged marriage, blandly played by Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, coming to love his new bride, the title character (Melanie Thierry) with unforeseeable and disastrous results. Instead of Toshiro Mifune as proud father and previously loyal retainer, Tavernier gives us Lambert Wilson as the Comte de Chabannes, a Montaigne-like polymath who has fought on both sides in the Wars of Religion and who counsels moderation in most things. Sadly Wilson, who was so staunch and moving in Of Gods and Men, a beautifully nuanced performance in a brilliant film, is just inert here and, since he is apparently the mouthpiece character for much of the film, he sets a tone of harrumphing indignation that hangs over the entire project.

Not that Tavernier has any trouble setting that tone himself. La Princesse is like an overstuffed chair, ponderous and uncomfortable.

The Double Hour -- Giuseppe Capotondi
Imagine a version of Vertigo told from the point of view of Madeleine/Judy. An idea with considerable merit and something of a quick-and-dirty synopsis of Capotondi's feature film debut. Ksenia Rappaport is a hotel maid who meets Filippo Timi at a speed-dating evening. Both are clearly undelighted with the process but pleasantly surprised by one another, and a relationship begins. He is an ex-cop who now is a security consultant for the very rich. One afternoon, he brings her to his current workplace for a romantic lunch and suddenly they find themselves the victims of a highly organized heist. When he tries to resist, one of the thieves shoots him, also wounding her. Capotondi handles all of this action with flair and skill, but the film goes wildly off the tracks in its next section, which is either a fever dream experienced by the woman while she is comatose or a very creepy turn of events in which she finds herself accused of being part of the gang. After that, as in some of the worst of Brian DePalma's Chinese box puzzle narratives, you stop caring. And the final third, in which all the narrative threads are seemingly worked out, is perfunctory and unconvincing.

When will filmmakers realize that there are some plot twists that leave an audience feeling betrayed, that break the chain of identification so severely that one loses faith in the filmmaker? Capotondi is clearly a talented tyro, and it will be interesting to see where he goes after The Double Hour, but this film is so over-elaborately plotted, yet so slackly written that the middle section serves no purpose whatsoever and we are left with little or no sense of who the characters really are.

The Tribeca Film Festival has begun its 10th annual run, and my review of the two Israeli films in the event can be found here. It's a strong offering from festival that usually carries a great deal of interest. Lately, Tribeca has been showing a lot more genre films, but they've been choosing quirky, unpredictable stuff that swings a lot harder than the run-of-the-mill crap that turns up at the multiplex.

One excellent example is Dick Maas's Sint, a Dutch horror-comedy that, like the Israeli film Rabies, has a lot more on its mind than teens threatening to have sex. Sint reworks the Dutch version of the legend of Santa Claus by having Niklas turn out to have been a renegade bishop who headed a gang of vicious, murderous thieves during the Middle Ages; they were finally stopped by vengeful villages (pitchforks, axes, torches -- you know the drill), but every December 5 on which there is a full moon, they come back from the dead to wreak havoc on unsuspecting Dutch folk. Maas tells this twisted fable with the same knowing meta-commentary smarts as Wes Craven did with the first Nightmare on Elm Street and the early installments of the Scream franchise. He doesn't have Craven's way with a political subtext -- any paranoia about government cover-ups is strictly lip service in Sint -- but the film is brisk and sufficiently goofy to keep you well-occupied for 84 minutes.

I'll have more Tribeca to mull over during the coming week.

Movies Under the Stars

2011-04-22T16:33:00.003-04:00

As someone whose first film experience was under the stars, watching 101 Dalmatians at the drive-in, I find the idea of open-air screenings very enticing. But where in NYC can you see a movie in the open-air? Of course, the city's Parks Department does film programs all summer and some of the movies they show are good ones, but if you are in the mood for something a little more testing, you could check out Rooftop Films, which will be in its 15th year this summer.

They've posted their schedule and it's more than intriguing:

Friday, May 13, 2011
Rooftop Films Summer Series Opening Night: This is What We Mean by Short Films
Opening Night of Rooftop Films 15th Annual Summer Series will feature grand stories in little packages, with some of the greatest new short films from all around the world.

Saturday, May 14, 2011
Freeloader (Zachary Raines | New York | World Premiere)
A special World Premiere of a new film by New York based filmmaker, Zachary Raines. A serious comedy following Frank, a feckless young man recently dumped by his girlfriend. In need of a place to stay, Frank moves from couch to couch, testing the patience of friends - and the kindness of strangers - until his luck runs out.

Thursday, May 19, 2011
Sound of Noise (Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stfarne Nillsson | Sweden | NY Premiere)
A clever and maniacally entertaining Swedish comedy about a group of "musical terrorists" who break into hospitals, banks, and other public places to play compositions using the surroundings as their instruments. The screening will feature a special live performance by the musicians from the film.

Friday, May 20, 2011
Dark 'Toons (Short Films)
Our popular annual program of enjoyably evil animation.

Thursday, May 26, 2011
Short Film Thrillers: Trapped in the Machine
A selection of heart-racing, breath quickening, edge-of-your-seat films featuring all kinds of people and things struggling to break free.

Friday, May 27, 2011
Romance Short Films
Romance, served up with a twist.

Saturday, May 28, 2011
Bad Posture (Malcolm Murray | Brooklyn, NY)
A nuanced, visually inventive vista of young life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Bad Posture follows Flo as he seeks to make amends - and make a connection - with Marisa, a beautiful girl whose car his best friend has stolen.

Screenings continue every weekend from May 13 through August 20.

A full schedule will be available soon.

Additional 2011 Feature Selections will include:

Green (Sophia Takal | Brooklyn, NY | NY Premiere)
A haunting meditation on jealousy and the ways women manipulate and attempt to destroy each other.

The Catechism Cataclysm (Todd Rohal | Brooklyn, NY | Part of BAM Cinemafest) www.catechismcataclysm.com
Rooftop continues our partnership with BAM Cinemafest with Rooftop alum Todd Rohal's madcap story about Father William Smoortser, who drops his bible into a toilet at a rest stop just before embarking on a day-long canoe trip, breaking loose all glorious hell.

The Extraordinary Ordinary Life of Jose Gonzalez (Mikel Cee Karlsson and Fredrik Egerstrand | Sweden | NY Premiere) www.plattformproduktion.se
Shot over a three year period in José González's studio, at home and on tour, using a combination of video diary, surveillance camera, tour footage and animation, filmmakers Mikel Cee Karlsson and Fredrik Egerstrand provide a look into the life of one of Sweden's most interesting artists.

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (Madeline Olnek | New York, NY | NY Premiere)
http://bit.ly/febsWy
Special Gay Pride Weekend celebration. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is a joyously campy nod to 50's sci-fi, following the adventures of lesbian space aliens on the planet Earth, and the romance between Jane, a shy greeting card store employee, and Zoinx, the woman Jane does not realize is from outer-space.

The Redemption of General Butt Naked (Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion | Washington, DC)
Joshua Milton Blahyi, aka General Butt Naked, has reinvented himself from the murderer thousands during Liberia's horrific 14-year civil war to the evangelist Joshua Milton Blahyi. In a riveting cinema vérité journey that unfolds over the course of five years, filmmakers Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion follow Blahyi's unrelenting crusade to redeem his life.

Where Soldiers Come From (Heather Courtney | Austin, TX) www.pbs.org/pov/wheresoldierscomefrom
From a snowy small town in Northern Michigan to the mountains of Afghanistan and back, Where Soldiers Come From follows the four-year journey of childhood friends and their town, forever changed by a faraway war.

Northside DIY Film Competition Winner
Rooftop partners with Brooklyn's Northside Festival to present a special outdoor screening of Northside's first annual DIY Film Competition winner. (www.thelmagazine.com/blogs/NorthsideFestivalNews/)

La Bocca del Lupo (Pietro Marcello | Italy)
Pietro Marcello's elegant, mysterious and moving film tells an epic love story from the ancient Italian port city of Genoa. As Marcello artfully weaves a gorgeous array of archival footage from Genoa's rich history, breathtaking modern-day 35mm recreations and a sweeping orchestral score into this incredible Italian chant d'amor.

Family Instinct (Andris Gauja | Austria)
Family Instinct is a film about incest - social taboo and a violation of religious norms. The film provides an extraordinarily intimate look into the lives of several people that live on the extreme margins of Latvian society, drawing you into a claustrophobic but compelling world that few viewers will have ever experienced.

Neurotypical (Adam Larsen | New York, NY | US Premiere) www.neuro-typical.com
What is the standard that identifies one person as whole and capable and another as disabled and broken? Neurotypical parallels the lives of three individuals on the autism spectrum, each facing a pivotal stage of growth.

Bellflower (Evan Glodel | New York, NY | NY Premiere)
An apocalyptic love story for the Mad Max generation, Evan Glodell's impressive feature debut paints a classic, yet urgently contemporary, tale of the destructive power of love.

Convento (Jarred Alterman | New York, NY | NY Premiere) convento.tumblr.com
With gorgeous, flowing camerawork filmmaker Jarred Alterman transports us into the world of Dutch kinetic artist Christiaan Zwanikken, who resurrects the deceased local wildlife by reanimating the skeletal remains with servomotors and robotic engineering. Christiaan Zwanikken and his robots will be there in person at the screening.

Fake it So Real (Robert Greene | New York, NY | NY Premiere) fakeitsoreal.com
Filmed over a single week leading up to a big show, the film follows a ragtag group of independent, semi-professional wrestlers in North Carolina, exploring what happens when the over-the-top theatrics of the wrestling ring collide with the realities of the working-class South. The show will include a live wrestling match featuring the film's subjects before the screening.

At the Edge of Russia (Michal Marczak | Poland)
Alexei is a nineteen year old recruit being flown in to perform his military service on the frontier of northern Russia. The base is one of few such remaining outposts on the Arctic Ocean. There are five other seasoned and long serving soldiers stationed here, each with their own personal story or secret that has caused them to retreat from the real world. Their training and breaking in of the new arrival is sometimes humorous, at times harsh. Gradually, they each reveal something of themselves in their daily interactions and private moments as they continue their absurd duty in this snow covered no man's land, hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement.

World's Best Dad (Joshua Gross | New York, NY | World Premiere) www.worldsbestdadmovie.com
Miles hasn't seen Matt since their father passed away. Now, they're going to blast him into space. Once they steal his ashes. And figure out how to launch the rocket. And get him to Nevada...

Falling Overnight (Conrad Jackson | Los Angeles | New York Premiere) www.fallingovernight.com
Falling Overnight tells the story of twenty-two year old Elliot Carson on the day before he has surgery to remove a brain tumor. Facing what could be his last night, Elliot's path intersects with Chloe Webb, a young photographer who invites him to her art show. Elliot welcomes the distraction and as the night descends, Chloe takes him on an intimate and exhilarating journey through the city. But as morning approaches, and Chloe learns of Elliot's condition, the magic of the evening unravels, and they must together face the uncertainty of Elliot's future.

Additional 2011 Summer Series Short Film Programs include:

New York Non-Fiction
Scratches, beats, and elegies from the city of cities.

Clermont Ferrand
Rooftop works with the world's premier short film festival to bring you a stunning selection of short gems from across the globe.

Animation Block Party
Some call it punk rock, some call it grass roots, but labels aside, NYC-based Animation Block Party is dedicated to exhibiting the world's best independent, professional and student animation.

Kill Screen Video Game Night
Rooftop partners with the avante garde video game magazine Kill Screen to bring you an evening of short films that ask the question, "What does it mean to play games?"

Orbit (Film) (NY Premiere) www.orbitfilm.com
A collaborative, feature-length omnibus movie about our solar system where every planet is represented by a short film. Co-produced by Rooftop Films and Cinemad.

Rural Route
A program of film offering city dwellers a glimpse of the rural life, where the grass is indeed greener. This program will be fittingly screened on a brand new Rooftop Venue: The Brooklyn Grange, an organic rooftop farm in Long Island City, Queens.

Industriance
Razor sharp short films about the changing industrial and agricultural landscape in urban and rural America and beyond.

Rooftop Shots
The official Closing Night of Rooftop Films 2011 Summer Series includes short films all about endings. Films so sharp we call them shots, fired from the roof one last time this year.

***

Rooftop Films is a non-profit organization whose mission is to engage and inspire the diverse communities of New York City by showcasing the work of emerging filmmakers and musicians. In addition to our Summer Series - which takes place in unique outdoor venues every weekend throughout the summer - Rooftop provides grants to filmmakers, teaches media literacy and filmmaking to young people, rents equipment at low-cost to artists and non-profits, and produces new independent films. At Rooftop Films, we bring the underground outdoors. For more information and updates please visit our website at www.rooftopfilms.com.

Speaking of the Iras . . .

2011-04-01T10:49:00.003-04:00

Oh, yes. The Iras did, as they always do, take place. Being a lazy SOB, I will merely refer you to the fine reporting of my friend and colleague Michael Giltz, whose reportage is as close to definitive as is humanly possible. As you can imagine, Michael crawled half-naked across the burning sands of the Sahara to bring this story to you, kind reader.

Next year, we will take up a collection to buy him a shirt.

And, another piece of Ira ritual, my ten-best list for 2010, based on 110 films, neatly enough:

1. The Strange Case of Angelica – Manoel de Oliveira

2. White Material – Claire Denis

3. Carlos – Olivier Assayas

4. The Ghost Writer – Roman Polanski

5. DDR/DDR – Amie Siegel

6. Boxing Gym – Frederick Wiseman

7. The Social Network -- David Fincher

8. The Portuguese Nun – Eugene Green

9. Un Prophete – Jacques Audiard

10. Mademoiselle Chambon – Stephane Brize

Honorable Mention (in no particular order): Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor), Carmel (Amos Gitai), The Girl on the Train (Andre Techine), Daddy Long Legs (Josh and Benny Safdie), The Juche Idea (Jim Finn), Lebanon (Samuel Maoz), Our Beloved Month of August (Manuel Gomes), Nora’s Will (Maria Chenillo), I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino), Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-Dong), Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman), Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol), Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette).

All in all, a very good year. The length of the honorable mention list suggests what I have felt all along about 2010 -- it was a year in which there were a lot of very good movies, a year of rich and varied pleasures, although not a year with any single drop-dead stand-out monster work of genius. Given a choice between a deep field of imperfect but graceful works like these and a year of one great movie and not much else, you can imagine where I stand.

I never have cottoned to drop-dead masterpieces anyway. I like my films like I like people, with all their flaws intact. (Of course, I'd rather spend time with, say, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Ted Williams or Alfred Hitchcock, than with folks whose flaws vastly overbalance their virtues, like Bernie Madoff or Leni Riefenstahl.)

And another year goes in the books.

Just Before the Door Shuts

2011-04-01T04:13:00.004-04:00

Well, I certainly procrastinated well this time. New Directors is almost over -- it ends Sunday -- and I've managed to waste a week before offering my quick round-up of the series. I could blame it on the run-up to the Iras and post-Ira letdown, which would be partly true, but regular readers know it's just laziness. However, my review of the two Jewish interest films is here.

I only got to a half-dozen of the films in this year's event, but here are my impressions of the other ones I saw.

Hit So Hard -- Patty Schemel was the original drummer for Hole, Courtney Love's band, and her life has been pretty complicated, to say the least. In addition to working with Love and being a close friend of her husband Kurt Cobain, Schemel had drinking and heroin problems. The first 40 minutes or so of this documentary, directed by P. David Ebersole, are riveting. Schemel is a likeable personality and the rapid rise of the band and its impact on her life make for lively viewing. After that, though, it turns into an increasingly self-serving episode of This Is Your Life. That's what happens when the director is a personal friend of the subject and her partner is the co-producer. A missed opportunity, particularly since Ebersole had the use of hours of privately shot video and film from Schemel.

Incendies -- A highly anticipated film from Quebec, directed by Dennis Villeneuve, with a strong cast headed by Lubna Azabal and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin (who is the best thing about the film). Azabal is the dead mother of Desormeaux-Poulin and her twin brother, Maxim Gaudette. In her will she sets out a task for the twins that involves excavating her mysterious past in a country that is clearly based on Lebanon. They are dropped unprepared into a history of tribal jealousies, political and sectarian violence, revenge, torture and the like. Villeneuve directs this material with considerable detachment, and the script is too schematic. Despite some nice performances and a few striking sequences, the result suffers from a significant lack of heat. The last line of the film says something about "breaking the chain of anger," but the film belies that phrase. More like breaking the chain of mild annoyance.

Majority -- Given its title, one might expect this to be a film about Turkey's slightly fragile democracy. Unfortunately, it's another meaning of majority that is at stake here. Metkan (Bartu Küçükçag ̆ layan) is 21, but he lives at home with his parents and works as a lowly errand boy for his father's construction firm. When he begins an affair with a young Kurdish woman, there are signs that he may be groping towards the adulthood that his age confers legally. But his father's vitriolic racism threatens the relationship and the girlfriend hasn't a chance against the sheer inertia of Metkan's life. Sort of an aimless Turkish variant on mumblecore, with more at stake and a thoroughly unappealing protagonist.

Hospitalite -- This one is the keeper, the best of the six films I saw, a hilarious farce by second-time feature director Koji Fukada. Kobayashi (Kenji Yamauchi), the owner of a small print shop finds himself importuned by a man (Kanji Furutachi) who claims to be the son of the shop's late co-owner, the guy who bailed out Kobayashi's dad when times were tough. Kobayashi offers him a job and he moves in, literally. First he brings his blonde girlfriend (Brierly Long), who is Brazilian or Bosnian or, more likely, American, and a teacher of English and/or salsa dancing. Then he gradually imports some new staff and eventually fills the shop and apartment with an army of mysterious foreigners. Fukada could have played this sinister intent like a junior Joseph Losey (there are echoes of The Servant) but, refreshingly he turns the project into spirited comedy with devastatingly effective timing and an alternately obsequious and menacing performance by Furutachi. The result is a sort of Tokyo-based Jonsonian comedy of humours, deftly orchestrated and terrific fun.

Taylor and Leacock R.I.P., Plus Schnabel's Latest

2011-03-24T00:12:00.002-04:00

Hard to imagine a film article that would mention both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Leacock, but they are currently sharing obituary pages all over the world (if there is any justice). Taylor is truly the last of the great movie stars of the studio period. (Except for maybe Mickey Rooney and Kirk Douglas, who else is left?) Never a great actress, although she is a luminous presence in Jane Eyre, Father of the Bride and Father's Little Dividend, she was a good person who did enormous charity work in support of people with AIDS, among others, and for that alone she deserves to thought of kindly.

Leacock, as my friend and fellow Ira-voter Howard Karren rightly observed, is important more as part of the first wave of American cinema-verite filmmakers than for his own films alone. But his work with D.A. Pennebaker and on his own is memorable and significant. At the very least, he deserves a Good Conduct Medal with oak leaf cluster for his arm wrestling with Jean-Luc Godard on the Stones movie (choose your title to fit you side in the battle).

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Julian Schnabel has yet to really impress me as a filmmaker. I find his work visually disorganized, if well-intentioned. His latest film, Miral, is guaranteed to raise hackles in certain part of the Jewish community here and in Israel, where it is set. My review can be found here.

And the 40th edition of New Directors/New Films opened at the Museum of Modern Art this evening. I'll have my assessment of the few films I managed to see in the next day or two.

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Finally, as some of you may know it's almost Ira time. The New York Independent Film Critics Circle -- the most rumpy (and rumply) of rump groups, is meeting Saturday night in an undisclosed location far away from the prying eyes of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Better Business Bureau. I'll report the results as soon as I sober up-- excuse me, wake up on Sunday.
For those of you who can't get enough of such matters (and who can't!?) I urge you to check the joint blog of Alex Lewin and Aaron Rich, the next generation of Ira voters (or should we call them Iras 2.0; the Reboot?).

War Zones Make Lousy Playgrounds

2011-03-16T15:46:00.002-04:00

Two new films, both opening Friday, put children at the heart of adult terrors. My review of them is here.

I've seen four of the films in the New Directors/New Films series so far, but nothing that has jumped up and grabbed me by the shirtfront shouting "See me!" I'll fill you in with more details over the weekend, by which time I hope to have raised that number a bit.

In the meanwhile, the most exciting news of the spring may be the Dziga Vertov series that will be playing at MoMA beginning April 15. (Don't forget to pay your taxes, comrades.) With guest presenters that will include Ken Jacobs, Willliam Kentridge, Guy Maddin and Peter Kubelka, a roundtable discussion on Vertov's work and the premiere of Michael Nyman's "remake" of Man With a Movie Camera, this looks pretty good. But the most important aspect of the program is that the museum is touting it as "the most comprehensive retrospective" of Vertov's films ever shown in the United States. Fourteen of the Kino-Week programs will be having their US premiere, and a newly restored full-frame print of Movie Camera will be shown. Skip the latest gross-out bromance and the next Jennifer Anesthesia romcom, and see some real cinema goddammit.

Some Films Are Better Left Undistributed

2011-03-11T20:09:00.003-05:00

This will be brief because I have almost nothing positive to say. While the 2011 version of New Directors/New Films is press-screening this week and next, one of the selections from last year came squirreling into town stealthily. If I hadn't read Stephen Holden's fawning review in today's Times, I wouldn't have noticed that Eric Mendelsohn's 3 Backyards had managed to find its way into theaters. As you can imagine from that opening, I am less than thrilled by Mendelsohn's film, a turgid collection of three barely related stories of life in the 'burbs that plays like bad imitation Cheever. (And since I have recently been rereading Bullet Park, I have the splendid original in my head for ready comparison.) Despite an excellent cast headed by Edie Falco (who is quite good in a painfully underwritten turn as a housewife who latches onto a movie star living nearby for the summer) and Elias Koteas (as a disaffected businessman whose life is altered by a momentary glimpse into real tragedy), the film is studied, arch and slight of impact. There are many worthier films out there that haven't found a distributor; it's a damned shame when something this trivial is released in their stead.

An Unlikely Documentary Subject, but . . . .

2011-03-10T09:20:00.005-05:00

The internal connivings of state legislators are seldom a subject for surprise. (Hey, another power in the NY State Senate is facing indictment, according to today's 'papers.) But a little corruption is preferable to a completely rigged system, and that is what most state legislatures are aiming for in the year after a new census. Gerrymandering of congressional districts isn't exactly a new subject either; Eldbridge Gerry, who gave the term his name, was governor of Massachusetts in 1812 when he signed the first blatantly crooked redistricting scheme in that state's history. Anyone who watched the machinations of Tom "The Convicted Felon" DeLay vis-a-vis the Texas state legislature has an inkling of what is at stake and what can happen to the most elementary rules of fair play. Still, it's an unikely subject for a documentary film, which makes Jeff Reichert's new film Gerrymandering a wild card. Typically, the film has not found a theatrical distributor, but it is turning up in community venues around the country and is available on DVD from the filmmakers. The latest public screening is scheduled for New York City on Thursday March 17, 6 p.m. at Congregation Rodeph Sholem (7 W. 83rd St.). A panel discussion will follow. The event is hosted by two New York state legislators who have been very involved in this issue, State Senator Adriano Espaillat (coincidentally, my state senator) and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries.

I always berate people who don't vote by noting that at any moment somewhere in the world, someone is -- literally -- dying for the right that they are neglecting. Of course, if the deck is stacked, the meaningfulness of that right is diminished, if not destroyed.

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Meanwhile, back in the relatively benign world of motion pictures (Hey, we don't got no Charlie Sheen or Galliano in MovieWorld. Just Mel Gibson), allow me to pull your coat to a lovely little documentary on a more visually compelling subject than state legislatures, avant-garde art, its suppression and preservation. The Desert of Forbidden Art, which opens tomorrow, is a frequently ravishing and often amusing tale of the unlikeliest cache of great art in modern times, a back-of-beyond collection saved from Stalin by a failed-painter-turned-archeologist-turned-art-dealer. My review is here, and I recommend the film wholeheartedly.

Ronit Alkabetz, the excellent Israeli actress, is something of a work of art herself, a star-in-the-making who channels the unconventional spirit of the great Barbara Stanwyck in her best work. Alkabetz is the center of this year's Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, and you can read my take on her and it here.

First Some Miscellaneous, then Kiki!!

2011-02-28T03:02:00.004-05:00

Just kidding. And if you don't know that joke, ask Gramps, he'll remember it.

First, a bunch of Jewish Week stories that are still relevant, so you might want to check them out. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is wrapping up its annual Film Comment Selects program, which includes three shorter films by Claude Lanzmann. I talk about them here, for those who want to know what I think.

Tonight, PBS has one of their better episodes in The American Experience, a 55-minute look at the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire. If you want to know what a Tea Party-Grover Norquist America will look like, this film will answer your question. As you may recall, I wrote about it in my spring film preview for JWeek.

I have to admit that it has been many years since I watched an Oscar telecast for more than about 20 minutes, even when I've been at Oscar parties (a ritual I try to avoid for reasons that will become clear momentarily). In recent years, even with the admirable work of former Ira Voter Bill Condon (also a former Ira winner; it's not what you know . . . ) the telecast reminds me of a more benign variation on waterboarding. So you can imagine my amusement that the one Oscar-related story I wrote this year, about the makers of the short documentary "Strangers No More," inadvertently tagged the recipients of the statuette. Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman are very nice people and I'm delighted that after four previous nominations apiece, they finally have won.

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The Iras are approaching, indeed looming large in my rear-view mirror. It's sort of like being chased by Godzilla, only he has about a dozen heads (in various stages of graying and male pattern baldness, including my own unfortunately). Of course, this has engendered some fascinating exchanges among the voters and I thought I'd share one riff of my own, simply because I think it goes to some issues that will be of interest to anyone who is reading this blog.

The topic that triggered the thoughts below was a thread that veered off the road when I denounced Kick-Ass, a film that I think is deeply repellent in its attitude toward violence, towards its characters and its audience. (Not to mention that the relationship between the father and daughter is unbelievably creepy.) I began by (mis)quoting Jonathan Rosenbaum's explanation for why he didn't see the Coen brothers' True Grit. Briefly put, it grew out of his mounting distaste for violent revenge narratives. This led to a spirited debate on whether they are the driving force in most American studio films today and whether there is something inherently bad about that. Gradually, though, the ground shifted and we took up what I think is, finally, the real problem, which is the way that violence itself is handled in American studio releases. I will apologize in advance for some of the very digressive moments in this post -- I was running on no sleep for a change. (Look at the time this was posted.) But I think that some of the points I made were worth disseminating further and I'm too lazy to actually edit an e-mail.

I'm not . . . going to argue that revenge is inherently a bad thing. I think it depends on context, degree of provocation and the nature and degree of vengeance taken. But surely you can't be preparing to defend, for example, Death Wish 1 through 8 as moral exemplars? To my mind, Kick-Ass isn't much different, only more extravagantly mounted and marginally more clever.

Take revenge out of the Western and you're reduced to empire-building films and not much else. But there is a significant difference between, say, the Anthony Mann westerns in which revenge is accompanied by real suffering and -- if you've looked at Jimmy Stewart's face at the end of Winchester 73 -- doesn't buy anything like real peace of mind, and the gleeful massacres that characterize most contemporary big-budget action films.

I think what bothers me the most about Kick-Ass and its little brothers is the complete refusal to suggest that there is a price exacted for all this killing, or that the victims are -- god help us -- human beings. And they're not. These films are little more than live-action video games, right down to their design and cutting styles.

Look, there have always been anodyne action films in which the characters are about as lifelike and realistic as shooting gallery clay pigeons. Some of those movies are even good films. But I reserve the right to say, 'okay, little boys, that's enough for today.' Besides, movies in which most of the characters exist only as talking bulls-eyes are dramaturgically shit. As Budd Boetticher said, the stronger the villain, the better the movie. The evil daddy-good daddy dialectic, such as it is, of Kick-Ass is feebly played out, not the least because the evil daddy is so fucking boring.

I stepped away from the computer to go to synagogue, which was interesting and surprisingly enough, quite apposite, as you will see.

Interestingly, the guest speaker at my synagogue this evening was one of the members of the board of the New York State Defenders Association, the organization of public defender lawyers, who spoke quite eloquently about the failings of a criminal justice system that is driven mainly by a mixture of revenge and -- now that these things are more privatized -- greed. I won't try to replicate his talk, which was excellent. I merely mention it because it seemed appropriate to our own discussion. I will, however, recommend that you check out the website of another organization with which he works, Equal Justice USA, to learn about some very different paradigms for a justice system.

So, before I left, I invoked Samuel Fuller and Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher and Alfred Hitchcock. This is gonna get a little complicated, so buckle up.

What sets Mann and Fuller apart from most of their contemporaries and virtually all of today's action film directors is their insistence on their heroes' responsibility for their actions. Fuller and Mann both structure key action scenes visually on the principle that both "good" and "bad" guys must be in the frame together when violence happens; as a result, both are visually equivalent, their actions are frequently interchangeable, the hero is as culpable as the villain.

In Fuller, this temporary moral equivalence is ratcheted up by the fact that a lot of his heroes are men who have chosen to live outside of conventional society and who are, frequently, borderline nutjobs. Moreover, Fuller tends to frame his films pretty tightly, claustrophobically in fact, so that when violence happens it's like a necessary explosion and nobody is exempt from the results. Finally, a lot of Fuller's time and energy are expended in deliberately deflating the genre expectations that we bring from more conventional action films. I'm thinking of the scene in Steel Helmet where the green-as-grass lieutenant tells Neyle Morrow to get a dead GI's dogtags; needless to say, this being the Fuller universe, which bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the real world (not the reel world), the tags are booby-trapped, Morrow is blown to atoms and Gene Evans sits there muttering, "Get his dogtags. Hmmph." I think it's telling that one of the things that Fuller was pissed off at WB for when he made Merrill's Marauders was that they cut shots in which GIs inadvertently shot their own men during the heat of combat; it doesn't comform to the genre stereotype, but it's what Sam saw when he was a rifleman in WWII. The violence in Fuller is suffocating, morally and visually. I don't see that in many contemporary US studio films. (But I have seen it in Lebanon and Beaufort, two Israeli war films; guess that has something to do with having almost universal military service. And I think The Hurt Locker catches a bit of this attitude also, to its immense credit.) Additionally, Fuller frequently tries to offer his protagonists a way of sidestepping violence as a solution, or the option of reversing the effects of their violent acts -- think of the final moments of Big Red One when Marvin saves his German counterpart -- who he shot -- because the war is over. (There's also that lovely and somewhat goofy discussion between Rod Steiger and Charles Bronson of comparative theology in the middle of Run of the Arrow. Only Sam!)

In Mann, besides the single-frame action, which tends to be even more primal and feral than in Fuller, there is an enormous focus on the actual pain incurred by violence. Think of any of the Stewart westerns, particularly The Man From Laramie and The Naked Spur. These are almost Christ tales, with Stewart's protagonists receiving stigmata and trembling and whimpering from a combination of rage and pain. Actions have consequences and, as Dave Bromberg would say, 'You gotta suffer if you want to sing the blues.' I think that this, combined with the extraordinary use of locations and the perverse family units that run through these films are a bit part of why they are so powerful, so intense. But the key is the way that Mann uses Stewart (and in Man of the West, Cooper but with very subtle and fascinating variations). At the center of Stewart's screen personal is a very American duality of his persona, that folksy, laconic Will Rogers-type who, underneath, harbors a potential for near-psychotic violence. Stewart was fortunate in his career that he worked with several great directors who found different but brilliant ways of utilizing that duality, Mann, Hitchcock and Capra. . . . But the one thing that links the Mann westerns and a film like Mr. Smith is that even when he is stripped of all his defenses, is in almost unbearable pain, he will revert to his moral center, which is fundamentally at odds with the revenge motive. Yes, he kills Dutch Henry Brown at the end of Winchester 73, but when he comes back to town afterwards, he looks utterly spent, like someone who has completed the task of a lifetime and has no idea what else he has to live for. There are several moments in Bend of the River when his character stops in the middle of an act of violence, in a mixture of loss of control, shame and remorse. Think of the moment when he fights with some of the guys trying to hijack the wagon train and pulls a knife on Jack Lambert (I think it was Jack Lambert, if my memory is correct; hey, we've all wanted to pull a knife on Jack Lambert or Jack Elam, right?); and Julia Adams yells his name; he stops, his eyes bulging with a demonic fury, then looks at the knife in his hand in utter shock; the hand is shaking, he looks back at her and drops the knife with a look of shame coming over his face. For me the key moment in that film (I think it's the most underrated of the cycle, a really great film that gets less attention than The Far Country, which is an easier read, being overly schematic and didactic and talky) comes when Stewart, Arthur Kennedy and a young Rock Hudson are shooting down from a rock outcropping at a bunch of bad guys; they've cut them to ribbons and Stewart says, "That's enough." Kennedy, who is cold as ice, glares at him and barks, "Why?" Hudson, clearly uncertain what is going on, asks earnestly, "Yes, why?" Stewart says, "If I have to tell you, you'll never understand." I could go on for pages in this vein; Mann's a great and underrated director, and the moral complexity of his films is undervalued. But you get the idea.

Again, someone will have to show me a comparable action director working today, someone who puts his heroes through the Stations of the Cross not merely to fulfill an audiences blood lust (Mel Gibson, figuratively and, heh, heh, literally) but to make him question the very basis of his actions. I will readily grant that there aren't too many action stars out there today who either iconographically or talent-wise carry the weight of Stewart or Cooper or Bogart (in the Hawks films, where his moral grace is so powerful) or even DeNiro and Pacino.

I'm too tired to go into much detail about Hitchcock and Boetticher. Briefly, each of them uses alternating point-of-view to force the audience to participate in/identify with the villain. Each of them has films in which the villain is the most interesting and even attractive character in the film. I won't bother listing the Hitchcocks -- we all know them very well. I'll just mention one: Lars Thorwald in Rear Window, with his genuine anguish when he asks "Why are you doing this to me?" Boetticher's best films are structured around the contrast between his likeable rogues (Marvin, Boone, Claude Akins, Pernell Roberts and James Coburn) and the truculence of Randolph Scott. Even Scott's character frequently comes to like and even respect some of these bad guys. Of course, this arc culminates in Ray Danton's Legs Diamond, an utterly charming narcissist who will kill anyone who slows down his ascent.

Again, with the possible exception of some Alan Rickman performances, where are the great baddies of the past? That, I admit, is also a function of the way that TV changes the playing field; Carroll O'Connor was a splendid character actor who frequently got those kind of roles, then TV made him a star. But it also has to do with the complete and utter contempt that lousy filmmakers have for their characters, good, bad or in-between. I think that you can see it in the cavalier way that crap screenwriters will kill off a character for the sole reason that they need to motivate the next action setpiece.

I think there is a definite sea-change going on in the action film over, as Kevin [Baker, a long-ago Ira voter who has returned to the flock and is very astute] rightly says, the past 20-30 years. I think it's directly attributable to several factors; the success of the women's movement and the backlash that spurred, the post-9/11 paranoia, fed by a moron in the White House who thought that global politics was an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive (with apologies to McQueen and that show), a generation that has grown up on video games, particularly on violent ones. (I'm not blaming videogames for social ills or aesthetic decline; it's just that the visual aesthetic and tone of a lot of these films reflects the influence of the video game.)

I probably could throw in the effect of Jaws and the Friday the 13th/Halloween franchises is making B movies into A movies, but I don't buy that; Fuller and Mann (at Eagle-Lion) and Boetticher were making B movies. It used to be the only place you could make a really radical social statement, as opposed to the "male weepies" as someone called the problem films with their wholesale sentimentality. But I will note the increasing role of the hypermasculinized hero -- starting with Governor Arnold and continuing through Robocop and the comic-book heroes with their plasticized musculature -- and the utter disdain that these characters have for their opponents. (Robocop is the exception; clearly Verhoeven is making a satire on everything I'm complaining about, but I don't know how many of the 14-year-old boys in the audiences got that, and the sequels are just pure shit.) Personally, I'd rather never hear another stupid one-liner from an action hero after he has killed someone. (Yeah, that probably started with Connery's 007, but with Schwarzenegger it became fetishized, largely because the big lummox cannot act.) And the villains are interchangeable knock-down targets.

I will say this. Sam Raimi's Spiderman films appear to me to be a significant exception to everything I've said here. I respect Raimi, although I don't really like the Spiderman films very much. (In truth, I miss the Three Stooges dopiness of the Evil Dead trilogy; now those are live-action cartoons by design.) I also will grudgingly accept that the two Christopher Nolan Batman films don't fit into this paradigm either; I have a different set of problems with them.

Does revenge drive all of American culture? Of course not. That's not what Rosenbaum said and if I suggested he did then I inadvertently misrepresented his statement. And there is a big difference between being sick of recent manifestations of that plot mechanism and dismissing obviously great works because they have revenge at their center. Fuller and Karlson, to pick up on Damien [Bona]'s complaint, make movies in which the protagonists are damaged by their quest for vengeance, when they aren't destroyed outright ("Underworld USA" for example).

I won't claim to speak for Rosenbaum; you can look up his comments on his blog, which is well worth reading by the way. But I will speak for me: I think Kick-Ass is a deplorable film and an easy, cheap one. And in that respect it is typical of a trend in recent American action films, a trend that makes me nauseous.

Glad I got that off my chest.

Look, there are cartoon-like action films that I really enjoy. They tend to me more self-consciously comic in intent like Alan Rudolph's all-but-forgotten Roadie, with Meat Loaf as a sort of human-cannonball-in-a-cowboy-hat and Kaki Hunter (whatever happened to her?) as his very own Olive Oyl. (I suspect this latter piece of casting was just another expression of Rudolph's affinities with Robert Altman, with Hunter as a stand-in for Shelley Duvall. Or maybe Robert Duvall. Who knows?) Of course that is a much more innocent film and the violence is all slapstick. (If you want to see what happens when someone confuses slapstick comedy with real volence, see the multi-car pileup at the end of John Schlesinger's deeply repellent 1981 film Honky Tonk Freeway. There's a man who really knew how to let the air out the balloon, while sucking it out of the theater.)

The violence in Sergio Leone's movies tends to be very fast and sometimes even cartoonish, but he also knows when to slow down and make an emotional and/or moral statement, and his heroes (such as they are) are outsiders who can never be integrated into the community that will grow up in their wake. Don Siegel, the same thing.

I could go on like this for days. These are some of my favorite filmmakers and films, and I'm just warming to my subject. And since all of these guys are dead (except Rudolph, who hasn't had a feature film released since 2002), I don't get to write about them much anymore.

But sleep beckons and tomorrow is a deadline day. No, today is a deadline day. Oy.

Before you go to sleep or whatever you plan on doing next, I urge you to check out the Equal Justice USA website. Good people doing good work. If there is anywhere in American life that needs a paradigm shift more than criminal justice . . . well, it really is needed.

Man With a Monocle

2011-01-27T17:54:00.003-05:00

Fritz Lang's Jewish identity is a contested space. Although he referred to it occasionally in interviews, and his mother was clearly Jewish, he was raised as a Catholic and invoked his Jewish roots when it was useful in filling in the background for his leaving Germany after 1933. That said, I have no compunction about claiming him as a Jewish filmmaker, if only because his particularly biting brand of paranoid fatalism feels very Jewish to me. Hence, with a massive retrospective of Lang's work on offer at Film Forum, I penned the following for Jewish Week; it seems to have slipped through the cracks there, but I'm posting it here for your edification.

The legend is that Fritz Lang, the great German filmmaker, already renowned for “Metropolis,” “M” and the creation of the fictional criminal genius Dr. Mabuse, left Germany one step ahead of the Nazis who pursued him. Unlike almost all other German Jews, though, Lang was being pursued by Nazis who wanted not to imprison and kill him -- they wanted to hire him to run the German film industry. Although his mother was Jewish, Lang was raised as a Catholic, but given his acquaintance with such enemies of the Reich as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the director figured he’d better be on the next train to Paris.

Paris led to New York and then to Hollywood.

Lang thrived in Hollywood, working there for twenty years, from 1936 to 1956, and creating 22 films. Many of the films are works of genius, as a glance at the schedule of Film Forum’s upcoming program, “Fritz Lang in Hollywood,” reminds us. Lang even managed to reunite with Weill for the exceedingly odd and very Brechtian “You and Me” (1938), and with Brecht for the surprirsingly straightforward “Hangmen Also Die” (1943), Brecht’s only Hollywood screen credit.

Lang’s American work is a felicitous blend of his own concerns and style – fatalistic, doom-chased, and paranoiac, shadow-drenched, dark and brooding – with the great strengths of the studio system with its multitude of technical talents, munificent resources and rich corps of actors. From his first effort (in the unlikely precincts of MGM), the aptly named “Fury,” a super-heated denunciation of lynch-law mob violence and vigilante revenge, Lang’s work explores the underside of man as social animal. The potential for revenge is at the heart of every Lang film, but in almost all of his work the heroes turn away from that possibility at only the very, very last moment, allowing society to enact its own, slightly more refined justice.

It doesn’t take a big leap to see that the 22 films that Lang made in the United States were almost uniformly films about the grotesque society he had left behind. Four of the films are overtly anti-Nazi efforts – “Man Hunt,” “Hangmen Also Die,” “Ministry of Fear” and “Cloak and Dagger” – but Lang’s contributions to the film noir, among the most potent in the entire cycle, are impossible to read without an understanding of Fascism and its sinister appeal. Even a western like “Rancho Notorious” (1952) has faint but unmistakable echoes of Fuhrer-speak, heavily encoded within the sagebrush.

Eventually Lang would return to his native Germany to find a nation-in-transformation, stumbling towards the kind of capitalist democracy that he had left behind in America, shaky with Cold War fears and driven by corporate agendas. In a nation that was haunted by the ghosts (some of them not dead) of its recent horrific past, Lang did his part to raise the specters by returning to the films of his silent-era artistic youth, first with the delirious two-part “Indian Tomb” and then with the last of the Mabuse epics, his final film, “The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.” Once more an omnipresent supercriminal stalked the streets of Berlin through his proxies. The only difference was that the black shirts had been replaced by charcoal-gray suits.

The program begins January 28 and will include several special guest speakers.

In the meanwhile, my Jewish Week article on the Hungarian series mentioned earlier this week is now online here. I think you'll find some of my remarks on Istvan Szabo of interest.

An update on Panahi plus more

2011-01-24T16:41:00.000-05:00

If you have been wondering what you can do to help free Jafar Panahi, look no further than Amnesty International (you were expecting maybe Paul Wolfowitz?). They have an active petition campaign going on behalf of the imprisoned Iranian filmmaker, and you can sign on here. If you are reading this, then I know you care about cinema, so you should be doing this.

In the meantime, the last of my NY Jewish Film Festival pieces is here, and my review of Barney's Version is here. I'll have a few additional words to offer on the festival shortly.

In the meantime, let me recommend a program that will include some excellent Hungarian films that are not available on DVD at the moment. The Museum of Jewish Heritage is doing double-bills of Jewish-themed Hungarian films on consecutive Sundays starting next weekend. Among the films they are showing are Istvan Szabo's Confidence and the Gyongassy-Kabay Revolt of Job. The former is easily the best work Szabo has done; it has a claustrophobic quality that later, sprawling work like Mephisto could have used more of. Revolt of Job is one of the best films about the 'hidden children,' and tough-minded enough to get your tears honestly. I don't know which is the bigger shame, that this film isn't available in the States or that none of Gyongassy and Kabay's other features have been shown here.

Here We Go Again . . . .

2011-01-06T12:49:00.003-05:00

The New York Jewish Film Festival is 20 this year, which means I've been covering it since I was ten years old. (I have jeans that are older than that.)

The lineup for this year's event is, if possible, even more variegated than usual. My first of three pieces on the festival is here, and I'll have a few more words to say about the Adlon film in this space, shortly.

Additionally, there's a new documentary about Phil Ochs, which I review here. If you are a diehard Ochs fan, by all means go see the film, but I thought it was a bit disappointing.

And a Happy New Year to All

2010-12-31T18:22:00.003-05:00

Yeah, I broke my new year's resolution early this year, like before Christmas. That's why I don't actually make them. But here I am breaking the silence as well to wish all a busy production schedule for 2011.

As regular readers know, I won't be ready to post a true ten-best list until something like March, when the Iras finally take place. But my editor at Jewish Week asked me for a year-end wrap-up for film, which is a first, and I obliged him with what I think is a pretty interesting overview.

I regret omitting a few items of interest from that piece. I should have mentioned Frederick Wiseman's graceful and surprisingly funny Boxing Gym, and I meant to add that the year's most important re-release was the new print of Shoah. (I had a truly bizarre interview with Claude Lanzmann, which can be read here.)

It was a year that ended with at least one piece of really terrible news, the imprisonment of Jafar Panahi. As many of you will know, Panahi was out on bail until last week when he was sentenced to six years imprisonment and a ban of 20 years on filmmaking and travel abroad. His crime is for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." For more information on Panahi and others with the courage to oppose the Ahmedinejad regime, I recommend several websites:

The Green Voice of Freedom: http://en.irangreenvoice.com/
Tehran Avenue: http://www.tehranavenue.com/
Reporters Without Frontiers -- Iran Page: http://en.rsf.org/iran-press-freedom-violations-recounted-31-12-2009,33433.html
Article 19 -- Global Campaign for Free Expression: http://www.article19.org/index.html
Index on Censorship: http://www.indexonline.org/

I will be updating the blogroll and other links, and will include these for future use.

Hoping your new year is cheerier than Panahi's.

Not a Film Post (But an Amazing Facsimile)

2010-10-23T05:02:00.003-04:00

Just want to pull your coat to a series of events taking place in New York City (yeah, I know, I'm too parochial by half, but that just happens to be where this program is set), an annual event celebrating New Literature from Europe. As regular readers of this blog know, one of my hobbyhorses is the dearth of literature in translation available in the US, Canada and the UK. (Sorry, I can't take on more of the globe than that.) This event, a series of panels, readings and other such literary doings, highlights the work of eight contemporary authors from the Old World. To quote the website:

In this year’s New Literature from Europe, eight cultural institutes have teamed up to present a series of discussions and readings featuring eight critically acclaimed European writers: Philippe Claudel (France), Kirmen Uribe (Spain), Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), Gerhard Roth (Austria), Radka Denemarková (Czech Republic), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Gabriela Adameşteanu (Romania), and Antonia Arslan (Italy). Moderators will include distinguished writer André Aciman, chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Writers' Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center and Susan Bernofsky, Guest Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College (CUNY).

Well worth your time and interest.

Ah, the Joys of Free Wi-Fi

2010-10-16T00:24:00.002-04:00

Here I am at the Hazleton (PA) Motor Lodge having given the first of two talks in a pair of synagogues in this town in the foothills of the Poconos. Tonight was about the insane diversity of the Jewish world and how it became so fragmented and complicated. I suspect those of you who are (still) reading this blog will have little interest in this subject, but tomorrow's talk, about Jewish aesthetics in the face of the seeming prohibition on graven images, might be more to your taste, particularly as I argue -- more than half-seriously -- that cinema is the Jewish art form par excellence. As I intimate in the talk, this is a notion that I have been playing with for a while, but would be reluctant to go to war over. I'll leave it for you readers to take up the cudgels right now. I'm going to sleep. I actually might get seven hours if I can fall asleep quickly.

Not Dead Quite Yet

2010-10-15T02:14:00.002-04:00

No, I'm still around. In fact, tomorrow I leave for a weekend gig as a scholar-in-residence for two synagogues in the Poconos. And when I get back, I'll try and update this blog more regularly. After all, it's been nearly three years of posting, this one being the 320th, and it would be a shame to stop now. Right?

An Absolute Must

2010-05-29T07:27:00.002-04:00

By far the best of this year's Rendezvous with French Cinema was Stephane Brize's Mademoiselle Chambon. When it played the Walter Reade, it didn't have a distributor, but that has been fixed and the film opened Friday in New York at the Lincoln Plaza and the Cinema Village. I can honestly say that this is one film you really must see this summer. Here's what I said when it played the WRT:

Mademoiselle Chambon, by Stéphane Brizé, is even better, a warm and intelligent drama about a 40-something husband who becomes involved with his son's grade-school teacher. Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain are charming as the mismatched couple, and Brizé handles the material with a minimum of melodrama so that the complexities of the emotions stand on their own. The result is quite a lovely and nuanced film and one that I hope will find a distributor pronto.

Skip the latest Bruckheimer rubbish and Sex and the Shitty 2. Go see this instead.

Panahi Released, For Now

2010-05-25T09:20:00.002-04:00

Jafar Panahi was released on bail about a half-hour ago. Apparently, the turning point was his decision to go on a hunger strike. For more information, go here.

It is unclear what happens now, but for the moment, Panahi is out of prison.

Meanwhile, in Cannes

2010-05-23T22:31:00.002-04:00

Nice to see Apichatpong Weerasethakul winning the Palme d'Or. I've been duly impressed by his previous work and am eger to see the new film. Plebs like me don't get to Cannes -- I'm too old to sleep on the beach and too happily married to find a starlet to shack up with -- but my friend and fellow Ira voter Michael Giltz has been covering the festival for several years, and his insights and interventions are always worthwhile. This time, he's been traipsing around the Riviera for the Huffington Post, and you can find his film-by-film report here.

The Latest Development in the Berlinger Case

2010-05-23T16:21:00.002-04:00

Joe Berlinger has gotten some temporary breathing space in his legal battle with Chevron. For the details, go to the New York Times's arts blog here. It's not great news, but it's better than nothing.

Incidentally, for all you non-New Yorkers or New Yorkers with disturbingly short memories, the name of the Chevron attorney quoted at the end of the story should ring bells, alarm bells. Randy M. Mastro was Rudy Giuiliani's chief of staff and then his deputy mayor, and chair of the Charter Revision Commission. Draw your own conclusions.

A Quick Followup on the Berlinger Case

2010-05-21T16:42:00.002-04:00

If you are interested in documentary film, you probably should be a member of the D-Word on-line community. I mention this because the discussion on the "Legal Corner" section of their forum pages has been very enlightening on this case. As Mark Barroso correctly notes, Judge Kaplan didn't deny that Berlinger was functioning as a journalist with a qualified version of the usual protectons. Rather, he said that "when comes to possessing evidence needed in civil action in a foreign court, it doesn't matter." Barroso goes on from there with several other useful explanations and concludes, quite rightly, that what we really need is a federal shield law protecting journalists and their sources. Go to The D-Word, register and check out his posting.

Where Was I?

2010-05-21T16:14:00.002-04:00

I've been busy, that's where I've been. What's it to you?

Sorry. I thought you were a family member.

Joking aside, let me start by suggesting you catch Daddy Longlegs, of which I recently wrote this.

On a considerably more sober note, I'd like to draw your attention to the latest assault on documentary filmmakers by a genius on the federal courts. Or as the New York Times put it,

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in New York granted a petition by Chevron seeking a subpoena for more than 600 hours of footage shot by Mr. Berlinger for “Crude.” The film chronicles the Ecuadorians who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron) saying that the operations at its oil field at Lago Agrio contaminated their water. Chevron has said that Mr. Berlinger’s footage could be helpful to the company as it seeks to have the litigation dismissed and pursues arbitration related to the lawsuit. (Full story is here.)

In other words, protections normally afforded to journalists under the First Amendment do not apply to documentarians functioning as journalists, and the "rights" of Chevron, notorious human-rights violators (see this, this and this)and environmental despoilers, take precedent. If you've ever seen The Corporation, the excellent Canadian documentary film directed by Mark Achbar and Jennfer Abbott, then you will understand the strange notion in Anglo-American law that a corporation is a "person" with the rights attendant thereto. (If you haven't, you can watch it at your computer here, if you don't mind sitting at the computer for three hours.)

At any rate, although Chevron are hardly the only corporation that makes its money by working closely with vicious dictators and destroyng rainforests, coastlines and the atmosphere, they are among the more egregious sinners. This court case sets a truly deadly precedent. I'll just refer you to some folks who can speak to the issue more eloquently than I, here, here and here.

And if you are a filmmaker, film journalist or just someone who has a concern for the truth, sign onto the letter in support of Joe Berlinger, buy a copy of Crude, and add Chevron to the list of companies whose products you wouldn't touch with surgical gloves and mask.

Wrapping Up Tribeca; More on Panahi

2010-04-30T21:15:00.005-04:00

For reasons unknown to me, my second piece on the Tribeca Film Festival for Jewish Week disappeared down the rabbithole this week. Too bad, too, because the four films I wrote about are not without merit. However, in the age of computers nothing is truly lost (and this is a good thing because?), so for those of you who care, here is the article.

In what must be one of the most peculiar assertions ever made by a major philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead once told an interlocutor that his only problem with the Jews was their lack of humor. Lack of humor?! Must have been those Anglo-Jewish academics he hung out with.

It would be wrong to say that the Jews invented stand-up comedy, although the badkhn may well be the first stand-up (and a forerunner of rap, to boot), but surely we have contributed mightily to this particular mode of performance art, beginning in the 20^th Century. One could list the Jewish stand-ups from vaudeville to the present as a unbroken line running from Weber and Fields through Jack Benny and Burns and Allen to Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Robert Klein and so on.

Inevitably, such a list would include Joan Rivers, who is the subject of a new documentary that is having its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. As Kathy Griffin points out in the film, Rivers was one of a tiny handful of women who kicked down doors to get on stage and on screen and, with her conquest of the Tonight Show in the ‘60s, Rivers probably did more than any other to keep those doors open to women comics.

Of course, that is part of the story told by Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg. But the focus of their film is more on Rivers as she is today, a 75-year-old woman fighting, biting and scratching to continue plying her trade. On stage, she is raucous, profane and frequently strident. Also brutally honest and very, very funny. Off-stage, Rivers is someone who lives to work, who seems utterly lost when not in motion, a person hiding and hugging a core of deep sadness and anger. As she admits herself, “If I wasn’t angry, I wouldn’t do comedy.”

Yet she repeatedly asserts to the filmmakers that she considers herself an actress, not a comic. “I play a comedienne,” she says defiantly. Over the course of the year in which the film was shot, we see her take that notion to its logical extreme, road-testing a play about her life at the Edinburgh Festival and in London. The mixed reviews in London scuttled the project, but you can feel Rivers’s intensity and commitment as both writer and star. She’s been doing this since 1966, over 40 years she proudly announces, and she isn’t going quietly. Then, she never has.

An ardent Zionist (the set of her play was festooned with Israeli flags), Rivers might not entirely recognize Ahmed Ahmed as one of her professional offspring. He’s an Egyptian-American comic and, now, a filmmaker whose first feature is a documentary Just Like Us, which chronicles a comedy tour of the Middle East he led about a year ago. He put together a multicultural roster of comedians, including both men and women from a bewildering array of ethnicities, for what would be the first comedy tour of the region and, in several of the countries included, a first-ever evening of stand-up comedy.

“Nobody has a concept of stand-up comedy in these countries,” he says early in the film. But all their cultures have humor in abundance.

The comics are for the most part quite good – Ahmed and Tommy Davidson make a particularly strong impression – but they seem as committed to the idea of using comedy to breakdown stereotypes and barriers as to working these houses for big laughs. In the course of the film, we see the first woman comic to play Dubai and the first Saudi woman comic, who appears briefly in the Riyadh sequence. The film ends with Ahmed and several other Arab and Muslim comics working a club in New York, where a different but no less powerful set of stereotypes need to be challenged. “Comedy provides a dialogue for social change,” Ahmed says bluntly.

Omid Djalili, who makes such a strong impression in the first half of Just Like Us is also represented at Tribeca by a comedy feature The Infidel. Written by David Baddiel and directed by Josh Appignanesi, this is a broad farce about Mahmood Nasir, a middle-aged Anglo-Pakistani Londoner (Djalili) whose life is thrown into complete chaos by two startling developments. His son’s fiancée has acquired a new stepfather, a stridently anti-western imam, who must give his blessing for the wedding to take place. And he has just learned from the papers left by his recently deceased mother that he was adopted and, to his utter bewilderment, was born a Jew named Solly Shimshillewitz. In his effort to sort out his own sense of identity and to satisfy the concerns of the rabbi who is caring for his previously unknown, now dying father, he needs someone to teach him about Judaism. His choice is a dyspeptic Jewish-American cabdriver, Lenny (Richard Schiff). Inevitably, things escalate from there.

The Infidel is frequently funny, occasionally silly and, surprisingly, relatively light on the soggy home truths and sentimentality. Djalili is a deft physical performer who brings real brio to the title role, but he also carries himself with a certain gravitas so that Mahmood/Solly never becomes a cliché. Even more important, he has a nice rapport with Schiff, whose own mixed motives and feelings give his character a bit more heft too.

With the presence of Djalili, Ahmed and the next generation of comics, the Jews no longer have a near-monopoly on stand-up (if they ever did, which is highly doubtful). Nor should they. I cannot imagine an American comedy pantheon that didn’t include Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney or George Carlin, to name only the most obvious stand-out stand-ups. I wouldn’t want to meet someone whose pantheon didn’t include them and a rainbow coalition of other funny women and men. At the risk of stating the obvious, as these films occasionally do, funny is funny, it doesn’t have a color or religion or gender or affectional preference. What it should do is speak truth, keeping in mind George Bernard Shaw’s excellent advice, “If you’re going to tell people the truth, make them laugh or they’ll kill you.”

Then there’s the Russian mob. If Alexander Gentelev’s new Israeli documentary, Thieves by Law is to be believed, they’ll laugh while they kill you. This portrait of four gentlemen of leisure who are former (one hopes) gangsters spotlights the sort of fierce geniality that has been absent from the screen since Edward G. Robinson’s move into comic criminality in the late ‘30s, and from the printed page since Jimmy Breslin’s semi-retirement. However, this is definitely a gang that can shoot straight, when needs (or whims) dictate, and Gentelev has spent a considerable amount of his career covering them, which works to the film’s advantage. There is a certain cable-TV slickness to the film and its subjects are a bit too glib to be believed, but they are never dull. They might want to consider a second career in stand-up comedy.

The Middle East provided some other memorable moments in this year's festival, few more memorable than the first hour of The White Meadows, written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. Rasoulof's first feature, Iron Island, played New Directors a couple of years ago; it was a visually striking if somewhat stifling film about a group of poor people living on a beached oil tanker. His new film is a cunning reversal of that film's narrative topography, tracing the wanderings of a man who moves from island to island in a dream-like, often fog-enshrouded sea.

Rahmat (Younes Ghazali) rows from one salt-encrusted island to another in Lake Urmia, collecting people's tears with a couple of tiny, beautiful glass implements. His passages are mysterious, each of the islands is a strange community with customs that seem downright pagan, and the result is, for about 60 minutes haunting, reminiscent of the best of Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov. The latter seems a particularly apposite parallel; both filmmakers are fascinated by seemingly pre-literate folklore-dominated social circles and both present an almost oneiric series of rites and rituals, deeply, inexplicably hermetic. Add to that the extraordinary setting of The White Meadows, a series of spectral landscapes composed of white-covered corrugations and crenellations, an eerie mix of ghostly and rocky, and you have a recipe for a work that tugs at some deeply buried, atavistic pre-memory.

The problem with the film is that, like most picaresque, the structure is more arbitrary than in other narratives and the filmmaker must find some other way to unify the work. Rasoulof has chosen to make the many episodes highly repetitive. For the first two-thirds of the film, that works splendidly, but much of the final half-hour feels exhausted, spent. Yet, when in the film's final scenes, we are transported to a palpably real modern world, with Rahmat riding a motor scooter to meet an old man in a wheelchair, the change is deeply unsatisfying. Still, The White Meadows is a fascinating exercise, and some of its images will stay with the viewer for long after the lights come up in the theater.

Concidentally, the editor of The White Meadows is Jafar Panahi who, as you probably know if you are a regular reader of this blog, is somewhere within the confines of Iran's infamous Evin Prison. The lastest development in his case is the creation of a petition by a raft of important American independent film directors and producers calling for his release. If you'd like to see the petition, you can find it here. I'm waiting for information on what else you can do in support of Panahi, but in the meantime, I recommend you go to Amnesty International's website to read a guide to writing letters in support of prisoners of conscience and drop a note to the Iranian authorities.

The Tribeca Beat

2010-04-26T12:00:00.004-04:00

Well the festival is almost halfway done, my first piece for Jewish Week is here, and I'll be writing from the festival through the rest of this week. Almost everything I've seen so far will be discussed in JWeek, but I did have the genuine pleasure of catching Neil Jordan's new film, Ondine, on Friday.

There has always been a fascinating tension in Jordan's work between a fairy-tale element in his storytelling and his choice of subject matter, and a flaky, perverse sexuality that underpins that tone. Ondine is one of the most likeable of his excursions into these intertwined realms. Syracuse (Colin Farrell) is a fisherman in a small Irish town, a recovering alcoholic with an ex-wife who still drinks and a precocious 11-year-old daughter, Annie (Allison Barry), whose kidney failure has left her in a wheelchair. At the beginning of the film, he is hauling in is nets after what looks like yet another day of failure when he sees that his catch includes a beautiful woman (Alicja Bachleda). Once revived, she seems to have total amnesia. Is she a selke, a Scottish sea-nymph? Annie is convinced and soon so is her father. On the other hand, mom's Scottish boyfriend (Tony Curran, in a charming but too-brief appearance) is skeptical; "So she swam from the Orkneys to be here," he gently needles Annie.

Jordan's fairy-tales have a way of colliding with the real world, which is where sexuality rears its familiar head in his films, and Ondine is no exception. Perhaps one should have expected as much, because this is one of the most sombre-looking fairy stories in film history. From the film's very first shot, images are shrouded in drab mists, overcast skies predominate and Jordan's palette consists mainly of gray-blue, blue-gray, gray and more gray. The lush green of the countryside is washed-out and interiors are either deeply shadowed or dully antiseptic.

This is the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, and the casting of Farrell underlines the economic and emotional fall. Farrell projects a deep melancholy even in his most energetic roles and here he is a surprisingly passive figure, buffeted by forces beyond his control or comprehension. Syracuse is a committed twelve-stepper -- he goes to confession because "this town is too small to have an AA chapter" -- and he has definitely surrendered himself to a higher power. It's a sweet performance, detailed and finely worked, and his interactions with Stephen Rea as the local priest and the women in his life are among the highlights of the film. Jordan is happy to sit back and let the energies of those interactions carry the film rhythmically, and the result is a charming work with surprising emotional heft.

An aside: Ondine would make a fascinating double-bill with John Boorman's unreleased A Tiger's Tale, a more explicit reflection on the Irish economic collapse. Both films are visually and emotionally dark folktales in which the sea plays a major part. In a sense, the Boorman is an urban counterpart to Jordan's more rural tale, and between them they capture the tensions underpinning Ireland's difficult transition from countryside to city. Besides, the pairing of the two films would be a tacit reunion of Farrell with Brendan Gleeson, echoing their wonderful double act from In Bruges.

A Good Time To Be a Moviegoer

2010-04-17T16:14:00.004-04:00

Lots of interesting films in NYC right now. (Yes, I know a lot of you don't live in New York, but there's a pretty good chance that if it's interesting here it won't be too dull where you are.) The Museum of Modern Art is doing their annual new German series; my review of one of the films is here, and there is at least one very intriguing item on the menu, a film about Hildegarde of Bingen by Margarethe von Trotta. Now that is a rather unlikely match -- medieval mystic meets hard-nosed modern radical feminist.

And, of course, the Tribeca Film Festival is right around the corner. I will have a lot to say about that both here and in Jewish Week.

In the meantime, let me pull your coat to a couple of films that I mentioned recently. Everyone Else is an impressive second feature by German filmmaker Maren Ade. It's a leisurely drama with a lot of wit, focusing on a couple who are vacationing in the sun and pondering the future of their relationship. Although they seem perfectly happy with one another and with their lives and careers back home, the seams and cracks begin to show when they compare themselves to the people around them. Ade gives this an agreeably meandering pace that seems to reflect not only the aimlessness of a vacation but also the diffuseness of her protagonists' lives. It's an intelligent and deeply likeable film, not a quality one sees enough of these days.

Beyond the Burly Q, which opens here on April 23, is also a film that meanders quite a bit. In fact, Leslie Zemeckis's documentary feature about the golden age of burlesque has only the loosest of structures. But the material and the interview subjects -- a veritable who's who of the grande dames of the burlesque stage, as well as family members -- are so delightful and the subject so engaging that it almost doesn't matter. For sheer fun, this is a winner, although I wish it had been tighter and better organized.

The Biopic -- A Tired Genre

2010-04-10T07:10:00.002-04:00

My friends and colleagues Ira Hozinsky and Ronnie Scheib have remarked from time to time that the biopic may well be the last genre that is impervious to change. With the entirely admirable exception of Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, nobody seems interested in reimagining the biographical film. I offer as a case in point Who Do You Love. My review can be read here.

I'll have more pleasant things to say about some other new films shortly. But without pre-empting my longer analysis, allow me to enthusiastically recommend Maren Ade's Everyone Else, currently at the IFC Center in New York; It Came from Kuchar, Jennifer M. Kroot's very amusing documentary portrait of George and Mike, the Brothers Kuchar, at Anthology Film Archives; and Behind the Burly Q, Leslie Zemeckis's baggy but entertaining paean to the lost art of burlesque. I saw all three in a single, very happy day. If all my days were like that one I'd be grinning like an idiot all the time. (Don't say it. Just don't say it.)

Update on Jafar Panahi

2010-04-05T14:32:00.002-04:00

I've been a supporter of and letter-writer for Amnesty International almost as long as I've been a film critic - since my senior year of high school in both cases. The hardest part of the former is the long wait before you see the results of a campaign.

If you see any.

I merely offer that observation as a reminder that the wheels of justice grind very slowly in the international arena, but constant pressure and attention do produce results more often than not.

All this is by way of introducing the latest information on the status of Jafar Panahi, who has been imprisoned by the Iranian government for more than a month. According to an update on the New York Times website, Panahi is beginning to show signs of ill-health, having been moved to a very small cell and denied any exercise.

For more information on the situation in Iran, among other places you can check out this site.

Playing Catch-Up

2010-04-01T11:41:00.002-04:00

Well, it must be spring because I'm falling behind here. Three recent films pieces at Jewish Week that I think you'll find of interest: Greenberg, the new Noah Baumbach, an exceptional quartet of Holocaust documentaries, and Leaves of Grass, the latest from Tim Blake Nelson.

I'll try and get to New Directors/New Films in the next day or so. Watch this space.

And now, in Baseball News . . . .

2010-03-22T13:52:00.002-04:00

Opening Day approacheth.

And with it comes the joyous news that my first book, co-written with my friend and colleague Charles Salzberg, is back in print after an absence of 17 years. On a Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball's Worst Teams is, if I say so myself, a masterpiece. And now that the health-care bill has passed, you can read the book without fear of laughing yourself sick.

If you are looking to buy a copy, you can find it here or here.

Tats All, Folks

2010-03-17T22:11:00.002-04:00

Terrible pun, but I can never resist them. My review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is online at Jewish Week; it's always interesting to see how other cinemas handle genre stuff that used to be the bread and butter of Hollywood. Too bad Hollywood can't do as well.

I've been spending most of my time at screenings of of the programs for New Directors/New Films and I can honestly say, without dropping any state secrets, that there are some excellent films therein, coming from young directors. I'll provide more details next week when the event kicks off.

Another Year, Another Iras

2010-03-14T05:11:00.003-04:00

And so, for the 35th time, we gathered together to decide the fate of Western civilization -- no, I'm sorry, that's not exactly right, it is?

Oh, yeah, we voted our own film awards and, if I say so myself, we acquitted ourselves with more grace, wit and intelligence than many of our colleagues and the various industry groups. If you want to read a more thorough recounting (literally), check out Michael Giltz's blog, Popsurfing. (There's a link to your left.)

However, here are my the final results in all the categories, with my own first-place choice in parentheses:

Best Picture: Hunger (Still Walking)
Best Director: Olivier Assayas -- Summer Hours (Hirokazu Kore-Eda -- Still Walking)
Best Actor: Sharlto Copley -- District 9 (Issei Ogata -- The Sun)
Best Actress: Catalina Saavedra -- The Maid (Penelope Cruz -- Broken Embraces)
Best Supporting Actor: Liam Cunningham -- Hunger (Cunningham)
Best Supporting Actress: Anna Faris -- Observe and Report (Edith Scob -- Summer Hours)
Best Screenplay: Olivier Assayas -- Summer Hours (Hirokazu Kore-Eda -- Still Walking)
Best Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt -- Hunger (Raoul Coutard -- Made in USA)
Best Production Design: Philip Ivey -- District 9 (Yelena Zhukova -- The Sun)
Best Music: Marvin Hamlisch -- The Informant! (Alberto Iglesias -- Broken Embraces)
Best Costumes: Janet Patterson -- Bright Star (Hope Hanafin -- (500) Days of Summer)

And here, at long last, is my ten-best list for 2009 (based on 76 films viewed -- my worst total since 2000m, unfortunately, but it was that kind of a year for us):

1. Still Walking – Hirokazu Kore-Eda

2. Summer Hours – Olivier Assayas

3. 35 Shots of Rum – Claire Denis

4. Hunger – Steve McQueen

5. (500) Days of Summer – Marc Webb

6. The Sun – Alexander Sokurov

7. La Silence du Lorna – Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne

8. Broken Embraces – Pedro Almodovar

9. The Beaches of Agnes – Agnes Varda

10. The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow

Honorable Mention: Police, Adjective, Duplicity, Katyn, The Cove, Empty Nest, Fados, Laila’s Birthday, Shall We Kiss?, In a Dream, Unmistaken Child, Made in USA.

It seems like everyone who does this nonsense for a living had to chime in with a ten-best list for the decade just completed. (I'm not going to get into the debate on which ten years constitute the decade. Let's get real, people.) The New York Independent Film Critics Circle were no exception. We used weighted voting, ten points down to one, (like the baseball writers voting for MVP and Cy Young awards). First, here is my ten-best list for the '00s:

1. The Son – Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

2. Colossal Youth – Pedro Costa

3. “The Heart of the World” – Guy Maddin

4. 2046 – Wong Kar-Wai

5. Goodbye Dragon Inn – Tsai Ming-Liang

6. Untold Scandal -- Je-Yong Lee

7. Notre Musique – Jean-Luc Godard

8. Syndromes and a Century – Apichatpong Weerasethakul

9. My Father, My Lord – David Volach

10. I’m Going Home – Manoel de Oliveira

This was a remarkable decade and getting this list down to a mere ten was downright painful. If you look at how our voting went, you'll get some sense of the great films I was forced to leave off my own list.

1. The Son
2. Zodiac -- David Fincher
3. Yi Yi -- Edward Yang
4. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- Andrew Dominik
5. Edge of Heaven -- Fatih Akin
In the Mood for Love -- Wong Kar-Wai
7. "The Heart of the World"
8. Mysterious Skin -- Gregg Araki
Bus 174 -- Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda
10. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu -- Cristi Puiu
Head-On -- Fatih Akin
Spirited Away -- Hayao Miyazaki
13. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days -- Cristian Mungiu
The Dreamers -- Bernardo Bertolucci
House of Sand and Fog -- Vadim Perlman

These are exciting lists. All of the filmmakers listed are, with the exceptions of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci and Manoel de Oliveira, are young filmmakers or mature filmmakers at the peak of their powers. The lists suggest some of the geo-economic shifts in the film world, with east Asian filmmakers, directors from Romania and the Middle East giving a massive transfusion of fresh talent to the art form. The most glaring omissions are the lack of women directors (although several of them turned up on individual best-of-decade lists) and Latin Americans (with the exception of Bus 174).

Things are definitely looking up. Or as the newspaperman in Hawks's The Thing should have said, "Watch the screens! Keep watching the movie screens!"

An Update on Jafar Panahi and Some New Films

2010-03-10T18:12:00.005-05:00

There hasn't been any movement in Teheran on the arrest of Jafar Panahi, as far as anyone here can see. However, The New York Times has a report on one new development involving a fellow filmmaker, the great Abbas Kiarostami, a frequent collaborator with Panahi.

And my latest offering in Jewish Week is a piece on the Rendezvous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade, IFC Center and BAM. In addition to the two Jewish-themed films, I saw several other items from the series and would like to draw your attention to two personal favorites. In the Beginning, by Xavier Giannolas, is a nice, tight little morality play, based on real events, about a professional conman (Francois Cluzet, who looks enough like a slightly younger Dustin Hoffman that I found it a little unnerving) who embarks on a wildly ambitious project to revive an abandoned highway project in a severely depressed region. He becomes involved both politically and romantically with the local mayor (Emmanuelle Devos) and things become quite complicated. Giannolas keeps the film moving at such a brisk pace that you hardly realize it's two hours long. This one strikes me as a highly commercial but thoroughly worthy item, and I'm hoping someone will pick it up. Mademoiselle Chambon, by Stéphane Brizé, is even better, a warm and intelligent drama about a 40-something husband who becomes involved with his son's grade-school teacher. Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain are charming as the mismatched couple, and Brizé handles the material with a minimum of melodrama so that the complexities of the emotions stand on their own. The result is quite a lovely and nuanced film and one that I hope will find a distributor pronto.

Pioneers

2010-03-03T11:37:00.003-05:00

Leo Hurwitz was one of the fathers of American documentary film, not just because he made some of the most significant political films of the '30s and '40s, but because he was at the hub of a circle of filmmakers that included Paul Strand, Ralph Steiner and Irving Lerner, among others. Several of his most interesting films anticipate key moments in the evolution of independent film in America, and he was around for some important moments in history as well.

So the upcoming retrospective of his work and that of his friends, colleagues and collaborators, "Leo Hurwitz and the New York School of Documentary Film," which opens at Anthology Film Archives a week from today, is worthy of notice. My review appears here.

More Bad News for Iranian Film

2010-03-02T05:25:00.002-05:00

At the risk of sounding like Howard Cosell, sometimes events happen that put what we do as film critics and filmmakers back into perspective.

According to a dispatch from Reuters, the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of such pro-women's rights films as The Circle and Offside and the stunning Crimson Gold, has been arrested for his opposition to the Ahmedinejad regime. Panahi was already banned from foreign travel, and he hasn't been able to make a film since Offside was completed in 2006.

Needless to say, I urge you to write to the Iranian government demanding confirmation or denial of the story and reminding them of their obligations under international law to respect the rights of their citizens. Check Amnesty International's various websites for information on how to write an effective plea. You can click on the graphic on the left-hand side of this page. And if you do such things, you might want to pray for Panahi and other dissidents who have been arrested. I also refer you again to the NY Times article on how Iran's filmmakers have responded to the illegitimate regime; you can find the link in the January 3 post.

And while we're on the subject of Iran, allow me to direct your attention to an excellent clearinghouse of information from Iranian progressives, hosted by Article 19, the Azad Tribune. A must-read in English and Farsi.