A Serious Man

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, and Richard Kind. 105 minutes.

A Serious Man was filmed in St. Louis Park, Minnesota where the Coens’ grew up in the Fifties. This black comedy is their most personal movie to date, the least ultra-violent and the most Jewish.

There’s a five minute Hassidic-flavored fable before the opening credits, a cinematic Rosetta Stone, done entirely in the mother tongue. Both loving and mocking, the vignette is set in 19^th century Eastern Europe and is basically a slow dance between the dreamy transcendence of Marc Chagall paintings and the unrelenting terror of dybbuks. A period piece made with Day-Glo exclamation marks. Call it a DNA sample drawn from memories of Jewish life in the shtetls where the industrial revolution never happened and pogroms and poverty did. Could it be that the Coens’ are coming out of the post-modern closet and revealing themselves as Jewish storytellers? It’s arguably the most surreal and shocking thing they’ve ever done.

Fast forward three generations to 1950’s America. The advert for the movie says it all: the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is fiddleless on the roof of his suburban tract home, TV aerial like a sail above his head, Noah searching the horizon for dry land. His body bristles with Stallonean grit but it’s oozing Rick Moranis from the gills, an unlikely hero in service of a hopelessly lost cause, a truly serious man. He’s Tevye dropped in the middle of Eisenhower’s America. Like red-shoed Dorothy in Emerald City, he’s a stranger in a very strange land, never quite at home. Gopnik’s wife and brother also have this quality, still wearing the psychological packing materials from the previous generation’s trek across the ocean to the Goldina Medina, America.

He’s a bit of an odd ball but easy to like, this Gopnik, a physics professor at a local college, a person who trusts mathematical equations to tell him when the sun is coming up rather than looking out the window. Stuhlbarg, who was the hedge fund consultant in the black comedy Cold Souls, plays him as the fruit of the tree of Jewish manhood: intelligent and unrelentingly fair, polite and helpful to everyone, even when attacked. A mensch. But there’s something off about the guy. He comes across both as comically inept like Nicholas Cage in the Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987) and virtuously inept like Billy Bob Thornton in the brothers’ 2001 film, The Man Who Wasn’t There.

And so it goes.

Like the aging hippie in The Big Lebowski who calls himself The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Gopnik pays a big price for not melting into the pot. He endures an endless series of bizarre things, all of them painful, as he gets wised up. His wife decides to leave him for another man (played with perfect pitch by Fred Melamed as an unctuous conniver). His brilliant, nutty brother (Richard Kind) has a criminal streak (Kind also plays a similar character on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm). A student tries to bribe Gopnik to get a passing grade, and when he’s turned down, sabotages his teacher’s tenure review.

There are some truly funny moments in all this but there’s never any emotional pay-off for all the nasty stuff Gopnik goes through. The movie ends in the middle of nowhere as if the film makers just got tired of beating him up. It’s hard to fathom why the Coens’ made Gopnik likeable but don’t seem to like him themselves.

Near the end of the film, as the exhausted, cornered Gopnik teeters on the brink of finally accepting the bribe, we see him in his physics classroom covering a blackboard as big as a racquetball court with an elaborate proof of the uncertainty principle. He ends by telling the class that he’s just proved that nothing exists but that, in the end, doesn’t mean anything either.

The brothers are spot on in depicting the superficiality of lower middle class tract home life and the not-so-quiet desperation of its denizens, the feints and ululations of emptiness and alienation. Here they have returned to the scene of the crime in this film, the other side of the emotional tracks from Leave it to Beaver, closer to Revolutionary Road, laying bare the roots of the murderous glee of Fargo and the utter bleakness of No Country for Old Men.

The film ends with the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, a song that shows up frequently in the movie, almost a character for the role it plays in liberating Gopnik’s son from his parents’ world and, surprisingly, linking him to his Eastern European forebears. Quoth the Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies/ and all the joy within you dies/ don’t you want somebody to love?”

Well, sure. But in the Coens’ world love seems to be just another shell game, and personal integrity never quite antes up.

Amelia

Starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere; Directed by Mira Nair; 111 minutes

There are two pioneering women crossing the Atlantic Ocean in this film. One is the title character, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), a Kansas native, the first woman to fly across the pond. The other is Mira Nair, the film’s director (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding), the first Indian woman to make a movie about Americans.

Earhart made her historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, about a year after Charles Lindbergh’s epochal jaunt. America fell head over heels in love with her, just the way it had with gallant, modest Lindbergh, and she became an instant inspiration to millions, a mythic swan soaring above the horizon lines of cash and class, the festering scabs of World War One.

The funny thing is that she did it as a passenger in a plane with two others, not as a solo pilot like Lindbergh, but never mind. America was hungry for a “Lady Lindy” and Amelia filled the bill. The film takes care to show us that flying was Earhart’s one true and only real love and setting aviation records her deepest passion.

There have been umpteen biopics about Earhart, a charmed, reckless, ultimately self-destructive person who died young (like James Dean and Michael Jackson) and who still has star power after she’s shuffled off the mortal coil. Amelia is the BBC version of this classic America tale: the exuberance of fearless, questing youth translated into the tragic, cold fire of Laurence of Arabia, more shadow than light. That said, Nair has made a lovely, overstuffed sofa of a film in the Merchant Ivory style, every frame brimming with opulence and comfort. Even minor characters are beautifully dressed, their clothing like supple architecture. Voiceovers of the actual words Earhart wrote and spoke about her flying experience add human feeling, even magic, to what is typically AOK. A nice touch.

Hilary Swank plays Earhart with a homespun elegance. She’s willful without ever being strident, sounding British even without an accent. An undeclared feminist just after women had won the right to vote, Earhart famously gave her husband a written note at their wedding ceremony freeing him, and herself, from living by medieval codes of faithfulness. She was a force of nature as certain and silent as the capillaries moving blood through vital organs, needing neither permission nor forgiveness.

Swank is 10 years into a career that began with a breathtaking, gender-bending performance in Boys Don’t Cry, for which she won the first of her two Academy Awards (the other was for Million Dollar Baby). The challenge of playing Earhart was to stay strictly within a narrow personality while somehow acting like there were no boundaries at all. A finely calibrated performance.

Richard Gere plays Amelia’s husband, George Putnam, the PR maven behind Earhart’s commercial success. He initially saw her as a heroic spokesperson for the inchoate air travel industry. He also knew a brand when he saw one, and used her to sell books and air travel products. A meal ticket, in other words. But Putnam, although a couple of decades Amelia’s senior, also fell in love with her, and kept proposing until she agreed to marry him.

Gere plays Putnam with a genteel, faintly patrician FDR-style accent, a welcome variation on the classy but commercially crass character he played in Chicago (and a hike from his nimble, nuanced work in An Officer and a Gentleman). It’s a role that doesn’t call for very much beyond absolute devotion to the heroine. Like Stanley Tucci playing Julia Child’s husband in “Julie/Julia,” what’s needed are male cups deliberately not runneth over at a female party. Still, quite a serviceable supporting role (both).

Earhart’s relationship with Putnam is complicated by her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), an aviation pioneer about Amelia’s age (and father of writer Gore Vidal). Some of Earhart’s biographers think that Gene was the love of her life although she ultimately chose to be with Putnam; they also talk about Earhart’s close relationships with her sister (who called her ‘Meelie’) and mother, and Putnam’s two offspring from his first marriage, her stepsons. None of this is in the film, hard to fathom from a director whose previous films showed a talent for slowly revealing underlying layers of emotion, some not so pretty. The price of a ticket west across the Atlantic?

Capitalism: A Love Story

Capitalism: A Love Story is a connect-the-dots expose of the Wall Street players who conspired to invent credit default swaps and then used them to conduct a cruel financial war against regular people like you and me. It’s an engaging if uneven piece of cinematic activism. Think of it as An Inconvenient Truth with Michael Moore in the Al Gore role, Huffington Post not Washington Post, Woody Allen merged with Ralph Nader.

MM is the clown prince of documentary film making and America’s self-appointed social conscience. He’s a provocateur, this fat, goofy-looking guy, a man more wedded to the emotional truth than facts, the left’s Rush Limbaugh.

The film’s title echoes Enemies: A Love Story, director Paul Mazursky’s story about a Holocaust survivor’s doomed struggle to love again after the Nazi horror show. While Capitalism is just as bleak and angry in places as Enemies, as haunted by brutality, it’s also full of humor, compassion and optimism. It is arguably MM’s best film to date.

There’s a kind of murder mystery at the heart of Capitalism, an almost gleeful dissection of how the economic meltdown happened and who’s to blame. In one Super-Size Me type sequence, pictures of top shelf Goldman Sachs execs are laid out like cards on a Vegas gaming table, circles and arrows showing how these folks got each other rich at taxpayer expense. The facts are not new but laughing about the absurdity of the situation is.

Like The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s pioneering documentary, Capitalism keeps drilling down into the bedrock of things. Morris’s film actually helped to free an innocent man sent to death row for a murder he did not commit. Moore’s film will probably not trundle any more Bernie Madoff’s off to jail but, then again, President Obama has already told us to just move on.

By my count, capitalism is defined as an “evil” half a dozen times in the movie, including twice by different priests and once by a bishop, authorities on the subject. Moore himself uses the word “revolution” at least three times during the film, although it’s not clear if he invokes Lenin or the Beatles. Either way, his goal is to foment political action and he uses many different tactics to get the job done.

The Merry Prankster routines were my personal favorite, Yippie-like stunts worthy of ‘60’s anti-Wall Street activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. LOL stuff like wrapping the perimeter of AIG’s headquarters in crime scene tape. Or showing up with a big canvas bag at Bank of America, all innocent and cuddly, come to take our taxpayer bailout money back.

MM works hard to humanize the stats we hear about foreclosures and unemployment by interviewing people suffering the consequences of the financial meltdown. Much of this takes place in Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan, one of GM’s many former factory towns. This community had already been devastated before the meltdown back when the plant closed, the American Dream baited and switched. There are some touching scenes with MM and his father surveying the elder Moore’s former worksite, now a pitted, featureless place with all traces of the factory, its workers and Main Street unfathomably and irretrievably gone.

In one of the film’s most remarkable moments, we see a disabled worker and his family being evicted from their home. Like millions of others, they gullibly gobbled up a variable mortgage thinking it was a bargain and ended up drowning in rising payments. Dead broke, no place to go, the man says he understands how people could get a gun and go postal. But, he adds quickly, it won’t be me. In other words, he’s mad as hell but willing to take it some more. Other interviewees echo his bewildered, neutered anger. And so, sad to say, do most of us. Does anyone really know what to do next? Does our government? Does the free market?

Well, Michael Moore does. For him capitalism is a monster on the once shining hill of American democracy, and it’s gotta go before it kills us and the planet earth. Sure, the message is hyperbolic and the messenger suspect, but so is a $700 billion bailout of the financial elite that created the meltdown in the first place. One thing seems clear: our nation’s financial crisis is part of a much more serious default in our democratic system of checks and balances. Capitalism is a contemporary version of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, rousing us citizens from our political slumber to fight for our rights and America’s health and moral integrity. We push the snooze bar at our peril.

NOTE: If this subject interests you but MM does not, I have heard good things about (but not seen) a more traditional documentary, American Casino.

The Informant!

Movies that use an exclamation point in their title are usually about average people pulling off amazing things, like the soccer movie Goal!, or something so far over-the-top as to be laughable, like Airplane! The Informant!, director Steven Soderbergh’s new film, is both at the same time. That’s very unusual and may qualify for an exclamation point all in itself.

The Informant! is based on the true story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), President of Archer Daniels Midland’s BioProducts Division, one of the profit centers of a $62 billion food processing behemoth. Basically, it’s a big-time corporate scam dressed up as a farce, with a twist that would bring tears to the eyes of Gordon Gekko, the “Greed is good” guy in Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street.

Whitacre is the film’s hero and its goat, a truly odd duck. A former biochemist in his late 30’s, he is likable and smart as Damon plays him, a seemingly harmless energizer bunny of a man eager to please all those he’ll meet on his way to the tippity top of the food chain. The Eagle Scout in him turns whistleblower for the FBI when he finds himself as a player in an ADM inspired price-fixing conspiracy. But this scout also owns a loopy Machiavellian Merit Badge, and that’s the reason he rats out his buddies, not ethics. He sees it as an easy way to clear out the competition for the top spot at ADM! And while all this is going on, right under the nose of the FBI, he decides to skim some scam for himself.

Way too strange to be true. Whitacre reminds me of John Nash (Russell Crowe) in “A Beautiful Mind,” a self-deluded/ chemically imbalanced man clever enough to make up stories that make his delusions seem real to himself and his peers. Even though we movie watchers eventually figure out what he’s up to, we never really get much of a sense of what Whitacre is feeling about anything. There doesn’t appear to be an emotional there there. For all we know, Whitacre was a genetically engineered executive grown in a secret ADM lab and dropped into a suit, a poster boy for the Science Geeks Association.

Much of the movie is about Whitacre wearing a wire and walking one. He shuttles back and forth between meeting with ADM’s top dogs and meeting with his FBI handlers, always the same earnest person, always plausible even when spinning stories from thin air. Soderbergh documents this dance in an almost documentary style, using very tight, grainy shots and flat lightning. It felt like the director had taken a cinematic Alka Seltzer after all that eye candy in his boffo box office films, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13.

The talented Mr. Damon gained 30 pounds for this role, shedding his normally lean and hungry look to become stocky and stiff-jointed. He doesn’t walk so much as float like a Macy’s parade balloon, head always slightly ahead of his body, his legs trailing along behind. I found it amazing that the man who played the sleek, lethal secret agent Jason Bourne in the Bourne Identity, was also this porked up little guy with the aviator glasses and a milquetoast mustache.

Although Damon’s Whitacre is not as fully realized as Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk or Meryl Streep’s Julia Childs, it’s still a great performance and worth seeing. We can only hope that the intelligence, agility and vulnerability of Damon’s riveting performance in “Good Will Hunting” finds more fertile scripts in the future. Has there ever been an actor that can look so clean and bright no matter how deep the do-do?

The ADM guys running the scam are all overweight lightweights, jocular, dull and cold-blooded like Tony Soprano’s posse. But Soderbergh denies his scammers the frosted hair and goofy nicknames, the reverence for Mother, which makes movie thugs seem ridiculous and less scary. He strips them down to the bare wiring, these hallow, stuffed men panting after the Grail.

Marvin Hamlisch’s Tin Pan Alleyesque musical score does its best to prod us into seeing the Keystone Cops nuttiness of this scam and Whitacre’s even nuttier efforts to exploit it. But it just isn’t funny. Worse, it doesn’t seem sad either. It felt like Erin Brockovitch (2000), Soderbergh’s first big box office success, with all the anger and moral outrage washed out.

I left the theater feeling dazed and confused. But that is how I often feel when thinking about credit-default swaps, Enron, junk bonds, et.al. How do people like Whitacre and the price fixers get away with their scams for so long? And why have we taxpayers continued to give ADM billions in annual subsidies even after the company has been convicted of rigging the game? Isn’t anyone watching the store?

The Informant! lets us feel what it’s like to be inside the erratic, disturbed heart pulsing at the center of ADM’s world, the same world we live in too. Maybe the exclamation point in the title is a cry for help.

Inglorious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino was 31 in 1994 when his film Pulp Fiction was nominated for three Academy Awards and he was anointed the Wunderkind of American cinema. Like fellow writer/director/actor Wunderkinds Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) and Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), Tarantino invented a new, audaciously hip visual story telling language. And like them, he seems to have lost his groove, and his box office, after early success.

Inglorious Basterds is something of a comeback film for Tarantino after his sojourn in the world of high concept, high fashion violence in the Kill Bill films (2003-4). It’s an ambitious, alternative history of World War Two, a more down to earth revenge saga in love with film history. The movie is driven as much by style as by story, a real treat for the eye even when the plot boils over and characters morph into caricature.

There’s much to like in this film. The opening scenes, set in rural, Nazi-occupied France, are beautiful and calm, and very unTarantino-like. Enter Colonel Hans Landa (the tri-lingual German actor Christoph Waltz) who is paying a visit to a farm in search of a Jewish family he believes is hiding in the basement there.

We’ve all seen this horrible set-up enough to know where it goes. But Tarantino makes Landa genuinely gracious, an almost New Age Nazi man, who treats his farmer/victim like a mensch. Still, Landa is a Nazi and Tarantino is fascinated by violence. What’s different is that the inevitable Quentintine fury of beautifully choreographed bullets eviscerates only wood, not human beings. We do not see any murders, perhaps a first in a Tarantino film.

While the gun smoke still lingers over the farm house like a toxic sunset, Landa sees a young woman running away from the slaughter into an open field. But rather than using his pistol, he smiles cryptically, choosing to let her go. It left this viewer wondering what the heck Landa was up to. It was the high point of the movie for me, and I was literally on the edge of my seat.

We meet the young escapee, Shoshanna Dreyfus (played by the French actress Melanie Laurent), several years later as the owner of a small movie theater in Paris. Tarantino films her on a tall wooden ladder, dreamily changing the letters of a movie title on the marquee. The muted theater lights barely make a dent in the inky, empty street. It was quite a touching scene, a fragile moment of hope amid war rendered with great simplicity and power.

In conventional war movies, this is where the heroine meets her true love. Here Shoshanna meets Private Fredrich Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a young German solider who has become a celebrity for killing hundreds of Americans. There’s no way Shoshanna will be attracted to the handsome, smitten Fredrich because, well, he’s a Nazi. Undeterred, in an effort to win her heart, Zoller persuades none other than Josef Goebbels, the brains behind Hitler, to use Shoshanna’s theater for the premiere of a movie he’s produced about Zoller’s exploits, with the young hero starring as himself.

It’s an offer she dare not refuse and even Hitler eventually piles on to the planned festivities, his entourage of ghastly thugs in tow.

This is where the movie started to unravel and spiral out of control. By putting all his sappily stereotyped Nazi big shots in Shoshanna’s theater at one time, Tarantino gives her a shot at avenging her family’s murder. They deserve it, of course, but this set-up is too ridiculous to believe. It’s like the scene in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service where ten different people come into the room one after another, toppers on top of toppers. And Tarantino adds even another layer to this already overloaded scene: a cadre of 12 Jewish-American soldiers who have their own plan to kill the Nazi high command.

These are the eponymous Basterds, guys who look like they’re waiting for the express bus back to Long Island after a day’s work in Midtown. But the formerly nice Jewish boys have been transformed by the horrors of genocide. They are like John Goodman’s para-military Jew, Walter, in the Cohn Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, both laughable and lethal. One of them, called the Bear Jew (Eli Roth), kills German soldiers with a baseball bat, probably a Martin Scorsese model. They creep us out even as we root for them to succeed, which probably says more about us than it does about them. Jewish mothers are advised not to take any of this personally.

And so it goes. Quentin Tarantino is himself an inglorious basterd, an ironic Hollywood
bad boy with a real passion for subverting societal (and cinematic) conventions. He wears this title as a badge of honor and believes it gives him the license to do pretty much anything to shock, dazzle or amaze us, or gross us out entirely. Personally, I wish QT’s films weren’t so hyped up on Darwinian adrenalin, the kill or be killed call of our animal nature. But then he wouldn’t be Quentin Tarantino, he’d be Stanley Kubrick.

District 9 (2009)

Starring: Sharlto Copely, Jason Cope. Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Produced by Key Creatives. 112 minutes. MPAA “R’ rating. Parent’s Advisory for profanity, violence and gore, and frightening/intense scenes.

The extraterrestrials in the sci-fi film District 9 are taken captive by the South African army without a fight and incarcerated in squalid refuge camps in Johannesburg. The locals call the extraterrestrials Prawns but, cinematically, they are more like gefilte fish. All Prawns are slender and tall with wide shoulders and fetching wasp waists like the robots in I Robot. They have veil-like tentacles over their mouth, same as the bad boy in Predator, and they speak a clickier, less guttural dialect of Klingon. Their skin is horny and plaited like the Ninja Turtles and they have hooves like the aliens in Contact.

The one really unique thing about Prawns is that they roll over so quickly. Their name caries more than whiff of terms like Kaffir and Sami, toxic slang full of the triumphalist racial fear and loathing that fueled apartheid, the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, holocausts of every size and shape. These visitors from another world are treated with the thwackingly punitive disdain that non-humans deserve in a zero sum game for dominance of planet Earth.

Humans neutralize the Prawns in District 9 because they are understandably afraid of a civilization that has mastered interplanetary travel. We know in our bones that human history is the story of stronger nations conquering weaker ones, and that conquest is usually driven by an advanced technology of some kind, iron over bronze, wheel over foot, guns over swords. Prawns are a trophy species, something in a cage to amuse and distract people from their troubles, another feather in the cap that humans believe is the crown of creation.

But Prawns still must earn their keep like everyone else on planet Earth, and their novel alien biology makes them cash cows, rare commodities which can be easily converted to a handsome profit. The aliens’ claw-like hands are hacked off, for example, and sold as a kind of power bar. There’s also a thriving trade among sexual adventurers drawn to the flame of alien bordellos. But this stuff is chump change compared to figuring out how to operate the cache of rifle-like Prawn weapons that have been captured, gizmos with the kick of the Ghostbusters’ nuclear-powered backpacks but painted like boogie boards.

Director Blomkamp’s film is high-spirited but gory like RoboCop but nicely balanced by dollops of crisp, CNN-style news reportage, also like RoboCop. The film really works as an R-rated, entertaining sci-fi/action/comedy/thriller/moral fable.

A field agent named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our hero, a bureaucrat quirky enough to be likable. He is the lead government employee tasked with moving 1.8 million Prawns to a new camp, District 10. The real motive in this operation is to disrupt any guerilla activities in the planning stages, and Wikus finds plenty of ingenious weapons systems made from spare parts including an elaborate computer network. The plot hinges on his accidentally ingesting the fruit of a jerry rigged chemistry lab, a very nasty black liquid, and then physically beginning to morph into a Prawn.

Life is never easy for cross-genome dressers. The humans in Wikus’ life, including his wife, toss him overboard pretty fast and the Prawns don’t trust him either. But Wikus can at least live as an outlaw among the Prawns and buy cat food (a Prawn delicacy) from the Nigerian warlords who are the aliens’ commercial brokers with the outside world. Pretty quickly, Wikus discovers that Prawns care about their friends and children and hate being bullied by police but go along with it to avoid further trouble.
In other words, accoutrement aside, the Prawns have a certain sensitivity that we recognize as being human and the humans who control the Prawns’ act with an insensitivity that can only be called alien.

Suffice it to say, like Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement, Wikus becomes more sympathetic to the Prawns as he experiences the cruelty inflicted on him as a non-human with alien parts. So does the viewer. The mind reels, the heart convulses, somehow history slogs on. When will we ever learn?

Back in the day, there were three reasons why extraterrestrials would pop by the Earth: to destroy humans (War of the Worlds, et.al), enslave us (The Matrix) or to help us grow up (The Day the Earth Stood Still, et.al). The aliens in District 9 aren’t monsters, missionaries or messiahs. The Prawns are strangers in a strange land but it’s the humans that are truly strange, and really scary. Scarier still, we are the only ones with the power to save us from ourselves.

Julie/Julia

Starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, StanleyTucci, Chris Messina.

Written and directed by Nora Ephron.

Produced by Columbia Pictures. 123 minutes.

Meryl Streep is the Venus of Willendorf of actors. The Paleolithic Venus is all bloated boobs and belly, a faceless fertility goddess, Eve as her own eternal garden. With Streep’s Venus, it's her heart and head that are fecund, a primal soul imagining the possible human.

In early films like Sophie’s Choice and Bridges of Madison County, her characters conveyed a sweet, enduring sadness about their lives and the grinding down of all flesh to dust. In recent flicks like The Devil Wears Prada and Doubt, Streep plays embittered characters, sharp-edged, manipulative people, nasty. Her range as an actor is amazing, the more so because she seems to consume the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to as a kind of food savored in all its forms. Who could possibly replace her? wondered my film friend Suzy recently. Good question. Dunno. Keira Knightly, perhaps. Kate Winslet? Stay tuned ...

In her latest movie, Julie & Julia, Streep plays Julia Child, the American chef, author and TV personality, who mid-wifed the arrival of French cuisine into mainstream American kitchens. The Julia portion of the film is basically a sweetened up biopic set in 1950’s Paris and New York during McCarthyism's mid-career witch hunts. It tracks Julia Child's evolution from bored matron to the diva of culinary arts.

Streep plays Julia as the physically awkward, slightly masculine woman she was, Terry Jones of Monty Python in drag, Lucy’s loopiness without the art. But there’s another Julia under all fuss and flutter: well-mannered and endearing, as stolid and resolute as Winston Churchill. She’s a truly odd duck and Streep played the role for its inherent comedy while never losing touch with the essential Julia. Not MS's best performance, but it must have been fun for someone so disciplined to let herself go so over-the-top.

In one scene early in the film, we see Julia, running on empty as a diplomat’s wife in Paris, decide to give French cooking a try. Improbably, she ends up in all-male, professional level class at the Cordon Blue. And there she crudely hacks away at onions while male colleagues in chic white chef’s coats slice them in a blur of fearless artistry.

Soon thereafter we see Julia at her kitchen table slicing onions. The pile must have been three feet high. The redolence of the onion mountain is so powerful that when Julia’s husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) comes in the door his hands fly up to his eyes as if he’s been shot, and he flees with just the slightest nod of his head and wave of the white flag of his hand. Julia returns a spousal wave of her own and resumes her quest of proper cutting technique, overriding nature’s call to her tear ducts, the obligation of wifely companionship. Soon, in similar fashion, there will be scientific cooking experiments to conduct and a 700 page cook book to write and sell

The onion scene is played for its inherent comedy, both actors maintaining their formal reserve even when under attack by powerful imagined chemical irritants. It's funny because we've all been there but end up blind with tears; it's notable for the raw power of acting skill not brought into play here. But it also succeeds in letting the audience know that Julia has an inner strength we didn’t see before, true staying power in adversity. Her little wave also says bye-bye to the decision to play a minor role in her own life. Thus begins the story of Julia’s ascent.

But Julia Child isn’t the only main character of this film. There’s also Julie’s story, a second (also true) narrative cleverly entwined with the Julia's. It’s about a young, attractive. thoroughly modern woman, Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), who fends off a feeling of hopelessness in the post-9.11 world by making a commitment to whip up each and every one of the 500+ recipes in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days. With unflagging encouragement from her editor husband Eric (Chris Messina), she blogs daily about her project, often quite openly, and wins a bunch of fans. Ultimately, she almost loses her husband in the process of landing a big book contract but it all comes out OK.

Julie’s path to success neatly parallels Julia’s and script writer/director Nora Ephron has fun cutting back and forth between the two stories, showing us how much women have changed in the last half century, and how much they are still the same. Yadda, yadda. It’s done mainly with clothing and the Internet, but also plenty of cute depictions of emotional meltdowns. Quick, wry cuts keep the characters and the audience from slipping beneath the surface of occasionally troubled waters in both eras. I think women may find this stuff funnier than men. Personally, I was amused by seeing Paul and Eric settle warmly into the role of the guy in the ballet troupe who lifts the prima ballerina when needed and otherwise acts as her silent, supportive pivot.

Ephron cast the blog as Julie’s best friend and uses it to serve up still bubbling, often half-baked portions of the wannabe chef’s inner life. I think this narrative device, which Ephron has employed in slightly different forms in Sleepless in Seattle and You'’ve Got Mail, adds a quirky fizz to romantic comedy story lines that might otherwise be too silly or conventional to succeed. This viewer generally likes Ephron because she is a really funny, insightful observer of people, especially when they are in love with someone or something. She certainly knows how to entertain. But I can’t help but wonder what the writer of When Harry Met Sally would have come up with in Julie/Julia if she’d throttled back on the funny girl stuff a little more often.

Bruno

BRUNO
Starring Sasha Baron Cohen. Directed by Larry Charles. Produced by Everyman Pictures. 81 minutes

Sasha Baron Cohen is the Ur-comic: equal parts tummler, provocateur and saboteur. Hard to say at this point whether he’s a satiric genius with Swiftian chops or just another wacked out love child of the Monty Python gang. His latest movie, Bruno, seems to fall into another category altogether. It’s more an experience in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word than entertainment. Yes, it’s really funny in places, but mostly not ha-ha funny, and nowhere near the runaway romp of his first flick, the groundbreaking Borat. Still, if you like your humor raw and outrageous, chock full of jokes about penises and the human body’s various fluids, gases and secretions, this movie is for you. Mix one part Austin Powers with two parts Marquis de Sade and a twist of bromance and you’re almost there.

Bruno is the story of a gay, German fashionista in resolute pursuit of celebrity. There’s something prissy even imperious about the eponymous Bruno, a comic exaggeration of the flamboyant narcissism of real fashionistas. It would have been an inspired choice except fashionistas don’t leave much for a comic to send up.

To complicate the comic equation further, Cohen has made Bruno a sadist, one of those archetypal Germanic practitioners of the new cruelty. He’s an S+M artist using other people’s pain as his palette, and he’s just not a likable fellow. Mike Meyers made this kind of character funny on Saturday Night Live but he was extremely careful to be charming and silly when he was being cruel, letting us in on the joke. Adam Sandler is also cruel and self-absorbed in Funny People but his occasional glint of self-awareness keeps us in the game. In Bruno, Cohen has eliminated the Keatonesque innocence he used so effectively in Borat, almost as if he is deliberately raising the comic bar for himself. The film veers pretty close to Andy Kaufman’s wrestling routine at times, that twilight zoned place where comedy becomes performance art and starts prying up the floor boards of our societal and sexual conventions even as we stand on them – and then keeps hitting us over the head with them.

Cohen used exactly the same Candid Camera-style strategy in both of his films. He embodies an extreme comic character and somehow makes him seem like a plausible denizen of a crazy world not quite our own. He then has this character do, say or want something slightly aberrant from real people and films their reactions. The results, as you’d expect, are sometimes embarrassing or ha-ha funny. But Sasha Cohen is not a benign, avuncular student of human nature like Allen Funt. He is a satirist who delights in rubbing our faces in the droppings of our sacred cows. Some of what he does is disturbing.

There’s one scene early in the film where Bruno repeatedly rams some Rube Goldberg contraption on a pulley into his dwarf partner’s butt hole. While certainly surreal enough to be comedy, the scene was more strange and cruel than funny. The really funny part (still not ha-ha) was how directly and frankly this kind of sexual act is presented in the film. It felt like Discovery Channel meets reality TV, nothing hidden or forbidden. Is this perhaps our culture’s final revenge on the Puritans, our inching ever closer to the tribal rites of A Clockwork Orange?

That said, I really liked the scene where Bruno’s penis (aided and abetted by special effects) is yoyo’d around his groin with the easy precision of a circus act and ends by speaking through its urethral opening. I’d never seen a penis do tricks before or heard one talk, although the male organ is well known for having its own mind. Maybe it was quoting Augie March, the Saul Bellow character who said, “I want, I want, I want.” (or was that from the Dangling Man?) The utterly unselfconscious freedom of this scene felt really liberating. I laughed out loud because there’s a tension between the tectonic plates of the body and the mind, and laughter is the earthquake that keeps them from breaking apart entirely.

I had another LOL experience when Bruno, attempting to become a celeb by embracing a high profile charity cause, flies to Israel to make peace in the Middle East. He actually succeeds in getting a Palestinian citizen and an Israeli citizen to hold hands and sing the moral equivalent of kumbayah. The really not funny ha-ha thing about this scene is that Bruno’s preposterous peace mission is about as successful as the efforts of myriad high-ranking officials over the last 60 years.

In the end, Bruno is not a good film, and Sasha Cohen is not trying to teach us to reclaim the power of singing and holding hands that has been lost since the Civil Rights movement went out of business. The man is a comic, not a sage, but he takes no prisoners, and that makes him an interesting guy to watch.

Public Enemies

“Public Enemies,” the new Michael Mann film, is about the legendary bank robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, and the fatal game of cat and mouse he plays with Melvin Purvis, an FBI man played by Christian Bale. I thought it was a rather pedestrian reenactment of America’s dark love affair with glamorous gangsters and their breezy but doomed fleecing of the conventional world. It felt like “Bonnie and Clyde” drained of appealing characters, wit and verve. Pretty standard stuff, played sotto voce by Depp, perhaps as Frank Stella and the Minimalists played off Jackson Pollack and the Abstract Expressionists.

That said, every once in a while I felt tendrils of soulful meditation on the why and wherefore of Dillinger and the Great Depression which spawned him, something like the narrator’s voice in Terrance Malick’s “Thin Red Line.” What drives a person like Dillinger to a life of extreme crime and what makes non-criminals so fascinated him and others like him (such as Al Capone), even to the point of making them culture heroes and matinee idols? But no. Director Mann never committed to sustained musings about the mysteries of human nature, let alone our species’ place in nature. That would have made this film too Art House and killed Box Office (or at least held it hostage).

Still, there is plenty of art in this flick. I liked the low-angle shots of desolate, Hopperesque buildings plastered like monuments against unblinking blue skies. That one crazy orchid-colored baby carriage whipping through a chaotic street scene was a riff, perhaps, on Eisenstein’s “Potemkin.” And what was going on with Dillinger disguising himself in wimpy mustache, granny glasses and straw boater, a dead-ringer for James Joyce? Another kind of outlaw in not-quite-post-Puritanical America?

Perhaps. But in the end, this is a cautionary tale. Dillinger famously robbed banks because that’s where the money was. What’s left unsaid is that it wasn’t anywhere else.

Millions of hard working Americans had lost their jobs, homes and savings in the financial collapse of 1929. They had also lost their confidence in a financial system which had nodded and winked at extreme margin trading and other instruments of under-secured investment. No one in government had been watching the store and those most responsible for the crash seemed to get off with a slap on the hand. People were hungry, humiliated and angry. The banks at the center of every community in the nation were the smiling corpse of a deeply flawed financial and governmental system, a daily reminder of conquest and cruelty.

John Dillinger, like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, became a kind of avenging angel, punishing the banks in ways that the government could not. He violated their integrity with his guerilla attacks and made banks feel worried about their future, insecure, diminished. Through Dillinger and his outlaw confreres, the banking system began to feel some of the same kind of pain that the average person was feeling. It was, to be sure, a brutal form of justice which also hurt and killed innocent people. Never a good thing. But in the absence of effective, reasoned correctives, human society demands that something be done, and this was how it came down. I suppose it makes for interesting drama with all its relentless pursuit and duels to the death. But it certainly isn’t the best way to foster a healthy nation.

State of Play

“The Truth? You can’t handle the truth.” That’s what Marine Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) snarls at Lieutenant Danny Kaffey (Tom Cruise) in “A Few Good Men.” Jessep’s viperous arrogance makes him hateful but, in the end, he is right. The truth is that that he ordered a Code Red, the murder of a sub-par soldier to safeguard his unit’s espirit de corps. It is definitely not something we can handle.

“State of Play” is a perfect storm of similar truths in politics. I went seeking a film with the heft and passion of “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 Hoffman-Redford film chronicling Bernstein and Woodward’s exposure of the Watergate break-ins which eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president. But what I got was something closer to a top 40 version of same: investigative journalism all dressed up as a mildly quirky, entertaining detective story that just happens to be about political corruption.

The film starts with a pretty young woman throwing herself in front of an on-coming DC Metro train during rush hour. The media pile on to an official police statement that it’s a suicide. But an aging, curmudgeonly ace reporter at the Washington Post, Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), sniffs foul play. He spends the rest of the film sifting through clues that eventually lead him, quite accidentally, to expose a quasi-military take over of the United States. I’m not sure, given the current state of our nation, why anyone would want to stage a coup and take on all that debt. Especially since they could get all the money, power and influence they could ever want just by gaming the banking system or the electric grid. Who knows, maybe they intended it as a mercy killing.

McAffrey is a Columbo-type character, all rumpled and seemingly out to lunch, who has the occasional Zen moment that pierces the opaque heart of plot darkness. Crowe lumbers through this movie like an amiable circus bear, impervious to the barriers of protocol and intimidation, surprisingly gentle despite his bulk.

He’s an old-fashioned man’s man in the John Wayne tradition, Crowe is. Like the heavyweight champion Jim Braddock he portrayed in Ron Howard’s sappy but affecting “Cinderella Man,” he’s a guy who likes to fight; taking a punch only makes it more interesting. In this film he plays against his type and never actually hits anyone, which is refreshing even as I involuntarily flinch every time he lifts his hand. He’s basically a gladiator without a sword in this film, an honest guy in a dishonest world who has to do dishonest things from time to time to keep the idea of honesty alive for himself and. who knows, Western civilization. This is Bogie’s old haunt, the cleft in the rock where Norman Rockwellesque ideas about community take shelter from Kafkaesque ideas about an arch, godless universe. Crowe pulls this trick off fairly well, notching up the non-violent cop character he played in “American Gangster.” Gotta love his new found plowshares.

Ben Affleck plays a popular US congressman, Stephen Collins, who was having an affair with the woman who was killed by the metro at the beginning of the film. Cal and Stephen are former college roommates and still best buddies. Much of the truth we can’t handle either starts or ends here. The story works despite another embarrassing performance by Ben in his quest to become a serious actor. The guy looks like he just rolled off the assembly line at U.S. Robotics, every facial gesture and movement technically accurate but somehow creepy. It was the same in “Hollywoodland,” where he portrayed George Reeves, early TV’s Superman. Maybe he’s taking his cues from “Barry Lyndon,” Stanley Kubric’s lavish, perverse exercise in taking the motion out of motion pictures.

Of all the Ben Affleck films I’ve seen, I liked him best in ”Good Will Hunting” with alternating doses of wise guy swagger and frightened kid vulnerability. There were odd, welcome little flashes of this guy from Southie in “State,” but I didn’t think they worked for US Congressman. It seemed to me that Ben was over his head, trying too hard to touch bottom.

Helen Mirren plays Cameron Lynne, Cal’s boss at the Washington Post, with the gravitas of the captain of the Titanic. She knows that the Internet and Google will soon sink the Post and most newspapers, and doesn’t quite know how to fight back without lowering the paper’s standards. This was also a truth I did not want to handle.

The Post, after all, was the paper that courageously pursued Richard Nixon and his henchmen through the snares and thickets of Watergate, backing brash, inexperienced young reporters against high-level government officials. Watergate would still just be a swanky address on the Potomac without the Post.

While this film certainly nods in the direction of these Fifth Estate giants, it’s about newshounds, not crusaders for justice. I suppose it’s a sign of the times that our heroes are not outraged, personally or morally, by the high-level crimes they expose. In the end, they are just doing their job: digging up what’s hidden and pantingly plopping it down at our feet. Alas, this strikes me as the most damaging coup of all.

The Great Buck Howard

There’s a scene in “Being John Malkovich” where every character in a crowded restaurant has John Malkovich’s face: the maitre’d, all the diners, male and female, the wait staff. Even the lounge lizard draped seductively across the piano wears the Malkovichian puss. I took it as a surreal montage of one man’s ability to shape-shift right in plain sight.

“The Great Buck Howard” is also a spoof built around John Malkovich but this one shrinks the vast array of characters in Malkovich’s range and pours them into one rather shallow vessel, the aging mentalist Buck Howard.

Buck is an entertainment dinosaur relentlessly stalking his audience in the faded former vaudeville theaters of small market cities. He is driven by the need to drink a daily dose of love from his remaining fans although he seems dismissive of those few individuals who shower him with their admiration. Without apparent friends or family, this hallow-eyed man crafts his decades old illusions with the unvarying solemnity of Levitical rites. He might be offering up sacrifices to the unseen forces which give him his ESP-like powers, the source of his belief that he is, in fact, great. He assiduously filters out anything, like half-empty theaters in seldom remembered towns, which might cast doubt over this self-talk, his greatest illusion.

The honorific ‘great’ was bestowed on Buck by Johnny Carson during the late host’s reign as the Pope of early late night television. Buck, a 61 time guest on the show, never caught a whiff of the ironic patina Carson lacquered onto the title. Was he so dazzled by the glow of the Hollywood Grail plopped onto his lap that he really believed he possessed powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men? Or did Johnny just affirm what he alone had always known?

Decades after his 15 minutes of fame, Buck still believes what everyone else takes as a goof. He never stops talking about the new killer illusion he’s working on, his ticket back to the mountain top. It certainly appears like he’s whistling a happy tune while Godot dallies. But, in the end, Buck actually delivers his grand illusion with surprising results.

I liked this modestly entertaining film best when it broke through its downbeat, deadpan, put-on style and revealed the man behind the wizard behind the curtain. There are several scenes where the serio-comic Buck completes one of his stage illusions and then seamlessly steps out of the carapace of his act like a cicada molting its shell. He stands before us all gooey and unformed, a crooked boyish smile snaking across his face as he says “Isn’t that wild?” as if he can’t believe the amazing thing that has just happened. It is his personal fountain of youth, a magical place covered up and forgotten, like the Mayan temples swallowed whole by the tropical jungle. This was a great piece of acting because it revealed a touching and forgotten part of Buck without ever breaking the film’s scuffling, kitschy tone.

Watching this great actor strut and fret on the constrained stage of the illusionist's personality was a special treat. He played the role like a jazz trumpeter, muting down his sensitivity, intelligence and explosiveness to play a simpler song. He still hits all his notes -- Buck is fragile and tough, polite and nasty, cunning and slightly retarded – but it’s all done in miniature, pianissimo. There are no Sunday school polite, extremely smart serial killers lurking here, no dangerous liaisons, no lines of fire. Buck Howard may be testy, pompous and self-absorbed but he is not Ted Bundy. He's just there to entertain us and himself, and happy are we for the comic relief.

Duplicity

This is an M.C. Escher kind of flick: your mind fits the pieces together a certain way and then there’s an ah-ha moment where another set of pieces appears unbidden out of nowhere. “Duplicity” uses a similar strategy to spin, tangle and resolve a middling, mish-mosh of a tale about two CIA agents who quit the service to make some real money by stealing the formula for curing baldness. No question the film delivers on its title. This viewer felt strapped into a kayak slicing deftly through the rapids of what’s what? and who’s who? until my internal compass got washed overboard, true north and all.

Our protagonists, played by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, are street smart, terminally suspicious former agents. After the requisite turf pissing contests, they notice that they are perfect fencing partners in the art of barbed repartee, the prelude to a kiss in the action/adventure genre. There are some intelligent, sharp-edged exchanges between them that evoked Tracey and Hepburn. This was arguably the high point of the film for me, although Julia was leaden in her role, not sleek, and the chemistry with Clive seemed scripted, not stirred.

Eventually, the agents fall in love as madly as two people can who suspect that the other one is just gaming them for some unknown objective. Mistrust and/or ambition tear them apart, and then longing and/or exhaustion bring them back together. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they are both being conned as part of a larger game that neither of them knows about. Or maybe that’s just what director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) wants us to think. And so it goes.

On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that secret agents are as vulnerable and bumbling as the rest of us in the clandestine affairs of the heart. On the other hand, it’s a little scary to know that those who once defended our nation from the bad guys are pretty easily tripped up by their own emotions. Where’s James Bond when we really need him? Nothing fazed Bond, not men with gold fingers or women with pussy galore. He lived in an aura of chic, technological invincibility, never shaken or stirred by fear or love. “Duplicity” is a kind of white flag waved at the Bond era and its triumphalist mythology. Alas, them days is gone.

The premise that secret agents jump from a team fighting for the survival of Western civilization to one seeking to make obscene profits by growing hair on busy streets is, I hope, absurd and sad enough to qualify as satire. Paul Giamatti, who plays the CEO of the company with the new product, does a fine caricature of an exuberantly amoral CEO, a glib, well-dressed huckster like Adam Eckhardt in “Thank You for Not Smoking.” Giamatti’s character is almost sexually aroused about the idea of making a killing on a product that (like all previous baldness cures) won’t actually work. But he’s most passionate about sticking it to his arch corporate rival (played with understated intensity by the always excellent Tom Wilkinson) whom he fears will get to market with the same product before he does. And so it goes.

I think part of the problem with “Duplicity” was that it wasn’t sure whether it was a social satire or a spy story or a love story, so it tried to be all three at once and didn’t have the narrative chops to keep it all in focus. It wasn’t the games within games that got me, or the duplicity either. It just wasn’t done very well. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into and this was soup. I am left somehow knowing that the world will not end in a bang or a whimper but in duplicity. Of course, if it’s done well, we won’t even know it happened.

The Miracle of Grain

Columbia Pictures founder Harry Cohn did not manage his studio by the seat of his pants. No one ever saw him fly by them either. But legend has it that his tushee was the decider on whether to release a movie. Too cheeky a response meant no go.

The Secret of Grain, a 2007 film written and directed by Abdel Kechiche, got a five cheek rating from me, which means I bailed at the 60 minute mark with 90 still on the clock. Many critics, including the usually reliable Roger Ebert, have hailed this film as a gem, however flawed. For me, the story telling was fatally flawed and, sorry, but I don’t see a gem.

That said, I very much liked the idea of seeing a heartfelt story about the trials of being a Muslim of North African origin in contemporary France (Kechiche’s family is from Tunisia). We Americans don’t get much about the humanity of Islamic people these days, let alone sympathetic portrayals of their struggle to live. It was a welcome respite from the ubiquitous post-9/11 jihadist cartoon characters who bedevil our society since the Russians got capitalism.

The hero of the story is Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a North African immigrant to France. Early on, he is laid off from his construction job of 35 years because he is not productive enough for his profit-driven bosses.

We sense Beiji is crushed by his loss but there’s no place on his beautifully sad, deeply lined face for any more suffering to register. We get that he will continue to stoically endure but the game’s over for him even though the final out has not been recorded. I felt sympathy for Beiji and all immigrants swimming upstream in an alien culture.

At this point, the plot stopped moving forward and slipped into a long series of slow, low-impact, overly long takes. The director made a choice to let the story unfold randomly and organically as life does and I get that. It’s one of the things that I love about deeply personal, hand-made films. But sometimes, as with Grain, I get lost with this technique and lose the emotional pulse of the story, never a good thing. And, suddenly, there I was at 2.5 cheeks and numbing out.

I hoped for renewed engagement when the focus finally shifted to Slimane’s extended family. Surprisingly, the patriarch of the clan isn’t at the center of their world. Mostly, he’s not there, almost as if he was already dead, a respected memory. He does not join dozens of family members gathering at his ex-wife’s house for the matriarch’s legendary couscous, perhaps the only Tunisian custom which has survived the family’s assimilation. This dish is kvelled over by all the adults at the table in the same way that Jews wax poetic about mom’s brisket or chicken soup, love you can eat, the last refuge of those caught in the ebb tide between cultures.

Food has given us a lot of great films like The Big Night, Mostly Marta and Babette’s Feast. Even not so great food-based films like Tortilla Soup work because they dish up the comforts of hearth and home, and how can you miss with that?

Well, for starters, by using a hand-held camera for 15-20 minutes without a break. This odd, extended ultra-close up technique at the couscous lovefest gave the director a way to make us feel physically present at the meal, no question about that. But he left me embedded there without making me feel like a guest. I felt lost again, unable to understand who was who and how things fit together, and why I should care.

The Secret of Grain had jumped with both feet from its stark, singular focus on Slimane to a boisterous multi-generational family dinner scene. It felt like a tropical rain storm dropping suddenly from a leaden sky with astonishing force, a refreshing change at first which quickly flooded the streets. And this is when I gave up and left the theater.

Sounds cranky, I know, but that was my experience. By contrast, take Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, for example. This was also a meandering tale with a cast of dozens of extended family members and friends. Demme, also like Kechiche, puts viewers in the extremely up-close and personal mode too many times, often around food. But it wasn’t long before I found his technique engaging and never quite got there with Kechiche.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Demme quickly got his viewers involved with the main characters and their dramatic conflicts. When he used ultra close-ups, they were part of a creative mixture of shots and set-ups, and the editing had a crisp rhythm which gave shape to the blur of so many quick impressions.

Kechiche has said that he admires Yasujiro Ozu, the great Japanese director who made a series of elegant black and white films in the 40’s and 50’s (Early Summer, Late Autumn, et.al) about the impact of modernity on a traditional family. I can see where Kechiche works similarly sympathetic emotional territory in his film, and his deliberately spare, low-drama style of story telling also echoes Ozu.

But I don‘t think this guy is as skilled an artist, and he doesn’t use his cinematic tools as effectively. Ozu’s films are a series full of beautiful, strategically composed shots, each designed to awaken or refresh the viewer’s perceptual palette and to guide him or her into the emotional content of the next scene. The Secret of Grain just isn’t built this way, not for me, anyway.

While stuff certainly happens in Grain, and some of it’s great, for me there never was a substantive dramatic there there. In some ways this film felt like the work of a gifted grad student at NYU film school, perhaps a little too in love with what he’s shot to make cuts that would make the film more accessible. Look, he’s an artist, and he needs to do what he is compelled to do. That’s what enriches cinema and the world. I just don’t think Grain was very good film making.

Knowing

The film Knowing is about precognition of terrible events, but not, alas, its own production. Hollywood has packaged director Alex Proyas’ new offering as a sci-fi film because stuff happens that cannot be explained by science. But the only real sci-fi bona fides this film can claim are the coat tails of the director’s 2004 box office bonanza, I, Robot (2004). Knowing is more of a thriller/mystery/drama/action picture with some sci-fi window dressing, a showcase for yet another of Nicholas Cage’s earnest, iconic performances. I find it creepy to witness another episode in Nicky’s serial murder of the talent, agile freshness and promise he showed in films like When Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. What a loss; he was a great actor.

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … science fiction films relied on the viewer’s imagination more than traditional story telling elements like character development and plausible plots. That’s one of the things that made them uniquely compelling to the initiated and pathetic escapism to those who didn’t have the chops to get off-world on their own. Contemporary sci-fi takes the sigh out of science fiction by doing all the imagining for the viewer. Chalk it up to the wow factor of computer generated special effects. Yes, some of this stuff is truly awesome (and the plane crash in Knowing is truly spectacular) but I find it upsetting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on making hi-def spectacles out of horrible explosions and crashes. What is this hunger for catastrophic destruction that brings hordes of people to mediocre films like Knowing? Actors have become props, mere set-ups, for the special effects that are the true stars in these films. That’s the most sci-fi thing about them, and the scariest.

Back in the day, the best pre-special effects sci-fi films, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952), used the arrival of superior alien intelligence on earth as a foil to prod our species along the evolutionary gyre. Kubric’s 2001 (1968) flipped the idea by taking human beings off-world in search of alien intelligence. The story in these superb films and their progeny [Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1984) to name a few] is built by laying high entertainment value over a fully realized alternative world which quietly meditates on the quirks and perks of our species. How and whether we’ll survive evolution’s crap shoot is the unspoken subtext.

Knowing is a different breed entirely, part of a recent run of guilt-free apocalyptic movies where the earth dies but it’s not our fault. Yes, our cavalier abuse of mother earth has mucked up the ecosystem pretty good but ultimately it won’t be the smoking gun of global immolation and human extinction.Old Sol’s erratic behavior is the bad guy in Knowing, not greenhouse gases. Could happen, of course. That's the bad news. The good news is that we can go back to polluting as much as we want because, hey, the really big decisions are made in another galaxy, far, far away.

Two Lovers

30 something Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is trudging along the crowded sidewalks of Brighton Beach, delivering dry cleaning from his family’s store. Then, astride a pier by the bay, he suddenly climbs over the railing and drops into the sea, plummeting downward with express elevator speed. Hitting bottom, he bounces back up toward the glint of surface light. He scurries away from the people who pull him out of the water, shoulders hunched like gargoyle wings. He reminded me of furtive, haunted Peter Lorre but also John Belusi, the samurai stunt pilot. I wasn’t sure what to think.

As the film unfolds, we learn that the force which drove Leonard off the pier, ironically and tragically, is rooted in the good life his Holocaust-surviving parents have worked so hard to tee up for him. He lives with them now in film time because he’s recovering after “hurting himself” (there are puncture wound scars on his forearms) after his fiancee ended their relationship.

Ruth, Leonard’s mother (the ever classy Isabella Rossellini), is the archetypal Jewish mom: a hygiene queen, totally devoted to her son but also compulsively nosey. She’s the kind of gal who gets down on her knees to look under Leonard’s door to see what he’s up to at night, just for his own good. Reuben, his father (Moni Moshonov), is a gentle, sweet natured man who gently and sweetly wheedles Leonard every day to come into the family business and finally make something of himself.

Leonard loves his parents and is nice enough to gently deflect their ceaseless meddling in his affairs rather than tell them to take a hike. But, to be fair, he doesn’t take it upon himself to take a hike either. His truth is that he doesn’t want to be where he is but doesn’t know where else to go. He is an eternal stranger in lands that are all too familiar.

And so the stage is set for this suicidal but reasonably nice Jewish boy from Brighton to meet Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a nice Jewish girl from the ‘hood. She’s pleasing enough to the eye but doesn’t turn him on. Still, here’s a woman of child-bearing age from a well-off family who is attracted to him and, perhaps more importantly, is not his mother. Unfortunately, she is also officially pre-approved by his parents and this automatically fogs the window of any real feelings Leonard might have for her.

Enter salvation: a silky blond shiksa named Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who just happens to live almost next door. Unfussy, easy going, non-judgmental, Michelle is the perfect antidote for the over-determined, hot house world of Jewish material world ambition. She’s the moral equivalent of olam ha ba, the promised messianic world where Jews finally get to kick back and enjoy themselves like everyone else.

Poor love starved Leonard dives into the promise of happily ever after with Michelle in the same way he jumped over the side of the pier, a lost soul seeking wholeness through losing the pieces of himself that don‘t play nicely together. But Michelle thinks of him as a brother, not a lover, and she clings to her love for Ron (Elias Koteas), a married man who doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave his wife for Michelle.

Suffice it to say that the plot works itself out with some bright spots along the way. Paltrow plays Michelle with remarkable sensual ease, beautiful inside and out, as they say.She’s fun to watch, and I think that will hold up even for non-Jewish men and women.

Phoenix’s best scene is with Michelle at a crowded dance club. While she gyrates obliviously, arms raised above her head, he buries his face in her hair, inhaling her with an animal intensity right up there with Brando’s “Stella” from A Streetcar named Desire.Truly great acting.

Films like Marty, Rebel Without a Cause and Lost in Yonkers, among many others, reenact the struggles of sons or daughters to get free of the rules and regs of well-meaning but over-protective parents. Some, like The Graduate, do it with wit, others, like The Chosen, do it with soul. This film, written and directed by James Gray (We Own the Night, Little Odessa), does it with leftovers, making little new of old hash.