I have scratched together a living, in one way or another, as a writer for more than 60 years now. I was a free-lance writer during the early stages of the Vietnam War. I was the Southwest Division Overnight News Editor for United Press International back when UPI was a legitimate news gathering organization. Following that, I went to the Dallas Morning News where I became the first person to write about rock 'n' roll on a daily basis for a Texas metropolitan newspaper. I later became the News' entertainment editor. Following some stints with a couple of prominent PR firms, I had the extraordinary good fortune to team with two communications legends, Ken Fairchild and Lisa LeMaster, as part of one kick-ass media consulting/crisis communications team. That was followed by stints as a department head with the City of Dallas (and its public information officer); the Dallas Northeast Chamber of Commerce where I had the good fortune to meet and work alongside some of this city's business and political titans; and editorial director for QuestCorp Media until that company went out of business. Now officially retired, concentrating on this blog.
Call it instinct, call it intuition, or some innate talent for defining beauty and style. Or just call it Vreeland.
Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor, society icon, and cultural arbiter, embodied confidence and cool. Her visionary approach to editing — Vreeland had her hands on the pages, and page design, at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue for five decades, beginning in the late 1930s — changed the course of both magazines, and inspired their readers. Readers who could afford the clothes and shoes and jewels, and the many, many more who could only dream.
Bringing dreams to life was what she was about.
Vreeland, who died in 1989 at 86, comes alive herself in the wonderfully illuminating documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel. With a lengthy interview session with her friend George Plimpton as the film's narrative spine, Vreeland emerges not only as a woman who embraced couture and culture, but also as someone whose philosophy was built on independent thinking and a recognition of the transformative power of beauty and art.
Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (a granddaughter-in-law), Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel also boasts interviews with designers (Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta), models (Veruschka, Polly Tree) and photographers (Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman). Ali MacGraw, who came straight out of college to be Vreeland's assistant, recalls (amusingly) her boss' rigorous working methods. And Vreeland's knack for discovering new faces and trends is remembered; this is the woman who brought the 18-year-old model Lauren Bacall to the world, who counseled Jackie Kennedy on her wardrobe, who hired Twiggy, who hobnobbed with Warhol.
Her life, and her work, transcended what we think of as "fashion." Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel celebrates a unique and uniquely determined woman.
Christopher Walken’s gentle, dare we say even normal, portrayal of an acclaimed concert cellist is the main attraction in Yaron Zilberman’s confident filmmaking debut,A Late Quartet. Walken elegantly plays Peter Mitchell, who a quarter century earlier joined three of his students to form the Fugue Quartet, a revered chamber music ensemble.
On the cusp of their 25th anniversary tour, Peter learns he is in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, putting the quartet’s future in doubt. If he’s still sound enough, their next performance with be Peter’s last.
The chosen piece of music is Beethoven’s 14th String Quartet, Opus 131, one of the maestro’s final works and reportedly one of his favorites. This melancholy opus is composed to be played faster than Peter’s hands can now handle, and intended to be performed without breaks for re-tuning, while strings are stretched off-key.
"It’s a struggle to continually adjust to each other until the end, even if we are out of tune," Peter explains to a class, unwittingly describing the dilemma the Fugue Quartet suddenly faces.
Jealousy, lust and marital strife may implode the group before Peter’s body wears out.
Second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is unhappily married to violist Juliette (Catherine Keener), staying together only for the music and daughter Alex (Imogen Poots), a promising musician herself. Robert covets the first violin chair held by Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), an arrogant sort without ambition to take risks. Except when it comes to Alex, whose interest in Daniel is a swipe at her parents.
Such urbane Upper East Side roundelays are reminiscent of Woody Allen’s early Manhattan phase, and Zilberman and co-writer Seth Grossman frequently deserve that comparison. A Late Quartet isn’t as stuffy as the subject suggests, prying into these privileged lives with allegro wit and recriminations. The Fugue Quartet and its temperamental indiscretions make it the Fleetwood Mac of chamber music.
Zilberman plays conductor to an indie cinema dream team of actors. That Hoffman and Keener are spot-on in each scene is no surprise; Ivanir’s magnetic brood and the range Poots displays certainly are.
Best of all there’s Walken, masterfully subdued by Peter’s sophistication and illness, yet still eccentric enough to deflect pity. His halting cadence is intact but sadder than usual, as in a monologue recalling a bittersweet meeting with cello legend Pablo Casals. How many surprises and peaks can Walken possibly have left, after so many movies and memorable roles? Well, there’s this one.
"One Day Dallas," a plan to pick up trash and recycling on the same day, was and is a great idea. But now the city of Houston has come up with a better plan: "One Bin for All."
Actually, it’s a throwback to the old days (and the present, if the absence of blue recycling carts in my neighborhood is any indication) when we never recycled at all. We just dumped everything into the garbage cans.
That’s what Houston is doing, except it’s taking everything in that garbage bin to a recycling center of some sort and not a landfill. This has all the earmarks of what some far-sighted Dallas sanitation officials (some of whom, sadly, are no longer making those decisions for the betterment of Dallas residents) wanted to accomplish at the McCommas Bluff Landfill.
A contest started by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg designed to spur innovations in city government awarded Houston’s plan a runner-up prize of $1 million to pursue the idea. Here is the video Houston submitted to the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge. Watch it and eat your hearts out. It could have been us.
We’ve all wanted at some point in our lives to become someone else, to shed our troubles and responsibilities and start afresh.
French-Algerian con artist Frederic Bourdin made a career of it, assuming throughout the 1990s a series of more than a dozen alter egos that took him across Europe on false passports.
Bourdin’s greatest con brought him in 1997 to America and to a traumatized family in San Antonio, who welcomed the 23-year-old interloper into their home as their long-lost son, Nicholas Barclay, a boy who vanished one day in 1994 when he was 13.
The mother of all stranger-than-fiction yarns, Bourdin’s Texas con is meticulously retold in director Bart Layton’s gripping, hair-raising documentary The Imposter.
Layton turns up the weird by having Bourdin, the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, recount his story for us and play himself in the clever dramatic reconstructions.
Bourdin gets under your skin.
"For as long as I remember, I wanted to be someone else. Someone who was acceptable," he says. "Nobody ever gave me a childhood, because to give a kid a childhood you need to love that kid."
Finding himself in Linares, Spain, in 1997, Bourdin decides to seek shelter at an orphanage. Grilled by the authorities, he lets out that he’s American. So begins the con.
A resourceful manipulator and a great storyteller, Bourdin recounts how he called the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Virginia to find a missing boy whose identity he could steal.
He picks Nicholas, despite their age difference.
To our astonishment, Nicholas’ family immediately accepts Bourdin as their beloved child. No matter that Bourdin is a dark-haired, brown-eyed, olive-skinned adult with dark stubble, while Nicholas was a blue-eyed, blond child with pale skin.
Everyone buys the lie, including the Spanish authorities, the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, and the FBI agent assigned to track down Nicholas’ supposed abductors. (Bourdin claims he had been kidnapped by an international sex slavery ring.)
If The Imposter provides a measure of insight into Bourdin’s pathology — he was the unwanted child of a 17-year-old French girl and an older Algerian man — it provides a searing, laser-sharp emotional portrait of Nicholas’ family, including his mother, Beverly Dollarhide, and his sister Carey Gibson.
Both refuse to accept the FBI’s later findings that Bourdin is a fraud — his fingerprints yield a thick Interpol file detailing his previous scams. It’s unnerving to learn that he always impersonates children.
The Imposter shows how our beliefs, our sense of truth, are more often shaped by our desires — for love, affection, revenge, closure — than by the facts.
The film leaves us with a couple of nagging questions: Is Bourdin lying to gain our sympathy when he tells about his own traumatic, loveless childhood? Did the family have an ulterior motive for so readily accepting the imposter?
Layton’s dazzling film is an exciting, edge-of-your-seat experience superior to any Hollywood mystery you’re likely to see for a long time.
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Miami, Fla. SWEET 16
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Miami, Fla. ELITE EIGHT
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Louisville
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Syracuse CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
Louisvillle 67 Syracuse 65
When we first meet Erik (Thure Lindhardt), a Danish filmmaker living in New York in 1997, he is on the telephone looking for a casual sexual hookup. He seems fickle and impatient, hanging up on potential partners at the first hint that the chemistry might be wrong, but eventually he finds more or less what he is looking for. Quite a bit more, actually, in the person of Paul (Zachary Booth), even though Paul says he has a steady girlfriend, and Erik is not interested in commitment.
Fate — or whatever force governs the erotic destinies of modern city dwellers — has other plans. Keep the Lights On, Ira Sachs’s sensitive, knowing new film (his fifth feature), follows Erik and Paul for more than a decade, during which their relationship blossoms, withers and renews itself like a perennial flower with a peculiar and unpredictable life cycle.
The physical attraction between them is strong and immediate, but they don’t necessarily seem like a promising couple, and not just because Paul is ostensibly straight. That is a minor detail in the greater scheme of things. The more significant obstacle appears to be a temperamental difference.
Erik, who has been desultorily working on a documentary about an avant-garde New York filmmaker, is something of a flake in work and love. His best female friend (Julianne Nicholson) worries indulgently about him. His sister (Paprika Steen) scolds him about his lack of direction, warning him that being "up and coming" is not an appropriate condition for a man in his 30s. With his gap-tooth smile, laid-back posture and unkempt blond hair, Erik seems locked in perpetual, irresponsible boyhood.
Paul, in contrast, presents a more conventionally grown-up face to the world. He is organized, ambitious and professionally well-established, with an important job in book publishing. But one of the most ingenious and convincing aspects of Sachs’s film is the way it allows the characters to move in surprising directions, upending our expectations and their own sense of who they are, individually and to each other.
So it is Paul who proves to be the wayward soul, in danger of losing everything — Erik, his job, his life — to drug addiction. And Erik, at first glance a freer, more hedonistic spirit with a wandering eye and an eager libido, turns out to be a more disciplined and steadfast fellow than anyone might have supposed. He grows out of his dilettantism and promiscuity even as Paul slides perilously in the other direction.
This summary — and I have only sketched the outlines of a wandering, episodic story — makes Keep the Lights On sound much more schematic, more like a morality tale, than it really is. Its subject is not addiction or ambition, or even love in a conventional romantic sense, but rather the more elusive and intriguing matter of intimacy: how it grows, falters and endures over time. The dialogue sometimes has a canned, hectoring sound, as if the actors had been called upon to announce their feelings rather than express them, but the look, mood and rhythm of the film are exquisitely, even thrillingly authentic. In scenes that jump from year to year and linger over significant, ordinary moments, Sachs captures the ways strangers turn into lovers and the equally scary and exciting ways that lovers can remain strangers.
In its commitment to candid, sympathetic emotional exploration, Keep the Lights On invites comparison to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, perhaps the best big-screen love story — gay or straight, vampire or human — in recent memory. That film seemed to telescope a universe of romantic possibility into a single 72-hour stretch, during which a one-night stand between two young British men grew into a profound, life-altering and yet still elusive connection. Sachs takes a longer view, but the films share an interest in mapping the nuances of feeling that arise between men for whom sex is the easy part. They also both examine the complexities of gay life at a time when closets have (mostly) emptied, the threat of AIDS has (largely) diminished and the tide of intolerance has (significantly) receded.
The richness of Sachs’s accomplishment lies in the sense of familiarity he creates, the implicit bond that develops between the couple on the screen and the people in the audience. Even more than Forty Shades of Blue and Married Life, his two most recent films (both well worth renting if you haven’t already), Keep the Lights On feels as if it’s about people you know. I don’t mean that Paul and Erik are recognizable types — since I’ve never met a Danish documentary filmmaker, I couldn’t really say — but rather the opposite. They are so real, so specific, that by the end of the film you feel implicated in their lives, close to them precisely because after all this time, you still don’t understand them completely.
He emerged from late-1960s Detroit as a ready-for-mythologizing troubadour, boasting a voice like Cat Stevens and a songwriting style reminiscent of Bob Dylan. He went by the name Rodriguez — just Rodriguez — and, chances are, you’ve never heard of him. Hell, I was a professional music critic at the time and I never heard of him.
That’s because, despite his considerable talent, and despite earning the respect of those in the industry who worked with him on his two long-forgotten studio albums, Rodriguez’ music career never took off with the American public.
For that, you can blame his painful shyness (he was known to perform with his back to the audience) or you can write it all off to some sort of poor planetary alignment. Whatever the reason, Rodriguez — the fascinating subject of the irresistible and inspirational Searching for Sugar Man, part music documentary, part quest, part homage to artists everywhere — had for decades been merely a footnote in American music history.
But as it turns out, an ocean away, unbeknown to most Americans — and least of all to the man himself — the international man of mystery known as Rodriguez was becoming a cultural phenomenon in South Africa.
"In the mid-‘70s if you walked into a random white, liberal middle-class household that had a turntable and a pot of pop records, and if you flipped through the records you would always see Abbey Road by The Beatles, you would always see Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel — and you would always see Cold Fact by Rodriguez," says Steven Sederman, a longtime fan whose unbridled curiosity and thirst for answers W — coupled with that of journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydom — provides the fuel for director Mike Bendjelloul’s film. "To us it was one of the most famous records of all times. The message it had was, ‘Be anti-establishment.’"
To this day in South Africa, Rodriguez is — without exaggeration — bigger than Elvis. Part of his popularity there came from the way his music spoke to a population in the throes of its fight against Apartheid and the resulting national self-analysis. Part of it also was in the fact that the South African government banned some of his songs from radio airplay — making it that much more delicious to the country’s naturally rebellious youth.
As important as anything else, though, was the air of intrigue surrounding this mysterious musician, this quiet genius.
"The thing was, we didn’t know who this guy was," Sederman said. "All our other rock stars, we had all the information we needed. But this guy? There was nothing. Then we found out that he had committed suicide. He set himself alight onstage and burned to death in front of the audience. It was the most incredible thing. It wasn’t just a suicide, it was probably the most grotesque suicide in rock history."
But so many questions remained unanswered. Where did Rodriguez come from? Where did he draw his inspiration from? And, most of all, why did he end it all the way he did — if that rumor was even, indeed, true?
Those are the questions at the center of Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man, a highly entertaining musical mystery tour that unfolds with the pacing and the allure of a well-told rock ‘n’ roll fairy tale. Benjelloul’s film won the Oscar this year for feature documentary.
At its start, it pretends to be a conventional music doc, though one boasting above-average artistic flourishes, such as brief and wonderfully restrained animated sequences. Then, a third of the way through, it shifts gears and becomes an irresistible detective story. By the time it’s finished, thanks to a wonderfully played twist, Sugar Man becomes the sweetest kind of documentary: a meaningful and inspirational tribute to unrecognized genius everywhere.
After all, Rodriguez is by no means the only artist who — thanks to bad breaks and uncontrollable circumstances — didn’t get the recognition he deserved. There are thousands out there with stories like his — tens of thousands, even — although perhaps not quite as dramatic. One gets the feeling, though, that his story — the details of which are difficult to discuss without giving anything away — had to play out the way that it did.
Bendjelloul gets that, and he makes the most of it. Perhaps his most masterful stroke in his Sundance-decorated film is the way he gets his audience so emotionally invested in the story of a man most had never heard of before. Part of that is because Rodriguez’ tale is such an inspirational one, but part of it also is that Benjelloul packages it in such an embraceable and entertaining way.
Recently, in a fit of pique and overgeneralization, I dismissively told a fellow movie fan that music documentaries are all the same. So many of them follow such a strict formula, I said — with full knowledge that I was overstating things, but no desire to temper myself — that if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
Two days later, I saw Searching for Sugar Man, and it was all that was necessary to remind me that generalization is a fool’s pursuit — and that all music docs are not created equal. Yes, some are formulaic. But some are beautiful, some are singular, some are marvels of storytelling.
And some, like Searching for Sugar Man, are all three.
Farewell, My Queen, Benoit Jacquot’s tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch, opens with a young woman shaking off sleep and scratching mosquito bites on her arm. It’s a lovely arm, as no less than Marie Antoinette (the well-cast Diane Kruger) proclaims. The young woman is Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux, fittingly recessive), who serves as the queen’s reader. Smitten as well as bitten, Sidonie adores the queen and luxuriates in her good graces. Sidonie also reads plays, novels and even fashion magazines to the queen as Marie Antoinette lazes in her bed at Versailles, pretty as a Fragonard picture while France violently seethes.
France hadn’t fully erupted when Sidonie wakes at dawn on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille fell. For Sidonie, the morning seems like any other with an early rise, a splash of lavender water and a jittery dash to the queen’s quarters. On her way Sidonie slips to the ground, suggesting her subservience and foreshadowing the greater fall to come. As usual in this deftly handled movie, Jacquot doesn’t linger on the obvious, in this case her tumble, but cuts to Sidonie looking around, as if to see if anyone has noticed. At Versailles etiquette was all. And "life at court," the 17th-century moralist Jean de La Bruyère wrote, "is a serious, melancholy game."
It’s a game that grows progressively more dangerous as the minutes race by in this efficiently plotted movie, which was written by Jacquot and Gilles Taurand and based on a novel by the French writer Chantal Thomas. It seems possible that Jacquot also dipped into Thomas’s Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, a cultural history that explores the mythifying of the queen largely through the pamphlets written about her. Widely disseminated before the revolution and even after heads began rolling, the pamphlets started off as fairly benign, more Us Weekly than Foreign Affairs — Marie Antoinette’s imperial bouffant was mocked along with her manners — but later become more pointed and politically expedient.
By 1789 the tone of the pamphlets had turned, in Thomas’s words, "from laughter to reprobation." Marie Antoinette was attacked from nose tip to toe, her body becoming a symbolic site of battle. Specifically it was a foreign (she was Austrian), increasingly sexualized body that, as the antiroyalist rhetoric heated up, became perversity incarnate. She was accused of participating in orgies and carrying on with other women. (At her trial in 1793 she was also accused of incest with her son.) The author of one pamphlet feverishly wrote that her mirrors multiplied "all the finer points of her venereal gymnastics." The propagandistic usefulness of the tracts was as naked as the queen’s lust was said to be, as in the 1789 screed The Austrian Woman on the Rampage, or the Royal Orgy.
Not for nothing does Jacquot set the movie’s first major sequence in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at Versailles, using it as a stage to introduce some of the larger dramas unfolding at the palace. This set piece opens shortly after Sidonie takes her introductory spill. Her dress muddied, she runs up the stairs to the queen’s bedroom, only to be scolded for her tardiness by Madame Campan (Noémie Lvovsky, a sly scene stealer), the tremulously watchful lady-in-waiting. As they are about to enter the chamber, a third woman, later identified as Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), loudly flounces out of Marie Antoinette’s bedroom without casting a single look at the hovering women and guards. Palace rumor has it that this is the queen’s lover, and she plays the court game well.
If the rules and the players of this continuing, increasingly dangerous court intrigue remain obscure, it’s because Farewell, My Queen is told through Sidonie’s eyes. She isn’t a privileged witness to history (or an all-knowing character), but she’s resourceful. Tapping her palace sources, notably an archivist (Michel Robin) and a dressmaker (Anne Benoît), Sidonie learns of news known only to the nobility and their trusted stewards: that the Bastille has been seized. "What will happen to us?" she asks, eyes wide. Her limited knowledge combined with what history tells us (even in foggy memory) invests the movie with the shiver of a murder mystery. Like everyone else she doesn’t have the answer to that question, but the fear in their faces suggests that they already know.
This is the first of Jacquot’s movies to be released on DVD in the United States in several years, and it’s a welcome return. (His films include A Single Girl, with the teenage Ledoyen.) Jacquot has always been a sensitive director of actresses, his sympathies evident in his caressing, sometimes ogling camerawork and the time and space he gives women and their stories. That sympathy is evident here too, though crucially, while he doesn’t demonize Marie Antoinette, he doesn’t turn her into a spurious feminist martyr. He tends not to trumpet his politics; he does brandish a few dead rats, some of Versailles’s other inhabitants. But because he shows you what Sidonie sees in the queen — and what the queen sees in Gabrielle — he finds truths beyond the era’s misogynist propaganda.
Farewell, My Queen has none of the mustiness or preciosity that can turn costume dramas into waxworks. Jacquot shot much of it at Versailles, which deepens the period verisimilitude, yet while the gilded rooms and satin clothes look sumptuous if often suitably absurd, almost clownish, the people in them breathe. That’s even true in several stunning scenes when the palace nobles, having heard the bad news from Paris, wander the halls in a daze, their bodies shadowed by the wavering candlelight, their unanswered servant bells ringing. Jacquot isn’t seeking pity for these walking dead — the movie is neither a political argument nor a trivializing fantasy — but, as he does with Marie Antoinette, he grants them a kind of measured absolution just by recognizing their humanity.
Too often I get confused reading the sports pages of the Dallas Morning News these days because, if I didn’t know better, I would think I was reading the Bryan Eagle.
For some unknown reason, the idiots running the sports department at the News have assigned a writer (Kate Hairopoulos) to cover Texas A&M sports full time, while the local college team — a team incidentally coached by a basketball legend — is, for all practical purposes ignored.
I can’t remember the last time I picked up a copy of the News when it didn’t run the Southeast Conference basketball standings. Why? The only school in that conference is almost 200 miles outside of Dallas. Yet, try to find an instance when the paper ran the Conference USA standings.
If you’re a regular reader of the Morning News sports section, you probably have no idea what Conference USA is. That’s the conference that SMU plays in. If you’re a regular reader of the Morning News sports section, you probably have no idea what SMU is. That’s a Dallas based university whose basketball team is coached by one Larry Brown, the only basketball coach in history to coach a team to an NCAA championship (at Kansas in 1988) and an NBA championship (the Detroit Pistons in 2004).
Next year SMU will play in what was the Big East Conference, which has a far stronger basketball legacy than the SEC.
Take a look at today’s paper as an example. On Page 8C, the page the News set aside as its college basketball page, Hairopoulos’ story on an absolutely meaningless game between A&M and LSU is spread across all six columns at the top of the page. Presumably, the paper picked up the tab to send her to College Station. Meanwhile, the non-staff written SMU game story (courtesy of the Associated Press) — the school’s final game of the season — begins two lines from the bottom of the page. True, Tulsa, where SMU played, is 50 miles farther from Dallas, than College Station, but that would not have stopped a legitimate sports editor of a Dallas daily from placing a higher coverage priority on SMU-Tulsa than A&M-LSU.
Earlier this season, I attended SMU’s game with Memphis, the only Conference USA team to be in the nation’s Top 25 this season. That game was never even mentioned in the sports pages of the Morning News. Not an "advance" story before the game — played right here in Dallas, for crying out loud — or a game story the next day.
In this day of the Internet and 24-hour cable news and sports, there’s only reason for a newspaper to exist: To cover local news. The News sports department does an admirable job covering the local professional sports teams. It’s way past time to devote that same attention to the local college sports teams.
Confining extremes of human behavior to a single, drab room, Compliance, the squirmy sophomore feature from the writer and director Craig Zobel, is a slow-motion punch to the groin. As such, it’s fitting that one of our first sights is a large "NO" stenciled in the parking lot of a fast-food joint in suburban Ohio: as the film progresses, the word becomes a silent mantra for viewers who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing.
Distracted by the challenges of a busy Friday, the restaurant supervisor, Sandra (a marvelous Ann Dowd), is further harried by a telephone call from a man claiming to be a police officer investigating a theft by Sandra’s young counter assistant, Becky (Dreama Walker). Middle-aged, a little worn and competent within the limits of a job that doesn’t require much critical thinking, Sandra agrees to search Becky and her belongings. But when nothing is found the caller (perfectly played by Pat Healy) becomes more demanding.
Alternating flattery and intimidation, he persuades the women that a strip search will save Becky from jail and earn Sandra the approval of her regional manager.
But that’s only the beginning. Based on a 2004 incident at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky. (and roughly 70 similar hoaxes nationwide), this psychological horror movie slithers rapidly from uncomfortable to unspeakable. And inasmuch as this level of sordidness can be handled tastefully, Zobel succeeds in expunging all titillation from Becky’s ordeal.
As her humiliations — and our incredulity — escalate, the director periodically allows us some relief, backing his camera out of the storeroom where Becky is confined to check on her mystified colleagues. Snapshots of greasy fries and slimy grills pump up the unsavory atmosphere, while Heather McIntosh’s ominous, cello-driven score plucks our nerves and stirs our stomachs.
Raising troubling questions about the influence of class and education on our response to authority, Zobel cares less about charges of exploitation than about making us feel the monstrousness of the behavior on view. (A sequence involving Sandra’s bewildered boyfriend, brilliantly handled by Bill Camp, teeters right on the edge of plausibility.)
But it’s Sandra herself who carries most of the film’s ethical baggage, her subtle resentment of her attractive prisoner complicating her apparently mindless actions. A brief coda emphasizes the character’s pathos — and wonders if obeying orders is ever a valid moral defense — but makes empathy no easier. And maybe that’s as it should be.
Susan Sontag concluded her book On Photography with a plea for "an ecology of images," an approach to making and reproducing photographs that would protect both the meaning of particular pictures and the integrity of the reality they depict. Since the 1970s, when the essays in Sontag’s book were written, the global glut of images has grown almost beyond measure. In the age of Instagram and Google Earth it is easy to believe — it is sometimes hard not to believe — that every inch of the planet, every human face and patch of wilderness, has been snapped up and uploaded. We have seen it all.
Ron Fricke’s film, Samsara, shot in a grand and vibrant 70-millimeter format — including some remarkable time-lapse photography — is partly a Sontagian case for sustainability. Or, to adapt the food-obsessed ecological language of the moment, it presents a visual argument for slow looking, for careful, meditative attention to what is seen. A spool of arresting, beautifully composed shots without narration or dialogue, Samsara is an invitation to watch closely and to suspend interpretation (another notion Sontag might have approved).
There are some interesting paradoxes clinging to this project. The first and most obvious is that the exquisite singularity of Fricke’s images is overwhelmed, and perhaps undermined, by their sheer abundance and variety. His camera seems to float through the world, hovering above rivers, oceans and forests and then alighting on nearly every continent.
He has an eye, behind the camera and in the editing room (where he worked with the film’s producer, Mark Magidson), for reflections and patterns. The structure of Samsara, which is propelled by the breathy, resonant hum of music by Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci, is like that of a poem or a sonata, a complex tissue of rhymes and motifs.
The film’s title is a Sanskrit word that means "the ever-turning wheel of life," and a loose and sometimes playful sense of the connectedness of everything pervades its 99 minutes. Traveling across 25 countries, to cities and rural outposts, you are invited to notice resemblances. People in factories and animals in factory farms, worshipers and prisoners, dancers and undulating waves — these things exist in a visual and choreographic harmony that allows you to infer themes that link them: work in the global economy, the state of the environment, the interactions and collisions between industry and nature.
But arresting as these images are, they may also be familiar, especially if you have been keeping up with the recent spate of documentaries that investigate the state of the modern world. The chickens and pigs in processing plants might remind you of Food Inc., while shots of crowded third-world slums, Chinese sulfur mines and transvestite prostitutes seem drawn from the lexicon of photojournalism and cinematic consciousness-raising.
This is not a matter of copying but rather a symptom of the visual information glut that alarmed Sontag. The only way to restore the power of images in a world inundated with them is, it seems, to make more, and to produce a context that will make them strange rather than obvious to the point of invisibility. Fricke did something like that 20 years ago with his film Baraka, a precursor to Samsara, and both films owe a clear debt to the work of Godfrey Reggio, on whose 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi Fricke worked as a cinematographer.
Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, with its Philip Glass music and its rapid cascade of intuitively associated images, stands as a monument of socially conscious head-trip cinema. Baraka and Samsara seem, in comparison, more accessible and perhaps a little softer. While they do challenge the viewer’s habits of perception — wrenching us temporarily out of our addiction to story and into a state of reflective reverie — they are also likely to soothe as much as they provoke. The world Samsara gives us is strange and beautiful, and in places disturbing, but it also seems manageable, even in its vastness, and perhaps too easily consumed through beautiful images.
Clear winner: City Manager Mary Suhm, who received the approval and support of 12 of the 15 council members for her actions.
Clear loser: District 14 council member Angela Hunt who, in calling for an independent investigation of Suhm’s actions regarding leasing city-owned land for gas drilling, called the city manager "a liar" and "dishonest," and then had the audacity, after 12 of her colleagues backed Suhm, to declare "no one has the right to attack my character." Thus, she goes on record as being the world’s thinnest skinned pit bull.
City Manager Mary Suhm
the winner and still champion
This whole debate has been much ado about nothing. It has to do with the difference between "city parks" and "city parklands." City parks are those places set aside by the city for some type of recreational purpose, whether it’s playing on swings, swimming, hiking, engaging in activities at a recreational center, cavorting at a splashground or just a marvelous semi-wilderness area like Moss Park where I can let my dog run wild and free without bothering another human soul. City parklands includes all these areas plus any other land owned by the Parks Department. It turns out some of this land is isolated swampland in the far corners of the city where no human being would venture unless they wanted to dump a body in place where they could be assured no one would find it.
When the city council said they didn’t want drilling on parklands it was obvious members were referring to city parks and not to Dallas’ answer to the swamps of the Meadowlands or Pelham Bay.
As a strict environmentalist, I do not support the concept of gas drilling within the city limits of Dallas. But an overwhelming majority of the city council disagrees with me on this issue and I would not argue with anyone who contends that a majority of the residents of this city supports drilling. Plus, when this matter first came up for debate almost six years ago, the city was going through such severe financial straits the council was forced to raise property tax rates just to continue to provide most basic services. At that time they instructed the city manager to "be creative" and (one of my least favorite expressions) "think outside the box" in finding new ways to increase revenues.
Now it seems a small handful of demagogues on the council want to chastise and punish her for doing exactly what they told her to do.
I worked alongside Mary Suhm for a few years when she was first assistant city manager. She has her faults. She tends to overreact in many situations. She can make decisions before all the facts are in. And, occasionally, she puts her faith and trust in individuals who do not deserve that faith and trust.
But I’ll tell you three things about Mary Suhm you can take to the bank. One: She is truthful. Two: She is honest. Three: She always — always — acts in a way she is convinced is in the best interest of the city and the citizens of Dallas.
Hopefully, when she does decide to step down, her replacement will have half of her integrity.
Want to get rid of some trash? First, dump the Dallas’ proposed waste management plan which hopes and prays but does nothing to guarantee the city will achieve zero waste by the year 2040, at least 10 years later than what any reasonable plan should call for.
Chief Wimp
Forrest Turner
But, according to the city’s chief wimp, Assistant City Manager Forrest Turner, this is the will of the people of Dallas. Ha! The constantly misguided and misinformed Turner is basing this on the fact that 50 people — 50 out of a city with a population of 1,223,229 — attended a meeting at City Hall back on Jan. 26 and, according to the city’s own presentation Monday to the Transportation and Environment Committee, could not agree on one single thing.
Here’s the plan in a nutshell: We’re hoping the good citizens of Dallas will voluntarily help us achieve zero waste by the year 2040 and if we see they are not volunteering to do this we’re going to get very, very mad.
Don’t believe me? Read it yourself. I wish I could link you right to the presentation but this link will get you close. It takes you to a list of Monday’s city council committee meetings. Just scroll down to the Transportation and Environment Committee and click on Local Solid Waste Management Plan Update. Your computer needs to be equipped with Adobe Reader to see this travesty in all its glory.
Here’s another kicker. The plan completely removed any mention of bans on plastic bags and foam cups because, chief wimp Turner argues, these are an "environmental and litter related issue."
WHAT? What is that man thinking? What is he drinking? A solid waste management plan, by definition, is an "environmental and litter related issue." When push comes to shove, what we’re talking about here is trash and garbage and please — please! — tell me how can anyone in their right mind can try to argue that garbage is not an environmental issue and litter is not a trash issue. And if the solid waste plan is not an environmental issue, what the hell is he doing briefing it to a body called the Transportation and Environment Committee?
Of course, this city administration has proved time and time again it doesn’t give a damn about the environment anyway. If it did, it wouldn’t be signing leases to drill for shale oil within the city limits or pushing for plans to construct a high speed tollroad through a city park and wilderness area. So this is just another way by chief wimp Turner to shunt aside product bans.
What the City Council will do, ultimately, is embrace this plan today that doesn’t ruffle any feathers. Heaven forbid, that body should demonstrate actual leadership, which often involves major feather ruffling. District 12's Sandy Greyson will argue the plan is "not very proactive" (her words at Monday’s committee hearing), but I’ll bet she, too, will cave and ultimately vote for it.
So what’s the big deal? Because it appears the city is also caving in on the Flow Control issue, in about 50 years the city will be looking for a spot for a new landfill and because that landfill will have to be hundreds of miles away, sanitation rates will climb at least 1,000 times of what they are today. But these wimps don’t care. They won’t be around then. That will be somebody else’s problem. How’s that for leadership.
Relatively dull show, with Seth McFarlane definitely out of his element. And that entire William Shatner episode was an unmitigated disaster. I still maintain the Oscar show would be better without a "host."
Couldn't disagree more with the Dallas Morning News' pronouncement that Ang Lee's win over Steven Spielberg was "a huge upset." The Lincoln bandwagon ground to a halt a couple of weeks ago (right around the time Spielberg arranged to have former President Bill Clinton introduce the film at the Golden Globes) and by the time the awards were ready to be handed out, both Lee and David O. Russell had better chances to win than Spielberg.
I only had two award surprises: Christoph Waltz winning supporting actor (I thought it was close between Tommy Lee Jones and Robert DeNiro) and, of course, the tie in the sound editing category.
I thought Catherine Zeta Jones nailed the All That Jazz number from Chicago, the best musical moment of the night. The sound mixing on Adele's Skyfall was abysmal. Any engineer who allows an orchestra and a chorus to overwhelm that woman's voice should be dismissed on the spot, no appeals allowed.
There are some good movies about breakups (Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Albert Brooks' Modern Romance) but not many where the breakup is amicable. The essence of storytelling is conflict, so someone needs to be unhappy before the happily ever after.
In the case of Celeste and Jesse (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg), the unhappiness belongs to their friends, who can't understand how the couple can laugh, love and live together several months after agreeing to a divorce.
Celeste is a successful marketing executive. Jesse is an unsuccessful artist who sleeps in the studio of the Los Angeles home they share. He's more than a little lazy, but in the secret, silly language they share, Celeste can vent her frustrations about clients such as pop tart Riley Banks (Emma Roberts). So when Jesse meets Belgian beauty Veronica (Rebecca Dayan), Celeste finds herself jealous.
While Celeste fends off a suitor of her own (Chris Messina as a nice guy from her yoga class with whom she has little in common), she tries to prepare for the wedding of her best friend (Ari Graynor) but goes into a tailspin co-piloted by her pot dealer (Will McCormack, whose brief real-life relationship with Jones became the basis for their script).
Jones has been an engagingly patient co-star in comedies such as I Love You, Man and The Big Year and in the TV series Parks and Recreation. In her first starring role, Jones is self-effacingly funny in a Kristen Wiig way without down-playing the intelligence she showed in The Social Network. By comparison, rubber-faced Samberg is irritatingly broad, although the character does grow when he's presented with a sobering challenge. Likewise, Roberts evolves from a cartoonish teen queen to something like a real person.
To its credit, Celeste and Jesse Forever wants to be more than a formulaic farce. It succeeds to the extent that the neighbors keep up with Jones.
One of the rarest qualities of a Hollywood film is provocation — the capacity to shock us. Even horror movies have become predictable.
In 1973, director William Friedkin followed the pioneering gay drama The Boys in the Band and the Oscar-winning thriller The French Connection with arguably the most shocking film in Hollywood history: The Exorcist. Friedkin has never came close to that level of success again, but almost 40 years later, he's made a movie that's equally ripe for dissection, if not consumption.
Killer Joebased on the play by Tracy Letts, is a tasteless tour of the rural underclasss, yet the gun-toting guide is hard to ignore. He's Matthew McConaughey, continuing his midcareer diversion into dangerous territory (Magic Mike, Bernie). He's downright scary as the title character, a swaggering, leather-jacketed Texas cop who moonlights as a hired killer.
Joe is hired by dimwitted trailer trash Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and his debt-ridden son, Chris (Emile Hirsch), to exterminate Ansel's ex-wife and collect her life insurance. The supposed beneficiary is spacey pubescent daughter Dottie (Juno Temple); but the secret schemer in the background is Ansel's stripper squeeze, Sharla (Gina Gershon).
When Chris gambles away the down payment on the murder contract, Joe asks for collateral: Dottie, whom he woos like a rapist Romeo while the rest of the clan cowers outside the double-wide.
Killer Joe is one of the most repugnant parodies of small-town stupidity that you will ever see, and Friedkin amplifies the shrill obscenities with blaring cartoon and kung-fu footage from his art director's fever dreams.
Yet the smeared colors, vivid dialogue and fearlessly unsympathetic cast compel our attention until a ferocious finale of sexualized violence that merits the NC-17 rating (and will permanently curb your appetite for fried chicken).
Watching Killer Joe to the bitter end is like playing the Pick 6 lottery and getting three of the numbers right. You don't win anything, but you still think you're smarter than all those other idiots.
I was about to criticize the City of Dallas’ Legislation Program for the 113th Congress, which was briefed to City Council today, for only paying lip service to deficit reduction — and I’m still going to do that — but first I must applaud the city for accepting the reality of global science change.
This is a big step forward for a council that, regardless of how blue the county is trending, is still a rather conservative body. There are Tea Party nuts out there who, regardless of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, absolutely refuse to accept the reality of climate change and many of those right-wingnuts are Congressmen representing the North Central Texas area.
Yet here is the city of Dallas, saying in its Legislation Program: "Although the challenges created by global climate change (emphasis mine), air pollution and energy security are international in scope, local governments are well placed to implement policies and pursue innovations to meet these challenges, especially if they are given the resources to do so."
What the City is saying in this section is basically this: Don’t order us to do anything that reduces greenhouse gases unless you give us the money to carry out those orders.
But the overall message of the program is "Don’t cut any more of our funding." And that’s where I have a problem.
If there is one thing upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree it is that the national deficit must be reduced. Where they disagree, of course, is how to reduce it. The Democrats argue that the deficit should be reduced with a combination of budget cuts and tax increases, primarily by eliminating deductions that benefit only the wealthiest of our citizens and the largest of our profit-making corporations. Republicans, for the most part, want the deficit reduced solely by cutting spending.
It appears to me the City is siding more with the Democrats on this issue. Here is what it had to say on deficit reduction:
"The City of Dallas supports efforts to reduce the federal deficit through a balanced approach (emphasis mine). Elimination of the federal deficit solely through discretionary spending cuts is impossible. Deficit reduction efforts should neither disproportionately focus on core local government programs nor reduce or delay much-needed investments in our nation’s core infrastructure. The reduction of the federal deficit should share the burden evenly and should not disproportionately harm national defense and our troops, safety net programs, or our nation’s cities."
My problem here is a lack of specificity on what the city means by "a balanced approach." That phrase is the one Democrats use to argue for both revenue increases and spending cuts. It appears the City doesn’t want to offend those millionaires here in Dallas, many of whom give money to the City, or the Congressional leaders from the area like Pete Sessions, Joe Barton, Sam Johnson, Jeb Hensarling et al to whom "a balanced approach" is anathema.
So my reaction to the city’s congressional legislative plan, if I was a member of Congress, would be "All well and good, but don’t tell me what not to cut until you give me a viable alternative for reducing the deficit."
I was 19 years old — a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. The summer before, my father, a vice president at Brown & Root, had been a delegate from Texas to the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Although he was a major supporter of Adlai Stevenson, he was pledged to Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas because, back then, Texas had something called the Unit Rule. The Unit Rule stated that the candidate supported by the majority of the delegation would be the candidate supported by the entire delegation.
There were five serious candidates vying for the Democration nomination for president — Stevenson, Johnson, Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington and a brash young Irish-Catholic senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
My dad did me an immense favor by taking me with him to the convention in Los Angeles. On Monday of that week, former President Harry S Truman, an avid Symington supporter, blew into town and held a news conference at the train station saying that, at 41. Kennedy was simply too young to be president. Kennedy’s camp announced the Massachusetts senator would not only answer the charge, but answer it a meeting of the Missouri delegation’s caucus the following day. My dad took me to that caucus and I heard Kennedy deliver a speech in which he outlined all the things that could not have happened in our history had individuals 41 or under be denied positions of responsibility. He ended his list with these words "…and Columbus could not have discovered America." My dad turned to me at that moment and said "There’s your next president."
I was not in Washington when Kennedy delivered his inaugural address — still the greatest in history (Proof: I doubt if anyone can quote a line from any other inaugural address, but millions who weren’t even born when Kennedy was elected knows "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.") But I’ll never forget how it electrified and energized me when I saw it on a black and white TV in Austin, Texas.
When I saw this superb re-interpretation of this great speech, prepared by the Harvard Kennedy School, it saddens me more than it electrifies or energizes. Perhaps that’s because the Kennedy presidency lasted only around 1,000 days and ended so tragically. If watching this doesn’t bring a lump to your throat or a tear to your eye, then you’re just too young. But you can still appreciate its majesty and purity of thought.
It takes a while to sort out who’s who in the gabby high school reunion comedy 10 Years. But once you do, the movie that comes together is an unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn’t aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like The Big Chill, American Graffiti or Diner. But it has enough markers — a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar — to suggest an approximate date.
This first feature directed by Jamie Linden, a writer of We Are Marshall and Dear John, who also wrote the screenplay for 10 Years, doesn’t define a generational mood beyond observing that a decade after graduation, several former classmates at Lake Howell High School (named after Linden’s alma mater in Florida) are struggling to grow up.
About 20 revelers converge at a hotel — the reunion was filmed at the Hotel Andaluz in Albuquerque — for a well-lubricated evening of reminiscing and catching up. The movie focuses on about a dozen of them, with Jake (Channing Tatum), the class jock, receiving the most attention.
Tatum, one of the movie’s producers, gives a disarmingly natural and appealing performance as this 28-year-old former high school hero who brings his longtime girlfriend, Jess (Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Tatum’s wife), to the fete. He is contemplating giving her an engagement ring he has stowed in his car’s glove compartment.
When a former sweetheart, Mary (Rosario Dawson), unexpectedly shows up with a husband, Paul (Ron Livingston), there is some awkwardness as the old flame sputters to life. The glum, wordless Paul leaves the party early, as does the beautiful and understanding Jess. But the movie wisely refrains from turning these pangs of desire and regret into shrill melodrama.
One alumnus, Reeves (Oscar Isaac), is a pop star who serenades the assemblage with his biggest hit, a sweet folk-pop love song inspired by the demure, hesitant Elise (Kate Mara), his secret high school crush. She is not into pop music and is only vaguely aware of his renown. The rootless, itinerant life he describes to her is a lonely existence, and although they have chemistry, she resists jumping into his arms.
Other characters regress alarmingly. The competitive buddies Marty (Justin Long) and A J (Max Minghella) vie for the attention of the radiant Anna (Lynn Collins), a sultry beauty who arrives in a fur stole, and end up making fools of themselves when they play a childish prank. Once their defenses are down, these three are not as they first presented themselves to be.
The most badly behaved of the group, Cully (Chris Pratt), was the class bully, who ostentatiously apologizes to those he teased, especially Peter (Aaron Yoo), a nerd he used to torment with homophobic remarks and who cringes at the sight of him. Then Cully repeats his ugly pattern while drinking himself into oblivion as his embarrassed wife (Ari Graynor) stands by. Stumbling onto the stage, he sings the worst version you’ve ever heard of The Lady in Red.
10 Years settles into a sweet and sad ending, with enough hints of bitterness to keep it from being cloying.
It takes a kind of crazy tenacity for an aspiring stand-up comedian to endure the grubby humiliations of life on the bottom rung of the professional ladder. Watching Matt Pandamiglio, the jocular, slightly schlubby alter ego of the comic performer and writer Mike Birbiglia, take his act on the road in Sleepwalk With Me is like observing an out-of-shape military recruit stumbling through the first week of boot camp. Survival depends less on talent than on having a thick enough skin to recover after every setback and still maintain a facade of genial equanimity.
Matt’s ordeal is not as excruciating as you might expect because he is unflappable and reasonably good-humored even in the worst of times. Before his road trip he works as a bartender in a New York comedy club, where he is seldom allowed to test his skills.
Despite scant evidence of significant talent in his early performances, which rely on flat jokes that elicit more groans than giggles, he refuses to give up. The first time he earns genuine laughs is when he muses out loud about his troubled relationship with Abby (Lauren Ambrose), his loyal, supportive live-in girlfriend of eight years.
Suddenly he connects with an audience on a human level. But that involves betraying his relationship by dismissing it. His remark — "I decided I’m not going to get married until I’m sure that nothing else good can happen in my life" — is not an encouraging sign for the couple’s future happiness.
This small, likable movie, which Birbiglia adapted from his 2008 one-man show with the producer Ira Glass (This American Life), Joe Birbiglia (his brother) and Seth Barrish, is several things loosely wound together by Matt’s breezy narration directly to the camera.
It is an unvarnished portrait of the kill-or-be-killed stand-up comedy world’s lower echelon, in which paying dues means driving from gig to gig for meager wages in places that are nearly empty or are home to crowds that subject the performer to brutal heckling.
It is also the story of a relationship that deteriorates as Matt’s ambition outweighs his uncertain commitment to Abby, who demonstrates extraordinary tolerance for his childishness and reluctance to marry. Beautiful, smart, funny and empathetic, Abby is about as good as it gets. And Ambrose infuses her with a warmer, more mature version of the sensitivity that she brought to Claire Fisher, her character in the much missed HBO series Six Feet Under.
The strangest thread of the movie has to do with Matt’s worsening sleep disorder, brought on by relationship anxiety, which he refuses to deal with until it endangers his safety. He has weird dreams during which he walks in his sleep. In the most perilous somnambulistic misadventure he hurts himself jumping from a second-story hotel window.
These episodes, some staged as surreal dream sequences, inject this otherwise prosaic-looking movie with a visual pizazz that makes Sleepwalk With Me more than just a glorified stand-up act.
With one ill-advised move Senator Marco Rubio destroyed any dreams he might have harbored to be elected President of the United States.
And here’s another tip for the Republican from Florida (free of charge, because that’s the kind of guy I am): Before he goes on national television rebutting the President Obama’s State of the Union Speech by saying "Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in," he should not be doing this.
Picture: Argo
Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln
Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Supporting Actor (the toughest race to call): Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook just barely over Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Director: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Adapted Screenplay: Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Original Screenplay: Michael Haneke, Amour
Animated Feature: Wreck-It Ralph
Cinematography: Life Of Pi
Costume Design (no contest): Anna Karenina
Documentary Feature: Searching for Sugar Man
Documentary Short (who knows?): Open Heart narrowly over Inocente
Film Editing: Argo
Foreign Language (Duh): Amour
Makeup: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Score: Life of Pi
Song: "Skyfall," Skyfall
Production Design: Anna Karenina
Animated Short: Paperboy
Live Action Short (I never get this one right): Curfew
Sound Editing: Skyfall
Sound Mixing: Les Miserables
Visual Effects: Life of Pi
COLLEGE MEN
1. Florida 18-2 (3)
2. Duke 19-2 (4)
3. Michigan 20-2 (1)
4. Indiana 20-2 (5)
5. Kansas 19-2 (2)
6. Gonzaga 21-2 (8)
7. Arizona 19-2 (6)
8. Miami, Fla. 17-3 (9)
9. Louisville 18-4 (10)
10. Syracuse 18-3 (7)
11, Ohio State 17-4 (11)
12. Minnesota 17-5 (12)
13. Creighton 20-3 (13)
14. Michigan State 18-4 (14)
15. Pittsburgh 18-5 (20)
16. Cincinnati 18-4 (17)
17. Colorado State 18-4 (NR)
18. New Mexico 19-3 (22)
19. Kansas State 17-4 (NR)
20. Georgetown 16-4 (NR)
21. North Carolina State 16-6 (21)
22. Butler 18-4 (18)
23. Oklahoma State 15-5 (NR)
24. UNLV 17-5 (23)
25. Wisconsin 15-7 (NR)
Dropped out: Marquette (25), Mississippi (19), Oregon (15), San Diego State (24), Wichita State (16).
COLLEGE WOMEN
1. Baylor 20-1 (2)
2. Connecticut 20-1 (1)
3. Notre Dame 20-1 (3)
4. Duke 20-1 (5)
5. Stanford 20-2 (4)
6. California 19-2 (6)
7. Maryland 18-3 (7)
8. Texas A&M 17-5 (11)
9. Kentucky 19-3 (10)
10. Penn State 17-3 (8)
11. Tennessee 17-5 (9)
12. Louisville 19-4 (15)
13. North Carolina 20-3 (12)
14. South Carolina 19-3 (13)
15. Purdue 18-3 (14)
16. Georgia 19-3 (21)
17. UCLA 17-4 (24)
18. Iowa State 15-5 (16)
19. Delaware 18-3 (22)
20. Colorado 16-5 (17)
21. Dayton 19-1 (19)
22. Syracuse 18-3 (25)
23. Wisconsin Green Bay 17-2 (23)
24. Florida State 18-4 (20)
25. Oklahoma State 25-5 (18)
NBA
1. San Antonion 38-11 (1)
2. Oklahoma City 35-12 (2)
3. Miamia 30-14 (4)
4. Los Angeles Clippers 24-15 (3)
5. Memphis 30-16 (5)
6. Denver 30-18 (6)
7. Golden State 30-17 (7)
8. New York 30-15 (8)
9. Chicago 29-18 (10)
10. Brooklyn 28-19 (9)
Literate, intelligent and a model of accomplished European filmmaking, Unforgivable showcases the kind of emotional complexity that is all but gone from the screen these days. The interplay between its characters is so intricate that the very nature of the film seems to change, more than once, as we watch it.
Directed by France’s veteran André Téchiné and co-written by him from a novel by Philippe Dijan, Unforgivable starts as an adult romance but quickly becomes a thriller. It then takes an unexpected turn toward bleakness before transitioning into something altogether different.
To do something this psychologically involved requires not just an accomplished director (Wild Reeds and The Girl on the Train are among Téchiné’s best-known works) but also actors up to the task, and Unforgivable has what it needs in French stars André Dussollier and Carole Bouquet. Plus there’s Italy’s Adriana Asti, a luminary as far back as 1964's Before the Revolution, a sequence from which is inserted in this film.
What’s at stake in Unforgivable is an exploration of the unknowability of the human heart, a look at the inexplicable, often painful things people do to each other, especially — like children to parents, lovers to each other — to those they care most about.
It’s not surprising that Unforgivable has a thriller element, because its protagonist, Francis (Dussolier), is a French writer who’s done so well with them that he’s become known as "the king of neo-Gothic thrillers."
Francis is introduced in Venice, where he wants to temporarily relocate to write his next book. Judith (Bouquet) is a French-born real estate agent he consults who makes an immediate impression. So immediate that before the afternoon is over, he impulsively asks her to move in with him, and she eventually agrees.
Following Judith’s advice, Francis rents a house not in the touristic heart of Venice but on the remote island of Sant ‘Erasmo, accessible only by boat. (Taking a similar tack, cinematographer Julien Hirsch has concentrated on deftly providing unexpected looks at a very familiar city.)
Unforgivable cuts almost immediately to 18 months later, when the happy couple welcomes a visit from Alice (Melanie Thierry), Francis’ adult daughter from an earlier marriage, and her daughter.
Though Alice seems friendly enough, there is an edge to everything she says, almost as if making trouble is second nature to her. She soon proceeds to do exactly that: Leaving her daughter behind, Alice promptly disappears.
Francis assumes Alice is with Alvise (Andrea Pergolesi), the wastrel son of an aristocratic family, but the young man denies it. What is undeniable is that his daughter’s disappearance is a serpent that worms its way into Francis’ and Judith’s previously happy lives.
Frustrated, worried, unable to sleep, Francis hires Anna Maria (Asti), a local private detective who happens to be an earlier lover of Judith’s, to try to find out where his daughter is.
Unable to leave well enough alone, the obsessive, suddenly jealous Francis also ends up hiring Anna Maria’s reprobate ex-con son Jeremie (Mauro Conte) to follow Judith, to see where she is going and, more to the point, to find out whether she is seeing anyone on the side. It’s no wonder that Judith says at one point, "The better I know you, the less I know who you are."
If any of this sounds familiar, rest assured it is not. Téchiné is a restless director, a fastidious storyteller who is not interested in what less adventurous movies have to say about human relationships. He wants to dig deeper, even if the results aren’t always clear.
Helping the director enormously is co-star Bouquet, who is exceptionally good as a woman of mystery almost despite herself. With an air of coolness projected through profound blue eyes, Bouquet as Judith projects a combination of independence and unknowability that both attracts and frustrates Dussollier’s Francis. This is the way people are, Unforgivable says, and we’d better get used to it.
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