Available on DVD: “Kill List”

The best horror movies — the ones that endure and fascinate and frighten us in perpetuity — don’t try to explain evil. There is no logical solution to the events in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (a radical difference from Stephen King’s novel, which did lay out a concise but much less satisfying answer). We know little about the creature in Alien, but the monster’s otherness is terrifying. The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Blair Witch Project, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead all provided intimations of what might be happening but left the bulk of it for you to decide. Even Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful Psycho, everyone agrees, would have been better without that five-minute epilogue in which a psychiatrist spells out what was troubling Norman Bates.

Kill List, British director Ben Wheatley’s follow-up to his debut Down Terrace, is one of the scariest films I’ve seen in ages, although I cannot in all honesty explain exactly what the movie is about. I could compare it to other pictures (including one in particular that Wheatley is obviously paying homage to here) but that would completely ruin the effect. This film is best approached cold.

There are a couple of things you should know going in, though. Kill List takes its time. At first, it practically crawls, coming on like one of those talky Ken Loach dramas about the working-class blues. Jay (Neil Maskell), an unemployed former soldier, argues with his wife (MyAnna Buring) about money. Jay drinks too much and shouts too much, and when he sits down to dinner with his friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his girlfriend Fiona (Emma Freyer), tempers flare and arguments explode.

A lot of this stuff, simple as it sounds, is extremely difficult to follow, because the actors’ accents render the dialogue near-unintelligible to American ears, and they keep talking about events in the past (especially something that went down in Kiev during the Iraq war) that we haven’t been let in on. What’s worse, none of these people is remotely likable. The natural response at this point is to start checking your watch and thinking about that episode of 30 Rock on your DVR you haven’t watched yet, because that will be a lot more fun than this dull, dreary film.

Stick with it. Wheatley, who also wrote the screenplay with his wife Amy Jump, knows what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is awesome. The first half-hour of Kill List is intended to be off-putting and discombobulating: You’re supposed to feel a bit baffled when Fiona makes a strange little mark on a mirror for no discernible purpose, then goes back to behaving normally. The movie is laying down important groundwork, giving you a feel for the everyday lives of these characters so when the crazy stuff arrives, the horror is even more hair-raising.

And boy, does it get crazy. Kill List is so carefully constructed and so precise with its shocks that the movie is practically impossible to write about in detail, so I will remain vague. The plot involves hit men, but this is not another Quentin Tarantino rip-off (he would probably love this movie, though). There is a scene of violence involving a hammer that makes a similar sequence in Drive seem like an episode of Home Improvement. Wheatley doesn’t rely on gore to frighten you — this is a much more sophisticated work than torture porn — but when blood is spilled, you will feel it in your gut.

Halfway through the film, the pace suddenly picks up (you’ll know the scene when you see it) and just when you think you’ve figured out where Kill List is heading, Wheatley schools you by proving you know nothing.

Some critics have taken Kill List to task for its lack of overall logic or its unwillingness to tuck every plot strand into place. But Wheatley is tackling the kind of grand, sweeping evil most movies shy away from, because you can’t just blame it on Satan or a crazy dude or plain old supernatural weirdness. This is a wonderfully dark, twisted and deeply unsettling movie, and the fact that a big chunk of the story is left for you to figure out is a strength, not a weakness. The meek and squeamish can stay home: Everyone else, get ready for some nasty business.

What’s next for city’s Solid Waste Plan

"I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment."

President John F. Kennedy uttered those words in a memorable speech delivered May 25, 1961, during which he also said this: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

At the time, everyone applauded his determination while, at the same time, thinking such a goal was impossible. Yet, a little more than eight years after he laid down the gauntlet, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and, of course, returned safely to earth.

The Dallas City Council on Wednesday passed a Solid Waste Management Plan designed to achieve zero waste going to the city’s landfill. Originally the plan called for this goal to be achieved by the year 2040, but Council member Linda Koop successfully added an amendment to the plan that removed this and all other "timelines" contained in the plan. Basically, this gives the city a "do-over."

So where should the city do next?

The city should establish the goals of having a 75 percent diversion rate by the year 2020 and a 100 percent diversion rate by the year 2030.

Too ambitious? Not nearly as ambitious as Kennedy’s "man on the moon" before the end of the 1960s. I know, many of you weren’t alive in 1961. But I was. Television shows were still broadcast in black and white. (1965 was the first year in which more than half of all television shows were broadcast in color.) Not only were there no personal computers in1961, that was the year the IBM Selectric typewriter was introduced. (For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, that was a revolutionary electric typewriter that replaced typing bars with a small sphere). However, most of us continued to use manual, non-electric typewriters. It wasn’t until 1970, a year after man landed on the moon, that Japan introduced the first pocket calculator.

So if President Kennedy could set less than a 10-year timeline for putting a man on the moon in that era, then achieving zero waste in 18years now should be a walk in the park.

The city must also lead by example.

The solid waste plan outlines things all of us must do to achieve zero waste. By all of us I not only mean us as individuals, but us as business owners, apartment owners, manufacturers, etc. If the city really wants "all of us" to follow its plan, it should take some actions to make it accountable.

The first thing the city can and should do immediately is to prohibit all city departments from using public funds to purchase bottled water.

Bottled water costs anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times as much as tap water and tastes no better than Dallas’s pristine tap water. An ounce of bottled water costs more than an ounce of gasoline and everyone these days is complaining about the high cost of gas. According to the Container Recyling Institute, only 20 percent of plastic water bottles are actually recycled; the rest end up in landfills where they take 1,000 years to biodegrade. In addition, large amounts of other resources, like energy, oil and even water are depleted in the bottle manufacturing process and transporting these bottles long distances burns enormous amounts of fossil fuels.

Require all city departments to purchase products that maximize postconsumer recycled content and recyclable or compostable materials, and that favor durability, repairability, and reuse.

Appoint a Zero Waste Coordinator to oversee the city’s diversion efforts and assistant coordinators for each city department. This coordinator should regularly update the City Council on how the city is "leading by example."

Actions the City Council should take immediately are:

An ordinance requiring the entire city to separate recyclables, compostables, and landfill trash.  The city now "asks" residents to separate recyclables, but doesn’t make it mandatory. The time for "asking" has passed and the city should provide composting containers in the same manner it provided the blue recycling containers.

An ordinance requiring the use of compostable plastic, recyclable paper and/or reusable checkout bags by all retail establishments starting October 1, 2015 and requiring these establishments charge a minimum of ten cents per bag. This ordinance should also apply to restaurants starting October 1, 2016.

An ordinance prohibiting restaurants and food vendors from using styrofoam food service ware and instead to use food ware that is compostable or recyclable.

Establish a cigarette litter abatement fee of 20 cents per pack of cigarettes sold in Dallas to recover the cost of abating cigarette litter from city streets, sidewalks, and other public property.

Require Yellow Pages distributors to get the approval, or opt-in agreement of all Dallas residents before delivering phone book directories.

If we could put a man on the moon in the 1960s, surely we can accomplish these aforementioned recommendations now.

Available on DVD: “Margaret”

Typically, 11 years between movies means Terrence Malick has returned. But, apparently, Kenneth Lonergan also works at a perfectionist’s pace.

His first movie, You Can Count on Me, was released during the Clinton administration. His second, Margaret, started shooting in Manhattan in 2005 during George W. Bush’s second term. But, for a variety of reasons that turned one of the film’s biggest financers litigious (he and Fox Searchlight settled), Margaret wasn’t ready for release until last October. According to a 2009 report in the Los Angeles Times, Lonergan was given final cut but never arrived at one he liked, not even with the advice and assistance of Martin Scorsese and Scorsese’s longtime, legendary editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

During these six years, two of the film’s producers, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, died, and several of its actors, namely Anna Paquin, became even more famous. Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Lonergan’s central character is a privileged 17-year-old named Lisa (Paquin) who has an intellectual understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around her. Still, news of other planets, other universes, the pain of others shocks her. It’s one of the truer movies I’ve seen about the consequences of the difference between being youthful and being young.

Lisa has a comfortable, relatively normal Upper East Side teenage life whose routine she struggles to maintain after she causes a bus accident that kills a pedestrian. She continues to explore and exploit her sexuality — with her fellow students (including one played by Kieran Culkin) and a teacher (Matt Damon) — and squabble with her mother (J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan’s wife), an actress starring in a hit play. But the bus accident and her hasty decision to fib on the police report gnaw at her until she finds herself at the doorstep of the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) and frequently in the company of the dead woman’s best friend (Jeannie Berlin, superb). Together, they pursue legal action. The scenes that aren’t devoted to Lisa are spent with the mother, Joan, who has just started dating a Colombian businessman (Jean Reno).

You can feel in Margaret what might have vexed Lonergan. He’s going for a low-key version of the social-moral dilemmas that brought out the best in men like Flaubert and Chekhov and Bellow. His principle struggle probably involved tone. How would he keep his ideas about society, family, connection, and art coherent? How could he make a timeless movie that, even for 2005, is also a modern one?

The scenes have a weird rhythm all their own. One batch of shots spans days and goes from Lisa at a party to a rather shrewdly composed, searingly acted argument between her and Joan, first about whether Lisa likes the opera then about the sort of thing that warring mothers and daughters fight about best: each other. Too many scenes end just as they seem to have heated up. But Hina Abdullah and Olivia Thirlby are very good as two of the classmates who argue against Lisa in combative classroom debates around 9/11, Israel, Arabs, and American nationalism.

Lonergan, who casts himself as Lisa’s lukewarm father, a screenwriter, possesses a rare talent for elevating an embarrassing sequence into sadness or tragedy. That bus accident, which happens in the first half-hour, is a moving example. It makes no sense that it begins the way it does, with Lisa chasing a bus whose driver blithely won’t stop. But the chase produces a pieta scene, with Lisa cradling the dying woman (Allison Janney), who’s full of New York spunk until the spunk departs. It’s magnificent theatrical directing. The artifice falls away and the illusion of reality squeezes your heart. The best scenes in the movie are like this — visceral, raw, seemingly real, and ferociously acted. Lonergan lets you see the way Lisa’s parents’ occupational vanity has coded their daughter’s genes. She’s an almost pathological performer — other people’s lives are her stage.

Lonergan’s years of apprehension are understandable: How do you bring this movie into the marketplace? With Malick, you can see where the time went: war sequences, dinosaurs, the dawn of time. With Lonergan, you feel it. He makes art of predicament. This movie doesn’t always cohere, but there’s something beautiful and compelling about his attempt to realize a humane vision of complex, vividly imperfect, sometimes aggravating people, to build a movie that turns out to be based on a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem with the opening line "Margaret, are you grieving."

It shouldn’t be considered an act of bravery for a filmmaker to present characters as flawed as Lisa and Joan — or for actors to pour into the roles as much of themselves as Paquin and Smith-Cameron do. But long ago American movies bought into the idea that imperfection equates badness or villainy. We know better. We have warts, and we deserve to see them.

Available on DVD: “Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale”

Based on the true story of a 1930 uprising (the Wushe Incident) by the Taiwanese aboriginal tribe Seediq against its Japanese military occupiers, Warriors of the Rainbow is bloody and overlong, but has great heart and an interesting insight into the cultural traditions of the Seediq, an indigenous people who have struggled for rights much like American Indian tribes. Many of the actors in the films are actual aboriginal tribespeople.

The spine of the film is the elder but virile chief Mouna Rudo (Lin Ching-Tai, an Aborigine making a magnetic acting debut), who leads the revolt that massacred more than 130 Japanese, but ultimately cost the lives of more than 1,000 Seediq.

The original version ran about 4½ hours; at 2½ hours, the international version shown here seems a bit much. But it has commitment and style, and you can see why John Woo, the noted Hong Kong action director, would want to produce it: It fits right in with his "heroic bloodshed" cinematic legacy.

Available on DVD: “Marley”

A thorn in the side of the Jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley was his lack of a black audience in the United States even at the height of his career. But in September 1980, eight months before his death at 36, that began to change with a triumphant engagement at Madison Square Garden, where he and his band, the Wailers, opened for the Commodores. The next day, according to Marley, a riveting two-and-a-half-hour documentary biography directed by Kevin Macdonald, he collapsed while running in Central Park. When examined, he was found to have inoperable, late-stage cancer.

Three years earlier Marley had chosen to ignore the danger signs when a malignant melanoma was discovered in one of his toes. He refused to have it treated — it probably would have meant an amputation — because he would no longer be able to dance onstage.

That stubbornness says a lot about Marley, whose obsessive drive seems only to have accelerated the more famous he became. He was so immersed in writing that he was said to sleep only four hours a night. Even when gravely ill he displayed a superhuman energy and willpower. Two of his children — David, aka Ziggy, now 43, and Cedella, now 44 — remember him as a disciplinarian who was hypercompetitive when they played games. All together he had 11 children from seven relationships.

His wife, Rita, who performed with his backup singers, the I Threes, made her peace with his womanizing and acted as his doorkeeper. Marley was not an aggressive sexual predator. A shy man, he was besieged with female adoration; women simply fell into his lap.

Though made with the cooperation of the Marley family, the film is far from a hagiography; and while stocked with musical sequences, it is not a concert film. Few if any of his songs are heard all the way through. Marley is a detailed, finely edited character study whose theme — Marley’s bid to reconcile his divided racial legacy — defined his music and his life.

The opening scene, on the coast of Ghana, shows what is called "the door of no return," through which countless Africans passed on their way to slavery. When he became a star, Marley passionately embraced his African roots, performing in Gabon (although it was a dictatorship) and at the ceremonies in which Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.

Born in an impoverished village in the Jamaican hills, Marley was brought up in a tin-roofed shack. He was the son of a young black woman, Cedella Marley Booker, who had a passing relationship with the much older Norval Marley, a British Army man of mixed race who was considered a white Jamaican. (He is seen in the film on horseback in a photograph.)

Because of his racially mixed parentage Bob Marley found himself a social outcast. At 12 he moved to the seething, poor Trench Town district of Kingston, where he soaked up music on the radio, learned the guitar and found a father figure in Clement Dodd, a record producer known as Sir Coxsone, who owned a recording studio. Marley was 16 in 1962, when his first single, Judge Not, set a righteous tone for what was to come.

The movie does a fascinating job of showing how, almost by accident, reggae evolved out of ska, Jamaica’s popular dance music of the time. American pop-soul, especially the music of groups like the Temptations, was also a major influence. Marley and the Wailers’ ska rendition of A Teenager in Love from Dion and the Belmonts is heard. Another hybrid, fraught with even more significance, is Selassie Is the Chapel, a rewritten version of the American hit Crying in the Chapel. This version praised Marley’s ultimate father figure, Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor whom Rastafarians regarded as a deity. Mortimer Planno, a drummer and Rastafari elder, was also an important mentor.

Once he embraced Rastafarianism, Marley and his inner circle maintained a self-disciplined regimen of exercise, training and abstemiousness, except for marijuana, which was considered a sacrament.

Chris Blackwell, the British record executive who signed and groomed Marley and the Wailers, comes across as a cool cookie who promoted them as "a black rock act" and created discord after they weren’t paid for their work on a grueling promotional tour. Two members quit, including Neville Livingston, known as Bunny Wailer, the movie’s most frequent commentator. (He would change his mind and rejoin the group.)

At this point the film becomes more of a career biography in which Marley, in spreading his global message of "one love, one heart," exhibits a messianic sense of himself. His symbolic importance put him at risk, and he narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in 1976. The culmination of his drive to be a peacemaker was his April 1978 One Love Peace concert, since called the Third World Woodstock, at a Kingston stadium. There he joined the hands of the rival political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga.

His music has only grown in importance since his death. Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1984 anthology, Legend, has sold 25 million copies worldwide, and his music and image proliferated at Arab Spring demonstrations. You have only to listen to him or see a filmed performance to understand the potency of a voice synonymous with fervent hope.

A few observations

• I was more than pleasantly surprised by the reception the long-term sanitation "zero waste" plan received yesterday from the Dallas City Council’s Environment and Transportation Committee. Ultra conservative Sandy Greyson went on record as saying her constituents are demanding a ban on plastic bags, which the plan proposes to implement within five years, and even Mr. Anti-Environment himself, Sheffie Kadane, couldn’t wait to make a motion to favorably recommend the plan to the full council.
• Now that Jimmie Fallon has been nixed as the host for the next Academy Awards show, I have an off-the-wall suggestion: Tom Hanks. He is beloved by the Hollywood community and, by the way, have you seen his hosting gigs on Saturday Night Live? I think he could pull it off. My real first choice to host would be Hugh Jackman but there’s a good chance he’ll be one of the co-favorites (along with Daniel Day-Lewis) for the best actor trophy this year so that might present a conflict. So let’s give Hanks a shot, if his schedule permits.
• You would think a new hotel opening in the Cedars area would receive more attention than it has, but I have not heard a word about the Nylo. Maybe because it’s only 70 rooms, but, still, the Cedars is a hot area right now.

Dallas may get a little greener

A while back I wrote about how Dallas likes to consider itself a "green city," which, in reality, it is, but only lima bean green, not forest green. However, the city is proposing what, for Dallas, can be considered an ambitious plan to get a little greener. (Cities like Austin, San Francisco and Los Angeles would call this plan less than "ambitious," but there you have it.)

Mary Nix at McCommas Bluff

Tomorrow, Dallas Sanitation Services Director Mary Nix will present to the City Council’s Transportation and Environment Committee something that is being billed as a "Local Solid Waste Management Plan."

Sounds simple enough and it’s main goal is particularly worthwhile: Eliminating buried waste (i.e., taking trash to landfills) by the year 2040, which seems too far in the future for me. But then I’ll be lucky to be around in 2020 when the goal of the plan is to divert 40 percent of our trash, which is where I would have wanted us to be today. But, like I said, Dallas is only lima bean green.

There is an interesting strategy at work here. Around this time last year, the big argument was over "flow control," a perfectly legal plan in which all the garbage collected within the city had to be taken to a municipal waste disposal facility, either the McCommas Bluff Landfill or the Bachman Transfer Station. That plan narrowly passed, but then private waste haulers, notably Waste Management Inc. (which, incidentally is solidly in favor of flow control, but only after its own landfill is filled), filed suit and a pro-business judge directly disavowed Supreme Court precedents and granted Waste Management an injunction.

With this new "Local Solid Waste Management Plan," the city is not making flow control (now the politically correct term is "resource recovery), a goal, but merely an unmentioned strategy needed to achieve a 100 percent diversion rate three decades from now. The way it’s being phrased now (on Page 15 of Nix’s presentation) is zero waste can be achieved through, among other things, "maximum resource recovery," which will require (although the presentation doesn’t specifically say so) flow control. Then on the next page of the presentation, labled "10 steps recommended in plan to achieve ‘Zero Waste’ status," steps nine and 10 call for the construction of a "Materials Recovery Facility" and to "develop a Resource Recovery Park to convert waste products to energy." We’ve already been told that the only way these two ideals are economically viable is through the implementation of flow control. So even though the words are explicitly mentioned, it’s still the elephant in the room.

But an even larger elephant is directly presented. On Page 17 of her presentation, Nix is going to call for banning the use of plastic bags and Styrofoam cups within the next five years. Why she’s stopping at plastic bags and not all non-reuseable bags as the real green cities have done is hard to figure out. Perhaps she just doesn’t want to push her luck with our obviously reactionary City Council. But it is definitely a step — a major step — in the right direction. The idea was floated not that long ago and was not warmly embraced by those council members.

I’ll be interested to see and hear how the discussion goes in tomorrow’s committee meeting. But perhaps we may begin to color Dallas a slightly deeper shade of green soon.

　

Romney tips the scales the wrong way

Mitt Romney’s misguided choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate paints a clear picture of the Republican’s vision for the future.
Republicans are against:

• Job training for the unemployed
• Tuition assistance for financially handicapped college students
• Replacing aging infrastructures in our cities
• Medical treatment or prescription medication for the elderly
• Preventative medical care for the poor
• Replacing retiring police officers and firefighters

Republicans are for:

• Even more tax giveaways for the rich
• Extravagant benefits for military contractors
• Reduced mine safety programs
• Reduced food safety programs
• Reduced environmental protection and preservation programs

If you think none of this true, just examine Ryan’s federal budget proposals — proposals the nation’s Catholic bishops said "will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment."
The choice has never been clearer between two presidential contenders. I have not been pleased with President Obama’s performance in the White House, but a second Obama term is far, far superior to the doomsday being offered by the Republicans.

Available on DVD: “Le Havre”

"Miracles do happen," a doctor tells a character named Arletty in Le Havre, Aki Kaurismaki’s new movie. "Not in my neighborhood," she replies.

Welcome to the tender, deadpan world of Kaurismaki, a Finnish filmmaker who has set his story of timely issues and timeless values in the French port city of the title. It turns out that Arletty (Kati Outinen) isn’t lying about the town’s toughest precincts, where her husband, Marcel (Andre Wilms), works as a shoeshine man. Together they eke out a modest existence along with a tightknit community of friends and neighbors who approach life with a similar signature brand of cynicism and cheerfulness.

When Marcel unexpectedly encounters a young man from Africa named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), what begins as one man’s mission to make a small difference becomes a potent — and often hilarious — testament to the power of community and collective sense of duty.

This movie was recommended to me by the great Philip Wuntch, the only knowledgeable film critic in the history of the Dallas Morning News. Now I understand why. Filmed in a high, nostalgic style that gives its setting the gleam and romance of another era, Le Havre is a movie composed entirely of fantastic faces, starting with Wilms’s own ruggedly handsome Marcel, whose even-eyed unflappability gives him the air of Buster Keaton combined with the suavest noir anti-hero. (Le Havre fits right in at a time when such films as Hugo and The Artist are casting fond glances back at cinema’s silent era.)

Alternately lighthearted and deeply spiritually grounded, Kaurismaki’s distinctive sensibility spins what could have been a grittily realist polemic into a fanciful fable, all the more affecting for being so tethered to the urgencies of the real world.

With its ragtag cast of cinematic archetypes (from Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s trench-coated cop to Marcel’s faithful pooch named Laika), Le Havre is propelled by equal parts theology and whimsy. It’s a treacherous combination that in Kaurismaki’s capable hands results in one of the finest films of the year, a comedy of unusual compassion and generosity that can get away with its most fanciful contrivances because its style is so simple and its tone so gentle and forgiving. Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen — especially in Kaurismaki’s lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.

Available on DVD: “Footnote”

Footnote is a film about Talmudic research, close analysis of the ancient writings on Jewish law. Talmudic scholars are detail oriented by trade, and the two in close-up here are a father and son long at odds, both emotionally and intellectually.

Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), the father, is the traditionalist who compares himself to an archaeologist combing through pot shards. He pores over evidence — so much so that he once spent 30 years pursuing a breakthrough that collapsed when a rival published first. Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) is the successful, admired, cutting-edge son, the one who expounds on gender and culture and the de-feminization of the Jewish man. Uriel gets the accolades, the academy membership, the adoring looks from women. Eliezer’s biggest triumph is a footnote: his name in the masterwork of a revered scholar.

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It’s a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky’s bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.

Its energy and eccentricity assert themselves in funky graphics, imaginative camerawork and everyday moments of awkwardness and absurdity. In a pivotal scene, people crowding a tiny room stand and rearrange their chairs each time someone opens the door to come or go. It’s one of many small but inspired comic touches that lightens the drama.

Cedar’s most recent film was 2007's Beaufort, a much grimmer, plainer piece of work that focused on Israeli soldiers entrenched in a mountain post in Lebanon. On the surface, not much links that film to this one, yet both train their sights on infighting in an airtight subculture that reveals larger issues of humanity and the truth.

Bar-Aba glowers magnificently, his compact form imploding with anger. Ashkenazi, his large, expressive eyes filled with anxiety or alarm, is a rough bear of an actor who transmits a piercing intellect and warmth. These two don’t look alike, but it’s easy work accepting them as a combative, complicated father and son. And it’s easy to see the passion they feel for the Talmud.

Available on DVD: “The Deep Blue Sea”

The most dangerous and addictive aspect of lust is its revelatory quality, the way it makes the whole of life that went before it feel like a wasteland of sleepwalking and tepid emotion. In The Deep Blue Sea, Rachel Weisz — in what has to be the performance of her career, and there have been lots of good ones — plays an intelligent woman in the grip of a lust that's too big to handle or suppress. She can either ride the tiger or be devoured.

Terence Davies adapted and directed the film, based on the play by Terence Rattigan, with a complete immersion in the viewpoint of his lead character. This is a small story, set in 1950, but the emotions are epic, and Davies expresses those emotions with an epic treatment — with a loud string section on the soundtrack, dreamy takes and scenes that crystallize in just a single line of dialogue, suggesting the power of memory to compress events into moments.

Weisz plays the 40ish wife of a 50ish judge who meets a 30ish young man (Tom Hiddleston), a former World War II pilot in the RAF. Her discovery of physical love cannot be ignored, even though she realizes that this young man, for all his surface bonhomie, has been dead since the war. The war was his great revelation, just as love is hers.

If I tell you this film is a study of one woman's torment, it might make The Deep Blue Sea sound unappealing, but it's riveting from beginning to end, because virtually at every moment, someone's entire life is in the balance. On most of those occasions, we're watching Weisz, but sometimes we're watching Simon Russell Beale as the husband, as he uses every ounce of British reserve, and every aspect of 1950s repression, to contain an impulse to burst into tears.

Weisz's performance, from moment to moment — in merciless close-up and long takes — is innovative, truthful and revealing. Her innate appeal helps, as well. I imagine most women watching will identify with her, just as most men will watch with the frustrating conviction that if only they were allowed into the movie, she could get rid of both men and finally be happy.

Gas drilling ordinance: a defining moment for the Dallas City Council

Dallas City Council to decide if this could happen next door to where you live

This afternoon I witnessed the presentations to the Dallas City Council concerning proposed gas drilling ordinances and realized the choice before the city body is a rather simple one: Do you place the health and welfare of citizens as well as the preservation of our environment over the corporate greed of energy companies and a handful of fat-cat landowners. That may seem rather blunt, but that’s the argument.

As it stands now, District 9 council member Sheffie Kadane has become, hands down, the most anti-environment council member in the city’s history. He is becoming an embarrassment, which causes me much pain to write, because I always considered Sheffie a friend. But he single-handily tried to defeat a pro-environmental resource recovery ordinance and today said quite clearly "I could care less if drilling makes my neighbor so sick he dies, I have a right to get rich off my mineral rights." So much for love thy neighbor.

It seems inconceivable to me that while we are under an EPA order to reduce harmful ozone in the air, the council is considering policies that will increase the amount of dangerous particles we breathe in every day.

But it all comes down to money. The gas drilling interests have the big bucks to buy any council member it wants. The environmental side simply tries to appeal the council person’s conscience. The vote on this ordinance will define the council and its members. The right thing to do is to approve an ordinance with at least 1,000-foot setbacks with absolutely no variances as well as strict prohibitions against drilling in city parks and flood plains. Those who vote for such an ordinance will be voting for the health and welfare of the citizens of Dallas. Those voting for anything less are caving in to the interests of the greedy.

Bad pollsters or lying voters?

Typical Texas pollster?

The one and only time when Dallas’ current system of electing city council members, known as the 14-1 system (14 single member districts with the mayor elected at large), was placed before voters for approval, it was narrowly defeated, even though polls taken before the election indicated it would win handily.

Here’s what happened. After making sure African Americans were disenfranchised for decades, a number of black leaders, led by the late Al Lipscomb, filed suit saying Dallas’ system of electing candidates was unfair. Federal courts, led by U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer agreed.

So the city’s white establishment came up with a plan called 10-4-1, in which 10 council members would be elected from single member districts, four council members would be elected from larger, "super," districts and the mayor would be elected at large. The city’s white voters recognized the plan for what it was — only giving minorities token representation — and approved it. The U.S. Justice Department, however, also recognized it for what is was and said the plan could not pass muster under the Voting Rights Act.

So, reluctantly, the city was forced to submit the 14-1 system to voters. At the time, in the early 1990s, I was working for a company hired to see that the 14-1 ordinance was passed. We conducted extensive polling and all the numbers indicated it would be approved easily. However, on election day, the vote was 45,624 against to 45,255 for.

Mike Lindley

It was the acute political strategist Mike Lindley (whose birthday is today, quite coincidentally) who realized why our polling numbers were so inaccurate. According to the Great Lindley, a voter saying he would vote against the measure identified that voter as a racist, someone in favor of denying Dallas blacks a political voice. And very few of those polled wanted to publicly admit, "Yeah, sure, I’m a racist." However, in the privacy of the voting booth, they were free to express their true feelings and motivations.

I was reminded of Lindley’s analysis in the wake of yesterday’s Dewhurst-Cruz runoff for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. The morning of the election, all the political pundits were calling the election "a tossup." The results were quite another matter. Cruz crushed Dewhurst. When I was working for a news wire service the rule in a two-person election was that anyone receiving more than 55 percent of the vote was considered a "landslide" victor. Cruz got 56 percent.

So why was everyone calling it "a tossup"? I’m going to attribute it to Lindley’s Rule.

Cruz is directly tied to the racist Tea Party. The Tea Party came about, quite simply, because black man was elected to the White House. And all the policies it advocates are either overtly racist (voter IDs, strict immigration laws) or covertly racist (gutting programs designed to help the poor, killing public education, maintaining tax cuts for the most wealthy Americans). And there are still those who don’t want the world (or their co-workers) to know they belong to this lunatic fringe. But, again, get them inside the privacy of a voting booth and they are free to let all their prejudices run rampant.

The only other explanation is that pollsters in the state of Texas have no idea how to conduct an accurate poll. And you know what? There may be some truth in that as well.

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Better than watching the Olympics opening ceremony

I'm still amazed that these folks realized sticking a ladder into the dumpster would work as quickly and as easily as it did.

Available on DVD: “Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog”

The opening shot of Quill illustrates just how willing the director Yoichi Sai is to exploit his film’s protagonist: it’s an irresistible close-up of a sleeping Labrador retriever puppy. Therein lies the essence of this simple, bluntly effective movie. Its principal selling point — the supreme watchability of dogs, especially working dogs — is undeniably powerful.

Quill (named after a birdlike birthmark on his side) is born in Tokyo and initially raised by a loving young couple who recognize his potential as a companion to the blind. He is taken to an obedience school where a firm but compassionate trainer, Satoru Tawada (Kippei Shiina), notes that Quill, unlike the rest of the dogs he is training with, responds thoughtfully to commands, not impetuously — an ideal quality for a seeing-eye dog. (The training segments are the movie’s most fascinating.)

Tawada finds a potential owner for him: the cantankerous Mitsuru Watanabe (Kaoru Kobayashi, overacting), an advocate for the disabled who has long resisted having a guide dog. Quill gradually wins Watanabe over, of course, and moves in with his family. And here the story, which thus far has underplayed its sentiment, overreaches: Watanabe’s wife is cool toward Quill, and he is consigned to an outdoor pen, in pelting rain and baking heat. At least Watanabe’s son plays with him.

Watanabe ages and grows ill, and so eventually does the title character. Quill lives only 12 years, but when you consider the devotion, responsibility and affection a dog can demonstrate in that time, you appreciate just how full their lives can be.

The innocent are not being punished at Penn State

Yesterday I read this letter that appeared on the editorial page of the Dallas Morning News criticizing the sanctions handed down by the NCAA. The letter writer said those sanctions only punished the innocent — past and present football players.

This person still doesn’t get it, but then she lives in a state that perpetuates the same kind of thought that led to the Penn State scandal.

The first thing I noticed when I moved to Texas was what a football-crazed place this was. It was back in 1956 and my dad had been charged with supervising the construction of a chemical plant in (where else?) Pasadena, along the Houston ship channel. We decided to locate in southern Houston, in an area that was then known as McGregor Park (for all I know it’s still known as McGregor Park) that wasn’t far from the campus of the University of Houston.

Now I thought, at the time, I was a comparatively well informed 14 year old, but I had never heard of the University of Houston prior to our establishing lodging in the Bayou City. My first mistake was admitting that to a new neighbor and a U of H grad. "You never heard of the University of Houston?" he asked with this look of absolute astonishment. "Why just two years ago we played Ole Miss!!!"

That, dear friends, was how I learned that, in Texas, the quality of the universities was measured by the notoriety of the schools its football team played.

So that’s the culture that this letter writer was raised in. Still, however, she doesn’t get it.

Let’s set the record straight here. The NCAA sanctions had nothing directly to do with sexually abusing innocent children. They did, however, have everything to do with the perpetuation of the culture I just described above — a culture in which football is so important that it takes priority over preventing the sexual abuse of children on the university’s campus. All these people involved in the football program — players as well as coaches — created and maintained this image of the ideal football program and nothing was to be uttered that in any way could shatter that image. Whether they knew that abuse was taking place on campus is irrelevant — the crime was willingly participating in a program that all the participants were convinced was above reproach.

And that’s what the NCAA punished. But more than that, it said loud and clear to all universities: "Sports have an important place in a university’s life, but they are not what keeps the institution’s heart beating."

Available on DVD: “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”

Here’s your Zen koan for today: Is it possible to create something so pure in its simplicity that it disappears?

Sure it is, answers Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary by David Gelb. Just come down to Jiro Ono’s tiny restaurant in the basement of a Tokyo office building, near the Ginza subway stop. There you will be presented with what many food connoisseurs consider the finest sushi on the planet, gastronomic objects unparalleled in their unadorned elegance. Seconds later, they’ll be gone.

Be prepared to make your reservations at least a month in advance, though, and expect a bill starting at $365; also, don’t hope for much in the way of ambience. Sukiyabashi Jiro holds only 10 seats, doesn’t offer appetizers, and is a bare-bones experience that’s purely about the fish. A food critic named Yamamoto admits he’s nervous every time he eats there, whether from the pressure of living up to the food or simply from being in the presence of God.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a foodie’s delight, obviously, and best viewed either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following. Gelb films the preparation of the nigiri with appropriate reverence: soaring strings on the soundtrack as knives glide through the red, glistening chunks of tuna in slo-mo close-up. But the film says as much about the human price one pays for perfection — or the pursuit thereof — and it’s not in dollars or yen.

At 85, Ono is the acknowledged master of his art. Michelin gave Sukiyabashi Jiro a rare three-star rating, meaning that it’s "worth traveling to the country just to eat there." Superstar chef Anthony Bourdain has bowed down and declared his unworthiness, and the Japanese government has named Jiro a living national treasure. In person, he’s smiling but ascetic, a lean, weathered artisan whose devotion to his craft is complete. Gelb’s camera follows him to the Tsukiji fish market, where we get a hint of what makes Ono’s sushi stand out from the pack (he has special arrangements with vendors whose standards are as exacting as his). Would you be willing to massage an octopus for 45 minutes, until its flesh possesses just the right amount of chewability? Jiro is. "It always has to taste better than last time," he says.

It’s not that Ono’s past is unimportant; he just doesn’t have much of one. Having left home at 9 — and being told by his parents not to come back — he became a sushi apprentice at a time when the food was still sold in the streets of Tokyo, well before it achieved global fame with the introduction of the California roll in the 1980s. We see old photos of Jiro in his youth, but they convey little. More compellingly complicated is the master’s relationship with his two sons. The elder, Yoshikazu, is still his father’s apprentice at 50, and he wonders if he’ll ever be his own man. ("Jiro’s ghost will always be there watching," he says with resignation at one point.)

A younger son, Takashi, is charged with the lesser task of managing a second restaurant, in Roppongi Hills, identical to the mother ship in every respect other than that everything’s reversed (the father’s a lefty, the son a righty). Both sons wanted to go to college, but Ono wouldn’t let them, and Yoshikazu says he hated making sushi at first. "I wasn’t much of a father," Jiro admits.

But what’s attentive parenthood when the universe is calling through the daily ritual of striving for the ineffable? The film’s title isn’t kidding -- Jiro really does dream of sushi — and his approach to life is the same as his approach to food: Do the same thing every day, only simpler and better. That means the same train to work, the same seat on that train, the same lean slice of akami placed just so on the same shaped ball of rice. "I don’t think I have achieved perfection," Jiro says, "but I feel ecstatic every day."

Available on DVD: “Here”

There are vistas in Braden King’s metaphysical road movie, Here, that are so beautiful you want to step through the screen and disappear into the Armenian landscape where much of it was filmed. In the most evocative scene, the camera slowly pans across pastures framed by distant mountains in which cattle graze amid a sprawling grid of power lines.

In another startling juxtaposition of pastoral and technological images, a traveler in Armenia uses a Google map to go from outer space to the heart of San Francisco in seconds. What does it imply that nowadays you can bask in an Armenian field and visit an American city at exactly the same moment? The trains of thought stirred up by the film’s contemplation of what is here and what is there — and where you are — are endless and stimulating. And the movie is embellished with spectacularly beautiful, enigmatic bursts of abstract imagery.

More problematic is an intermittent narrator (Peter Coyote) who meditates in poetic language on the conflicting aesthetics of science and exploration and on the notion that "truth is conjecture." If what he says is helpful in deciphering the film’s aesthetics, it also sounds grandiose. And as the movie advances, you discover that the ideas voiced by the narrator are embedded in scenes that need no further explication. This is a film that begins with a printed announcement: "The story is asleep. It dreams." Whatever that means.

The scientist and the artistic explorer are embodied by Ben Foster (The Messenger) and Lubna Azabal (Incendies), an attractive couple with chemistry. Foster plays Will, an American satellite-mapping engineer whose job is to match objects on the ground to satellite photos. Azabal’s character, Gadarine, is an Armenian expatriate photographer who has returned to her homeland from abroad following a successful Paris exhibition of her Polaroid snapshots.

After they meet by chance in a restaurant where she translates his breakfast order into Armenian, Gadarine becomes Will’s traveling companion on a quest to photograph the rapidly changing country that she left behind. She also serves as Will’s de facto interpreter, and the two become lovers.

Both are searchers, she for her past, he for the future. Remembering his childhood growing up in a Northern California vineyard, Will recalls taking long walks in which he tried to get lost. "I wanted to find the edge of the world," he says.

In a toast while drinking homemade vodka with some locals, he is saluted for creating maps that "bring wisdom to the world." But do they? And is wisdom the right word? Gadarine, upon returning to her peasant family, is treated as a prodigal daughter who is wasting her life by not settling down and doing "real" work.

With its layers of weighted dialogue, Here has a lot in common with Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, a film whose intellectual superstructure didn’t preclude the emergence of vivid, quirky personalities. The same can’t be said of Here, where the ideas are more implied than stated, and Will and Gadarine never completely break out of their symbolic shells.

They ultimately clash, when Gadarine accuses Will of skimming the surface of the world while gathering geographic data that will be used for corporate exploitation of Armenian resources. In her pictures she is trying to preserve the moment and the sense of place that his work is helping to erase.

Here, to its detriment, never builds its ideas into a cohesive vision. The screenplay by King and Dani Valent too often wanders off into poetic vagueness. But visually, Here, filmed by Lol Crowley, is still a stunner. Flawed as it is, I admired it immensely.

The Morning News' “shocking revelation” about something we’ve known all along

At the top of the front page of today’s Dallas Morning News is the headline "Health law will shrink deficit, budget office says." Like that’s news.

In a stunning example of hyperbole, the first paragraph of the story goes like this:

"President Barach Obama’s health care overhaul will shrink rather than increase the nation’s huge federal deficit over the next decade, Congress’ nonpartisan budget scorekeepers said Tuesday, supporting Obama’s contention in a major election-year dispute with Republicans"

Wake up, News! The Congressional Budget Office has been saying the President’s health care plan would reduce the deficit from the moment the White House proposed it. In fact, if you read past the jump on the News’ story, all the way down to the 10^th paragraph, you will find these words:

"The Congressional Budget Office has consistently projected that Obama’s overhaul will reduce the deficit …"

Duh! Then what’s the news value in this story? Maybe it’s just the Morning News that has realized for the first time what the CBO has been saying all along. Now, that’s a scary thought for those who depend on the paper as their primary news source.

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The Penn State sanctions

"We all have to remember that we can’t let our love of the games get ahead of the core values, and we know that happens often. This is a painful, painful reminder that awful things can happen when that occurs."
—MARK EMMERT, president of the N.C.A.A., announcing sanctions against Penn State University after the child sexual abuse scandal.

The Penn State football program is now irrelevant which is exactly the right place for it to be. It was rendered irrelevant because, in the minds of a few misguided people, the program was considered more relevant than the safety and welfare of innocent children.

It is impossible to have any sympathy whatsoever with those criticizing the severity of the sanctions handed down yesterday by the NCAA.

For one, the family of disgraced ex-Penn State football coach Joe Paterno should just shut up. Of course they don’t want to see their family name dragged through the mud, but they are beginning to sound like O.J. Simpson saying he will himself bring to justice the murderer of his wife. My message to the family: Suffer in silence.

To those who say the NCAA is unfairly punishing the innocent — those football players on the team far removed from the scandal — the organization was careful to do just the opposite by saying any one of those players can transfer to another school, if they want, and play immediately. Normally, an NCAA athlete must sit out a year after transferring.

And finally, to those who say "Why punish the football team when this wasn’t a football issue?", my response is: "Are you out of your f-ing mind?"

This was, above all things, a football issue. The scandal arose because Paterno and other school officials felt the football program was so important that it had to be protected at all costs — even if that meant more children would be sexually abused by a predator allowed to roam the campus freely.

I thought it was telling that every single head football coach and even former coaches interviewed after the sanctions were announced thought they were just. The sanctions’ critics are a very, very small minority — most of them located in central Pennsylvania — but they don’t have a leg to stand on. They still don’t get it.

An excellent profile of the Boss

David Remnick

Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming Harum Scarum and Help! was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles "greater than the Beatles." At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room.

So begins a superb Springsteen profile appearing in the current New Yorker written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick. It’s probably the next best thing to reading a full-scale Springsteen biography. You can find the entire piece here.

Available on DVD: “Black Butterflies”

Paula Van der Oest’s Black Butterflies is a rending biographical portrait of the poet Ingrid Jonker, who has been called the South African Sylvia Plath because both women destroyed themselves at an early age and had what might be called "daddy issues." Plath was 30 when she died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1963. Jonker drowned herself two years later at 31.

Her poetry gained an international platform in 1994, when Nelson Mandela read her poem The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga (Die Kind) during his first address to the new South African Parliament. This searing work, in which the spirit of a slain child "raises his fist against his father in the march of the generations who scream Africa," comes from Jonker’s second collection of Afrikaans-language poems, Smoke and Ochre. Mandela’s tribute is heard at the end of the film.

Although Black Butterflies shows Jonker witnessing the event that inspired the poem, the movie is not a high-minded political film recycling the outrages associated with apartheid. In Greg Latter’s screenplay Ingrid (Carice van Houten) connects the death of a child shot by the police to her secret abortion after becoming pregnant by her lover, Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham), a novelist 20 years her senior.

Her affair with Jack, whom she meets when he rescues her after she swims too far out to sea, is the spine of the drama. The depiction of her emotional and mental instability is an unsparing portrait of a tortured soul. Van Houten portrays her as more than just a moody, volatile handful. To become involved with Ingrid is to juggle lighted sticks of dynamite. One minute she is ravenously needy, the next a vicious child who screams, "You’re nothing," if she doesn’t get her way.

Van Houten manages the difficult task of capturing the emotional and sexual magnetism of this toxic woman at the mercy of her emotions, and her intensity makes her at once irresistible and dangerous to men. When Jack, who is married with two children, says he is completely in love with her, you believe him. Ingrid sleeps with whomever she wants whenever she wants. The first rupture in their bond comes when she makes a blatant pass at another man in front of him at a party.

As their relationship seesaws, Jack barely tolerates her promiscuity and drinking, and is repeatedly wounded by her recklessness and cruelty. But as Ingrid’s mental health spirals downward, he wearily comes to her rescue. He is one of two lovers in the story who tell her, "You drain me," which is an understatement considering her demands.

Jack’s stabilizing influence is no match against Ingrid’s father, Abraham (Rutger Hauer), with whom she plays lethal emotional games. A racist Afrikaner — and the minister for censorship in Parliament — he is outspoken in his belief that blacks have inferior intelligence. He calls his daughter a slut and is infuriated when she gives a newspaper interview criticizing his politics.

But she can’t resist baiting him by presenting him with her poems, which he detests. In one scene she coaxes him into reading aloud The Child Who Was Shot Dead, until he refuses to continue and tears it to shreds. Yet he is enough of a parent to take her in when she has nowhere else to go, even though it is like welcoming an arsonist into his home. The hate flows both ways. She fantasizes that he is poisoning her. And when her mental health deteriorates, he gives consent for her to have the electroshock therapy that finally breaks her spirit and destroys her gift.

In its jagged style and tone Black Butterflies is as close to an inside-out view of Jonker’s tumultuous life as a movie could go without sinking into chaos. Its hues are continuously changing, and the seaside weather around Cape Town reflects her tempestuous emotional life.

The climate and environment, though dramatically beautiful, are rarely calm. Ingrid is so self-consuming that even her sister, Anna (Candice D’Arcy), and her daughter, Simone (played by several children), from a failed marriage are little more than baggage she drags around. As for literary politics, there is only a token effort to acknowledge her support of a persecuted black writer (Thamsanqua Mbongo).

Black Butterflies mostly avoids the sentimental cliché of the artist as anguished martyr and is content to be a harrowing psychological drama. At the same time, it gives Jonker’s despairing poetry its due in brief spoken interludes and shows her, in a creative fever, scrawling it on the walls of her apartment.

The movie reminds you of the extent to which poetry has been marginalized as a cultural force since the early 1960s. When Jack and his best friend, Uys Krige (Graham Clarke), meticulously reassemble torn fragments of her work into the manuscript that is published as Smoke and Ochre, it really matters.

Available on DVD: “The Fairy”

One’s enjoyment of The Fairy depends a lot on knowing why it’s worth seeing. It’s a comedy with two or three big laughs, but it’s not side-splitting. Nor does it have a particularly compelling story. Its appeal is rather in watching people who have devised their own original style of comic performance and have taken it to a rare level of refinement.

The romance of a hotel clerk (Dominique Abel) and a mental patient (Fiona Gordon) — she thinks she is a fairy who can grant wishes — becomes the clothesline for a series of methodically planned and meticulously executed comic bits. Abel and Gordon, who also wrote and directed the picture (along with Bruno Romy), have their antecedents in American silent film and Jacques Tati’s comedy, but they’ve come up with something that is very much their own thing.

They look alike. Abel was born in Belgium, and Gordon was born in Australia, but they look like brother and sister, with rangy dancers’ bodies and faces that have just a touch of Dr. Seuss in them. Their comedy has a presentational feel about it, almost like vaudeville, with hints of the circus, dance and Cirque du Soleil. There are elements of absurdity and of identification with the outsiders of the world, but with none of the sentimentality that usually goes with those qualities.

These people do not go for the tear and the smile. They go for the smile. You’ll find in The Fairy neither the steampunk art direction nor the forced and syrupy zaniness of a lesser Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie (Micmacs, Delicatessen). Abel and Gordon engage the mind, they surprise and they impress. It’s all very confident and expert. They know they don’t have to do anything but what they do, and the viewer will respond.

You might not love it; it might not be your thing, but you’ll come away with no doubt that these people have this thing honed. Seeing Abel and Gordon is like finally seeing the real version of something you’ve previously only seen imitated. They are as in control of the comic tone as they are of their movements — and they move beautifully.

After Aurora: Vigilante justice is not the answer

From the editorial pages of today’s New York Times:

The most appropriate response now to the shootings early Friday in Aurora, Colo., is also the simplest: sympathy for the victims, for the injured and for their families.

President Obama asked a crowd in Fort Myers, Fla., "to pause in a moment of silence for the victims of this terrible tragedy, for the people who knew them and loved them, for those who are still struggling to recover, and for all the victims of less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities every single day."

He returned to the White House and, like Mitt Romney, pulled his political ads off the air in Colorado.

Romney addressed the senseless violence at a previously scheduled campaign stop in New Hampshire.

"I stand before you today not as a man running for office but as a father and grandfather, a husband, an American," he said. "This is a time for each of us to look into our hearts and remember how much we love one another and how much we love and how much we care for our great country."

Both men struck absolutely the right note. The country needs a pause for reflection, to wait for more information and to take a break from this ugly political campaign. But as Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, a leader in the search for sensible answers about guns, said, we will need to do more than reflect.

"Maybe," the mayor said, "it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they’re going to do about it."

Sadly, however, it seems unlikely that they will tell us what they are going to do about it, or that there will be a national dialogue about it, just as there was no national dialogue after Columbine or after Virginia Tech or after Jared Lee Loughner tried to assassinate then-Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Politicians are far too fearful of the gun lobby to address gun violence, and, as a society, we keep getting stuck on a theoretical debate about the Second Amendment, which keeps us from taking practical measures that just might help avoid the all-too-frequent tragedies like the one in Aurora.

Whether you believe, as many perfectly reasonable people do, that the amendment gives each individual the right to bear arms, or whether you believe, as (I and) this editorial page has often argued, that it is society’s right to raising a militia, there is no excuse to ignore the out-of-control gun market.

The country needs laws that allow gun ownership, but laws that also control their sale and use in careful ways. Instead, we have been seeing a rash of "stand your ground" self-defense laws, other laws that recklessly encourage the carrying of concealed weapons and efforts to force every state to knuckle under to those laws. Assault rifles like one used by the killer in Colorado are too readily available, as are high-capacity ammunition clips.

What we do not need is more heedless rhetoric like we heard on Friday from Representative Louie Gohmert, the Texas Republican who drew a bizarre connection during a radio interview between the horror in Colorado and "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs."

Gohmert added: "It does make me wonder, you know, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying? That could have stopped this guy more quickly?"

That sort of call to vigilante justice is sadly too familiar, and it may be the single most dangerous idea in the debate over gun ownership.

©2012 New York Times

New Dylan album, North American Tour

If you're a big Bob Dylan fan, as I am, you may want to know that he will release the 35th album of his career, Tempest, Sept. 11. It is interesting to note that The Tempest was the name of the last play Shakespeare ever wrote. Could Dylan, who is now 71 years old and still tours constantly, be hinting at something here?

He will also kick-off a North American tour Oct. 5 in Winnepeg with Mark Knopfler on the bill with him. The first time I heard Knopfler sing was when Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing was initially being played on FM radio and I thought at the time he sound remarkably like Dylan.

There will only be one Texas stop on the tour and that will be (lucky us) Nov. 1 at the Verizon Theater in Grand Prairie. As I recall, the last time Dylan played the area it was right across the street from the Verizon, at the baseball stadium there. Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp shared the bill with him that time. That show happened to fall on my birthday.

Just saying.

Anybody know the name of an expert sadist, torturer

There are certain people who need to be tortured, who need to experience such excruciating pain that they are praying their lives will end quickly. But they keep on living and they keep on feeling a pain so intense it literally drives them out of their minds.

My latest nominee for this sentence is one Elisabeth Escalona.

Now in case you missed the story on the front page of the Metro Section of Friday’s Dallas Morning News, the aformentioned monster pleaded guilty Thursday to "injury to a child."

"Injury" doesn’t begin to convey what she did. When her 2-year-old daughter pooped in her pants, the woman dragged her daughter by her feet from the kitchen to another room in their house where she kicked her in the stomach, hit her with a jug of milk, a belt and a shoe. She then put glue on the poor girl’s hands and glued them to the wall. When the infant was finally taken to the hospital she was suffering from "extensive bruising, brain swelling, broken bones, swollen intestines, bruised lungs and an injured liver."

To all interested sadists and torturers: the line forms outside my door.

Baseball’s post season

I see that Major League baseball has added a second wild-card team to its post-season mix. As I understand it, the two wild cards in each league will play a one-game playoff with the winner in each league joining their respective league’s division winners in the normal playoff series.

We can all agree that’s a dumb idea, almost as dumb as letting the winner of the all-star game decide which league gets home field advantage in the World Series.

So let’s dump both of those.

What major league baseball should do is simply follow the lead of the NBA. First it needs to shorten it’s regular season by 20 games at the most, 10 at the least.

Then simply have the teams with the eight best records in both leagues begin seven-game playoff series with the team having the best regular season winning percentage always having the home field advantage, right through the world series.

Looking at the teams at the halfway point, here’s what a first round playoff matchup would look like (seeding is in parenthesis)

American League: (8) Detroit Tigers at (1) New York Yankees, (7) Cleveland Indians at (2) Texas Rangers, (6) Tampa Bay Rays at (3) Los Angeles Angels and (5) Baltimore Orioles at (4) Chicago White Sox.

National League: (8) San Francisco Giants at (1) Washington Nationals, (7) St. Louis Cardinals at (2) Pittsburgh Pirates, (6) New York Mets at (3) Cincinnati Reds and (5) Los Angeles Dodgers at (4) Atlanta Braves.

To me, it makes for a far more interesting and exciting post season. That’s one reason why it will never happen.

The Mavericks could actually be really good next season

I really believe the Mavericks have a better team heading into the 2012-2013 season than they did last year and possibly as good as the team that won the NBA title two years ago. Now for those with short memories, that title run involved almost as much luck as it did skill. Remember, the Mavs entered the playoffs two years as the No. 4 seed in the West and I think this coming year’s team has an excellent shot at finishing fourth as well. You know the Thunder will finish ahead of the Mavs as will the Lakers. I can’t see both the Spurs and the Clippers having a better record than Dallas, however, although one of them will. Also remember that if Labron James had played against us as he played against OKC in the most recent finals, Dallas would still be looking for its first NBA title.

Darren Collison is a major upgrade over Jason Kidd. Not, Kidd in his prime, but then Kidd has been past his prime for the last three or four years now. Collison brings Russell Westbrook-like speed and agility to the Mavericks at point guard (Kidd was never known for his speed) and he’s a far better defender.

If he can remain injury free (and that’s a big "if"), Chris Kamen could be the best center ever to wear a Mavericks uniform with the exception of ol’ What’s-His-Name who left Dallas for New York last year at this time. But there were injury concerns surrounding ol’ W-H-N as well and Kamen is more of an offensive threat than the dear departed Olympian ever hoped to be.

But the kicker is the addition of Elton Brand. He may not be the pure shooter that Jason Terry was (but then the Mavs aren’t asking him to play two guard either). He does, however, possess far more basketball smarts than Terry and the addition of Brand is going to allow coach Rick Carlisle to let Dirk have a lot more much-needed rest during games.

And if either rookie Jared Cunningham or Jae Crowder begin performing like a lottery pick (I’m not expecting that kind of miracle) than this team could go the distance.

But at the least, they will finish better than last year’s squad that ended the season seventh in the West.

Available on DVD: “The Hunter”

An ecological thriller about a professional animal killer and loner who discovers a newfound sense of stewardship for the planet — along with a concern for other people — The Hunter is engrossing and thoughtful entertainment. It’s a mystery with a message.

Based on a 1999 novel by Australian writer Julia Leigh, the film stars Willem Dafoe as Martin, an elite hunter who has been hired by a mysterious firm to bag the last remaining example of a Tasmanian tiger, a real-life (though probably extinct) predator that looks like it’s part dog, part cat. Though the firm’s reasons for wanting the animal are murky, they become clearer — and more clearly nefarious — as the mystery unfolds.

Martin doesn’t really care why though. He’s in it for the money.

Martin’s efforts to track the animal are hampered by unseen (and possibly dangerous) enemies: radical environmentalists, or "greenies," who want to save the tiger; local loggers who have somehow mistaken him for one of the greenies; and rival hunters.

Martin, in short, becomes both hunter and hunted.

That’s one part of the story.

The other, more interesting part involves Martin’s relationship with Lucy (Frances O’Connor) — a greenie in whose remote Tasmanian house he has set up camp — and her two children (Morgana Davies and Finn Woodlock). Although it behooves him to remain emotionally uninvolved, Martin can’t help developing feelings for Lucy, whose husband has recently disappeared and is presumed dead. But Lucy’s kids also insinuate themselves into his affections. As Lucy’s loquacious daughter Sass, Davies is a charmer. Woodlock is equally memorable — in a virtually mute performance — as the boy, Bike, a character on whom much of the mystery hinges.

Australian television director Daniel Nettheim tells both stories well, braiding them together into a single thread with a firm hand and evocative visual style. The forests of Tasmania are brought to gorgeous life — as is the tiger, in a few moments of believably executed CGI.

But the film’s neatest trick isn’t getting us to believe in a beast that likely disappeared sometime in the 20th century and that now exists only in taxidermied museum displays and black-and-white video clips.

It’s convincing us of Martin’s transformation from hard-boiled mercenary to almost-family man, precipitated by a tragedy that reveals the true heartlessness of his employer. Dafoe carries off both extremes of Martin’s character with aplomb and psychological depth.

At the core of the movie is the message that the real lonely hunter is the heart.