Tabarnouche Reviews

McLuhan's Wake (2002)

Sluggish panorama of now-classic media theories advanced by a precocious visionary

[8 January 2016]

As McLuhan's rear-view-mirror analogy predicts, today's world-view of the present has been shifting from one framed by 19th-century referents to one derived from post-1945 premises. In a few years the Reagan/Thatcher/Gorbachev-Bush41/Yeltsin-Clinton/Blair era will supplant it.

The image in the mirror may indeed be closer than it appears in the convex passenger-side mirror, but our gaze is still firmly, axiomatically retrospective. Human beings have a distinct collective bias for — to paraphrase McLuhan — drawing conclusions about the present from the roiling wake behind the cruise ship rather than from the endless stretch of unknown waters between prow and horizon.

The acceptance of extreme wealth concentration, of corruption of the electoral process, of propaganda designed to ensure irremediable political polarization, of the utilitarian economic objectification of human activity, of perduring ideology-based terrorism, of impotence before human-caused climate change and unchecked population growth — this conditioned resignation is a feature of society we now take for granted. Yet it was still sinking its roots when McLuhan's Wake came out in 2002.

Does this make McLuhan's Wake irrelevant? On the contrary.

What does obscure McLuhan's brilliant synthesis, at least as portrayed in this film, is the screenplay's tortoise-like pacing. Contrary to the revelations about the nature of chaos and social upheaval that McLuhan finds in Edgar Allan Poe's maelstrom allegory, the film plods on for 93 minutes at a soporific crawl worthy of a long, mediocre Italian opera. Had McLuhan been alive when the film was made, and had he not been able to punch up the story line exponentially, he'd almost certainly have hurled himself overboard into the maelstrom — if only to feel his synapses fire again.

The cascading mass hypnosis with "virtual reality," the paranoia that attends the demise of privacy, and the impoverishment of human relations bequeathed by social media (McLuhan's "global village") — as social innovations become mutations, they illustrate McLuhan's Laws of Media: Enhancement becomes its opposite, Obsolescence, much as automobile-based mobility morphed into dysfunctional, perpetually congested urban immobility. This shift likely means that McLuhan's "the medium is the message" is due for a resurgence before finally receding into revered historical curiosity.

To dismiss this film because of stylistic shortcomings would be to blind oneself to the insights of a genius on a par with William Blake, Buckminister Fuller, Chomsky, Atwood, Jobs, Assange, Zuckerburg.

Charlie Rose (1991–2017)

Heresy Alert: Charlie Rose's mainstream bias makes him the most frustrating, overrated interviewer on TV

[27 October 2015]

Charlie Rose's hour-long interview with Bernie Sanders on 26 Oct 2015 was, once again, hardly up to the standards one would expect from a televised interview series that has appeared on PBS for nearly a quarter-century.

Rose's aggressive, sometimes shabby, treatment of guests who challenge his neo-liberal bias and that of the show's funders is not new. See, for example, Scott F's comment (23 May 2015) on Rose's variable manner with other political guests:

"Two examples will hopefully illustrate {Rose's 'scrappy' biased interview style}. When Thomas L. Friedman is the guest (as he has been countless times) , I sit and wait for the moment when Charlie is going to bend forward to kiss Friedman's ring, as if everything Friedman says is as epochal as a papal homily. Contrast that with when someone from the political left is the guest (hardly ever, of course). When Noam Chomsky was the guest several years ago, Charlie attacked from every direction everything that Chomsky said, and that was after Charlie fessed up that Chomsky was one of the most requested guests ever by the viewers."

Rose made Sanders his new Chomsky. I did not count how many times Rose (a lawyer by training) put leading questions to Sanders, only to cut him off mid-sentence with additional questions. But it had to number in the dozens. Sanders took Rose's rapid-fire interruptions with good grace, perhaps sensing how many viewers would sympathize with him. And Sanders likely knew that sooner or later Rose was bound to slip up and let him (accidentally?) answer one of Rose's questions fully.

Despite Rose's persistent dismembering of Sanders' concisely articulated and well-supported explanations of his campaign's purpose, Sanders got a number of key ideas across. In the process, he nudged Rose into seeing that health care and education didn't really belong in the "social welfare program" drawer to which Rose had relegated them.

One marvels that Rose seems unaware that, to the politically savvy, the normative overtones Rose takes with guests whose opinions — left, right, economic, medical, artistic — veer from the beaten path betray him as a loyal defender of an elite-consecrated status quo.

Whatever talents Charlie Rose's decades on the air may confer, his most glaring professional deficit is his inability to get out of the way of guests who don't fit his Procrustean mold. Let them make their cases without the badgering, Charlie!

When it comes to effectively interviewing people who hold opinions at odds with his own, Rose has quite a few things to learn from NPR's Terry Gross and former late-night king Jon Stewart. Only, as a 73-year- old establishment-beholden millionaire, Rose may now be too comfortable with his Janus-faced role as darling/bulldog to sniff them out.

Putin's Kiss (2011)

Drama delivered, political promise insidiously unfulfilled

[8 July 2014]

Putin's Kiss (shot and edited so as to situate it midway between documentary and Reality TV show) follows Masha Drokova, a rather naïve 19-year-old who eventually rose to prominence in Nashi, a pro-Russia, anti-fascist, thug-infested political youth organization. ("Nashi" is presumably derived from the Russian word for "nationalist" similar to the way "Nazi" was derived from the German term for National Socialist.) Nashi offers members "summer camps" reminiscent of both the Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union and the Hitler Youth. It proves to have a nasty, violent side that Masha ideologically blinds herself to. For Masha, though, Nashi held more immediate benefits (new car, spacious digs, a meeting with the head of the Russian state, the hem of whose garment she touched).

That gradually changes as she gets to know Oleg Kashin, an opposition journalist who figures prominently in the film. Masha reflexively dislikes him, as her Nashi affiliation requires. True-believer Masha thus serves as foil to Stalwart Oleg, who endures much for his commitment to journalistic professionalism. He has chosen a lonely life of hardship and injury, and we are all glad of it.

Oleg appears as one of two credited cast members on the IMDb "full cast" listing. (Masha's name is curiously not present.) The other cast member being ... Vladimir Putin, formerly a lieutenant colonel in the KGB and now (again) President of the Russian Federation and de facto strongman leader since 1999. (If you watch closely, a secondary theme may emerge: Here's yet another short man who entered public life to make a right pest of himself so as not to be overlooked.)

Actually, the film, set in Moscow, shows hundreds of other political militants as well (thousands, if you count the political rally scenes). A few of them are captioned during public appearances and motivational speeches.

For those who still believed Russia to be a fledgling but functional post-Soviet-era democracy, the film will hold upsetting revelations. One of them is that political leaders see no downside to saying one thing and doing another — a tendency yielded to with even more relish and gusto in Russia than in chaotic corners of the EU or in the corporation-beholden US Congress.

Another is how PR-savvy Putin has become in his dealings with the public and the media, the better to put a palatable, modern face on Russia while consolidating absolute control and entrenching the Russian police state. Putin has, for example, cannily overseen the creation of a range of political organizations that act as clubs for Russians young and old, affording them relatively harmless, socially sanctioned, toothless outlets for their nationalism.

But there's little in Putin's strategies that can't be found in countries the world over. Putin just has fewer qualms about making dissidents offers they can't refuse.

For those who even cursorily follow international news, Putin's Kiss will flesh in some details about how the Russian political machine operates. Otherwise, it could prove a yawner after the first half-hour or so. Had this film been made in the West, the full cast would have included a few dozen informants and interviewees. But that's not in the cards in Putin's Russia.

And so, while admiring Oleg's bravery and Masha's political maturation, viewers over, say, age 30 will be left wondering why the film was built around the well-intentioned but bland Masha (including childhood photos of her and other biopic trappings). Is it primarily a self-aggrandizing compensation for political disillusionment? She was likely well placed to arrange for its production via contacts she'd developed as a Nashi figurehead.

Russophiles will find material of interest in Putin's Kiss, as may those who have just begun delving into political studies.

Others ... probably not so much.

Renoir (2012)

A more sensuous than sensual portrait of the artist as an old man

[18 June 2014]

And to think I almost didn't see this film because of its ridiculously low IMDb rating. Are those now skewed by investment bankers, flash traders, and other impatient shills of Satan who find the pace of films like Renoir glacial?

What a shame, if so. This film recounts and humanizes the final years of one of the world's most revered painters, one who rejected the title of artist. It is an Impressionistically rendered portrait (worth seeing for the Mediterranean light alone) that sparely and delicately portrays a cascade of relationships: between a father and a son 53 years younger, an arthritic painter who came to his métier in his fourth decade and a tempestuous adolescent model, the regenerative radiance of untrammeled eros, a love triangle, a female entourage who devotedly care for and carry le Patron wherever he will paint, a duty-bound WW I biplane pilot and a feisty fetishized lover, a latent filmmaker who here begins shedding his timorous, jejune indifference and later won international renown.

It is a masterpiece, a visual, gustatory, and vocal feast, yet one from which music is mostly absent. A lingering, sequestered fin-de-siècle world from which war was mostly distant. A microcosm where vital energy in all its guises was evoked and honored. It prompts you to take in the light, the space, the nourishing gusts from the Mediterranean, the temperate, fertile verdure, the French cadences of early-20th-century rural France.

Why so much talk among reviewers of abundant female "nudity" and "nakedness"? After a scene or two, it goes almost unnoticed, so naturally did it blend with the Edenic environs.

The film is, perhaps above all, a condensed history of a family permeated by quiet genius and love of art and the arts. One somehow senses its origins and dénouements without being told of them.

Renoir (the film) had deficits that others more critically competent than I have detailed. But it's tempting to begrudge Jacques Renoir, Gilles Bourdos and Jérôme Tonnerre the laconic textual bio of Andrée Heuschling (Christa Theret) that rolled by just before the credits. It asserted, not without Schadenfreude, that after her breakup with Jean Renoir in 1931 (not covered in the film), Andrée fell into a life of "obscure poverty".

Yet no one actually knows what became of her. Could she not, for all we know, have bested Jean's fate? Might she have found her way to a Sardinian isle like the one where Lina Wertmüller shot Swept Away? A reclusive Impressionist may have offered to make a breezy, clothing-optional life with her in a cliff-side villa there (or so the sequel I'm planning has it). Only Heuschling, unlike Wertmüller's Raffaella, this time opted to stay put and leave the painted porcelain intact.

Las Acacias (2011)

All about Acacias

[3 June 2014]

The Acacia (a.k.a. thorn tree, whistling thorn, wattle) is a genus of shrubs and trees, often spine-bearing (outside Australia). Its name derives from the Greek word for thorn. The tree has long been associated with the shores of the Nile, although its varieties are found worldwide.

The Acacia's reputation precedes its début as film title. It has come to symbolize resurrection and immortality. Egyptian mythology ties the acacia to the tree of life. In Freemasonry it embodies purity, even endurance of the soul. Acacias also fill needs for timber and firewood.

Las Acacias opens as Rubén, a lorry driver, wanders among timber harvesters in Paraguay as they pile high his flatbed with acacia boles. He will cross the Argentine border to take acacia timber to market in Buenos Aires.

At the request of his boss, Rubén will also take Jacinta (of indigenous origin) and, to his surprise, her 8-month-old infant with him. Jacinta has arranged to visit her cousin in Buenos Aires and will probably look for work there.

It's a long trip. Much of the film is shot looking into the lorry cabin through the windows on either side of the flatbed tractor. Dialog is spare and deliberate. On the occasions when Jacinta is asked about the baby's father, for instance, she replies — without a trace of bitterness — "The baby has no father." Rubén and Jacinta exchange first names. She teaches Rubén some words in her native language. Rubén defers to Jacinta and the baby by smoking outside when the lorry is stopped. She waits patiently, as he does for her when twice he pulls his rig over so that she can phone her cousin.

The cast has only three members — one of whom can't yet talk and is prone to incontinence — but all are well chosen. It would be hard to imagine other actors who could fill the roles as well.

Rubén and Jacinta, hardened but not deadened, have gracefully resigned themselves to their lots. Each has an incomplete family. Neither seems to be expecting anything special from life. Both have facial contours that reward the repeated scrutiny of tight shots.

Whether by precocious talent or by NSA connivance, Anahí (that's the baby) puts in a stellar performance. Not only does she (the Actor) seem mysteriously disposed to respond on cue flawlessly, but her Character (much like the Actor) also brings out the best in Rubén and Jacinta. It's likely that the two of them would otherwise have passed the trip in awkward silence. (Those who, like me, consider all babies of Anahí's age to be more or less indistinguishable from one another have another think coming.)

Las Acacias extols, without exalting, the quiet delights that arise unbidden in everyday life. Pablo Giorgelli (director and writer) and writer Salvador Roselli acknowledge what is mundane about road culture. And they show us how prosaically enjoyable those encounters could still be in the Argentina of 2011, as they might have been in mythic 1950s America. Despite the vagaries and precariousness of that life, therein lies contentment of a sort. Speech figures far less prominently in it than do glances, gestures, civility, and trust born of experience.

Nothing explodes into flame in this film. No one gets shot or tasered or even spit at. No voices are raised. No one hoodwinks anyone else. No lawyers, no strivers, no moneychangers, no Mr Burnses. No phonies. In other words, another iteration of magical realism.

A hint of resolution comes just before the credits roll. We fade to black full of hope, if not change.

Las Acacias ends as it began: with shots of acacias. The kind that grow and are felled, and the kind that move about on two legs.

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)

highly underneglected

[5 February 2014]

Tom Cruise seemed almost a natural to play Lestat in Interview With the Vampire. The locations were excellent, the late-18th-century set design superb, and the cinematography competent.

But director Neil Jordan seemed at a loss for ways to give the plot primacy. As a result, Cruise and Pitt had to distract the viewer from the film's substance deficit by playing up their screen presences. The former, unfortunately, overshadowed the latter beyond what the script required.

It's as though Jordan, who has done very creditable work on films that dealt with his native Ireland (The Crying Game, Michael Collins), let Louisiana languor swamp his direction. Jordan recognized that he'd gone about things in an "unconscious" way (see his IMDb bio). His interpretation remolded, circumscribed, and sometimes denatured the seamless world into which scenarist and author Anne Rice had long lured her readers. The film, Jordan said, "seemed to me to be about guilt."

Viewers who had read Rice's novel by the same name may find it hard to believe that she had much of a hand in the final product. Still, as vampire films go, this one is truer to the literary genre than most. But judging by my stubbornly wandering thoughts, it did not work.

To hazard a hypothesis: Sensing that Jordan was adrift, Cruise commandeered directorial and authorial control. And ultimately he sapped the film's vitality by diverting and squandering its essence.

The Good German (2006)

The Dummkopf-bedeviled German

[8 May 2013]

Believable period decor, urban post-war detailing, B&W shots set up to mimic 1940s camera work — and especially Cate Blanchett's fine, shadowy lineaments and her credible spoken German — these may save unsuspecting viewers from a pernicious slide into the Quagmire of Despond.

Until mid-movie, that is. The dull tenterhooks on which I was to writhe from that point forward proved ineffectual against mind fog. It thickened with each random plot twist. My finger inched toward, but never found, Fast-forward, Pause or Self-Immolate.

It were as though the low light and the absence of color had leached timing and savoir-faire from the The Good German set. (Blanchett, however, apparently knew to wear light- and color-fast threads that prevented her aura from dimming.)

But why did Soderbergh and Attanasio not huddle behind camera, where they might improvise a remedial script? Had they heeded their roiling instincts prompting them to demur, the rewrite they'd have produced on the fly might have gone down as one of the most inspired saves in the annals of film.

Would it have been so difficult, for example, to have had Tobey Maguire dismembered in the first ten minutes after carelessly stepping on live unexploded ordnance? His demise would have been supremely satisfying — and not all that gory in fifty-some shades of grey.

Rejiggering The Good German would have required a bit more finagling than that, though nothing too fancy. The percussive force of the deus ex machina Maguire explosion could have thrust Clooney backward into a rubble pit, leaving him dazed and blessedly mute. Whatever acting talents his fans impute to him would only have been heightened by a 90- minute stint of pantomime.

The wispy plot line of The Good German is tangled beyond the ability of most mortals to unknot. Viewers would have had fewer misgivings about the writers if Clooney had played an aphasiac. What ever is he trying to tell us? we'd have wondered. Instead, puzzlement gnawed: Why does this cuddlesome cipher keep striving to come off as gauche, vacuous and witless?

Clooney's overacting flame-out — one can think of B&W screwball comedies with more subtle leads — ensured that the film's deficiencies would scorch its assets. That need not have been so. Few would publicly deny that Clooney has the range needed to play a speechless war casualty. Had he been thus retasked, Soderbergh's strained attempts at cinematic authenticity would not have stood out so starkly.

Even a dumb Clooney, however, ought to have known better than to let his character be written into a fumbling, gratuitous "tribute" to Casablanca toward the end. But — surprise! — he acquiesced. That aesthetic insult proved to be the film's coup de grâce.

Finally, mercifully, as the credits began rolling by, my arms slowly unwrapped and allowed my head to rise and inhale freely again.

Even if someone just gave birth to you, life's too short. You'd be better off spending two hours at the Lotto machine.

Run Lola Run (1998)

A pre-Bush43, pre-Greece quantum running tour of Berlin

[8 July 2012]

Find a way to see this film. Pay no mind to what you think of it at first. Give it the benefit of the doubt for half an hour. It takes it that long to get warmed up.

For eons sages of various stripes have maintained that the obstacles that stud our lives are of unconscious origin and so of our own making. Reclusion, they claim, allows the chain of cause and effect to emerge with crystalline clarity. It permeates every sphere. Life events seem arbitrary but aren't. Change world views, change realities.

Panels of pedigreed experts have protested that those assertions are but the ramblings of unlettered dreamers, shamans and work-shirkers. They insist that seers and others on the fringes have always sought notoriety. It breaks the tedium of endless days in dank caves and snake-ridden forest huts. That's how they justify their defeatist withdrawal from social obligations and cascading human chatter.

But what if marginalized mystics got it right these past few millennia? What if a smidgen less doubt, a tad more empathy, and an extra erg of attention here and there send the billiard balls on radically different trajectories?

What if lagniappe can reverse entropy? Is that what makes Lola run?

The Price of Sugar (2007)

How the commodity-dependence trade works hell on latter-day heroes

[19 June 2012]

Paul Newman's narration of The Price of Sugar occurred after he had moved from acting roles to voice roles and narration. It was the second-to-last film in which he had direct involvement before his death in 2008. The film made it onto the Academy's documentary feature shortlist for the Oscars.

Newman's participation helped call attention to the plight of undocumented Haitians recruited by the Vicini family in the Dominican Republic to work on their sugar plantations in extraordinarily squalid and pathogenic conditions. Deprived of their identity papers on arrival, and looked down upon by many among the lighter-skinned local population, most sugarcane workers and their families could no longer leave the plantation, let alone the country.

Father Christopher Hartley is a Catholic missionary priest who grew up in a wealthy Spanish family that moved to London about the time he was born. He later worked with Mother Teresa in Calcultta for many years and with Latino immigrants in NYC before beginning his ministry in the Dominican Republic. There he revived a church by developing close ties with the poorest of the poor. Gradually he drew international attention to the exploitation and mistreatment of the Haitians sequestered on vast plantations devoted to growing tall, perennial, sucrose-rich Saccharum grasses.

The film is about Hartley, his campaign to improve the social and working conditions he encountered, his commitment to his parish, and the effect his doggedness had on the forgotten lives of migrant Haitians. He may have a bit too much photogenic chic and ease around camera crews for some tastes — suffer the upper-class priest to go unto the cutters and forbid his amour-propre not — but indisputably Hartley lived and worked for a decade in places others feared to dread.

If you number among those who tire of seeing religion expropriated for political gain — or if you tend to find people who walk the talk against very long odds more noteworthy than various permutations of Idol shows — you might appreciate this fleeting glimpse behind the DR's PR: Tropical Island Nation Prospers by Rising to Meet Demand of First-World Neighbors.

If your conscience has the wherewithal to trump comfort, prepare to squirm. The Price of Sugar shows how profiteers knowingly degrade the lives of unseen thousands so that a chunk of the world's largest crop, sugarcane, may wend its way from its raw state to refined American kitchens.

Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010)

A first-rate documentary about disruptions in the food supply coming soon to farms near you

[8 February 2012]

Do you have sneaking suspicions that all is not well in the food chain?

— Are you puzzled and even disturbed when you see so much malnutrition and famine worldwide? And yet, when you look behind the headlines, you find evidence gathered by international agriculture experts that the planet has more than enough resources to feed everyone, if only we modify a few of our practices.

— Do you keep hearing rumors that agribusiness farming practices have, in a matter of a few decades, been destroying topsoil that took centuries to build up? And that not only are they rendering farmland sterile in the absence of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, but that they're also profiting handsomely from it?

— Are you well enough informed to recognize that the Earth has reached peak oil production? And that, from here on out, the petroleum on which today's societies have based their transportation, prosperity, and general well-being will be scarcer and scarcer, and more and more unaffordable, especially for the world's least affluent 95%?

— Does all this talk about the "carrying capacity" of the Earth, and how it has been exceeded, perplex and annoy, or possibly frustrate, you? Do you understand that it would take 1.5 Planet Earths to supply human resource needs at our current rate of consumption? And that, at our present rate of "growth", we could need up to 6 Planet Earths by the end of this century? (Those will be hard to find, let alone build pipelines to.)

— Do you ever wonder whether the multinational corporations that now control (or "own" the "patents" to) 75% of the seed varieties worldwide are improving or worsening the ability of earthlings to feed themselves now and in the immediate future?

— If you're male (as 49% of us are), are you secure enough to consider evidence that in societies where women have central roles in farming, food production is far more efficient, productive, and sustainable?

— Do you gather facts about problems and then act accordingly, or do you prefer reacting to facts based on a conviction that it's all just one more plot to make you feel "bad"?

— Do you count yourself among those who are curious and open-minded enough to listen to what agro-ecology experts and actual farmers (using natural cultivation methods outside North America and Europe) have to teach us — even if it means reading film subtitles?

If so, the news is good: this film is for you.

In fact, this film may be among the most memorable you'll ever see. That's because in the months and years ahead, events now gaining momentum will remind you of its messages more and more frequently.

You may find it all the more memorable because, unlike other documentaries in this vein, it offers more than a little inspiration in the form of flesh-and-blood, hands-on champions who vigorously defy what appears to be a toxic, inexorably rising tide. They embody and exemplify ways for the 95% to restore and, perhaps, maintain sanity, health ... and survival — once the 95% realize that, with the leverage their numbers and moral force confer, however Quixotic it seems today, they can turn back any tide.

Temple Grandin (2010 TV Movie)

One of the more mind-bending movies I'd never heard of

[15 January 2012]

"Who's this here Claire Danes?" I muttered as I read the DVD box, playing the hayseed to vex the merger-weary corporate predators standing elbow to elbow about me. In fact, I had dim suspicions that Temple Grandin might be someone worthy of attention. But the actual draw was finding out what kind of person bore a name so sublimely exemplary of trochaic dimeter. I took the DVD home.

Few biopics shed light so penetratingly on autism. Not just on the isolation, exclusion, withdrawal, and social phobia that accompany it, but also, in this case, on the courage, eccentric brilliance, cross- species communion, and triumphs that it can occasion. Temple Grandin's life stands in glaring defiance of the denatured Newtonian materialism we take for absolute reality, for her understanding passeth all reason.

Of the dozen-odd people to whom I've recommended Temple Grandin, five or six actually watched it. More important, all were delighted they did.

By her very presence Temple Grandin the person, whom the movie-makers wisely consulted, very likely imparted quantum insight to a film that otherwise might have been reduced to pathos. (The DVD includes an interview with her.) Add to that Danes' interpretation, gifted writers, and deft direction by Mick Jackson, and you wind up with a film that's fascinating from start to finish. Yet in places it was so uncomfortable to watch that the eventual catharsis caught me off guard.

For a few days thereafter an unbearable lightness of musing set in. I was probably not alone in calling to mind anyone I'd ever known who was, or might have been, diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. What if ASD proves one of the more cunning interventions Gaia has devised to show us how acutely our delusions and diversions have subverted our essence over the past dozen millennia?

If you feel any kinship with non-human animals, you likely won't regret seeing Temple Grandin. You'll discover how some "disabled" members of our species have re-established connections with myriad other species and habitats at the expense of the chattering mind. And you could find yourself aghast at what the rest of us have unwittingly put the Temple Grandins of the world through for nudging us homeward.

The Road (I) (2009)

'agonizingly desperate and sad' — or just agonizing?

[15 January 2012]

As much as I like much of Cormac McCarthy's writing and Viggo Mortensen's work, I barely made it through the first third of this film before calling it quits. Lawdy, lawdy, how I tried to make it to the halfway point, too. It was early; I was wide awake and primed for being intrigued.

But my core psychic temperature had already fallen too far too fast.

Didn't even have the urge to FFwd it to see how it turned out. That was, under the circumstances, the only socially responsible thing to do. What kind of anomie might I have sunken into, and how grey and grimy might I have rendered the worlds of my neighbours, compeers, and consorts, if it turned out that THE ROAD never DID turn out? If, however, you believe that the role of high-roller art today is to abet us in programming ourselves to fulfill the most individuated, alienated, bestial destiny of which Homo sappyins is capable — in the process pushing returns on personal security and pharmaceutical stocks through the stratosphere — then THE ROAD COULD WELL BE YOUR SACRED PATH.

You may be right, who knows. Just don't forget to add a few more boxes to your dehydrated-food stockpiles each week or two, or we may never find out.

Who Wrote the Bible? (2004 TV Movie)

Fills in a few holes

[22 November 2009]

This 100+-minute documentary represents a quest by British theological scholar Robert Beckford to put the derivation and composition of the Bible into perspective for viewers of this Channel 4 (UK) presentation. He seeks to answer questions about how the books of the Bible were written, by whom, in what social and political context, and in what sequence. To what extent were they historically accurate? Were historical discrepancies material to their credibility and to Judeo-Christian traditions? Naturally, he starts with the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), all of which were supposedly written by Moses.

His coverage of the remaining books in the OT is less exhaustive, but he examines the four Gospels as closely as he does the Pentateuch. His comments on Saul of Tarsus, later known as the apostle Paul (who wrote the bulk of the NT), highlight the issues and ambiguities surrounding the rise of early Christianity.

Beckford visits the Holy Land, Europe, the UK, and the USA in order to situate ancient Biblical sites, temples, churches, and museums, where he interviews Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars, believers, and practitioners. His style is infectiously engaging (indeed, distractingly impassioned at times), and his commentary nuanced and articulate. He is, for the most part, a pleasure to listen to.

But depictions of Beckford's comings and goings became tedious about mid-way through the film. Endlessly recurring shots of Beckford in cars, trucks, planes, and afoot — transporting himself from one backdrop locale to another, presumably to emphasize to what lengths he had gone to conduct his research first-hand — wound up calling more attention to the huge carbon footprint he was leaving than to his assiduity. Though he seldom revealed how much he himself took Biblical narrative to heart, he did steer suspiciously clear of scripture alluding to the exceptional warmth of Carbon-Emitters' Hell.

Of necessity, too, given the visual format and the imperatives of television, he could not go into as much depth as one might have wished (e.g., the development of the King James Bible). Doubtless he was entirely capable of doing so.

Still, because the Bible is so central to world culture, for non-scholars who are curious about the Bible as historical or literary artifact, or those here below who merely seek a more complete overview, this documentary is worth the investment of time. The interviews themselves are well structured and tightly edited. Viewers leave it with greater awareness of Biblical chronology and controversies — if not with as many crisp, definitive answers as the opening sequences lead them to expect.

Quarterlife (2007–2008)

It's not the length of the course that wearies, it's the irregularly spaced hurdles

[6 July 2008]

There are indeed a lot of good points about quarterlife: the production values, the cast. Herskovitz & Zwick let the script pander too much to stereotypes about 20-somethings, true. But individual experimentation with hedonism and perfidy as antidotes to angst is common to all civilizations in decline, and so they are not by themselves implausible enough to repel. Not right away.

I was pretty sure, in fact, that I was going to make it all the way to the last episode. I can do small doses, 3-4 mini-episodes on the web site, once every ten days or so.

Then came the Las Vegas trip. Though you don't really know where they were leaving from and thus over what period the bus-ride melodrama was spread, it didn't become unviewable until just after their arrival in the city of water-wasting consumer delusion. Even brief exposure to the desert sun can make you giddy, it seems. By the time the tribe had entered their hotel suite and parted the remote-controlled curtains over the glass wall that looked out onto the nondescript expanse of twinkling lights, they'd embraced the high-roller luxury appointments that decades of refinements to mobster taste had made a reality. (It might be well to remind ourselves here that 25 is the new 15.) Kind of makes you wonder where all that self-deprecating Weltschmerz went.

Where's Eric when we need him? He'd have reminded the gang that Vegas exists to showcase the trappings of a society that gives free reign to the very corporations that our sweet, confused, self-obsessed 20-somethings so dislike working for. Hadn't they listened to any lyrics about how showing awe only encourages them? But our quarterlifers would have laughed Eric off. Their faith in the virtue of realism (a term that now subsumes temporizing) is absolute. It is this realism that, they seem to believe, will guide them beyond the drug-induced illusions about solidarity, economic justice, activism, and the consequences of irresponsible hegemony that every Boomer ever born -- now accidental millionaires all -- so pathetically fell prey to.

As quarterlife has worn on, it has become clearer and clearer that the sequel, halflife (still lower case, but subtitled in English and dubbed in Mandarin), will show our gang grappling with the sacrifices and bitter disappointments of gaining entry to the corner offices of the thriving American subsidiaries of Shanghai-based conglomerates. From there they will be inflicting corporatism on a new and larger generation of the dispossessed. (They're the ones using public transport.)

That is, if there still *are* corporations and identifiable generations after the Implosion. The American experiment in self-determination at some point morphed into a collective desire for liberty, convenience, and the pursuit of truthiness. And the new vision hasn't been faring all that well lately.

(Q)uarterlife missed a beautiful opportunity to inspire us with a new genre. Its innovation was in offering viewers a front-row iPod seat just as the tsunami is breaking.

The Architecture of Doom (1989)

The power of incompetent narration

[2 April 2008]

The film approaches the Nazi period from a refreshing angle: the seldom-documented (in film) visions that informed official Nazi aesthetics, given priority by a host of top Nazis who, like their Fuehrer, were failed artists. It offered a number of insights, such as the role played by architectural sketches Hitler had made in his youth and the future propaganda value of gargantuan Greek-influenced architecture (e.g., Reich buildings were designed to decompose along the lines of Roman ruins so as to impress archaeologists centuries later).

But the English narration by Sam Gray was so atrocious that it was difficult to separate it from the visual and conceptual qualities of the film itself. Imagine a Beethoven symphony where the strings are played without passion and several beats off from the other sections – no reflection on the composer, but still hard to listen to. So great was the impact of the narration, in fact, that I expected to see ratings averaging 5 or 6 (my vote) on the IMDb site. Gray's uneven, indifferent inflection applied to a script he clearly (to judge by his mispronunciations) had not familiarized himself with gave the film an amateurish quality that it surely did not have in the original Swedish or the German versions. Moreover, the English translation, done by a German, was awkward in places.

As tragic an oversight as the choice of the English narrator was, Peter Cohen and the producers ultimately retain responsibility for letting it pass, especially since Cohen had worked in English before. Any educated native English-speaker asked to review it would have cautioned them, after a single listening, not to underestimate how much the narration undermined its effectiveness. Engaging another narrator surely would not have broken the budget.

Had I the choice, I'd see this film again with the Swedish or German narrations, subtitled in English.

Le matou (1985)

Another, lesser known dimension to North American film-making

[17 May 2007]

Le Matou (The Alley Cat) is an allegorical film in which youth, friendship, goodness, love, honesty, simplicity, perseverance, etc. — a few Scout virtues are omitted — ultimately beat out the jaded and seemingly invincible forces of the dark side. A struggling late-20-something couple in Montreal, supported by their friends and family and a rather unusual stranger, seize on a too-good-to-be-true opportunity to realize their dreams of having their own restaurant and, by happenstance, a family of convenience. Along the way improbable obstacles and challenges supervene but prove surmountable. The Alley Cat is comfortable, well cast and acted, and sometimes intriguing. The resolution is, in the main, satisfying, if foreseeable and low-key.

The theme may not be particularly novel, but there are one or two other-worldly plot devices that wouldn't be out of place in a Gabriel García Márquez epic. Story development will likely seem fresh to North American viewers who are not used to Quebec movie-making or the kind of Continental European films that are not usually screened in North America outside repertoire theatres. What is novel, though, is how the story develops without recurring to guns, murders, explosions, torture, drug abuse, invasions, exploitation, cruelty, ethnic and racial caricatures, cataclysms, or related cinematic staples that are now standard features of the Hollywood film template and, by inference, daily American life.

In fact, you'd almost think you were watching a film made in the 1930s rather than the 1980s. Viewers may get the distinct the impression that they're seeing a story that could actually happen to ordinary people of ordinary means (supernatural occurrences notwithstanding). Few films made in French, whether Québécois or European, slight the erotic, and here the sex scenes are tastefully done and not gratuitous. The Alley Cat, like other Québec films, reflects values of Québec society, where violence and aggressiveness are still considered rude rather than, as in films from English-speaking North America, justifiable adaptations to modern life. But for these very reasons, those who appreciate action over character development may find The Alley Cat pleasant enough, but too dull (i.e., too subtle).

For all the insight into French-speaking North America that The Alley Cat affords (including a brief tour of rural Québec), few will rank it with Québec masterpieces like The Barbarian Invasions, Léolo, or C.R.A.Z.Y. Some devices used to advance the story, particularly certain deus ex machina plot twists, are necessary to sustain the allegory, but they leave loose ends. Several critics believed Egon Ratablavasky to represent American wealth and interventionism, but compared with what the world has come to know under the Bush administration, the allegorical references are timid and unrecognizable.

The film itself takes no overt pro- or anti-American stance. Its focus is micro, personal, and subdued — a bias that runs through many Québec films — to the point that social and political features are all but incidental to plot and setting. Whereas the characters in The Alley Cat are believable and imminently likable — the kind of folks you'd like to have in your own circle of friends — the story itself lacks the pace and substance to make it memorable, other than as a glimpse into life in Montreal in the 1980s. Personable characters and exposure to the gentler society that lies a mere 60 km north of the U.S.-Canada border, however, are not negligible attributes in a film that offers respite from the eternal American quest for mind-bending blockbusters.

Do attempt to see The Alley Cat in its subtitled version rather than the dubbed version. Even if you don't understand French, you're likely to enjoy the contrast between the elegant informality and warm cadences of Québécois French, and the more familiar and impassioned French (of France) spoken by Julien Guiomar (as chef Aurelien Picquot) and the measured, precise European French of Jean Carmet (who played Egon Ratablavasky). If you read French, the book by Yves Beauchemin on which the film is based, though overly long and endowed with some of the same developmental defects, will dazzle you with its vivid narrative, perky dialogue, and apt description, without the self-conscious stylistic flourishes that often afflict French novelists.

Ike: Countdown to D-Day (2004 TV Movie)

worthwhile for history buffs, but ...

[30 September 2005]

It's very difficult, for me, to understand those reviews that credit Selleck with a defining performance as Ike. His acting, intonation, enunciation, and body language were flat and unconvincing. Unless Ike was that dull himself, which does not seem to be the case, Selleck was a very disappointing casting choice.

The main scenes that have stuck with me were the endless shots of Selleck lighting cigarettes and exhaling smoke during one-on-one encounters with Churchill and his staff members. Not since some of the early Nick Nolte films has anyone relied so much on empty gesture to compensate for a weak screen presence.

But the film might be a must-see for history buffs. It reveals aspects of the invasion decision-making and execution process that, as far as I know, have not been adequately treated elsewhere.

Just don't expect to come away from it inspired or feeling some connection with the Ike character. And you certainly won't come away impressed with the similarity that Selleck's interpretation bears to Eisenhower (as George C. Scott's did to Patton -- reportedly making even Patton's daughter forget she wasn't watching her father).

Carrington (1995)

Delicately portrayed amorous eccentricity as only the British can do

[24 November 2002]

If you require the overdone loudness, violence and aggressivity of an American film (Training Day comes to mind), you'll need to take an extra dose of Ritalin to get through this film. (That advice could have been useful to a few of the previous reviewers, in fact.)

For those who don't have to be hit over the head, though, this film is a riveting masterpiece about the varied forms human love can assume--and a reminder that subcultures, like the Bloomsbury Group, have always given social norms a wide berth. British society has long tolerated eccentricity, especially when discreetly indulged, of which the nuanced contours of relationships among the literate in early-20th-century Britain provide an excellent illustration. Combine this refreshing glimpse of consensual mores with outstanding interpretations by Thompson and Pryce, and with fidelity to historical fact, and you've got two delightful hours of first-rate cinema on your hands.

And not an exploding car or a vengeance-driven, gadget-laden military operation against a demonized third-world country anywhere to be found. Amazing. And bravo. 9 out of 10.

The Henry Miller Odyssey (1969)

Unique autobiographical retrospective of Henry Miller

[21 December 2001]

I saw this film a year or two ago and have not been able to find it again. It bears being seen several times.

Anyone who has read and enjoyed Henry Miller, or who appreciates Miller's place in 20th-century American literature, should see this film. It's basically one long interview with Miller, who by the time of its release was in his late 70s. He died at 88 in 1980.

Yet he is sharp as a tack here and as charming as ever. There are scenes with him swimming and cycling, and a visit with him to his old Paris haunts.

Nothing that I know of conveys what Miller was like in person as well as this film does. By his own admission, his writings, marvelous as they were, did not reveal him: "...the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible." (Barbara Kraft, "The Last Days of Henry Miller," Hudson Review, Autumn 1993, vol. 46(3):477)

Listening to Miller, seeing him gesticulate, watching him move and reflect--indispensable complements to his writing for any serious admirer of his work.

The Tailor of Panama (2001)

You'd better be half asleep already

[7 November 2001]

I'm a die-hard LeCarré fan, and this is the worst rendering of one of his books I've ever seen -- even though LeCarré himself did the screenplay. The humour is lame, the characters unbelievable (yes, the plot is tongue-in-cheek, but even so), the story line boring from about the middle to the end.

Brosnan puts in a passable performance, but it's too blatantly a heavy-handed spoof of a spy thriller to work. I wound up fast-forwarding it through several scenes. See it for the Panama scenery, see it for what it says about U.S. foreign policy, but don't expect anything worthy of the author of Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor.

What a disappointment. 4 out of 10.

Thomas est amoureux (2000)

Spoof on logical future outcome of Internet-based culture

[22 June 2001]

One of the most stimulating, hilarious, thought provoking films I've seen in years. About an agoraphobe living maybe a decade into the future (in Belgium), when it is possible to have exclusively virtual relationships. Narrator/star has wry sense of humour, yet is quite compassionate and understanding as he goes about his daily business -- in all realms of life -- via interactive electronic media.

Film touches on experiences many of us have had in chat rooms, via email, on ICQ, on web pages, etc. It will probably seem very familiar to you. You're likely to find yourself nodding, "yes, yes, I've done that.... ah, yes, that's just the way it could be....."

Subtly and credibly casted, directed and acted. A film that is good enough to bear viewing two or three times. Something Ridley Scott might have made, if he'd thought of it first and if he'd sworn off violence.

Amores Perros (2000)

Life in the postmodern barrios of Mexico City

[22 June 2001]

A film teeming with chaos and contrast, and skilfully interwoven plot lines that tie together seemingly disparate events. Well casted and directed, but I was not prepared for the level of gratuitous, if realistic, violence. If you're a dog lover, the first half hour will be almost unbearable, and will leave you wondering whether all the scenes were staged without loss of life.

Some excellent and satisfying scenes and characterizations in the second half of the movie -- which you'll deserve if you survive the first half. A testament to the adaptive, street-wise genius of those caught in a stratum of society that most North Americans don't encounter often, and usually turn their heads from when they do encounter it.

Not a film the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce will be promoting. Not a film that I will see again. But YMMV....

Aimee & Jaguar (1999)

Initiation into Lesbian love set in WW II Berlin

[22 June 2001]

A subtle, yet startling and arousing, film that keeps you guessing until almost the end. Very little slack in the story line. The horrors of the Nazi era seen through civilian Berliner eyes. An incisive portrait of a group of women coping with the war, leading their lives between bombings. Lives that were at once passionate, daring, deprived, fearful. Outstanding cinematography that reinforces the eroticism. Maria Schrader will seduce viewers of either sex.

Max Färberböck had done only television until this film, which won a Cannes prize and was nominated for Best Foreign Film (I think) at the Academy Awards. Not a bad outcome for a first try! Something of the same energy, feel and pathos of Benigni's La Vita è bella, also set in WW II and dealing with a few of the same themes.

After the Thin Man (1936)

Tied for first among all Thin Man movies; best for Asta

[31 December 1999]

The typical Thin Man plot with the group summons and interrogation at the end, and the usual surprise deduction and confession.

This one, though, contains the best scenes of all the Thin Man movies for Asta, the brainy but timorous wire-haired fox terrier who often steals the show. Far more talented than the standard cinema dog, Asta gives a superlative performance during a living room chase in which he runs off with a note that had been tied to a rock, to Nick and Nora's chagrin. (When was the last time you saw a terrier put his snout under water and blow bubbles?) Asta also shoos off an unwanted suitor to Mrs. Asta. This film is unquestionably Asta's finest hour.

Best line is from Nora: "Oh, Asta, I don't know what's wrong with you on this case. You're losing your grip."

Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984)

A masterpiece

[26 October 1999]

I can only echo the preceding comments: See this film. I would add some ifs, however: See this film if you appreciate good direction, consistently solid acting, and discriminating characterizations; if you savour cultural subtleties; if you find 20th-century European history fascinating; if you think the dynamics of community life have much to tell about the human condition; if you've ever wondered what it meant to be German in the 1920s, '30s, & '40s (although the film covers 1919-1982); if you can't quite understand how Nazism could have gained acceptance and then pre-eminence in a northern German village far removed from Berlin and full of the usual diverse personalities; if you want to put a human face on the monolithic histories about war and propaganda; and if your attention span is longer than that required by the average Hollywood production (the film runs to something like 16 hours, in 9 videocassettes).

Heimat is a superb cinematic chronicle of social and political change in human enterprise, a Bildungsroman of a community. You will not forget it.