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.
Dallas Morning News sports columnist Rich Gosselin orchestrated an interesting exercise today, inviting readers to conduct their own draft for the Dallas Cowboys. He sets up the hypothesis by reiterating the team’s needs: two starting offensive linemen, a starting safety, an impact defensive tackle, a blocking tight end, a second running back, a third wide receiver and, for added depth, another safety, cornerback, linebacker and pass rusher. "Also," he writes, "keep your eyes open for a down-the-line quarterback if one’s there at the right price."
He makes the exercise a lot easier by offering a number of options at each level of the draft.
So here’s what I would have done. First, I would not have traded out of the 18th pick. Instead, I would have snapped up defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd, a Florida prospect many believe would be a top 10 pick, if not a top five pick. In his junior (last) year at Florida, he was credited with 31 tackles (19 solo), eight of which went for lost yardage. He was a Sporting News first team all-American and a third team AP all-American.
Because I didn’t trade down, that means my next pick is at 47, and there I’m taking Larry Warford, an offensive guard who started 37 consecutive games for the Kentucky Wildcats and didn’t allow a single sack his senior year
With the 80th selection (I can’t pick at 74 because I didn’t do the aforementioned trade), I’m going with the same player the Cowboys chose: J.J. Wilcox, the safety from Georgia Southern with 4.5 speed and who also can return kicks (he averaged 25.2 yards per kickoff return his senior year). He also had 88 tackles, two interceptions and three pass breakups.
Thus, with my first three picks, I addressed three pressing needs, which is much more than the Cowboys braintrust accomplished.
It’s now the third day of the draft and with the 114th pick, although it would be tempting to take a second guard (Earl Watford from James Madison), I’m going to take a flyer on "a down-the-line quarterback" and take Landry Jones of Oklahoma, the Big 12's all-time leading passer. He just seems like too great a bargain to bypass here and, frankly, I’m not sold on the idea of Tony Romo being the answer to the Cowboys’ offensive questions—never have been, never will be.
Besides, with the 151st pick, I can grab my second offensive lineman, Tanner Hawkinson, a 6-5, 298-pound tackle out of the University of Kansas. Because of the current quality of my offensive line, I feel relatively positive Hawkinson can step right in and be a starter.
With my final pick, the 185th choice, I’m taking tight end Michael Williams. Because he played his college ball under Nick Saban at Alabama, you know he’s an excellent blocker. He also had three receptions, one for a touchdown, in the national championship game against Notre Dame.
So that’s my draft and, although I’m prejudiced, of course, I think it’s a better one than the Cowboys had.
Silver Linings Playbook *****Silver Linings Playbook is rich in life’s complications. It will make you laugh, but don’t expect it to fit in any snug genre pigeonhole. Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent. For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.
Broken City **½ To put it as positively as possible, there’s never a dull moment in this flick — and that’s not something you can take for granted at this time of the year. At the same time, though, there’s rarely a believable moment in the script.
The Guilt Trip **½ There is something promising about the match-up of an old-school show-biz kid like Barbra Streisand with the modern, anxiously self-aware Seth Rogen, but what could have been the multigenerational Thunderdome of Jewish Humor instead turns out bloodlessly disappointing.
The Details *** Top-shelf cast, headed by Tobey Maguire, slips into familiar grooves of adultery, lies, blackmail, and pet poisoning. It’s the spectacular blow-ups and dressing-downs that make this such a nervy pleasure.
Not Fade Away **** By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat. It’s a small gem with a killer rock soundtrack, well worth seeking out.
Neighboring Sounds ****½ With his sound designer, Pablo Lamar, director Kleber Mendonça Filho has created the aural landscape of a horror movie. And, for much of its running time, a thriller without a plot. Filho’s mastery of pacing, theme and stylistic eccentricity throughout is so assured as to be breathtaking.
Tchoupitoulas ****½ A jewel-bright whoosh of a ride through nighttime New Orleans. Bill and Turner Ross — the directors, producers, camera operators, and troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas — could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in–New Orleans documentary for each of the world’s great cities. It explores the border between innocence and experience. It is alive with the risk and curiosity of youth, and unapologetic in insisting that the pursuit of fun can be a profound and transformative experience.
Only the Young **½ Rarely coalesces into anything more meaningful than a casual collection of moments. Maybe that’s the point.
Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa **½ Part of the issue here may be the nature of the talking heads themselves, most of whom are culled from Trungpa’s inner circle and lack the objectivity needed to properly judge his philosophy or make it accessible. The movie goes mushy when it should be critical, and leaves you with questions that it’s not prepared to answer.
Let's see. With their first pick they passed on defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd, considered by many a top five talent who would have filled a major area of need, and instead traded down to get Wisconsin center Travis Frederick, who would have been available in the third round.
But it was the second pick that was really dumfounding. Why on earth did the Cowboys take tight end Gavin Escobar of San Diego State, admittedly a fine pass catcher but a notoriously poor blocker, unless coach Jason Garrett plans to emulate New England's double tight end offense? But to do that, the Cowboys would need a New England quality offensive line. This is the third time since 2006 the Cowboys have taken a tight end in the second round and those picks -- Anthony Fasano and Martellus Bennett -- didn't exactly work out that well.
The Cowboys will make the argument that Escobar was the best player available at that pick, but I'm not buying it, especially when a better player and a real need, offensive guard Larry Warford of Kentucky, was available.
With the 74th pick in the draft the Cowboys shocked me again, passing on offensive tackle Terron Armstead of Arkansas-Pine Bluff, to take a wide receiver, Terrance Williams of Baylor, over the superior WR Keenen Allen of California. My issues with Williams is that Baylor ran the spread which means he didn't face the kind of coverages he's going to see in the NFL. Plus, at 6-2, 208, he could take a real pounding in the NFL, especially running across the middle.
I did like the Cowboys' final pick of the day, strong safety J.J. Wilcox out of Georgia Southern, even though he only played the position his final year in school. He spent his first three seasons as a wide receiver and running back, but that actually might help him figuring out offensive tendencies. He is regarded as a smart player and physical tackler. I'm betting, barring injury, he'll be starting for the Cowboys when the 2013 season opens.
Going into the draft, everyone agreed the biggest area of needs for the Cowboys were the offensive line and safety. They addressed two of those needs (although not nearly well enough on the OL) and I will admit that the current Cowboys offensive line is so poor, they will probably be able to scavenger some scraps tomorrow that will be good enough to start in 2013.
Of course, that doesn't make them a contender. In fact, I didn't see the Cowboys do anything in Days 1 and 2 of the draft to make them any better than last year's 8-8.
The Impossible **½ An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.
Promised Land **½ There’s reason to worry when a simplistic movie like this one takes on an issue of overarching importance to the nation’s future. The challenges presented by fracking are immense, and Capra-esque nostalgia isn’t helpful.
A Haunted House (no stars) No-holds-barred comedy is one thing, hurtful thoughtlessness is something else entirely. An ostensible comedy shouldn’t have so many moments that feel so ugly.
The Central Park Five *** Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It’s also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers — from their arrest through their absolution — it fails to add anything substantively new.
Any Day Now *** An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants the child in question.
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga *** There is indeed much beauty on display, from the icy Taiga landscape to the age-old trapping techniques passed on through generations. But this does feel like a lesser Werner Herzog project (he joined on after it was shot). For viewers who don’t share his awe, a short film probably would have sufficed.
Wuthering Heights **½ If you can handle the glacial pacing and lack of dialogue, there is a certain squirmy satisfaction to watching this well-worn story of love, cruelty and madness play out minus the long-winded speeches and romantic catharsis.
Family Weekend ** This belabored comedy, directed by Benjamin Epps, has a slick visual veneer and some capable performances, especially by Olesya Rulin and Joey King. But the script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amounts to airplane pablum.
Someone asked me today to pick a winner in the District 13 City Council race, the one between Jennifer Staubach Gates, Leland R. Burk and two other candidates no one cares about except their immediate families. After giving an answer, I fired back with a question of my own: Why are these candidates seeking this seat now held by retiring Ann Margolin?
Jennifer Staubach Gates
So I decided to visit their respective Web pages in search of an answer. Ms. Gates, who, of course, would hope and pray we don’t forget the "Staubach," says "Being a great city means having great basics. As our Councilmember, Jennifer will focus on improving the city services that touch our everyday lives, and she’ll making sure that City Hall is continually working to cut waste, find efficiencies and protect our taxpayers."
Talk about hyperbole. What does that mean exactly? Has she identified "waste" to cut? What efficiencies? And protect us from what, pray tell. (What we need is protection from empty headed city council candidates.)
She certainly has identified ways to spend more taxpayer money. "Council District 13 has the worst streets in the city with 170 lane miles of streets that need reconstruction, and another 70 lane miles of streets that need resurfacing. … As our Councilmember, Jennifer will work to prioritize the immediate improvement of our streets, and she will work to ensure regular maintenance so that we do not fall into such disrepair in the future."
That costs money. So does this:
"Jennifer knows first hand the value of our local parks, greenspaces and rec centers. As our councilmember, she will work to ensure these amenities are clean, well-maintained and enhanced, so that our neighbors of all ages can have access to the outdoor spaces that improve our quality of life."
So she’s for better streets and cleaner parks. That’s really standing tough on the issues.
But how about Burk?
Leeland Burk
He promises, according to his Web Page "to continue the strong fiscal leadership and neighborhood advocacy shown by previous District 13 leaders."
What???? Translate please. Is he including those previous District 13 leaders who are convicted felons?
He lists his priorities as "stimulate smart economic development (as opposed, I guess, to stupid economic development), protect the character of District 13's neighborhoods (does this include Five Points, one of the highest crime areas in the city?), make sure your tax dollars are not wasted (he doesn’t say how, but the way one of his "previous District 13 leaders," Mitchell Rasansky did it, was to be in the minority and vote against everything) and support the efforts of all who are combating crime" (which, I guess, answers my earlier question about whether he will protect the character of all his district’s hoods).
So he’s for economic development, neighborhood protection, against wasteful spending and against crime. Now that’s standing tough.
What I find interesting is that neither Gates nor Burke have the courage to publish a stand on a "real" issue facing the district, such as a lighted soccer field for Ursuline Academy.
Obviously, what we have here is a popularity contest, not a race involving issues. Just another example of why the city is so lacking in leadership from its elected officials and another reason I’m thankful for our council-manager form of government, Heaven forbid we should allow these dolts to actually run things around here.
That’s about how many Americans Texas senators Coward Cronyn and Coward Cruz murdered today. The blood is dripping from their cowardly fingers.
According to every legitimate public opinion poll, the overwhelming majority of Americans favor stricter background checks before a person can purchase a weapon designed to do only one thing: kill. A majority favors the banning of magazines that hold more than 10 bullets and semi automatic attack war weapons in private hands. Even a majority of NRA members favor these regulations.
This is either Cronyn or Cruz; I can't tell them apart.
But, as we’ve all learned, money trumps democracy every single time, especially when dealing with a body of legislators as cowardly as Cronyn, Cruz and their ilk. The gun dealers and the gun manufacturers have the money; the American people don’t. Cowards Cronyn and Cruz simply lack the courage to stand up to special interests. Instead, they see it as their mission to make sure that America’s mass murderers are the most well armed mass murderers the world has ever known.
270.
That’s how many Americans are shot and killed every day of the year. But, according to Cowards Cruz and Cronyn, their deaths are not worth preventing. According to Cowards Cronyn and Cruz, the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School should be forgotten. Their brief lives and their tragic deaths are not anything to be concerned about, according to the two cowards we sent to the Senate.
Instead of looking at the overwhelming need for safety and sanity in the United States, Cowards Cronyn and Cruz blindly and unthinkingly catered to the whims of the gun lobby.
Between 20 and 40 percent of all guns sold in the United States today were sold without the seller performing any kind of a background check. According to a New York Times story on Wednesday, it is easy for criminals to purchase weapons over the Internet, weapons that will later be used to kill innocent Americans during the commission of criminal activities.
Because Cowards Cronyn and Cruz could not come up with logical explanations to explain their cowardly stance, they resorted to what they do best: lying. They claimed requiring stricter background checks would result in a national gun registry, even though the bill contained specific language to prohibit that. One of their fellow murderers, Senator Coward Coburn of Oklahoma argued the bill would raise taxes. Another, Senator Coward Flake of Arizona said the bill would require a background check on a gun sold via an office bulletin board. (Actually, I wish the bill did require that, but it didn’t. Another lie.)
The people of Texas are too wishy-washy to do anything about this, but I’m sincerely hoping that voters in other states will be angered enough by the actions of this cowardly minority in the Senate (a majority, in fact, did vote for sensible gun legislation, but the cowards made sure a majority didn’t win this time) to replace them with representatives who put the will of the people ahead of loyalty to a lobby.
As President Obama said last night: "Sooner or later, we are going to get this right. The memories of these children demand it, and so do the American people."
Django Unchained*****The film doesn't play it safe, so neither will I. Instead, I'll say that it finds writer/director Quentin Tarantino perched improbably but securely on the top of a production that's wildly extravagant, ferociously violent, ludicrously lurid and outrageously entertaining, yet also, remarkably, very much about the pernicious lunacy of racism and, yes, slavery's singular horrors. It also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot.
Trashed ***½ If we must talk trash, Jeremy Irons — assisted by a scientist or two and Vangelis's doomy score — is an inspired choice of guide. Soothing and sensitive, his liquid gaze alighting on oozing landfills and belching incinerators, he moves through the film with a tragic dignity that belies his whimsical neckwear and jaunty hats.
Future Weather ***½ Revolving around a quietly spectacular performance by young Perla Haney-Jardine, Future Weather integrates a green message into a striking and emotional drama about intergenerational female conflict.
A Whisper to a Roar ***½ An impressive array of archival news footage, enlightening interviews with activists, politicos, academics and journalists, plus a dispensable Alfred Molina-narrated animated parable, round out this provocative, if at times overly ambitious documentary about the soft dictatorships that constrained five different countries and the peaceful revolutions that sought to expunge them.
Dragon **½ As a whole, it does not quite work, especially at the end, when director Peter Chan tries for a Shakespearean climax of filial rebellion and paternal rage. But at its less grandiose moments, the combination of expressive acting and kinetic action pays off in ways that are likely to satisfy both novices and adepts in martial-arts fandom.
Save the Date **½ The film has the vapid, beige feel of an off-the-peg product made to exploit a niche market rather than a film with something on its mind about what it means to make the jump from youth to adulthood today.
One Day on Earth **½ The film is driven by a we-are-the-world connectedness, but remains a travelogue in search of a defining center. The overall impression is as fleeting as much of the imagery that flashes across the screen.
I resurrect this wonderful commercial not only because it deserves another look but also to remind viewers it was written and directed by the Coen Brothers, proving (1) not all their best work is on the big screen and (2) they have wicked sense of humor I wish they would employ more often.
The search for the truth in the remarkable documentary The Flat begins in modern-day Israel. After the death of Grandma Gerda at age 98, her family begins the long process of cleaning out the apartment that’s like a slice of prewar Berlin life. There are lots of gloves. Lots of bags. Lots of shoes. And lots of books. It’s hoarding with panache.
Yet it’s a newspaper clipping about a Nazi in Palestine that most intrigues the family, and especially her grandson, Arnon Goldfinger, also the film’s director.
Turns out his German grandparents, who escaped the Holocaust by immigrating to Palestine, were close friends with a high official in the S.S. and his wife before — and, more surprisingly, after — World War II. The official was associated with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and was the predecessor to Adolf Eichmann.
Goldfinger looks for clues about how this relationship happened, interviewing his mother, family friends, experts and the daughter of Leopold von Mildenstein, the Nazi in question. There are startling revelations, guilt and lots of people in denial.
The movie feels more like a thriller and a mystery than a documentary. Perhaps someday, someone will be inspired to dramatize this astonishing story.
I wish you could see Rust and Bone, French director Jacques Audiard’s beautiful melodrama, without knowing what happens at the half-hour point. But if you’ve seen the magazine interviews with Marion Cotillard, or the reviews of the film, pro and con, when it opened in theaters, or even its trailer like the one above, you already know.
In a dreamlike flash, Cotillard’s Stephanie, a trainer of orca whales at a Marineland park, loses her legs. She wakes in a hospital, like so many other characters in so many movies — especially war movies — to gaze at the end of the bed and the flat nothing of a crisp, white sheet. The shock is seismic.
That’s not the only jolt in Rust and Bone, a love story and a story of two people who bring each other back to life. Audiard, whose screenplay here synthesizes elements of a short story by Craig Davidson, opens with the close-up of feet tramping down the side of a wide road pocked with food franchises and gas stations. Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his 5-year-old son (Armand Verdure) are hoboing their way to Antibes, in the south of France, thumbing rides, hopping trains, scrounging garbage bins for food.
Ali is heading to his sister’s, where he hopes to unload his boy and find a job. Which he does, as a bouncer in a nightclub. And that’s how he meets Stephanie, pre-accident, when she comes to dance and gets caught up in a nasty brawl.
The pair reconnect with a phone call that leads to a surprisingly casual meeting, after Stephanie becomes a double amputee. Rust and Bone tracks these two souls — his life rooted in violence, hers marked by a sort of empty sybaritism — as they discover how much they need each other, help each other, and challenge each other. (And want each other — the sex here is urgent, vital.)
Audiard, who made the uncompromising prison saga A Prophet, is like a gritty, realist Douglas Sirk — throwing his characters into whirlwind scenarios that are filled with big emotions and fateful turns of events. But there’s a deep truthfulness here, too, in the way Ali and Stephanie latch on to each other out of need, and then begin to realize they are in love.
Thanks to the ace deployment of digital effects, Stephanie’s absent limbs are, to the viewer, wholly believable, as are the prosthetics she gets fitted with later. But it is what Cotillard does with her body, her face, her eyes, that brings real believability to Stephanie’s plight. It’s an incredibly nuanced performance (the look of total despair in the hospital room; the poetry and exhilaration of the moment when Stephanie, on a sunlit balcony, reenacts the dancelike gestures she used when she worked with the whales). It was criminal that Cotillard, winner of the best-actress Oscar a few years ago for La Vie en Rose, wasn’t recognized again for this performance.
Schoenaerts is just as good. As Ali falls into a world of illegal boxing, winning money and pummeling opponents, it’s like somebody finally knocked the guy the right way in the head: The world, with Stephanie at his side, finally makes sense.
The narrative at the heart of Rust and Bone is a vehicle for sentiment and over-the-top histrionics if ever there was one, but Audiard and his two stars deliver the exact opposite: a film thrillingly raw and essential, life-affirming, sublime.
In an efficient, mostly wordless sequence near the beginning of her quietly affecting film A Simple Life, the director Ann Hui shows the rhythms of shared routine and intimacy that bind the lead characters. Ah Tao (Deanie Ip) has fixed Roger Leung (Andy Lau) an elaborate meal that seems to be his ordinary fare. As she shuffles around serving, Roger eats with a kind of distracted concentration. There are no thank yous or compliments, just a request for ox tongue soon.
These two aren’t married or lovers, but servant and master. Ah Tao, orphaned as a child, has been with the Leung family for 60 years, since long before Roger was born. Now he is the last of his family in Hong Kong — the others have decamped to San Francisco — and Ah Tao works for him alone, sharing his compact apartment.
Just as soon as Hui establishes their relationship, she changes its terms. Ah Tao has a stroke and announces she’s retiring. What’s more, she says, she wants to live in an old people’s home. In scenes with an almost documentary flavor, Roger finds her one. We learn about this growth industry in Hong Kong, about the price of a single room versus a shared one and about the various charges for an escort outside the home. (South Asian immigrants are the cheapest.)
Once Ah Tao has moved, the old-age home becomes the film’s center. Roger visits Ah Tao there regularly. He takes her to restaurants and looks out for her as she always has for him.
That’s more or less the story of A Simple Life, which in its understated, slightly melancholy way considers the varieties of affection and love. Roger, who works in the film business, may seem callous and self-involved at first. But Hui lets his decency be revealed and grow. Lau, whose features increasingly look cut from stone, gives the character an implacable solemnity. People comment on Roger’s kindness or assume he must be Ah Tao’s godson or nephew, an impression he doesn’t correct.
The bond they have doesn’t keep Roger and Ah Tao from seeming alone in the busy city; neither is married or has family around. Ah Tao finds a tentative social life in the home, a place that Hui doesn’t sentimentalize or make into a cautionary tale. There too she emphasizes the distance between people. The occasional overhead shot shows a busy warren of atomized spaces, with a sense of each keeping to each.
The film’s bleached-out palette, with its muted colors — and the sometimes harsher fluorescent light of the home — heightens the atmosphere of loneliness. Hui often shoots Lau by himself in the frame, alone in his apartment or the sole person in a row of empty airport seats. A successful man, Roger runs into acquaintances everywhere. Still, he, like Ah Tao, remains essentially self-contained.
Lau (Infernal Affairs, House of Flying Daggers, Hui’s Boat People), wears Roger’s gravity lightly, as Ip does Ah Tao’s wariness. They’re both guarded but not impenetrable. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.
Comparisons to such ensemble capers as Ocean's Eleven or Tower Heist are inevitable, but South Korea's The Thieves carves its own niche with moments of romance and stylish mayhem mixed with a more emotionally conflicted, winner-take-all sensibility than its American brethren.
Director Dong-hoo Choi (The Big Swindle), who co-wrote the sometimes overly complex script with Gi-cheol Lee, begins by jauntily setting up the potential theft of a $30 million diamond from a Macau casino vault by an intrepid band of high-end crooks, each, of course, with a burgling specialty.
But instead of all roads leading to the final jewel theft, the film shifts midway into decidedly darker cat-and-mouse territory as the diamond is located, allegiances splinter and the cops force the robbers into survival mode.
While the movie's second half feels more consequential — and more impressively action-packed — than its first part, it also loses some of its initial charm and quirk via a protracted, often dizzying descent into a kind of booty-centric game of hot potato.
Already a blockbuster on its native turf, Choi's slickly made diversion, shot in Seoul and Busan, South Korea; Hong Kong; and Macau, features a cast of Asian superstars including Gianna Jun, Hae-sook Kim, Yun-seok Kim and Jung-jae Lee, all of whom prove game and lively participants.
In comparison with the earlier film, the Parisian odyssey is far less tethered to the social climate or to much of anything in the way of narrative expectations. It begins with the filmmaker himself waking into a dream and looking out upon a dreaming audience from the empty loge of a movie theater. This tribute to the power of cinema is the most unequivocal scene in the movie and also as eerie (and eerily soundscaped) as anything David Lynch might conjure.
For each of his assignments, Oscar dons an elaborate disguise in his mobile dressing room. His first persona, an elderly female beggar who stands by the Seine crooked-backed and ignored, suggests an extreme exercise in empathy. That characterizes much of the day’s experiment, but finally the connective tissue is nothing more or less than the trying on of roles.
With his elastic physicality and fearlessness, Lavant is "what if" incarnate, digging beneath identities that are all too easily fixed. He’s assassin and victim, dying old man and nostalgic lover, concerned father and sewer-dwelling gnome.
In one of the most spectacular sequences, that flower-chomping gnome surfaces in the Père Lachaise cemetery, where he violently crashes a fashion shoot and spirits away the impassive model (Eva Mendes). In full sexual readiness, he’s comforted by a lullaby.
While peeling away one disguise and applying the next, Oscar laments the world’s shift from heavy machines to invisible technology. An anxious nostalgia runs through his day, from the old-fashioned backstage ambience of his limousine dressing room to the nod to Scob’s role in the horror classic Eyes Without a Face and, not least, Kylie Minogue’s soulful showstopper amid the broken mannequins of a shuttered department store.
In Holy Motors Carax insists on our other selves. His daylong ride is a wary celebration, a joyful dirge that’s served up in concentrated form by a roving band of accordion players. It’s all in a day’s work.
Depending on your point of view, This Is Not a Film both is and isn’t a film. What it is for sure is the only kind of film its co-director Jafar Panahi can make for now.
Panahi is not just one of Iran’s top filmmakers, he is its most politically outspoken, director of such works as Offside, The Circle and Crimson Gold that deal even more directly than the Oscar-winning A Separation with the restrictions placed on ordinary life by that country’s political leadership.
Partly for that reason Panahi was hit hard by the Iranian government in 2010: He was sentenced to six years in prison and banned for 20 years from filmmaking or even conducting interviews with the foreign press.
Panahi is out on bail but confined to his Tehran high-rise apartment under house arrest while he goes through a series of appeals. (The first one was recently turned down.)
So that limited urban space is necessarily the setting for this potent clandestine documentary, a day-in-the-life video diary shot on an iPhone and a small digital video camcorder by Panahi and his friend and co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. It was reportedly smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden inside a cake in advance of its unannounced screening at the 2011 Cannes film festival.
Playing out this scenario all the way through the closing credits, Panahi labels what he’s done "an effort" (as opposed to a film) and under such categories as "thanks to colleagues" and "many thanks" he’s listed no names. If the government doesn’t want him to make a film, he is not going to make one, and he’s certainly not going to name any names.
Fascinating for what it signifies as much as what it shows, This Is Not a Film illustrates how Panahi is struggling to stay alive creatively and, paradoxically, can’t help but demonstrate how much of a natural filmmaker he is. Even when he turns his camera on the most mundane activities, his passion for cinema enters into and enlarges the picture.
The first part of This Is Not a Film in effect sets the scene of Panahi’s current existence. We see him in everyday activities like eating breakfast and feeding his daughter’s enormous pet iguana Igi, and we also hear, through a series of recorded phone conversations, the details of his life: He’s missing family New Year’s celebrations because of house arrest and, as a talk with his lawyer shows, is still facing potentially serious legal repercussions.
Even in these not especially dramatic situations we can’t help but register that Panahi, with jet black hair and a matching T-shirt worn over jeans, is a man of noticeable intensity who is facing his situation with total sang-froid.
One of Panahi’s phone calls is to fellow director Mirtahmasb, who comes to the apartment and gets behind the camera to record something he jokingly calls Behind the Scenes of Iranian Filmmakers Not Making Films.
Declaring himself unhappy with what he’s filmed, Panahi tries a different tack, reading from the script of what was to be his latest film, which the government has refused to approve, about a girl imprisoned by her parents to prevent her from attending university. Finally, Panahi gives up on this tack as well: "If we could tell a film," he says in a key line, "then why make a film?"
After Mirtahmasb leaves, Panahi more or less stumbles on another story line when a worker comes around collecting trash from the building’s apartments. Camera in hand, unable to resist the new situation, Panahi trails along, interviewing the young man and pulling us into a haphazard situation that culminates in a view of a New Year’s bonfire outside the apartment gates, a fire that inevitably takes on apocalyptic overtones. Even when this director is "not making a film," he is creating situations that we won’t forget.
Some movies use make-believe to make you squirm or cry or rise to righteous anger. Bully does all of that with reality.
Documentarian Lee Hirsch peers into one of the most horrifying things you’ll ever see — the lives of bullied young teens — and wrings and terrifies and outrages you impressively.
Bully focuses on five or children around the United States who have been abused by schoolmates, two so relentlessly that they committed suicide. The film speaks to the impact of bullying and, more terribly, actually depicts the abuse and — worse — the ineffective responses of scholastic and legal authorities, who sometimes exacerbate the troubles.
You sense that some corners have been shaved in Bully, but that doesn’t lessen the film’s impact or import. Watching two fathers mourn their sons, who took their own lives, is utterly gut-wrenching, and you want to reach out and help any child headed toward such a dire decision.
Bully was initially rated R for profanities that, frankly, I can’t recall hearing. But it’s been edited and re-rated PG-13 for its DVD release, meaning that those who most need to learn from it — victims of bullying and, yes, their tormentors — will get to see it. I think it could be argued that it ought to be mandatory.
Has there been a young boy with an older face than Thomas Doret in the Dardenne brothers’ film, The Kid With A Bike? Playing Cyril Catoul, an 11-year-old abandoned by his father, Doret betrays little emotion beyond a furrowed brow as his character cycles around the Belgian city of Liege looking for proof he’s no longer wanted. With his blonde buzzcut and upturned nose, the character could be Tintin marooned in the real world, his comic-book adventures turned taunting and cruel.
The movie, a grand jury prize winner at last year’s Cannes film festival and recently released on DVD as part of the Criterion collection, sounds unbearably sad in outline, and the Dardennes film it in their usual quasi-documentary style. And yet The Kid With A Bike is, remarkably, about hope — about the connections people forge when the ones they’ve been given desert them. Escaping the state-run facility in which he has been dumped, Cyril runs back to the last place he lived with his father — he needs to see for himself that the apartment is empty — and when he gets chased by authorities into a doctor’s office, he clings desperately to a woman sitting in the waiting room. She asks Cyril to ease his grip but still lets him hold on; the moment, his ferocious need, touches something in her.
As I said, you can see how the American remake of this would play, and the After-School Special version, too. The Dardennes don’t telegraph the story’s emotions, though, but let us locate them in the flow of their rigorously natural medium shots. There’s no backstory — Cyril’s mother is gone, never mentioned — and the only obvious touch of sentiment is the occasional burst from the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on the soundtrack.
Yet, because neither Thomas nor the filmmakers beg for our attention, The Kid With A Bike richly rewards it. Like all their movies — La Promesse (1998), The Son (2002), The Child (2005), etc. — this one peers into society’s margins, bearing witness to mistakes and resilience, mundane acts of cowardice and courage, those lightning moments where one sees one’s options with the clarity they deserve. "It’s him or me,’’ the boyfriend says, fed up with Cyril’s angry outbursts, and we can see that Samantha’s almost grateful to him for making the decision so easy.
The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try. All the scenes of Cyril on his bike move with the freedom the boy is denied elsewhere; his wheels are his only friends and an extension of his will. At times he appears to be a lonely mechanical centaur. Doret’s performance is solemn and focused all the way to the final image, which comes after one more brush with catastrophe and seems almost a throwaway, just another shot of the kid on his bike. It may only be after you take the disc from the player that you realize what’s different: He’s finally riding toward something rather than away.
The hard part for The Sessionswon’t be to win the hearts of audiences. As disarmingly funny and as well acted as it is, director Ben Lewin’s film is all but guaranteed to do that. The trick is persuading people to see it in the first place.
That’s because, although it arrives as one of the most enjoyable DVDs of the young year it is a hard sell, thanks to its deceivingly off-putting one-sentence summary: A man in an iron lung hires a sex surrogate to help him lose his virginity before he dies.
I know that noise I'm hearing is the sound of people clicking through Pete’s Place looking for something a tad more uplifting to rent. It’s also the sound of people making a terrible mistake.
That’s because The Sessions isn’t merely a depressing, less-arty riff on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or some other well-intended but emotionally exhausting film in which courage trumps paralysis. Rather, it is a beautiful and inspiring story that celebrates the human spirit, underscores the value of emotional connections, and invites viewers to laugh along with it at the beautifully embarrassing urges that remind us that we aren’t as far removed from Australopithecus Afarensis as we like to pretend.
It’s also because the man at the center of Lewin’s real-life story isn’t prone to depressing thoughts. Portrayed in an award-worthy turn by the underrated but brilliant John Hawkes, his name is Mark O’Brien and he, after contracting polio as a child, defied all expectations — medical and otherwise — to become a college graduate, a journalist and poet, and, above all, a 38-year-old. All this, despite being unable to move from the neck down and confined for the majority of his day to an iron lung.
It’s a device with which O’Brien has a love-hate relationship. Without it, he’d be unable to breathe on his own. At the same time, though, it has a way of cramping his style with the ladies. And so, afraid of dying before ever knowing the intimacy of sex, he decides to hire a "sex surrogate" — which is apparently a thing — to help him check that particular box off his bucket list.
What’s most impressive about Hawkes’ performance is the way he fills the screen with life and personality despite being able to move only his head, and then only 90 degrees. You want to find out how good an actor is? Take away his toolbox and see what he can do. In Hawkes’ case, he accomplishes something remarkable.
A quiet co-star of such movies such as Winter’s Bone (a role for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and Martha Marcy May Marlene, Hawkes’ beanpole frame and piercing eyes usually land him roles as grungy and slightly psychopathic felons. In The Sessions, he gets an opportunity to demonstrate his range, and he seizes it. Not only does he change his physical comportment — contorting his slight frame with a frightening degree of believability — but he alters his voice as well. Gone is any hint of the strength or defiance that movie watchers are used to hearing from him. For his O’Brien, even words are work, and so his voice becomes reedy and weak and convincingly laborious.
Despite the broken body, the hollow voice, the reliance on a hulking medical device to stay alive, however, Hawkes makes it clear that his O’Brien is more than the sum of his medical issues. Within the film’s first 15 minutes, his personality and his wry wit take over.
Some of the most amusing moments come during his regular visits to his parish priest (William H. Macy) to talk things out — and to seek pre-emptive absolution for his premeditated fornication. But it is Helen Hunt, as O’Brien’s sex surrogate, who provides the film’s emotional center.
Her name is Cheryl, and she’s a pro, so she approaches it all clinically — very straight-forwardly, very matter-of-factly and very, very nakedly. As caring and supportive as she is of O’Brien’s emotional needs, she makes it clear: to her, sex with him is just an act — just therapy.
It has to be, really, given the potential for emotional entanglements in her line of work. In fact, that’s why they are limited to no more than six sessions together. Still, she isn’t surprised when it becomes more than "just therapy" to O’Brien. She is blindsided, however, when the same happens to her.
The result is a human drama that quietly argues that the gift of life isn’t one to be taken lightly. As such, it’s also stands to be a wonderfully rewarding film, both for Hawkes — who richly deserved the awards he received for this performance and who should have been nominated for an Oscar — and for those reading this smart enough to take a chance on it with a rental.
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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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.
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