What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

I love Metropolitan too, Dan, but surely you saw it on the new Criterion Edition DVD (good disc for a good movie), and not in a theatre.

__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

L'Enfant - The Child (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium)

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, L'Enfant opens with Sonia (Déborah François), a very young mother toting her newborn son around the streets of a cold, gray working class Belgian town looking for her boyfriend, Bruno (Jérémie Renier). She goes to her apartment to find Bruno has sublet it while she was in the hospital. She wanders the streets and his regular haunts until she finds him, working. Bruno is a small-time theif and petty criminal, and didn't even bother to come see Sonia or their new son yet. He can barely be bothered to hold him now. They have to spend the night at a shelter waiting for the sublet to be up, and in the middle of the night Bruno gets a call from his main fence to do some business. He does, and she casually mentions that if raising the baby is too much for them there is a market for healthy infants that pays much more than the market for stolen electronics and jewelry. Bruno, Silvia and the boy they name Jimmy spend a couple days together and everything seems normal - or as normal as it is going to get. We don't quite see what it is Sonia loves about Bruno, but she is a teenager in a vulnerable position and is surely trying to make the best of the situation. When Bruno takes the baby for a walk in the carriage, he realizes completely unemotionally he'd like to make some quick cash. It's all done through mysterious phonecalls but a deal is quickly struck, though Bruno never sees the people he sells Jimmy to. When he returns to Sonia with an empty carraige and a wad of bills, she is horrified, goes into hysterics and collapses in shock. He rushes her to the hospital but realizes he must get the child back, not for any emotional pull he's feeling himself or even to calm his girlfriend but because when Sonia wakes up she's going to tell the police what he's done.

L'Enfant is similar in some basics to the South African film Tsotsi in that a street criminal has to find his humanity through the innocence of an infant. But in Tsotsi it is much more theatrical and melodramatic, and the turn is from psychopath to human being. Bruno, though not a violent or dangerous criminal, is still one of the most unlikeable characters you'll meet. But he has no rages, he doesn't beat or kill or rape or even yell, he just quietly and matter-of-factly treats his own flesh and blood as if it were a lifeless commodity. He will eventually come to feel something, but it is a long road, and his humanity is regained very slowly and only after he has run into a couple of dead ends that limit his natural choices. Considering the subject matter, L'Enfant is a very restrained and quiet piece. It's not as emotiuonally engaging or as shocking as it might have been in a different style, but the documentary-like tone in a way makes the thought of selling a newborn baby all the more horrific.

GRADE: B+



Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Jonathan Demme, USA)

A beautiful concert documentary from the director who already made one great entry in the genre with 1984's Stop Making Sense. In the spring of 2005, the great singer and songwriter Neil Young was diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain aneurysm. Rather than panic or go into a deep depression, Neil was infused with a burst of creative inspiration. The result was the album Prairie Wind, full of songs about looking back on life, loss, friendship, love and time with the depth and power of an artist who felt like this might truly be the last time he was able to express himself. Young had successful surgery, and the sixty-year-old debuted the album in a concert at the famous Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN. He played with his regular band who have been with him for decades, including Spooner Oldham, Ben Keith and Neil's wife Pegi as well as a couple friends as guests like Emmylou Harris. Young's musical style over his long career has been fairly eclectic spanning folk rock, rockabilly and his mantle as the godfather of grunge, but the instrumentation and tone of Prairie Wind is most similar to his great '70s masterpiece Harvest and the 1992 classic Harvest Moon. The concert blends songs from all three of those albums as Neil and company play on a warm stage. It starts with brief interviews of the participants before the concert, but mostly this is about the wonderful music. Demme doesn't do anything flashy directorially, but then neither does Neil. Demme captures the quiet poetry and wistful beauty of Young's performance and music (something Jim Jarmusch flubbed in his 1997 documentary Year of the Horse) . If you have no idea who Neil Young is (though how could that be?), you'll become and instant fan. For any who already knows what a genius the man is, the concert film is a must see.

GRADE: A-

Correct. I should have read the thread title a little slower.

__________________
"Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me." - Federico Fellini

"If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed." - Stanley Kubrick

"Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you." - Roger Ebert

Watched Freedomland last night. Brutally slow and got even slower at the end. Julianne Moore was extrememly irritating in it too. There was nothing unique about this film whatsoever and i'm gonna say it was the worst movie i've seen in a year.

4/10

Bluebird (Mijke de Jong, Netherlands)

Dutch coming-of-ager about a nine-year-old girl named Merel (Elske Rotteveel) who has to deal with a group of bullies at school. I suppose it is at once comforting and infuriating to realize that mean-spirited children in groups like school are just a fact of life, no matter where you're from. If you're a little bit of an outsider who's too smart or too happy or too anything, you can be sure some insecure, petty little sh!ts are going to hassle you for no apparent reason. Merel is smart and cute and kind and introspective. In a perfect world such a child would be encouraged and supported, or at the very least not have to put up with unnecessary crap. Alas... Considering how familiar this type of story is, either from other films and literature or our own unhappy memories, director de Jong does a good job at keeping it understated and real. Rotteveel is a good child actress and captures the pain and sadness of the character perfectly. One of the secondary plots about her caring for and dealing with her adopted little brother, who suffers from a major physical handicap, is handled nicely and the scenes between her and little Kaspar (Kees Scholten) are natural and charming. Ultimately Bluebird doesn't really offer much of anything new and it's certainly not stylized like Welcome to the Dollhouse or anything of the sort, but it's a well told little movie.

GRADE: B-

Kinky Boots (Julian Jarrold, U.K.)

Kinky Boots is based on a true story, but what it's really based on are a whole slew of other movies from the past decade or so produced in the U.K. I guess you'd have to go back to The Commitments - the 1991 Alan Parker film, not the Roddy Doyle novel. From that one popular and successful international hit a basic blueprint was created. You take a simple, working class community - either very rural or in a slow and dying industrial town, add a bunch of pale and initially crusty but loveable bunch of eccentrics, introduce some scheme or activity that seems an unlikely fit with that group, watch as they transfer their hopes and dreams to this task, add a deadline of a plant closing or somebody who is ill and watch the wacky yet sweetly gentle comedy that follows. It was done perfectly in The Commitments, which had some dark edges and a real infectious passion for soul music. In the years after that movie came The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Calendar Girls, Saving Grace, Waking Ned Divine, Blow Dry, etc., becoming more and more formulaic with every outing. Kinky Boots is the latest, and surely won't be the last.

The Price & Sons shoe factory in Northampton has survived since the late 19th Century, a small business built on the love of their product - quality men's shoes. After his father dies, Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) reluctantly takes over the family business he never wanted. But it's about to go bankrupt, and Charlie has no idea how to save it or the jobs of the craftsmen and women who have worked there for decades. Then comes a chance meeting with a drag queen named Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor) outside of a SoHo club. Soon Charlie has the brainstorm to turn his factory into a boot factory, with the projected clientele drag queens like Lola, who's manly weight is much too much for the sexy footware designed for women. How will the conservative workers of this small Midlands town initially take to a drag queen in their midst? How will he change them, and vice versa? Will they get their new line designed and perfected in time for the big show in Milan? Will they save "These Boots Are Made for Walking" for the happy finale? Will Charlie stay with his dour and cold fiance or fall for the cute girl who works on the line and supports his dreams? If you don't know the answers to all of that and more before you walk in to such a movie then you were probably also shocked that Reese Witherspoon won the big case at the end of Legally Blonde. It's all as made-to-order as shoes coming down the conveyor belt.

As far as these things go, it's fine. Chiwetel Ejiofor is having fun, it doesn't get too bogged down in dramatic and depressing subplots but stays focused on the simple throughline that fans of this type of movie shovel in like chocolate ice cream that's melting. To me it's the very definition of average, and I'd rather watch The Commitments again instead, or see Ejiofor in something like Dirty Pretty Things.

GRADE: C

I Not Stupid 2. It's a local Singaporean movie.. I love it!

Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea (Chris Metzler & Jeff Springer, USA)

Documentary about California's infamous Salton Sea, its history and its probable deadly future. In first few years of the 20th Century, a bunch of enterprising farmers decided to try irrigating the desert in the southeastern part of the state. Water was diverted from the Colorado River, and for a time the rich soil of the Salton basin boasted incredible bounty that could be harvested year-round. In 1909, the Colorado broke through the various cut-offs that had been designed and flooded the valley, destroying much of what was there and killing many. It flooded it to such an extent that it created an enormous lake, thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide, and all of this 195 feet below sea level! The run-off from the accrued and continued agriculture in the area lead to an unusually high salt content in the water, thus the Salton Sea was born. They brought saltwater fish from the ocean to populate this new unintentionally man-made sea, mostly tilapia, which thrived. They thrived to the point that by the 1950s The Salton Sea was known as one of the best sport fishing areas in the entire world.

For a time in the '50s and '60s, The Salton Sea was a paradise that rivaled Palm Springs, and towns and businesses and land speculators by the thousands flocked to the area. But the Sea was too salty, and getting saltier with every passing year. The high salt content coupled with the hot waters of the high summer (where water temperatures can reach 90 degrees) eventually led to enormous fishkills where literally millions a day would wash up dead on the shores, deprived of oxygen in the water. Still, the cycle of nature is such that those dead fish turned into massive amounts of algee, which led to just as huge a fish population the following year...followed by just as large a fishkill. And so on, and so on. The smell in the summertime wasn't pleasant, to put it mildly, and it was known back in the '60s that freshwater needed to be regularly supplied to the Satlon Sea to keep the salinity levels in check. But nothing was done. Not then, and not since. In 1976 and 1977, two huge tropical storms flood the sea and destroy much of what was left of the Salton communities. By the 1980s, development had essentially stopped around The Salton Sea, and all that was left were ghost towns.

Since then things have only gotten worse, including by the '90s huge threats to the bird populations that stop there. The continuing cycle of dead and rotting fish leads to avian botulism, killing tens of thousands of birds. But the birds keep coming as over 90% of Southern California's natural wetlands have been destroyed and developed in the past fifty years, leaving The Salton Sea as the only refuge for migrating geese and pelicans especially, though it is much more than waterfowl as over half of the known species of U.S. birds have been spotted at The Salton Sea over the decades. Pop Star turned Palm Springs Mayor turned Congressman Sonny Bono made saving The Salton Sea a special priority, and his legislation had real traction...until he was killed in a skiing accident in 1998. As a sort of tribute to him, the legislation passed after his death, but with nobody left to shepherd the effort and dispense the money wisely, the Salton Sea Authority has accomplished virtually nothing by way of actually reversing the ecological disaster. Added to the maddness, the fresh water from the Colorado that could potentially save the Sea is now being diverted all the way to San Diego and Los Angeles, thanks to political manuevering and big money.

All that remains as far as living people around the ragtag, rusted, rotting little towns of The Salton Sea are either nutty eccentrics, elderly retirees who moved there in the heyday and have resigned themselves to stay until they die, or pockets of welfare communities as the rent and land are so cheap that counties have shuttled unwanted people out to the desert and the stinking, salty, dying seaside. Filmmaker John Waters narrates this history and elegy of The Salton Sea. Fascinating stuff, and tragic that nothing is being done - whether or not the film's apocalyptic conclusions turn out to be true in the coming decades. The film is also quite funny, thanks to Waters' narration and the wacky folks that still live on the ever-retreating banks. Informative and entertaining.

GRADE: B+




Vinterkyss - Kissed by Winter (Sara Johnsen, Sweden)

A moody piece about Victoria (Annika Hallin), a doctor who has fled the big city after the death of her son. Two months after his funeral and adjusting to being a small town doctor, she becomes involved with a local man named Kai (Kristoffer Joner) who drives the snowplow on the back roads at night for a living. When the body of a teenage boy (Jade Francis Haj) is found in the snowbanks alongside the road, Kai becomes the cheif suspect as the police surmise it was a hit-and-run incident. Victoria as the town's doctor has unique access to the case and must decide whether or not to believe Kai's claims of innocence, all while still processing the death of her own boy. What followed could have been a taught and suspenseful mystery or even a supernatural ghost story, but director and co-writer Sara Johnsen has instead crafted an interesting character piece where the biggest mysteries are inside of us and the most haunting ghosts are those of our own consciences. The emotional finale where we finally learn all the details of both boy's deaths is well earned and much more satisfying than the contrivances of any twisting thriller.

GRADE: B+

Thanks for the great reviews Pikey

__________________
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

Lü cao Di - Mongolian Ping Pong (Hoa Ning, China)

Very nice slice-of-life piece that feels like it has the authenticity of documentary while offering some of the most beautiful landscapes you'll ever see on a cinema screen. Six-year-old Bilike and his family are part of a small community of nomadic shepherds that live on the expansive grasslands of modern day Mongolia. There are two other boys of about the same age, Dawa & Eguotou, who also live in the area with their families. It is a secluded and simple life, but children are curious no matter where they're from. One day Bilike finds a ping-pong ball floating down the river. Of course he has never seen one before and has no idea what it is for. Neither does his family, though his grandmother says it is a glowing pearl from heaven. The wise Lama's they encounter have no idea what it is, but a man who travels the countryside with a small tent show where he projects movies tells them it's a ping-pong ball - though he doesn't tell them what that means exactlty. Dawa's father has traded a couple sheep for an old television set, but they get no reception on the plains. For a couple minutes the boys do tune in some sound without pictures, and they hear the noises of a ping pong game, which the commentator tells them is China's national sport, making the ping-pong ball China's national ball. They aren't sure what the noise was, though they guess it was the clopping of horse's hooves and ping-pong a game they envision to be more like polo. But they are sure the Nation must be worried about its missing ball! With Bilkie and Dawa on horseback and Eguotou on a scooter, the three small boys head off to Bejing to return the treasure...even though they have no idea where Bejing really is, or how far. Mongolian Ping Pong isn't as plot driven as that may sound, and it doesn't become the sort of broad comedy the South African '80s arthouse hit The Gods Must be Crazy was. It's a gentle and unassuming look at a region and the few characters who populate it.

The glimpse of the modern nomads largely from the perspective of these children is fascinating and doesn't fall into the traps of either condescention or infantalizing. The child actors are all genuine and have an easy charm in front of the camera. The most memorable thing about the movie is the cinematography (by Jie Du) that shows off the stunningly gorgeous landscapes of Inner Mongolia's grasslands. Seemingly limitless horizons filled with bright green grass blowing in the wind under skies that are azure blue or darkend from distant storms, it's really breathtaking.

GRADE: B



Äideistä Parhain - Mother of Mine (Klaus Härö, Finland)

In stark contrast to Mongolian Ping Pong, the Finnish film Mother of Mine is hopelessly bogged down in thw tired cliché of melodrama. During WWII, about 70,000 Finnish children were sent to neutral neighbor Switzerland as the Nazis occupied the land and the Russians bagan pushing in through the eastern borders. This is the fictional story of one such boy, a nine-year-old name Eero (Topi Majaniemi). His father is killed by Russian bombs so his distraught mother (Marjaana Maijala) decides to send him to Sweden so he'll be safe. Once there Eero is one of the lucky ones in that he isn't placed in a large children's home but with a family. Hjalmar (Michael Nyqvist) and Signe Jönsson (Maria Lundqvist) are a middle-aged couple with a farm on the shore. Hjalmar bonds quickly and easily with Eero, but Signe is distant and strict. Eero is homesick, misses his mother, and can be a rebellious little cuss, which makes Signe all the more strict. Eero has spotty contact with his mother via mail, and after months does finally settle into his new life a bit. Signe has been keeping the death of her young daughter a secret from Eero, explaining her difficulty in acdepting a new child into her home, but eventually they develop a bond and love deeper even than the one he shares with his real mother. The story itself, though offering no surprises at all, isn't the problem. Nor is the acting, as Majaniemi is a more than competent child actor who can play the sullenness and confusion of the character well and Maria Lundqvist is quite good and reminds me of a Swedish Melinda Dillon. But the direction is so obvious and standard TV-movie quality, and the constantly surging and intrusive score with a slowly tinkling piano and wailing strings betrays any of the subtlty in performance. What's left is a very standard and manipulative weeper that never comes close to the level of great movies like Boorman's Hope & Glory (1987) or Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander (1982).

GRADE: C-

Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen - The Forest for the Trees (Maren Ade, Germany)

Character piece about a twenty-eight-year-old named Melanie Pröschle (Eva Löbau), who is leaving her small-town comfortable life to take on the big city of Baden-Baden. Melanie is a school teacher, and after the success of dealing with kids from her hometown she's ready for new challenges...or so she thinks. She's also broken up with her longtime fiancé, though she doesn't know anybody in Baden-Baden. She's incredibly optomistic, but wildly naive. In her head she imagines she has the world all figured out, but she's in for a relentless dose of reality. The children in her classes, especially the ninth graders, sense her timidity and naïveté, and they feast upon it with contempt and cruelty. Even the other teachers have sized her up as a probable early washout. Within the first few weeks she has exhausted every technique she can think of and the noisy, unruly children are running the class, paying no attention to her at best and hurling insults and even their chocolate milk at her at worst. But Melanie doesn't admit defeat or ask for help from the other teachers, not even Thorsten (Jan Neumann), another young teacher who seems similarly timid and idealistic but has somehow survived in the system and tries in vein to befriend her. But perhaps because Thorsten reminds her of her fiancé she left behind or more probably because she sees herself in him and imagines herself much differently, she scoffs him repeatedly.

Her home life offers no solace either, and she spends every night or day off alone in her small apartment. She has, inadvertandly at first, started spying on a twentysomething female neighbor, Tina (Daniela Holtz), who lives across the courtyard, and in a chance meeting away from their apartments Melanie introudces herself. Tina is everything Melanie is not: self-reliant, hip, beautiful and popular. They start a kind of casual friendship, but Melanie pushes it too much and soon her only semblance of a friendship is just as awkward and strained as her days at school. The film is excrutiating throughout as we watch the socially retarded and undynamic young woman fail over and over again, each time not learning from the mistake and backing off but redoubling her efforts and failing even more spectacularly and embarassingly the next time. She hides these failures from everybody and becomes a shaking wreck. The end sequence can be interpreted as either an odd fantasy or the way she has finally escaped her unhappy life.

The Forest for the Trees is very low-key and realistic, adding to the incredible awkwardness of Melanie, as she is not a silly movie character in a comedy, but a real and sad person who we witness spiraling out of control in her own self-tormented way. It's an effective approach for the kind of character we don't often see examined with any sense of truth.

GRADE: B-


Last night I also saw another collection of nine short subjects...

• The Fan & the Flower (Bill Plympton, USA)
  Animator Bill Pympton has been nominated for or won just about every award a cartoonist can get in the past twenty years. His pencils and watercolors with his surreal take on any manner of subjects is immediately identifiable. "The Fan & the Flower" is a more gentle fable than some of his best-known works, but still very much a Plymptoon: an unlikely romance bewteen a ceiling fan and a potted flower. Narrated by Paul Giamatti, it's a breezy and bright seven minutes in mostly black and white ink that brings to mind Shel Silverstein almost as much as Plympton.
• Tama Tu - Sons of War (Taika Waititi, New Zealand)
  An odd and amusing piece about a small group of Maori WWII soldiers hiding from snipers in a bombed-out building. But this isn't about the suspense and horror of warfare, it's about the simple silliness and childlike bonding that goes on between young men anywhere, war or not. They partake in little games where they make faces at each other, play 'pull my finger' or slap a "shoot me" sign on the back of a fellow soldier's helmet, all done in a Caro & Jeunet Delicatessen style.
• Driver's Ed (Thom Harp, USA)
  Fine little comedy about an eighteen-year-old lovesick girl who desperately needs her license so she can visit her boyfriend who has left for college. This is a fifth attempt to learn how to drive, after four failures on her driven test. She is a horrible driver, monsterously distracted, and a stoic teacher has to sit in the passenger seat in horror. Frankly it's not as funny as Bob Newhart's old stand-up routine or even the "Get A LIfe" episode where Chris Elliott's halfwit too his driving test, but it delivers plenty of laughs in eleven minutes.
• Torte Bluma (Benjamin Ross, Great Britain)
  So many short films are at least tinged with comedy, if not all-out jokes with punchlines. Torte Bluma is not. It's an eighteen minute piece about a Nazi officer (Stellan Skarsgård) in charge of a Concentration Camp, and the Jewish man (Simon McBurney) he keeps on as his personal assistant to cook for him. The episode of their relationship we witness is the Jew asking the Nazi for a kind of tempered mercy for his father, who has just arrived on the latest train, which oddly turns out to be really more horrific than if he had been killed with everybody else in his group. Chilling and painful.
• Milk (Peter Mackie Burns, Scotland)
  Two character piece about a woman (Brenda Fricker) and her twenty-something granddaughter (Kathleen McDermott) as the elder woman is bathed. As it starts we can tell it has been a somewhat strained relationship, but they have a bonding moment in front of our eyes.
  
  
• Oh My God (John Bryant, USA)
  Some of you may have seen this on the net at some point. It's a bloody dark comedy where 90% of the dialogue is "Oh my God! How did this happen?!?" with a truly hysterical punchline that makes the gore-filled set-up worth it. But I won't spoil any of it by telling you anything more about it.
• Our Time Is Up (Rob Pearlstein, USA)
  Decent if obvious little comedy about a therapist, played by Kevin Pollak, who we watch go through his day calmly and quiety listening to his roster of patients rant about their troubles. Later he receives a phonecall telling him he has only six weeks to live. The next day he tells his patients bluntly what whining morons they are...which of course turns out to be the therapy they needed all along. I'm a big fan of Pollak's, and he makes the piece work with his performance, even if the comedy idea is less than fresh.
• One Minute Past Midnight (Celia Galen Julve, Great Britain)
  A couple of bored guys (Alexander Perkins and Stan Robinson) working the graveyard shift at a convenience store as one laments about the girl he loves from the day shift. Though he's never met her he watches her actions on the tapes of the security camera. There's some nonsense about this being fifty years in the future and bans on coffee and cigarettes, but these are dropped in and have no bearing on anything that happens in the story. It meanders along and does give the viwer an accurate feeling of boredom, but I suspect they were going for more. They didn't acheive it.
• Birthday Boy (Sejong Park, Australia)
  Nicely computer animated short about a small boy in Korea during the '50s imaging the exploits of his soldier father on the front, and the package that arrives that he assumes is a birthday present from Dad. The animation is fantastic, and the emotional payoff a good one.

KZ (Rex Bloomstein, United Kingdom)

Documentary about the WWII death camp in Mauthausen, Austria. It was the last Concentration Camp to be liberated, receiving trainloads of victims right up until three days before the Allies arrived in May of 1945. But KZ doesn't employ the typical devices of black and white archival photographs and testimony from survivors, rather it shows the site today as it exists as a museum and monument. Mauthausen is a picturesque small village west of Vienna along the Danube, and the camp sits atop a hill overlooking the entire town. How does it feel to be a tourist at a former concentration camp? How does it feel to work there as a guide, day in day out? How does it feel to live there as a local with the dark secrets of the past? And what of those who've chosen this town to be their new home? These are the questions the film examines, and this approach to the story of the Hell of a Concentration Camp makes for an engaging and horrific film. Other than on the walls of the museum displays I can't remember a single photograph being used, but it's still one of the most vivid Holocaust documentaries I've seen. A tour guide standing in one of the gas chambers telling a group of students in graphic detail what went on thousands of times exactly where they are standing, then explaining that the shower heads that used to be on the ceiling are now gone as tourists have stolen them as souveniers in the past decade and pointing out how a memorial plaque in the chamber has been vandalized with a swastika...it is gripping stuff.

GRADE: A-



Factotum (Bent Hamer, USA/Norway)

Disappointing movie based on some of skidrow poet and novelist Charles Bukowski's writings, with a miscast Matt Dillon. Besides having the wrong actor, another problem is Factotum covers some of the same ground (sometimes the exact same ground) as Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (1987), and it is nowhere near as good as that film. Dillon stars as Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's thinly-veiled alter ego. He likes to drink, gamble, write and screw, in about that order of preference. None of those pursuits make him very employable, and the main narrative of Factotum, such as it is, follows Henry from menial job to menial job, some lasting hours and some weeks but all ending when Henry decides to go off and drink or gamble. We also see him with a couple of the women in his life, two barflies named Jan (Lili Taylor) and Laura (Marisa Tomei). Lili Taylor is excellent and gives one of her best performances in years, but Marisa - who plays essentially the same role Faye Dunaway did in Schroeder's film (though it is a much shorter episode in Factotum) is miscast. But she's perfect compared to Dillon.

I like Matt, from My Bodyguard and Tex to The Flamingo Kid and Drugstore Cowboy to City of Ghosts and Crash and most of what he's done in between. But Chinaski is just plain out of his range, and you catch him "acting" in virtually every single scene. And let me state the obvious that I guess nobody told the director or producers: he's waaaaaay too good looking to ever play the role convincingly anyway. He's too big, too fit (sadly he's in much better shape to play this character than he was as the racist cop in Crash), his hair's too nice and he simply can't carry himself as an alcoholic down and outer. Mickey Rourke, who starred in Barfly, really inhabited the character and adopted Bukowski's unique cadence and posture and made it his own. Dillon seems like he's doing an impression of Rourke's performance at times, and it's not even a convincing impression. It's really too bad. But the movie is flawed beyond the crucial miscasting as it has no clear tone, and what is there misses most of the dark humor that makes Bukowski's writings about degredation and lack of typical ambition so interesting and beloved. Director Bent Hamer, who's last feature was the terrific offbeat international hit Kitchen Stories, doesn't have a good handle on the material...and his leading man is too much a leading man instead of casting to the character. A missed opportunity.

GRADE: C

Lucky Number Slevin

__________________

thanks for your great reviews holden

Just three more days of the Portland International Festival. Tonight I'm seeing Art School Confidential and The Notorious Betty Page, then I'll wind up with six or seven more movies on Saturday and Sunday.

The Corspe Bride, which I thought was very well done and had a very good story to it.

Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, USA)

Like Zwigoff's Ghost World (2000), Art School Confidential is also adapted from a Daniel Clowes comic, though this time only gaining basic inspiration as it was just a four-page self-contained story in one issue of Eightball. The movie starts out hysterically, as we watch a young outsider in middle school tormented by bullies and too shy to talk to girls. He realizes that his talent for drawing could be his ticket to at once rise above the jerks and become adored by beautiful women. Now a high scool graduate, Jerome (Max Minghella) is off to art school where he hopes to find his way in the world. When he gets there he finds a kaleidoscope of every stripe of outsider, tenuously bonded together by art. Jerome has an obsession with a nude model, Audrey (Sophia Myles from Underworld and Tristan + Isolde), who was featured in the school's brochure, and when she models for his class he is thunderstruck. Even among other misfits, Jerome doesn't seem to quite fit in with his roommates and fellow students, and what's worse the odd faculty, especially his professor Sandy (John Malkovich), seem to praise an asthetic, or lack of asthetic, that Jerome just doesn't get. The portraits of art school freaks and burned-out faculty is all dead on. Some of them may be easy targets, sure, but a bullseye is a bullseye, and the first half of the film is full of great stuff. But there's also a series of murders around the campus, and the subplot of the viscious strangler becomes intertwined more and more with Jerome's story. At first it seems like a silly parody of slasher movies in a way, but by the final act it has melded into some sort of attempt at a larger satire. For me the satire and strangler stuff didn't work anywhere near as well as the extremely funny look at art school, which had a flavor of authenticity and was truly funny. Clowes' own work in Eightball especially does this sort of thing blending disperate styles and storylines, but they are much more subtle connections and such dissimilar ideas, while they may very well be in the same issue, would not likely be intertwined as narratives. Not in such an obvious way.

But even with a narrative that I thought went astray a bit, Art School Confidential is still a satisfying movie. The parts that do work are so funny, I can almost forgive that they write themselves into a corner. Max Minghella is good in the lead, but it's the diverse supporting cast that really steals the show. Malkovich is perfect, and the best acting done by anyone is Jim Broadbent, who plays an aged former graduate of the university who is a jaded, alcoholic shut-in living just off campus in a dark rent-controlled apartment and serves as a sort of mentor for the increasingly disillusioned and frustrated Jerome. He only has a handful of scenes, but Broadbent is having an absolute blast and does more with his eyes alone than most actors do with their entire bodies. Matt Keeslar is well cast as Jerome's rival in the classroom and for the affections of his dreamgirl, and Sophia Myles sufficiently dreamy as the love interest. Angelica Huston and Steve Buscemi aren't asked to do as much and their roles are familiar as the kinds of parts they've played before, but they are welcome glorified cameos just the same. Joel Moore (Dodgeball) and Ethan Suplee ("My Name Is Earl") are two of the stand-outs among the other students, and Adam Scott has a wonderful scene as a returning graduate who has made it big as an artist. But all of the parts, even the smallest background freaks and types, are all very well cast and effective.

I wish Zwigoff and Clowes would have had the inspiration and determination to carry the wit and energy and spot-on perspective of the first half of the movie all the way through to the finale, but it's still a pretty good flick that may well become a cult favorite among all of those who are dealing with the inequities of a system that grades something as purely subjective as art. To those artsy-fartsy kids in high schools and that you see walking around college campuses, Art School Confidential could turn out to be their Napoleon Dynamite or Monty Python & the Holy Grail, where almost every line is memorized and quoted as a mantra.

GRADE: B-



The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron, USA)

Bettie Page was the pin-up queen and underground sex goddess of the repressed 1950s, and she continues to be an enduring icon today. With her trademark bangs, warm smile, jet-black hair and beautiful curves, she's automatically identifiable even if you've never known her name. This biopic looks at her rise and fall, how a modest good girl from Nashville, TN became a timeless sex object. Gretchen Mol, who back in '98 and '99 was tapped as one of the "next big things" but never had a role or success to justify her dozens of appearances on magazine covers and "Enertainment Tonight", is really the perfect choice to bring Betty back to life. After years of rumors that anyone from Jennifer Connelly to Liv Tyler was going to star in the project, the lower-profile Mol (Rounders, The Shape of Things) excels in the role. Great supporting cast too, led by Lili Taylor, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris and Sarah Paulson and featuring a dozen character actors in small roles and cameos including David Strathairn, Austin Pendleton, John Cullum, Matt McGrath, Michael Gaston, Max Casella, Victor Slezak and Cara Seymour. But it is most definitely Grethen Mol's movie.

The director and co-writer is Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) and she made some interesting choices that really work. The movie is shot mostly in black & white with some color sequences sparsed throughout. In both cases, it is shot very much in keeping with the style and look of lower budgeted flicks from the '50s, and this goes so far as to include obvious stock footage, with camera movements, lighting and frame compositions that harken back to the old B-movies. This could have been distracting and gimmicky, but I thought it worked very organically and did indeed give the feel as if this movie was somehow made in 1956. Even when dealing with dark subjects like incest and rape, it's presented exactly the same way it would have been then, but without ever becoming a self-conscious Airplane!-style parody like Die, Mommie, Die! or The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra from recent years that have fun with their one-joke premises but become tiring for an entire feature. That old-time '50s asthetic doesn't hold true when it comes to nudity, and there are quite a few scenes of the lovely Miss Mol as the lovely Ms. Page without any clothes on. But the nudity is presented in the same innocent yet seductive style as the eternally famous photographs of Bettie Page, who went from modeling in her bathing suit to modeling partially and completely nude to posing in bondage and fetish pics and one-reel mail-order films. The Notorious Bettie Page is similar to Tim Burton's Ed Wood in many respects, including in tone and presenting the title subject as an eternal innocent. This may be a more simplified take on who Page was and how aware she was of her impact and what she was asked to do, but for the narrative, the style of the film, the character and the performance, it works.

For any Page enthusiasts, all of the major points of her career are detailed, from her days with the "camera clubs" around New York, her chance meeting with Jerry Tibbs on the beach that led to her hairstyle, her popularity in magazines, the years of working with Irving and Paula Klaw, her Florida sessions with Bunny Yeager and her appearance as a Playboy centerfold. I don't think some of the larger points the movie goes for about the hypocrisy of the repressed sexual culture are anywhere near as weighty and important as the filmmakers may have hoped, but it's a nicely understated biopic with interesting stylistic choices, a very good turn by Mol, and a breezy hundred minutes.

GRADE: B

I am going to see Date Movie tonight (don't hate)

__________________
letterboxd

Requiem of Snow (Jamil Rostami, Iraq/Iran)

A teenaged Kurdish girl named Rojan (Shadi Variani) living in a small village in the mountains on the Iran/Iraq border is unhappy. She is engaged to her best friend's brother, Jian (Masoud Yousefi), who she loves. But he has been gone for over a year trying to make enough money so they may marry properly. In the meantime there has been a drought, and Rojan's father (Mohayeddin Variani) has gone into debt. He has now promised his young daughter to the richest man in their town, Faegh (Anvar Farajpour), who is her father's age. He is a widower and needs a new mother for his children, so they have come to a business agreement. But Rojan is refusing the arrangement, and tries to get a letter to her beloved before her wedding. The man who carries the letters from town to town, Saeed (Jalil Mohammad Veysi), is a halfwit who travels the countryside selling fabric. Just before the wedding, Saeed returns and tells her that Jian will meet her the next morning outside the village. She meets up with Saeed and follows him into the mountains, and they are far from home before she realizes he has lied to her and intends to marry her himself!

This is the first film from Iraq officially sumbitted for Academy Awards consideration. First time director Jamil Rostam has a nice idea to focus on a story that has nothing to do with the chaotic war torn state of much of his country, and this dark little fable really highlights the horrible position women are in and how few men of the society are at all sympathetic to the situation. The father is a beast of a character, her mother is useless, Saeed just plain creepy and even when her love arrives he is no knight to rescue her but quick to believe the worst about her with absolutely no evidence. There are only two men in Rojan's ordeal who are decent and help her and save her from the kidnapping, though all is for naught and ultimately she happily accepts death as a solution. Strange movie, and I'm sure much of the cultural stuff was lost in the translation, though I did like the last shot.

GRADE: C

Saw Running Scared today with Paul Walker. It's strange, violent, and good