BLADE RUNNER

"Gosh, you've really got some nice toys here."

Once again I have cause for gratitude for living in NYC, as NYC is apparently one of only two cities to have gotten full-out screenings on big screens of the (probably and hopefully last) Final Director’s Cut of BLADE RUNNER, which is coming out in a big old multi-DVD package in December. They've done a final digital clean up, erasing little problematic bits, like visible wires holding up supposedly airborned police cars, etc. They even added Joanna Cassidy's face to the body of the stuntperson who runs through all those big sheets of candy glass, and it actually works. I was worried that there'd be even more serious tinkering with the story, but no, Ridley Scott hasn't done to his magnum opus what George Lucas did to his. So BLADE RUNNER is back, its visual and sonic beauty undimmed and even enhanced, and its problems still unresolved and in some ways even magnified.

1. BLADE RUNNER really is something from a purely technical standpoint. It is one of the most gorgeously made films ever. And it really really really can only be appreciated on a BIG FUCKING SCREEN. DVDs of this film are a waste of DVDs. It is like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or BRAZIL or 2001 or BARRY LYNDON in that regard. This cleaned up version looks great, sounds great, and is just a joy to behold, especially in these days of hand-held camera quick cut nonsense. And the recent big-screen engagement at the Ziegfeld is a marvel: crystal clear digital projection, great sound, goodness gracious me and mine, just an ecstatic orgy of sight and sound and gorgeousness and gorgeosity made cinema.

2. BLADE RUNNER is not a very good movie in pretty much every other way. Harrison Ford's performance is lackluster to say the least, he seems completely lost, veering from existential despair in one scene to low-comedy mugging in the next, and not in a good way. The character remains enough of a cipher for the director to be able to claim, 25 years after the fact, that he isn’t even a human being. The story is pretty well dumbed down from Philip K. Dick's remarkable novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, replacing Dick's satiric edge with a world-weary noir aesthetic that was really horribly cloying when the film was burdened with a tiresome narration.

3. It struck me this time that the movie's attitude toward women is not particularly positive. They are either replicants or repulsive. The only two (apparently) human women with speaking roles in the film are an aged Asian woman who gives Deckard information about snake scales and a thickset woman with an eyepatch who sells Deckard a bottle after he retires Zora. The three female leads are all replicants, all three of them are murderers, all three of them are used rather degradingly for sexual purposes. Zora is a performer in a sleazy nightclub whose routine involves a snake (“watch her take the pleasures of the serpent that once corrupted man!”), Pris is referred to as a standard pleasure model for military recreation. Rachael starts the film as a bold, confident woman, but her self-realization as a replicant is combined with a chilling descent into mechanization: she is finally turned into a sex toy with no will of her own. She can't even speak for herself during that really hideous rape scene (I’m afraid it can’t really be called anything else) and in her final appearance as she and Deckard run off into the elevator. Now this could be part of the point about the woeful way in which the replicants are treated, purely as things, but it never really comes across as the point, somehow.

4. Ridley Scott has gone on the record claiming that Deckard is a replicant, that he was always a replicant. And there are assorted little clues scattered throughout the film, to be fair, but they have always felt more like an attempt to draw a parallel between Deckard and the replicants he is hunting, more as an attempt to add some moral ambiguity to the story. There is one little clue that sticks out like a sore thumb, a waking vision that Deckard has of a unicorn, which is apparently intended as a piece of installed memory in Deckard's artificial memory banks, and I'm sorry but it is just plain bullshit. If Deckard is a replicant, Scott should have shot something somewhere to indicate this just a little more clearly than he does.

And anyway, if Deckard is a replicant the whole film goes out the window. It is like having Victor Fleming say that Dorothy is a witch, that she was always a witch. Actually, no, that really makes more sense, as Glinda seems to recognize some kind of magical powers in Dorothy ("Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"). Bottom Line: If Deckard is a replicant, Mr. Scott might have made it into an actual part of the film itself, not something that one can only recognize by reading an article in the New York Times 25 years after the film is released.

So what is the thrill of BLADE RUNNER? Well, for me it is purely the visuals and the soundtrack. I don’t “prefer” technique to story or emotion, by any means, but I’ll admit to being fairly susceptible to the seductions of pretty pictures on a big screen, and to needing some time to overcome the initial “whoa!” factor. My father pointed out to me many many many years ago that I am a sucker for spectacle, and I can’t entirely disagree. I’ll get carried away by the pretty pictures, I’ll admit it. I don’t think I’m as bad as I used to be about it. I could see through the pretty pictures in drivel like BARTON FINK and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY to the gaping empty derivative disasters that they are when they were first released. I still watch HUDSUCKER sometimes when it is on, just to look at the prettiness, and there is a lot of it, but the film is a train wreck. I’ll see a movie for the technique alone, hey, why not, but I ain’t going to pretend even for a moment that a film like BLADE RUNNER, as radiantly gorgeous as it is, is anywhere near a 2001 or LAWRENCE or NASHVILLE or or or or or or or, and could never be a RULES OF THE GAME or a 400 BLOWS or IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

HARRY POTTER AND THE WEIRDLY UNEVEN FRANCHISE

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

I haven't been entirely untouched by the Harry Potter phenomenon. I read the first book, and enjoyed it thoroughly as a good brisk read with some genuinely moving moments. I started the second book, and put it down when I found myself wanting some kind of literary Fast-Forward button. On the advice of my great friend Kent, I've started reading ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, and have been getting good fun out of it. I'd seen the first film in the theatre, largely out of curiosity, and mostly enjoyed it, but had missed the second one because I just didn't care. I finally saw it on DVD, and still didn't care.

I saw the third film, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, when it got a lot of glowing reviews, and I agreed with them all: it remains the best of the franchise, hands down, no question, period full stop. It is still the only film in the franchise to aspire to being anything other than a sort of cinematic Cliff's Notes. Alfonso Cuaron manages to capture the funky energy of Rowling's world, the messy little details and and the more than healthy respect for transgression, the willingness to occasionally do the wrong thing for the right reasons. I keep remembering the glorious charm used to activate a certain magical map: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

I keep wanting to slow the film down and look in the shadows for the little things that might be lurking (and they are there: at one point a tiny electric train can be spotted running through a big piece of astronomical machinery). Like the similar flourishes in CHILDREN OF MEN, these aren't slapped on to the movie in a desperate bid for attention; they feel completely integrated to the story, and help keep things interesting. This is no mean feat: the story is, when you think about it, pretty damned unwieldy. But Cuaron pulls it off, scoring some real triumphs along the way. A scene of panic in a room full of living paintings is particularly wonderful; there hasn't been anything like it in the series before or since. I mean really: Cuaron's film even features fascinating end titles.

Cuaron's film also features some of the most moving moments in the series, especially those featuring Daniel Radcliffe's scenes with David Thewlis and Gary Oldman. And any film that has glorious actors like Timothy Spall, David Thewlis and Gary Oldman onscreen at the same time, turning into animals, is my kind of movie.

My hopes were high for the next film,HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, or as I've come to think of it, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF NYQUIL. There's the occasional bit of largely computer-generated energy (one big scene involving a dragon is particularly impressive), but mostly it just lies there onscreen, never more lifelessly than during the big scene at the end showing the regeneration of Lord Voldemort, as played by Ralph Fiennes, who herewith wins my vote as the Least Terrifying Villain In Film History.

Rant: the Lord Voldemort in this film is a big fat pussy. He prances around in a Martha Graham shroud, with his head all shaven and his bad teeth and no nose, and I just sat there wondering what the fuck everybody was so scared of. This little nancyboy has the entire magical world so terrified that they daren't even say his name aloud? Why didn't Indiana Jones come along and just shoot him? He's a near total-waste. Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West would kick his sorry little ass. Darth Vader would pinch his fingers together and say "I find your lack of nose disturbing." Dr. Mabuse would glance at his watch and fire Voldemort for being late. Hannibal Lecter would eat him for a mid-morning snack. Tony Soprano would snap that pencil neck. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestley would purse her lips over that outfit, and little Voldy would just evaporate. Lady Kaede in RAN would have Voldemort's head and balls, not that I really believe he has any, on a plate in nothing flat. A certain little boy in CITY OF GOD would etc. etc. etc. etc.

Who's to blame for this sorry state of villainy? Surely the director, one Mike Newell, who seems to be able to create engaging romantic comedies but is just out of his depth at getting fear flowing. Think about it. Compare this big scene in GOBLET OF BOREDOM with anything in Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films, and you'll see the difference. The comparatively minor scene in FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING where the hobbits are attacked by the Nazgul on Weathertop is far more upsetting than this would-be apocalyptic moment, upon which a lot of the future of the franchise depends. It just flat out doesn't goddamn work.

So I was not looking forward to ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. I had made up my mind to wait for cable. But I literally had nothing else to do one Saturday afternoon, so I decided to check it out. I had a free pass, so why not?

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX puts the focus back where it belongs: the characters and what they do and why. Gary Oldman and David Thewlis make a more than welcome returns, with Oldman getting some particularly good scenes as Sirius Black. But the biggest impression is made by the sublime Imelda Staunton as Delores Umbridge. Umbridge is the teacher you had in grade school who worked very hard to appear very very sweet and couldn't be trusted in any way whatsoever, you know you had her, possibly as a guidance counselor. She's monstrous and marvelous, far more threatening and dangerous than Fiennes' flouncing Lord Whoopdedoo. A child sitting near me said about Staunton's character: "I hope she dies."

The Big Scenes are suitably big and effective, and the climactic battle between Fiennes and Michael Gambon almost makes up for the lackluster climax of the previous film. But the biggest scene of all, the biggest and most dangerous conflict takes place inside Harry Potter's head as he struggles to deal with the growing influence of Lord Voldemort's supposedly EVIL presence within him. That director David Yates manages to make this both convincing and effective makes me relieved that he will be doing the next entry, but not as relieved and excited as I'd be if Alfonso Cuaron were at the helm.

"Mischief managed."

HAIRSPRAY

"Ah'm tryin' to ahrn in here!"

HAIRSPRAY is the best of the recent spate of musicals based on Broadway shows. That may not sound like the highest praise, but trust me, it is. HAIRSPRAY eschews, mostly, the atrocious Cuisinart editing and fatal miscasting that have characterized such recent horrors as CHICAGO, DREAMGIRLS, RENT and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

Mostly.

So here's the good news: the movie has moments of real infectious fun. The story centers on Tracy Turnblad, a young girl in Baltimore in 1962, who is a rabid fan of the local TV program, The Corny Collins Show, a sort of Baltimore Bandstand. She manages to overcome prejudices based on her weight and low/no class origins, and winds up one of the dancing teen regulars on the show. Tracy is soon flirting with the hottest boy on the show, the tasty Linc, and lobbying to have the show's monthly Negro Day turned into outright integration, a position that puts her election as Miss Hairspray of 1962 in jeopardy.

The plot largely downplays the realities of the civil rights struggle as being the kind of thing that can be dealt with successfully by a good beat that can be danced to, and I feel kind of churlish even bringing the matter up. The real subject of HAIRSPRAY is the pure joy of music and dancing and stopping to sing a big song. There's a lot of good fun in the film, which includes most of the Broadway score intact, and a really catchy score it is. And for a change, the cast is up to it, with one latex-covered big-starred exception. Nikki Blonsky makes the most of her film debut, handling the singing and dancing with great aplomb. Michelle Pfeiffer is convincingly wicked as the monstrous station manager whose daughter is Tracy's main competition, and she even succeeds in making her signature song, "Miss Baltimore Crabs," one of the film's highlights. James Marsden, as Corny Collins, takes his million dollar smile and amps it up to a real vision of TV hyper-eagerness, one of the funniest running jokes in the film. Allison Janney can't be on screen for more than 5 minutes, but gets more laughs per moment than anyone else.

There are a lot of changes from the original John Waters film and the Broadway show, many of them for the better. The story feels a bit tighter and better organized, but I miss the sense of wild triumph that characterized the Waters film and the show on Broadway. The sexual charge is also missing: where Rikki Lake in the original and Marisa Jaret Winokur on Broadway made no secret of their intense physical desire for Linc, there's an odd chastity to the film's Tracy and Linc. They don't even really kiss until their big final embrace. The only convincing sexual charge in the film comes between a young black man named Seaweed and his white girlfriend, the "permanently punished" Penny Pingleton.

Okay, I'll just cut to the chase. I thought Travolta SUCKED, except for one big cool moment he has at the very end which seems to be cool enough to make everyone ignore how just plain DREADFUL he has been up till then. As Tracy's mother Edna, Travolta is almost but not quite entirely unrecognizable beneath what has to be the worst prosthetic makeup job in the history of prosthetic makeup. He also uses a really overdone accent that seems to be the way that some people in Baltimore might actually speak or might have spoken, but it just feels fake and overdone, like the makeup. I was reminded of Wallace Beery in GRAND HOTEL, who is the only person, in a film populated with German characters, to bother putting on a German accent.

There's more, alas. The screenwriter and director have updated the story to make Edna something of an agoraphobic with severe body-image issues, hammering these points home very clearly in a way that makes Edna more of an object of pity than anything else, and it just brings the story to a halt. They've also re-arranged the story so that Edna's rejuvenation doesn't really happen until the end of the story, where the show made it clear that Edna's rescue is complete purely by getting that fabulous makeover in the "Welcome To The Sixties" number, about a third of the way through the show.

I don't want to dwell to completely on Travolta, but he is a huge distraction. If they'd only been able to get a star of similar bankability who hadn't felt it necessary to wear hideously disfiguring makeup and adopt an outlandish accent, the film would have been nearly perfect.

RATATOUILLE

You probably already know the basic premise: a rat with culinary talent winds up the secret genius in a Parisian restaurant. Not the most promising of ideas, right? Mercifully, director Brad Bird (THE IRON GIANT, THE INCREDIBLES) keeps the story lively and the characters interesting, but there's an intimacy to RATATOUILLE that was completely missing from Pixar's last outing, the dismal CARS. The epicurean rodent Remy's relationship with his human friend, the hapless chef's assistant Linguini, never descends into the kind of tired sidekickery that characterizes the SHREK franchise, and the little romance that develops between Linguini and his kitchenmate Colette doesn't feel shoe-horned into the story.

The animation, as usual with Pixar, is wonderful. The character animation is terrific, lots of wonderful little gestures abound. One little moment keeps coming back to me, a little shake of the finger that Remy delivers to himself when he remembers a missing ingredient to a soup recipe, a sort of "ah-ha!" gesture that beggars description. Think about it: they actually capture the look on somebody's face when they smell something delicious. And there's no shortage of Cool Big Scenes. There's a lot of fun to be had in watching Remy scurry through the kitchen, using ladles for a ladders and dodging giant cleavers, and a sequence involving Remy learning how to transmit his directions to Linguini by turning him into a sort of living marionette would have delighted Buster Keaton.

And so on. I liked the film a lot. A lot. The film is also just plain GORGEOUS. It doesn't go for the visual gusto the way that CARS did, with its lingering views of the car-inspired landscapes and neon-lit night scenes. The world of RATATOUILLE is different from any Pixar has done before, the light feels more like Vermeer than anything else. But there are plenty of gorgeous views of Paris, and some jaw-dropping camerawork, especially one particularly wonderful sequence following Remy's journey through the walls of a building, as he samples the goings-on in assorted apartments through holes in the masonry.

One thing about the movie is bugging me, though, and I don't want to go into too much detail about the plot lest I give away any dread Spoilers. The film seems to deliver a rather carefully worded rebuke to critics toward the end of the film, telling us that even the most sloppily created work of food (or art) is more important than any work of criticism written about that work of food (or art), and I'm sorry, I just don't see it at all. I'll need to see the film again to get a better handle on what it means in this regard.

Do I think you should see it? Absolutely. See it in a theatre with the best possible projection and sound. Go now.

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!

"Too Much For Guy!"

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN is the latest film from Guy Maddin, the Canadian auteur who specializes in making old-fashioned films. We were lucky enough to be able to see it with a live band, live Foley artists supplying sound effects, and a narrator (Edward Hibbert) who hit just the right note of fussy ferocity. I understand from a friend that Lou Reed fell asleep the night he was doing the narration.

And the movie was cool, too. One of Maddin's silent films, filled with cheap but effective effects and razor sharp editing, the kind of quick crazy stuff that they try to do in CHICAGO and fail miserably at doing. BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! is easily the best of Maddin's films, a fast and furious melodrama divided, old-time serial style, into twelve episodes. But it isn't all fun and parody games. The film is labelled A Remembrance In Twelve Episodes, and the main character of the film is named Guy Maddin. I have no way of knowing if there is any real connection between the events of the film and the events of Mr. Maddin's childhood (for his sake, I bloody well hope there isn't), but the added feeling of autobiography lends the film an intensity that has been lacking in Maddin's other films. There's a fresh manic quality to several scenes that lift them straight into serious nightmare territory. One in particular involving Guy's youth-obsessed mother and a surgical procedure with a corpse hits Oedipal territory that makes PSYCHO seem downright quaint.

The film begins with a character named Guy Maddin returning to his childhood home, a lighthouse on an otherwise deserted island that once also served as an orphanage run by Maddin's parents. Guy is soon flashing back to his childhood life on the island with his family. Maddin's mother keeps strict tabs on young Guy and his sister through use of something called an aerophone, and is obsessed with regaining her lost youth. Maddin's father is always at work in his lab on some mysterious project that seems to have something to do with the strange wounds on the back of all the little orphans' heads. A love triangle eventually develops between Guy, his sister, and a visiting detective investigating Nefarious Deeds on the island.

I was no stranger to Maddin's films before seeing BRAND. His films always have the look of older films, like one of those exploitation films from the 30s that occasionally surface, like the immortal REEFER MADNESS or MANIAC or MARIJUANA: WEED WITH ROOTS IN HELL. Films that have all the trappings of 1930s filmmaking, but with the surprising extra of nudity and drug use. Unfortunately, Maddin's films also have the drawbacks of those early 30s films: stodgy filmmaking and unfortunate performances. For all their visual beauty, they seem leaden.

All that changed around the time he made his short film THE HEART OF THE WORLD, a wondrous hyper-kinetic short in which Maddin seems to have abandoned the world of synch sound entirely. His camera was set free, his editing got sharper, the energy quotient was upped considerably, but more importantly, something seems to have been cut loose in Maddin himself as a filmmaker. His following features in this style (DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY and COWARDS BEND THE KNEE) are very exciting, but in BRAND UPON THE BRAIN Maddin really goes for broke. Its a great show.

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY

"This is an eruption!"

Well, not really.

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY is crime thriller starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. Hoskins plays Harold Shand, who we are told runs all of the organized crime in London. Harold is about to make the biggest deal of his life, one that will make him even more rich and powerful and even respectable. He wants to buy up and renovate some London waterfront property, and doing this seems to have something to do with establishing ties with the American mafia, representatives of which are visiting as Harold's guests. A couple of slayings and bombings in Harold's organization threaten to blow the whole operation, and Harold has to do some quick maneuvering to ensure that his empire will stay intact and on top while not scaring off the Yanks.

This movie should work like, well, gangbusters. It seems to have it all. A great gang story, a terrific script jammed with all kinds of interesting events and tasty near-blasphemy (the movie isn't set on Good Friday for nothing), great actors giving solid work, great gritty atmosphere, funky off-the-beaten-track London locations and some neat pre-Tarantino graphic violence that must have been deeply shocking when the film was first released in 1980. So why doesn't it work? Why wasn't I as involved as I should have been? The film seems to move along in fits and starts, there's never as much tension as there really should be, even Hoskins and Mirren seem to be rather oddly restrained.

They get their moments of course. Mirren's film work has always been oddly uneven, to me. In THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY she plays Victoria, Hoskins' wife and apparent consigliere. A classy and dignified woman who makes a fascinating foil to Hoskins' rougher diamond in the butch. They're a great couple, wonderful to watch, somehow you just know these two have the best sex ever. They really come together in one remarkable scene where she manages to calm him down from a howling rage attack. She punches and slaps him, finally grabbing his hands and staring him down.

But even this scene doesn't quite seem to work as well as it might. It felt like something was missing, that the actors were holding something back. I couldn't help thinking that another take, where Hoskins and Mirren really went for broke, was in order. It's like a really great rehearsal, a really great idea for a scene that needed more time to get the best out of everybody concerned, and that's pretty much how the whole movie winds up feeling.

This can only be the fault of the director, John McKenzie. It isn't fair to McKenzie to compare him to Coppola or Hawks or Scorsese or the Tarantino of RESERVOIR DOGS, but it isn't fair to me as a viewer to make me wish that one of those filmmakers had been in charge. There just isn't the level of tension and simple sustained interest in THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY that you'd find THE GODFATHER or SCARFACE or RESERVOIR DOGS or even in an average episode of THE SOPRANOS or PRIME SUSPECT.

And it is a shame. What could have been a masterpiece isn't.

THE LONG GOODBYE

"Hooray for Hollywood"

I saw a new print of Robert Altman's THE LONG GOODBYE, his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's last novel, starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe. The movie is getting a lot of attention lately as an overlooked masterpiece, an attitude which I'm afraid I can only see as having more to do with belated respect for a recently deceased auteur than the actual quality of the film itself.

The story, such as it is, centers on Elliot Gould's Marlowe, who finds himself being investigated after helping a friend of his, one Terry Lennox, cross the border into Mexico. It turns out that Lennox is accused of murdering his wife, and stealing money, and nobody (the cops, some almost amusing reimagined-for-the-1970s gangsters) wants to believe that Marlowe knows as little about what's going on as he does. There's a major sequence involving Marlowe's aborted investigation into the doings of a rather unstable novelist and his wife (who, in typical Chandler fashion, are involved with the departed Lennox and his deceased wife) and so on and so on.

The plot isn't really the point. The point is Altman's personal filmmaking style, as idiosyncratic as any in movies. The delight in actors acting (both good and bad) and Altman's roving camera are what the film is really about, and there are some wonderful moments. A remarkable scene involving a character's late night suicide on the beach, wandering off into the blackest ocean imaginable, is like something out of Kurosawa, and there's a wonderful cameo by an actress who delivers one of the most moving depictions of fear I've ever seen in a movie.

Is there enough to make the film worthwhile? Yeah. See it once. You might want to see it more than once, as I do, mainly to watch Sterling Hayden's performance and to try to see if the plot makes any sense at all. The problem, as with a lot of Altman's films, is the smart-assery that he just can't seem to resist. Altman simply never met a cheap joke that he didn't love. That goddamn title song that keeps popping up over and over and over and over and over again, even as a tune played on someone's doorbell, starts as an intriguing joke on the idea of movie theme songs but eventually just gets annoying. And there's the allegedly ironic use of "Hooray for Hollywood" at the opening and closing of the film. Okay, it kind of works to call attention to the artifice of old Hollywood versus the allegedly updated more realistic film that Altman seems to think he's providing. But Altman's ending is more movie-friendly than Chandler's ending. Chandler's novel ends with a real cynicism and despair, a real non-Hollywood ending that Altman's smart-assery just can't come anywhere near.

Or did I miss the point?

300

"This won't be quick. You won't enjoy it."

The Spartans, according to the film 300, were a bunch of Manly Men. Really Manly. And their women are really Womanly, which doesn't mean much except that when they aren't standing by their own Manly Men they are giving birth to more of them, who can be trained to be WARRIORS. Unworthy babies (evidently those who are not perfect physical specimens or who seem to demonstrate any interest in interior decoration) are exposed to the elements, meaning that these brave Manly Spartans don't have the decency or the nerve to kill off their own inadequate offspring.

And these are the people we're supposed to be rooting for: a race of people who pride themselves on being ruthless in battle but who leave their own unmilitary-worthy babies to the tender mercies of wild animals. Am I alone in thinking the Spartans were a bunch of scumbags that the world is better off without?

Probably.

300, based apparently on a well-known "graphic novel," tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, during which a small band of 300 Spartans held off a whole bunch of invaders. King Leonidas, the leader of the Spartans, learns of the impending invasion of his lands by the dread Xerxes and his Persian hordes. Leonidas decides to take 300 of his Manliest Men to stop the invasion, knowing that he and his 300 are wildly outnumbered.

The rest of the movie is just one long battle scene with the occasional interruption for largely unnecessary plot complications, including a really gratuitous one involving Leonidas' wife who is holding down the fort at home while Leonidas is off hacking limbs. There's not a lot of surprise to be had in this story, but there is a lot to be offended at.

Make no mistake: 300 worships the White Male Military Man in a way that makes BIRTH OF A NATION look like an episode of DIFF'RENT STROKES. The Pure White Manly Bulging Spartans (always ensuring their abs are shown to best advantage) do battle against an invading horde that is:

1. Racially mixed. They're identified as Persians even though a certain sub-horde incorrectly known as the Immortals are dressed like ninjas carrying what look like samurai swords.

2. Largely anonymous. Faces are very seldom visible, as the enemy is usually shown wearing concealing costumes and masks, unlike the nearly nude and exceedingly toned Spartans.

3. Sexually Ambiguous. The God-king of the Persians, Xerxes, is like a gay-panicked director's feverdream. Covered from head to toe in jewelry and piercings, he's a RuPaul of the Ancient World. He actually flounces and wears eye makeup (think late '60s Barbra).

4. Physically Repulsive. The Persians seem to have a cottage industry in surgical experimentation. There's what looks like a mutated giant turned loose on the Spartans, and a horrifying sequence showing what seems to be a man whose arms have been replaced with axe blades to speed up the execution process. Further, the Spartans' ultimate defeat hinges upon their betrayal by a hideously deformed Greek character who had the bad luck to survive the Spartans' infant screening process, and who holds something of a grudge when Leonidas spurns his offer of service. Ultimately, physical perfection is the barometer to character for this film: virtue = tight abs and big pecs.

As far as the acting goes, more time seems to have been spent at the gym or in the makeup chair touching up abs than in rehearsal. Gerard Butler fulfills the promise he displayed in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. He sounds like he learned his lines phonetically, or is trying to overcome a very thick Scots accent or a serious speech impediment, or maybe even all three. The script doesn't help much, but altogether too many of his lines are simply shouted out word by word, as in "THIS! IS! SPARTA!!" And the time at the gym has paid off. No non-pornographic film in my experience pays so much attention to the male torso: big pecs, abs that do nothing but ripple. The cast is expected to do a lot of physical action, the battle scenes are really very choreographed, you can see the actors counting off in their heads "turn and flex and hack and flex and sever and flex and slash and pose and walk walk walk and pose."

All in all, an unbelievable movie. Scary and dangerous on so many levels. Unworthy of your time, except to scare the living daylights out of you at the state of a country populated with people who don't see this garbage for what it is.

THE PIRATE QUEEN

Is a new musical from the creators of LES MISERABLES based apparently on real historical events involving an Irish woman who manages to overcome gender prejudice, gain the respect of the men in her clan, and become a pirate/freedom fighter. There’s a BIG SET, and there are BIG SONGS. There’s a lot of that Irish clomp-dancing that people just go crazy for, and that damned Irish-sounding flute/pipe thing that we’ve been hearing since “My Heart will Go On.” There’s about 45 minutes of plot blown up to fill 2 and a half hours, and enough simplistic nattering about female empowerment to fill a lifetime’s worth of Lifetime movies of the week. All this, and Queen Elizabeth I too.

The score is memorable, in the sense that it keeps triggering your memories of other songs. Echoes of LES MIS are all over the place, big power sung chorus numbers meant to inspire Big Feelings, and tender little power ballads that keep threatening to turn into “My Heart Will Go On.” One extended wedding celebration number sounds like a remix of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Bits and pieces of EVITA and WICKED, and most bizarrely PACIFIC OVERTURES can be heard, and it doesn’t help the evening at all. I just kept wishing that I was actually watching EVITA and WICKED and PACIFIC OVERTURES and SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER AN D UNCUT and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and even LES MIS instead of THE PIRATE QUEEN.

The similarities to WICKED get to be rather pronounced, especially in the second act, as the focus shifts to the relationship between Queen Glinda/Elizabeth and Pirate Queen Elphaba/Grace. Bits of staging and certain lighting effects feel plagiarized from WICKED, as well as from LES MISERABLES (a scene of pathetic beggarly types swarming out of a trap door led the man sitting next to me to laugh out loud and say “Oh, no, this isn’t ripped off from LES MIS at all!”).

And what isn’t ripped off is often downright hilarious. A song entitled “Boys Will Be Boys” sung by the Pirate Queen’s brutish and arranged fiancé includes the deathless lyric “She’s confused about gender!” A later sequence involving the Big Bad British soldiers attacking a church during the christening of the Pirate Queen’s dear little newborn laddie is staged for Maximum Theatricality (Red Lights! Smoke! Chorus Boys With Spears! Choreographed Slow Motion Fighting!) and winds up inspiring Maximum Hilarity. And think about this. A “serious” theatrical production in the 21st Century actually contains the following lines of dialogue:

Impetuous Youth: I’ll make a woman of her!
Imperious Father: I hope she’ll make a man of you!

Simple fairness compels me to admit that there are some good things about the show. The sets are interesting, the lighting is interesting, the costumes are more than serviceable, if a bit too specifically intended to grab a tony for Costume Design. The cast does the very best they can with what they’ve been given, but you kind of wonder if they know how bad what they’ve been given really is. There’s a lot of head-tossing and noble posturing and grimacing to indicate suffering, and the British bad guys flick their capes a lot.

I could go on all day. In a nutshell, this is the kind of show your best friend’s mother will just love, never quite understanding why you’re laughing so hard at it.

ZODIAC

"Here comes the Hurdy Gurdy Man, he's singing songs of love..."

Imagine a film that combines ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Now imagine a good version of that movie. Try. Okay. Now. That movie in your head is not just in your head. It is David Fincher's ZODIAC, and it is very much worth seeing. Much to my surprise.

You probably know by now what the film is about: the search for a serial killer, and all that. ZODIAC is not what usually passes for a detective thriller: that cliched parade of ugly murder scenes with occasional police interruptions culminating in a Big Finish with the killer vanquished until the almost-inevitable sequel. ZODIAC reverses this formula, giving us a parade of investigation scenes punctuated with occasional ugly murders. The investigation really is the thing in this film, and there are scenes of cops and reporters talking and going round and round what sometimes feels like the same material over and over. This is at least partly the point, as the main thrust of the film is the hold that the Zodiac begins to have on the people involved in the investigation, eventually turning into an obsession on the part of Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

That this never gets dull is due in no small measure to Fincher's admirable cast. Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr., to say nothing of a host of other fine actors like Dermot Mulroney and Elias Koteas in smaller roles. I liked watching Downey and Gyllenhall together; their comedy-tinged scenes are the perfect foil to Edwards and Ruffalo's no-nonsense work.

I'd not been a fan of Fincher's earlier films, like SEVEN or FIGHT CLUB or THE GAME. They all just seem to suffer from serious Style-itis. Fancy editing and special effects and mood all over the place (the police in SEVEN seem to have no idea how to switch on a light), rather surprisingly predictable plots (anyone who thinks for a moment about which Deadly Sins have not yet been enacted will be two steps ahead of the cops in SEVEN) all combined with a feeling that some kind of never-clearly-articulated Big Message is intended (what the hell was FIGHT CLUB really about, anyway?). ZODIAC has what none of Fincher's other films have had: people I give a damn about, in a story I found interesting. The visual flourishes made sense (the Transamerica Tower assembles itself onscreen to show the passage of an extended chunk of time) and the mood-inducing touches actually worked. I found myself getting terribly upset at the approach of a car playing Hurdy Gurdy Man on its radio.

And I stayed terribly upset, even after the final credits rolled. I got a paranoid contact high from ZODIAC, one that had me jumpy and nervous and just generally creeped out all the way home. ZODIAC stayed with me in a way that few movies I've seen recently have.

AGAINST THE DAY

"Are you kind deities? or wrathful deities?"

So I got the new Pynchon novel. In the weeks leading up to the publication date, I had been clearing my literary calendar, not getting too involved in anything too big or long. I’d re-read THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, for example, a good clear direct and above all short little book that was just what I needed. Then a few days before the Pynchon was released, I was killing some time in a chain bookstore and found myself checking out a series of detective thrillers by Ian Rankin, who’s been on my radar for quite some time now. I picked up one called RESURRECTION MEN, and soon realized that I’d been standing there reading the opening chapter and feeling no desire to stop. I went ahead and got the book, and was enjoying it a lot.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of the new Pynchon a couple of days early, an accommodating local indie bookstore offered to sell me the copy that was behind the counter. Evidently a staff person had gotten the book out early and had been paging through it. I started reading the book on the subway home, and have had an odd reaction to it. Basically, there are parts of it that I’ve liked a good deal, and there have been parts that I’ve not liked a good deal. I’ve come close to putting it down altogether a few times, but I know myself well enough to know that it would be better for me to complete one reading that I didn’t like very much than to stop completely. This way, if I ever decide to read the book again I’ll have a better chance of getting more out of it.

I’m not sure there is going to be a second reading, though. I’m just not feeling enough excitement about the book to make me terribly enthusiastic about going through the effort a second time. There are plenty of big old books that have made considerably more sense on a second or third reading, things like JR and DAVID COPPERFIELD (most of Dickens, actually) and INFINITE JEST and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW and MASON & DIXON, but all of those books had me in their grip in a way that AGAINST THE DAY doesn’t have me. I’m looking forward to being through with AGAINST THE DAY so I can move on to something just plain shorter.

I never did finish the Rankin book. It started well, but I was getting impatient with it long before I had to put it down to concentrate on AGAINST THE DAY. I’ve got a couple of other Rankins, and will be getting to them at some point.

I’m having to do some serious examination of my possessions. There’s just way too much stuff in that apartment. I overheard a woman in a bookstore discussing her personal library, and she said something that has stuck with me ever since, something about how you have to ask yourself if you own the books, or if the books own you. Soon after I did some pruning of my accumulated VHS tapes, and was brought face to face with the Folly of Pure Ownership for Ownership’s Sake. After all, how many copies of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE does one man really need?

FYI – I had four copies. On VHS. Taped from a variety of sources over the years.

I don’t have so many multiple copies of books, but I do seem to pick stuff up. Occasionally I purge long-unread stuff, like those copies of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE that seem to pop onto my shelves every few years when I decide that maybe I’ll give the book One Last Shot. I’m still not sure how on earth a copy of THE CELESTINE PROPHECY got onto my shelves, or even into my apartment, but it won’t be there much longer.

THE COAST OF UTOPIA

“Just your ordinary nine-act play.” Robert Benchley in re: STRANGE INTERLUDE.

As SALVAGE, the third and mercifully final part of Tom Stoppard’s magnum opus THE COAST OF UTOPIA staggered to a close, Mr. Benchley’s words popped into my head, and I kind of smiled to myself. Apart from a few moments featuring Josh Hamilton and the sublime Martha Plimpton, there wasn’t a lot else to smile about.

Mr. Stoppard’s mammoth trilogy about the intellectual history of the 19th Century and the men who laid the philosophic foundation for the Russian Revolution starts well. The first play, VOYAGE, was a very entertaining evening in the theatre, stimulating and thought-provoking and moving. The acting was impeccable, and surprising. Billy Crudup’s performance as Bellinsky, the Russian literary critic who has a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth was a revelation, a real change from the terribly stiff work I’d seen him deliver before. Ethan Hawke was having a grand time as the wildly enthusiastic Michael Bakunin, veering hilariously from one philosophy to another. Director Jack O’Brien keeps the action and the talk lively, and pulls off some wonderful little coups de theatre. If I found there to be a few too many blonde Bakunin sisters to keep track of, I didn’t let it ruin my evening.

What can I say? I liked it a lot. I didn’t feel terribly lost, considering the complexity of the play and the fact that I know next to nothing about Russian history. I seriously considered buying the T-shirt. I was looking forward to Part II, SHIPWRECK.

The first act of SHIPWRECK lived up to the promise of VOYAGE, but there were some danger signs, mostly involving casting. As the trilogy continues, one specific character begins to dominate, a man named Alexander Herzen, unfortunately played by an actor named Brian F. O’Byrne.

It would be no ordinary actor who can make this character engaging, at least as written by Stoppard. The role of Herzen is fiendishly difficult: lots and lots of long monologues that are supposed to explain complex philosophic positions and give lots and lots of historic background, interspersed with scenes dealing with mundane things like his wife’s infidelity and other domestic issues. And Mr. O’Byrne is simply not up to it. He is unable to make me give a damn about the man he is playing, or even to make me believe that he has a vague idea of what the hell he is supposed to be talking about. He might as well be reciting pi. I have never come so close to standing up and screaming at an actor to please shut the fuck up as when I sat writhing through O’Byrne’s unforgivably inept handling of the final scenes of the increasingly aptly entitled SHIPWRECK.

And it didn’t get better in SALVAGE. If SHIPWRECK was at least half interesting, at least until O’Byrne started jabbering, SALVAGE is a near-total failure. Ceaseless senseless oral diarrhea of historical data by O’Byrne, more characters introduced for a few minutes and then never heard from again, and less and less of actual interest. There’s the occasional sign of life provided by the return of Ethan Hawke as Bakunin (Hawke’s Bakunin is, by the way, the only character in the entire trilogy who gets convincingly older as time allegedly passes), Jennifer Ehle as Herzen’s housekeeper, and most especially by Josh Hamilton and Martha Plimpton as the writer Ogarev and his wife. Hamilton and Plimpton play the only interesting and engaging characters in this part of the trilogy. They actually seem to have an interest and affection for each other, and their interest in each other is infectious; you can feel the audience in the Beaumont start to react to something actually approaching energy on that stage.

It doesn’t last long. O’Byrne’s Herzen is soon gabbling again, and the play finally finally finally ends, with some ultimate gibberish from Herzen about how the important thing is to do the best you can in the period you’re in, and a really insulting final line: “There’s a storm coming.” Get it boys and girls? The storm of THE REVOLUTION!!!!!

There’s a sense of exhaustion to the proceedings, not just in the audience but onstage. Hawke and Ehle and Hamilton and Plimpton apart, the rest of the cast don’t register as clearly as they have in the earlier segments, at least partly because Stoppard is so busy trying to cram so much history into the play that the characters never come alive as anything other than names to be heard about once or twice and then forgotten about. Even the direction seems tired: the final tableau and musical flourish reminded me of nothing so much as Disney’s Hall of Presidents.

So that was it. Was it worth it? Yes and no. I’m glad to have seen it, certainly, but I can only say I enjoyed about half of it. My brother once described reading Norman Mailer’s big book HARLOT’S GHOST in this way: “The first 650 pages were wonderful.” I kind of feel the same way about THE COAST OF UTOPIA: the first 4 and a half hours were wonderful. That the remaining 4 and a half hours felt more like another 12 and a half hours is a big problem, one that Stoppard and O’Brien haven’t come anywhere near solving.

PAN'S LABYRINTH

And now for something very much the same.

As long as this film centers on the vicious sadistic military Captain (a splendid performance by Sergio Lopez) and his relationship with his housekeeper, who has connections with the rebels who want to do him harm, this film is fascinating and horrifying and grimly funny. Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, the director/screenwriter Guillermo Del Toro has decided to muddy this gripping story with some sentimental nonsense about a little girl and her interaction with some mythical creatures including a fawn, some fairies, and that creature you'll see in all the stills with his eyes in the palms of his hands.

See, the little girl's mother is the Captain's new wife. They're all in Spain during WWII, the Captain is a Fascist leader trying to wipe out a bunch of Communist rebels, and they're all living in some house in the middle of a forest that just happens to be infested with these rebels. The little girl, named Ofelia (get it?), is informed by a fawn (no, really, a fawn for Christ's sake) that she is a lost princess from another world, and that she has to pass three tests in order to prove herself worthy, and I'm sorry but I'm getting bored writing about it.

Forget about the little girl. She's probably the least interesting little girl who has every been expected to carry a movie and failed miserably. Her trials and tribulations have wowed a lot of people, especially the North American Film Critic Establishment (NAFCE) who have uniformly raved about this oddly tired and oddly unimaginative little film. The grownups, especially Sergio Lopez as the brutal but compelling Captain and Maribel Verdu as his housekeeper, are what the film is really about.

Lopez' Captain is a memorable villain, but he's more than that. Lopez never quite sinks into the obvious cliches of the psycho sadist. He trades them for a quiet conviction that is always convincing, never more so than during one memorable scene where he performs some emergency surgery on himself. Verdu's equally quiet and convincing performance is every bit Lopez' match. You just can't take your eyes off her, she manages to make every moment live onscreen.

So why are people falling all over themselves to praise this flick? Beats the hell out of me. PAN'S LABYRINTH offers some easy reassurance about transcending suffering, all wrapped up with a message of self-sacrifice and some stuff about escape through fantasy, and people just lap this stuff up. Now I don't mind me some reassurance about transcending suffering etc., but I just wish it had been done better. For a film about a girl's escape into fantasy to help her deal with the horrors of the real world around her, I much preferred Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND, a film that couldn't expect to be embraced by the kind of folks who are swooning over PAN'S LABYRINTH. And there it is, for me, in a nutshell. PAN'S LABYRINTH is a Terry Gilliam film for people who don't like Terry Gilliam films, who need the easy happy endings and reassurance that Gilliam relentlessly refuses to provide.

CHILDREN OF MEN

"Bazooka." "I was just getting used to Froly."

CHILDREN OF MEN is Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation of P. D. James' dystopian 1992 novel, set in a future where no more babies are being born and society is collapsing fast. Cuaron and his co-screenwriters pretty well jettison James' perhaps over-intellectualized story, keeping only the barest bones of the narrative, and creating a far more threatening world of terrorist attacks and generalized despair. An informed viewer will be able to catch echoes of Gitmo and Abu Ghrabe as well as of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

The new story centers on Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a low-level bureaucrat at the British Ministry of Energy. He is gradually drawn into an underground conspiracy to protect the only known pregnant woman in the world from the clutches of the pretty plainly untrustworthy government of which he is a part. This involves a series of increasingly hair-raising action sequences, including one ingenious sequence involving an escape and chase via a car that refuses to start.

Cuaron, whose HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN is the only one of the franchise worth seeing more than once, keeps CHILDREN OF MEN full of fascinating details (a kitten that gradually claws its way up Owen's pantleg, graffitti taken from Picasso's Guernica, lots of interesting animal imagery, including a reference to the cover of Pink Floyd's album Animals) that never seem shoehorned into the film for their own sakes, but seem designed to help keep the film alive, from sinking into a mass of genre cliches. Make no mistake, there is a lot more to this film than Spielbergian Big Set Pieces. It is interesting to compare the ending of CHILDREN OF MEN with the ending of Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS, to see the difference between a film that ends on a note of genuinely moving if qualified optimism, rather than sheer pandering knee-jerk sentimentality.

See it. See it now. Turn off your computer and go.

DREAMGIRLS

There's a little secret about DREAMGIRLS, the famed Broadway musical that gave the world the classic anthem "And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going." A little secret that has only been shared by a small coterie of people. Simply put, that secret is this: DREAMGIRLS isn't really very good. A book that is a pretty tired parade of showbiz rags to riches cliches (guess what? Fame Isn't All It Is Cracked Up To Be) and a couple of pretty good songs. Under Michael Bennett's then-revolutionary staging, the show did supply a couple of goosebump moments (including "And I Am Telling You"), but my principal memory of DREAMGIRLS is of Jennifer Holliday throwing the single greatest temper tantrum in the history of live musical drama. She was electrifying. Not much else about the show was, though.

So it can't be a surprise that my hopes for the film were not high. Could Bill Condon, a perfectly competent filmmaker (KINSEY and GODS AND MONSTERS) work the cinematic equivalent of Michael Bennett's magic on this rather uninspiring material? Or would he follow the lead of the unspeakable Rob Marshall in creating the atrocious film of CHICAGO, easily the worst film ever released by a major studio, casting a bunch of non-singing actors, or worse, non-acting singers, shooting each scene from every possible angle but the correct one, and editing the whole mess with a rusty blender?

If DREAMGIRLS never quite hits the lows of CHICAGO, it doesn't entirely hit any new heights either. The characters are two-dimensional, at best, and the story remains trite and largely uninteresting, except for a couple of finger-snapping payback moments. The casting is mostly better than expected, happily, and thank God they can all sing. Eddie Murphy delivers the film's most assured performance: his musical numbers and his book scenes are equally exciting. Jennifer Hudson is getting a lot of Oscar buzz, and her "And I Am Telling You" is easily the film's highlight. The biggest surprise in the film is the comatose work of Jamie Foxx, who brings absolutely nothing to the film whatsoever, delivering the living definition of a one-note performance.

At least part of the reason for the remarkable impact of Hudson's "And I Am Telling You" is that it is the first (if not quite the only) time that Condon actually lets his cast sing for more than a second at a time. All of the other musical numbers are very heavily edited in the way of most recent musical films: there's a cut after every three words or so, from a closeup to a long shot, or to a high shot, or to something else to illustrate the passage of time/make some plot points, or basically to just about anything that will break the continuity of the song and remind you that you are watching a movie. Condon seems particularly fond of showing me the back of his singers' heads. God forbid we should just get a chance to watch somebody sing. Hudson's "And I Am Telling You" is a potent reminder of what musicals are all really ultimately about: the pure pleasure of watching people sing. Condon similarly lets Eddie Murphy's songs and Beyonce Knowles' performance of a new song entitled "Listen" stand more or less on the talents of his actor/singers rather than on his editor, and these scenes are by far the best in the film as a result.

Think about that for a minute: actor/singers who can actually sing. After the horrors of Woody Allen's misguided EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU and the aforementioned CHICAGO it is a real treat to hear people who know their way round a song get a crack at a movie, rather than Renee Zellwegger, Richard Gere, or that Gerard Butler person.

Worth seeing? Sure. Why not. See it in a theatre with good sound.

INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch's latest film, the first since the surrealistically over-rated MULHOLLAND DR. Clocking in at a completely indefensible 2 hours and 48 minutes, EMPIRE covers some of the same territory as MULHOLLAND: we're once again in a no-man's-land of narrative and cinematic tricks, where Nothing Is As It Seems To Be, and everything is as Lynchian as it can possibly be.

Insert that little sound of frustration and annoyance that Marge Simpson makes here.

The story, or stories, seem to center on an actress named Nikki Grace, played admirably by Laura Dern. Nikki is making a film, and finds that the line between herself and the character she is playing seems to be fading. We also find out that an earlier production of the film in progress (in Poland, for some reason) was halted due to the murder of the two leads. We get scenes from the film that Nikki is making, scenes from Nikki's life that seem to mimic the film Nikki is making, scenes from the earlier Polish production, and scenes from the life of Nikki's Polish counterpart which seem to refer to moments in Nikki's life and Nikki's film, and scenes that might be dreams, and a sitcom featuring humanized rabbits, and a lot of other stuff that will probably make sense with repeat viewings.

If there are any repeat viewings. INLAND EMPIRE doesn't quite sink under the weight of all the metacinematic trickery, but it never really takes off, either. Lynch does begin the film brilliantly,though. The old sense of effortless Lynchian menace, which he seems able to induce at will out of ordinary settings and with a few rumbling sound effects, comes across very quickly and excitingly. But then something else happens. What had been an exciting tingle of dread gives way to a familiar sense of the familiar, that I'd seen it all before. Elements of LOST HIGHWAY, BLUE VELVET, ERASERHEAD, even the red curtains from TWIN PEAKS, and unfortunately big chunks of MULHOLLAND all inform INLAND EMPIRE.

There's nothing particularly wrong with a director working on similar themes and ideas and motifs from film to film. But with Lynch it feels like he's just plain repeating himself. Nothing's being learned, nothing's being digested, just chewed over and over and over.

SPRING AWAKENING

“I don’t do sadness.”

One day Bob called me over to the computer, sat me down, and saying, “Watch this,” played a video clip. About three minutes later the clip ended and I got up to find the reduced-price mailer I had gotten for SPRING AWAKENING, a clip of which Bob had just shown me. We saw the complete show earlier this week, and I’m having a hard time getting certain parts of it out of my head. In a good way.

The show is a musical version of Frank Wedekind’s apparently notorious 1890’s play, which has been banned off and on over the years. I’ve never read the play. Is the play banned because it dares to deal in a frank way with the sexual and emotional maturation of children, or because it lays the blame for what happens to these children squarely on the repressive trinity of Church, School and Home?

Anyway, the play focuses on a pair of schoolboys, Moritz and Melchior. Moritz is the school misfit, not unintelligent but rather clearly having a rough time with puberty: his hormones are really gushing. Melchior seems to be the school’s star, handsome and intelligent, clearly meant for Better Things. Moritz is being picked on by the school administration, Melchior begins a relationship with a young girl named Wendla.

The plot isn’t really the thing in this show. Anyone with any experience of narratives at all will be able to see where the story is going. What is at stake is the relentless energy and passion on that stage, the way that the screwed up hysteria of youth has been captured in a work of theatre that never condescends to the characters or to the audience. There’s none of the sentimentality or self-congratulation that mars RENT, no tacked-on pseudo-happy ending or self-righteous gabbling about the end of the millennium. A scene that evokes the ghosts of the past is powerful and harrowing and deeply moving, especially in comparison with a certain idiotic scene in GREY GARDENS.

Per Addison DeWitt: I am available for shouting from rooftops and dancing in the streets. (I thought that went out with Woolcott!)

Here's the clip.

COMPANY

"Sometimes I see him looking, and looking. I just look right back."

We saw the new revival of Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY the other night. There's been a lot of buzz about this production, as it is directed by John Doyle, who gave us last year's revival of SWEENEY TODD in which the cast doubled as the orchestra, and features Raul Esparza who recently came out in the New York Times as being not entirely gay or straight or even particularly bisexual, but kind of ambivisexual, which is supposed to mean that he can relate to Bobby, the commitment-phobic hero of COMPANY. Mr. Esparza's Bobby is particularly effective, a lost soul navigating around a series of married Scyllas and Charybdeses. His final outburst, the song "Being Alive," is one of the more moving things you'll see in a theatre this year. He manages to be funny, sexy, charming, and yet still believably lonely. The cast plays their instruments ably, and they sing and act their assorted roles very well.

Maybe a little too well. The big problem with the show is the book by George Furth, which is basically a series of sketches of apparently unhappy or endearingly quirky married couples (including one married couple-to-be) as they interact unhappily or endearingly quirkily, while Bobby watches and wonders, "What do you get out of this whole marriage thing?" As my partner Bob said afterward, the problem with sketches is that they are sketchy. The book is never quite as good as it wants to be and thinks it is, and is often just plain dated. One scene involving Bobby and his scene partners getting sitcomishly giggly after smoking pot is right out of Love American Style, and there is an unironic use of the term "generation gap." The actors (under Doyle's direction) do their considerable best, but they may be working too hard, aiming for a "seriousness" that the material just can't bear. For example, the sketch ending Act One centers on Amy and Paul, who are just about to get married. The great comic song "Getting Married Today" is the highlight of the scene, and is pulled off gorgeously, but the scene soon turns very sour, as Amy displays more than sitcom-level nerves, finally calling off the wedding altogether, causing Paul to leave very near tears. Of course, in true sketch-comedy fashion, Amy comes to her senses and runs off to find Paul and go through with the wedding, but it just doesn't wash. Amy's terror-turning-into-rage and Paul's bemused tolerance-turning-into-despair are so vividly and painfully realized that I found it impossible to believe that the wedding would go on. Who on earth would marry Amy after that? There's "good and crazy" and there's "flat-out stupid."

That caveat aside, though, the production works beautifully, fluid and exciting during the musical numbers if significantly less so during the frankly underwritten dialogue scenes. (at least we're not treated to any visits from ghosts of the past) The set and costumes and lighting are excellent. The score is just amazing. I don't see how anyone with a functioning nervous system can fail to get goosebumps during that opening number, especially as staged by Mr. Doyle and performed by this cast. And the songs keep coming, "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" and "Barcelona" and "Another Hundred People" and "Side By Side By Side" and on and on, all inventively staged and perfectly performed.

Bottom line: see it. Just don't be surprised if you find yourself waiting rather impatiently for the next song.

RULES OF THE GAME

"You're not a fool, you're a poet. A dangerous poet."

Film Forum is currently showing a new 35mm print of Jean Renoir's film. I've seen it three times in the past couple of weeks, and will probably squeeze in at least one one more trip.

I've been wracking my brain trying to put words to what it is that makes that movie so special, and I can't do it. I've tried to find writing on the film, and haven't been particularly successful. There's supposed to be a little BFI monograph by V.F.Perkins on RULES that has been delayed again and again and again. I know the usual line is to portray the film as a picture of French society just before WWII, and it certainly is that, but it isn't really that at all. At no time is anything as trivial as politics or current events ever mentioned in the film (which is very likely the point, of course). It's a picture of a bunch of people (of all classes) leading rather silly trivial lives with rather silly trivial mores. The series of ever-so-civilized affairs and social proprieties reveal how shallow the upper classes are, and the lower classes are not much better: at one point a chef mentions how he respects his boss for being angry that potato salad was improperly prepared, for having a palate sensitive enough to realize that the white wine was added after the potatoes had cooled instead of when they were piping hot. That's the sign of a real gentleman! And there are later events that show the real brutality lurking under the civilized veneer, too, and I don't mean just the still-horrifying hunt sequence.

The film isn't just a hatchet job, either. It is clear that Renoir, as director and screenwriter and actor, really loves these people even as he shows us how bloody awful they are. There are no out and out villains, and no out and out heroes. One character, the aviator Jurieu, is repeatedly referred to as a 'hero,' but the character is so unappealing in comparison with his opposite, the Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, that the term doesn't really carry a lot of weight. And Robert is a fascinating character: an accomplished rake who has just cut off a long term affair because he wants to be worthy of his wife, and who has to deal with the fact that his ex-mistress wants him back and his wife isn't happy when she finds out about the affair that was common knowledge to everyone but her. What makes the film special is the way that Renoir is able to show me so thoroughly that, as his own character Octave says, "Everyone has his reasons."

The acting is pretty well perfect. Roland Toutain can't quite make me interested in Andre Jurieu, but this is more than made up for by Marcel Dalio's endlessly fascinating Robert de la Chesnaye. He puts a fascinating twist on his words that makes me wish my French was better so that I could really understand what he's doing.

One thing that keeps coming up, both in print and in the commentaries on the Criterion DVD, is the use of deep focus, which seems to have been revolutionary in France at the time the film was made, or at least which Renoir uses in a way that had not been typical in French films up to that point. And it is marvelous: repeat viewings show all kinds of things going on in all those rooms that can be glimpsed off in the distance, sometimes very important things.

There are lots of incredibly complex shots, with lots of very carefully laid out choreography of actors/characters. One in particular begins as a closeup of Christine, who begins to tell her assembled guests/the audience about her relationship with Andre. As she speaks, her husband Robert (Dalio) and Octave (Renoir) move into view behind her, reacting to her description of her friendship with Andre, clearly mocking her statments that she and Andre are just friends. As her speech ends, Dalio thanks her for her speech, and describes the upcoming delights of the week in the country, the camera moves to include the other guests, and there is a good deal of carefully worked out activity as the shot comes to an end. I'd be here all day if I described all of it, and worked out all of the ramifications of each move and gesture. An amazing shot, only one of dozens of similar virtuosity throughout the film. And Renoir's technique is never obtrusive, never calling attention to itself.

One more important thing. Part of the danger of reading/writing about RULES OF THE GAME is the impression that the film is a humorless solemn monster. Make no mistake: RULES OF THE GAME is one of the most entertaining of the films usually considered as "classics." See it. See it often. It repays repeat viewings like few movies I know.

THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED

We saw Douglas Carter Beane’s play this week. It provides an interesting counterpoint to the other big theatrical experience we’ve had lately. GREY GARDENS was a huge success Off-Broadway, much of the fuss centering on the female lead performance. If I can’t say I quite understand what the big deal is over Christine Ebersole’s performance in GREY GARDENS, I can certainly understand why people are so excited over Julie White’s performance as Diane, the Machiavellian Mephistophelian Agent From Hell. And similarly to GREY GARDENS, there’s not much else to make too much fuss over.

The play concerns Mitchell, a rising leading man with what Diane describes as a recurring case of homosexuality. In NYC to collect a rather improbable-seeming NY Film Critics Award for Best Actor, Mitchell hooks up with Alex, a young hustler. Alex and Mitchell hit it off, much to Diane’s dismay. Mitchell is clearly her star client, and if his gayness gets around he’ll be stuck in boutique projects for life.

The play is well-written enough. Beane can certainly get off good lines, and keeps the action rather lively. Unfortunately, none of the actors is operating at the same kind of near-operatic level of sheer outrageousness as White. She’s a grand Dickensian Giant, tearing into that role like a shark with a swimmer, great fun to watch even as you thank God in heaven that she’s safely on a stage rather than anywhere near your real life. But no one else quite comes alive on stage as completely as she does. The stage shouldn’t feel quite so empty when White isn’t around.

And later, on the way home, you'll probably find yourself wondering certain things. Like why the agent of a rising young actor who has just won the NY Film Critics Award never shows any concern about ensuring him an Oscar nomination. Or more importantly how we're supposed to feel about the elaborately happy ending arranged so beautifully by Diane: how happy is it really supposed to be? I found myself feeling rather queasy about the whole thing, and that may be the point. Or is it? I can't quite escape the feeling that a stronger set of actors being directed to get their characters across might have clarified a good deal.