When it came to live-action big-studio movies, silly season stretched from January to September in 2010. Movie-lovers found little to savor beyond the ambitious, exciting Iraq War film “Green Zone,” the unwieldy but bighearted and witty “Iron Man 2,” and, if only to argue over, "Inception."

Still, creativity percolated throughout the year in cartoons, documentaries and independent and foreign films.

Animators brought different styles and moods to features, from the droll, Gallic-flavored “Despicable Me” (pictured here) to "Tangled," which enriched Rapunzel with a swashbuckling new character and a wised-up yet traditional view of a maiden finding romance as well as her true identity.

Documentary-makers persisted in putting out original and fervid explorations of live-wire issues (“Waiting for Superman’) and gnarly lives (“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work”), often in character studies that opened windows on stories that appeared to be covered and closed ("The Tillman Story," “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer”).

The indie world spawned pungent entertainments like “Greenberg” and “Cyrus” as well as some perfect miniatures, like "Mother and Child" and "Please Give."

My 10-best list (see link below) includes three summer films: "Toy Story 3," "The Kids Are All Right," and "Winter's Bone." It also includes the great Italian movie, "Vincere," which opened in New York in March and played a few days here months later at the Charles. (Some other foreign contenders, like "Carlos," never opened here at all.)

Led by "The Social Network" (which tops my list), we really did, come September, get a fall-winter cornucopia this year -- a horn of plenty of good films. For the full list, with pictures and commentary, click here.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Awards
        

Here's more of my annotated list of the new additions to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry: 

"Let There Be Light" (1946). Let's hope some astute revival programmers think of showcasing this great film, not just with John Huston's other classic war-time documentaries, “Report from the Aleutians” and “Battle of San Pietro," but with his intelligent and haunting biopic, "Freud." The War Department's ban on "Let There Be Light,” an unsparing documentary about the psychological treatment of traumatized combat veterans, lasted for three and a half decades. Those of us who saw it on public television in the 1980s will never forget it. The Library says it "was blocked... because no effort was made during filming to disguise or mask the identities of combat veterans suffering from various forms of psychological trauma." Critic James Agee wrote, "the glaring obvious reason has not been mentioned: that any sane human being who saw the film would join the armed forces, if at all, with a straight face and a painfully maturing mind."

"Lonesome" (1928). As cinema, Paul Fejos's movie is beautiful and inventive; as a romance it's equally robust and delicate as it depicts two lovers caught in a storm at Coney Island.

"Make Way for Tomorrow" (1937). Orson Welles said that Leo McCarey's movie about old age in hard times would "make a stone cry," but it temporarily made McCarey unemployable -- which is why he took on the assignment of "The Awful Truth." I've been dying to see this portrait of a senior couple and their selfish children since Criterion released a disc of it this fall; this is one more good reason to catch up with it.

"Malcolm X" (1992). Spike Lee’s biopic, featuring a charismatic performance by Denzel Washington in the title role, is important for all sorts of historical and cultural reasons. But for movie-lovers its biggest gift may have been to nudge this gifted but erratic director into fact-based filmmaking -- and into his current standing as one of our great documentary-makers. (That's Lee, above, in 1992.)

"McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971). One of my 115 favorite films. Click here to read my reasons for it on my list of "unabashed movie ecstasies."

"Newark Athlete" (1891). An experimental film made at the Edison Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, where the fhe filmmakers, W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise, would help create the Edison Kinetograph (the great inventor's breakthrough camera) and the Edison Kinetoscope (the great inventor's breakthrough playback device).

"Our Lady of the Sphere" (1969). The Library calls this Lawrence Jordan movie, inspired by “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” "a surrealistic dream-like journey blending baroque images with Victorian-era image cut-outs, iconic space age symbols, various musical themes and noise effects, including animal sounds and buzzers."

"The Pink Panther"(1964). Terrific choice. See my post on director Blake Edwards and this movie here.

"Preservation of the Sign Language" (1913). The Library describes it as "a two-minute film featuring George Veditz, onetime president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) of the United States, demonstrating in sign language the importance of defending the right of deaf people to sign as opposed to verbalizing their communication."

"Saturday Night Fever" (1977). Is this the first time that a list has contained both a seminal movie and a parody of it? John Badham's superb pop musical (above) exploded into theaters -- and schools and clubs and streets -- with its red-hot Bee Gees sound track and its dynamite John Travolta performance. Travolta showed real movie-star greatness as a Brooklyn boy who achieves poetry in motion on the dance floor; he helped Badham snag audiences of all ages into the emotional vortex of frustrated post-'60s urban youth. This movie turned the disco craze volcanic -- inspiring Robert Hays' riotously funny burlesque of Travolta's dance moves in "Airplane!"

"Study of a River" (1996). The Library praises Peter Hutton's "meditative examination of the winter cycle of the Hudson River over a two-year period, showing its environment, ships plying its waterways, ice floes, and the interaction of nature and civilization. Some critics have described Hutton’s work as reminiscent of the 19th century artist Thomas Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School."

"Tarantella." (1940). Again, according to the Library: "A five-minute color, avant-garde short film created by Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer of visual music and electronic art in experimental cinema. With piano accompaniment by Edwin Gershefsky, “Tarantella” features rich reds and blues that Bute uses to signify a lighter mood, while her syncopated spirals, shards, lines and squiggles dance exuberantly to Gershefsky’s modern beat."

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945) Elia Kazan displayed his extraordinary movie talent in his very first feature film, based on the novel by Betty Smith about a girl growing up in Brooklyn tenements at the turn of the last century. It inspired one of critic James Agee's most moving and original reviews. He praised Kazan's handling of the girl (the incandescent Peggy Ann Garner) and her alcoholic father (the searingly poignant James Dunn), and noted Kazan's budding visual artistry: "There is a shot of Dunn ghastly drunk in his inky waiter's suit, so painfully malappropriate to daylight, being shoved and shouted along his home street, which is as poetic and individualized an image of a state beneath humiliation as I have seen."

"A Trip Down Market Street" (1906). Give the Library of Congress credit for both historical and contemporary journalistic savvy. "Sixty Minutes" recently covered this 13-minute “actuality” film of a cable-car ride along San Francisco’s Market Street, detailing how historian David Kiehn discovered that it was (as the Library notes) "likely filmed just a few days before the devastating earthquake on April 18, 1906."

* Get more information about the 2010 National Film Registry movies.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Classics Illustrated
        

Today the Library of Congress announced 25 more selections for the National Film Registry. The Registry is designed to highlight the American cinema's broad social-cultural significance as well as mark its key creative leaps. It also underlines the need for film preservation -- to safe-keep our native art and our collective historical memory.

Happily, in doing so, the Library each year manages to honor an eclectic group of entertaining or fascinating movies. Here's my annotation of today's list (in two posts).

"Airplane!" (1980). At the tail-end of the Seventies disaster-film craze, this smash-hit parody of a plane-in-peril movie brought Hellzapoppin' brashness and energy to the burlesque of Hollywood genres. Though it spawned sub-standard sequels and a debased comedy sub-genre of its own (see, for instance, the "Scary Movie" series), it also led to some other disreputable classics -- the "Police Squad!" TV show and "Naked Gun" franchise, also starring Leslie Nielsen.

"All the President’s Men" (Pictured above, 1976). This rendering of how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) exposed the underbelly of the Nixon White House both fed into contemporary political disillusionment and romanticized investigative journalism. (The romance peeked with Jason Robards' debonair depiction of editor Ben Bradlee as a swashbuckling commander in a well-tailored suit.) Screenwriter William Goldman cannily inserted a show-biz saying into the script -- "Follow the money" -- that was widely seen as the most authentic and meaningful line in the whole movie. It was nowhere to be found in Bernstein and Woodward's original book.

"The Bargain" (1914). Cowboy star William S. Hart's debut movie. The Library of Congress says, "the film was selected because of Hart’s charisma, the film’s authenticity and realistic portrayal of the Western genre and the star’s good/bad man role as an outlaw attempting to go straight."

"Cry of Jazz" (1959). African-American independent filmmaker Ed Bland made this 34-minute short subject in Chicago’s black neighborhoods with scores of volunteers helping him conduct, film and edit interviews with "interracial artists and intellectuals." Featuring Sun Ra and his Arkestra, this short, according to the Library of Congress, "argues that black life in America shares a structural identity with jazz music" and "demonstrates the unifying tension between rehearsed and improvised jazz."

"Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967)." This is the short film that George Lucas wants you to know about when he discusses returning to "small experimental movies." Made while he was studying film at USC, later expanded into "THX 1138" as part of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope production slate at Warner Bros., it's a Big-Brother-is-Watching-You dystopia that created a sensation in film circles -- I remember reading about in the basement of the Bleecker Street Cinema when I was working for a defunct magazine called "Film Society Review."

"The Empire Strikes Back (1980)." Lucas invented and sustained the "Star Wars" series, but director Irvin Kershner elevated its artistic standing with this second entry in the series. (For my tribute to Kershner, click here.) Now how about including Kershner's other great movies, like the film that won him this assignment -- a lesser-known but also terrific sequel, "The Return of a Man Called Horse?"

"The Exorcist" (1973). However you feel about William Friedkin's monster hit of a horror movie (I'm among the skeptics), it widened the horror audience, poured new ingredients into the cauldron, and brought other gifted filmmakers into the form -- including John Boorman, who made the visually extravagant "Exorcist II: The Heretic." That's Max von Sydow and Linda Blair in a scene from Friedkin's film, above.

"The Front Page" (1931). This gleeful rejiggering of the crack Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur stage comedy about Chicago newspapers influenced rapid-fire farces like the inside-Hollywood spoof "Bombshell" and spawned the now-more-famous "His Girl Friday." It remains a gas to see and hear Hecht and MacArthur's ink-stained clowns spew purple jokes and argot in Lewis Milestone's  gritty, energetic version. Director Milestone ("All Quiet on the Western Front" always worked best in the trenches—the movie’s press room has all the testosterone of a gym or a barracks.

"Grey Gardens" (1976). The Albert and David Maysles cinema-verite milestone created a cult for East Hampton, New York's mother-and-daughter eccentrics, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy. It was the basis for the Broadway show and the HBO movie of the same name.

"I Am Joaquin" (1969). Luis Valdez, who later created the Los Angeles theater sensation "Zoot Suit" as well as its movie version, and the Ritchie Valens biopic "La Bamba," made this 20-minute adaptation of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales's epic poem. According to the Library, the poem "weaves together the long tangled roots of his Mexican, Spanish, Indian and American parentage and a past mythology of pre-Columbian cultures" and the film "is important to the history and culture of Chicanos in America, spotlighting the challenges they have endured because of discrimination."

"It’s a Gift (1934)." It's the third W.C Fields film on the list; we'd be happy if the Library decided to include his entire canon.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Classics Illustrated
        

A giant Chinese-restaurant take-out box arrived today. It featured the Kung Fu Panda himself karate-kicking his way into the new year -- that is, "2011: The Year of Awesomeness."

Promoting the forthcoming "Kung Fu Panda 2" (set to open in May), the box contained an East-meets-West New Year's Party table setting for four, including wooden mats, plastic champagne glasses, ceramic soup bowls, a dumpling steamer and a dumpling recipe.

Is it the most outlandish swag that I've received on the movie beat?

No, that would have to be the talking "Donnie Brasco" tissue-box that said "Fuhgedaboutit" every time you pulled out a tissue.

But this comes in a close second. It also has a fortune-cookie kind of logic to it. "Yesterday is history/tomorrow is a mystery/but today is a gift/that's why it's called the present," says the "Kung Fu Panda" quote accompanying the package.

And all good "Kung Fu Panda" fans know that the high point of the first film was a fight over a dumpling.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Adore the film or despise it (as I did), anyone could see that Natalie Portman was giving her all to the role of the tormented dancer in 'Black Swan.' (That's Portman with her director, Darren Aronofsky.) Now her publicist has confirmed her engagement to choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who did the dance scenes for "Black Swan." The publicist has also confirmed that Portman is carrying his child.

The idea that Portman was falling in love with her choreographer while playing a dancer who must lose herself in a part -- this at least adds some upbeat interest to the movie. The whole event becomes a piquant case of life imitating non-art.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Auteurs, Performers
        

The biggest head-scratcher among year-end movie phenomena has got to be the critical enthusiasm for "Black Swan."

It's laughably obvious as a horror film, hideously misshapen as a dance film, and intolerably masochistic as a character study of a one-note character -- Natalie Portman's good-girl ballerina (right), who must tap into her dark side in order to play both the white swan and the black swan in "Swan Lake" at Lincoln Center.

I saw it on Christmas Day with a packed house. It elicited no palpable response except an occasional titter.

The minute you see that the heroine sleeps in a bedroom fit for an eight-year-old, you just wait for the moment when she jams all her stuffed animals down the garbage chute.

Portman is valiant -- she convinces you that she's a superb dancer -- but, off her toes, she can't do much of anything here except act urgently confused, especially around her slimy-genius choreographer (Vincent Cassel) and her bitter, controlling mother (Barbara Hershey).

Mila Kunis is just as monochromatic but a lot more fun as a blithe spirit (from San Francisco, naturally!) who joins the company and immediately impresses everyone with her free, effortless style. You cease believing in the plot when the choreographer doesn't just switch casting and toss the role to the Girl Who Knows How from the City That Knows How.

Director Darren Aronofsky uses off-kilter angles and prowling cameras to capture details you don't often see in ballet movies -- like the way the muscles of the back work when the dancers are extending their arms -- but he never gives you the pleasure of seeing a portion of "Swan Lake" in all its full-bodied, lyric glory.

He's enslaved to his pseudo-profound vision of an artist's need to immolate himself or herself in the search for perfection. What's worse about the movie, though, is the way it tortures its heroine and then serves her up to the audience as the embodiment of a higher purity -- the self-sacrificing female who gives herself (in this case) to her art.

She's more like a sacrificial lamb slaughtered on the altar of a film director's ego.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: At the Megaplex, Auteurs, Performers
        

The only welcome surprise at the Christmas weekend box office came from the better-than-projected performance of "True Grit." The Coen Bros.' faithful, spirited and expansive adaptation of Charles Portis' terrific, deadpan-funny novel took in roughly $26 million for the weekend and about $37 million in the last five days.

It should do even better. Paramount Pictures has reported that 65 percent of the 'True Grit" audience was male; 70 percent of the ticket-buyers were 25 years and older.

Those are dumbfounding statistics for a movie that boasts, in 14-year-old Mattie Ross, a unique, stalwart young heroine -- and showcases, in Hailee Steinfeld, who plays Mattie (right), one of the most surprising, articulate and pleasurably intense girl performances in all of American movies.

"True Grit" deserves a bigger and even broader audience of women and men -- and tweens of both sexes -- not just for Steinfeld's Ross, but for the Coens' crackling use throughout of Portis' dialogue. "True Grit" comes to life because of language that springs rhythmically off the screen and fully experiences the values and experiences of its characters.

Opening on December 22 as a holiday gift for audiences, it didn't win honorable mentions in the  movie round-ups that closed earlier, like the survey of all films released in 2010 that appeared in "Entertainment Weekly." But this movie built on verbal dexterity should benefit from overwhelmingly positive word of mouth.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: At the Megaplex, Auteurs, characters
        

The eloquent and impassioned David Seidler, who wrote the script for the stirring historical drama "The King's Speech" (opening in Baltimore Christmas Day), made clear to me this week that he always wanted it to celebrate more than "friendship and overcoming obstacles like stuttering."

Yes, the movie centers on the complicated, moving bond between the stammering King George VI (Colin Firth, right)) and his unconventional speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, below). But George VI's brother and predecessor, Edward VIII, is the one who raises the dramatic stakes when he renounces the throne.

That's when it becomes icy-clear that "This movie is also about something I’m very passionate about, which is the social contract -- which is ignored at our peril, but is ignored continually right now. With privilege, with power, with wealth, comes responsibility and duty. [George VI] absolutely understood this and [Edward VIII] either didn’t or chose adamantly to deny it. His job was to be king and he quit his job. It’s like a certain recent governor of Alaska!"

Edward VIII's lover and then wife, Baltimore's Wallis Simpson, functions as the villain of the piece, a ruthless social climber with a soft spot for fascism.

But the rest of the movie celebrates the affection shared by a monarch and an upwardly-mobile commoner from the other side of the globe -- George VI and Logue, who was Australian.

Seidler was born in Britain and raised in the United States; director Tom Hooper's mother is Australian. The writer and director "agreed that there was no way an English therapist could have succeeded, because if you’re English, you’re basically stuck with being in awe of royalty. Look at me, I have an American passport, I’m an American citizen. But I’m British-born, and I also have a British passport and am a British citizen. When the Queen Mother [George VI's widow] said, 'Mr. Seidler, please, don't tell this story in my lifetime, it would be too painful' – I waited."

As an Australian, Logue was perfect for the job of rescuing George VI, Seidler said. "Australians are irreverent. He was able to break through the class barriers. His whole technique was based on equality. You have to mate and befriend the patient. When you read about Logue -- and there isn’t much to read, just bits and pieces -- the words that keep on being used to describe him are 'charismatic' and 'confident.'"

But he focused his charisma and confidence on his patients. "He would say, 'You can fix your stutter. I’ll give you certain aids, but you’re going to do the work, and you can conquer it; I know you can.' Now, a therapist can’t do that if he's saying 'Yes, Your Majesty,' and 'No, Your Majesty.' It was imperative that Logue broke all that down."

Posted by Michael Sragow at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Moviemakers
        

See Julie Taymor's elating and moving version of "The Tempest" on the big screen -- while you can. (That's Taymor, left, with her star, Helen Mirren, in a Matt Sayles photo, right.)

It's been eliciting contradictory responses from reviewers -- some say it's too visual, others say it lacks a point of view -- often the sign that in a busy movie season, it's hard for overworked journalists to grasp the riches right in front of them. And without the right critical mass, movies like these tend to disappear.

The film speaks beautifully for itself -- but Taymor does, too, on her film's behalf.

Take the exhilarating image of three buffoonish figures doing a drunken dance on a ridge to the words, "Freedom, high day! High day, freedom!" Taymor told me last week, "Where else can you do that better -- have men singing 'freedom, high day, high day, freedom'-- than on a cliff on a horizon?"

When I mentioned it was like a happy version of the Dance of Death in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," she said, "Those kinds of images are archetypal...They’re in our brain, of what is it that is freedom. Bergman's dance is a dance of death, but freedom is linked to death, isn’t it? In the end, when Prospera says, 'Set me free' -- what is she talking about, after all?"

Taymor has a talent for bringing emotional vitality to bold concepts -- she weds a questing intellect to a seize-the-day temperament. "We had just finished doing the 'freedom high day' in a closer shot, and it was perfect timing. We were shooting on Hawaii in daylight, so we could never go overtime -- when the sun goes down, the sun goes down. I just looked over and said, 'Run, run, run, let’s get it, let’s get it' -- because you could see the sun going down over the horizon over the ocean. And they just went off. It was really wild."

The director cast a black actor, Djimon Hounsou, to lead that dance as the island native, Caliban."When we talked about Caliban, first we talked about the racial issues. He’s brilliant talking about this part, because he sees Caliban as a man who had no idea of what slavery is or what enslavement was. It was his island and it was taken from him. And as a man from Benin, with an understanding of witchcraft, he went on and on about the power of female sorcerers in Benin."

She and Hounsou both recognized the real-world clout of magic. "If you live in a culture where black magic or sorcery exists, as I did, in Bali, for four years, you know that if people believe in something, it’s true – I don’t care what your skepticism is, what religion you’re in."

And Hounsou had no problem following the commands of Helen Mirren's wizardly Prospera. "When I asked Djimon how he was going to feel about Helen, a small, older white woman, playing Prospera and controlling his Caliban with a staff, he said he understood that she had the magic, she had the power, and that her power was in the staff. Just look at all the kings and leaders in Africa, he told me, every one of them holds a staff. He’s a very smart guy and he understands that a force like magic must be reckoned with if the culture believes in that force. It motivates people because it touches some inner psyche that has more power than their physical being. And I think Shakespeare knew about that. Women were burned at the stake for witchcraft. It’s not ho ho ho, Harry Potter. It’s something much more serious." 

Photo of Djimon Hounsou by Fred Prouser

Posted by Michael Sragow at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

But for a really scary Christmas -- far scarier than any "Black Christmas" slasher films -- check out "Silent Partner" (1978), starring Elliott Gould as a meek, "underestimated" Toronto bank teller. Correctly reading a clue that he's about to be held up by a robber in a Santa suit (Christopher Plummer), Gould makes out like a bandit: He stashes away most of the loot in his own safe-deposit box.

No one knows except him and this bad Santa -- and Santa turns out to be a vengeful (and spine-tingling) psychopath.

Curtis Hanson, the director and co-writer of "L.A. Confidential," made his first big mark as a screenwriter with this movie. Under Daryl Duke's direction, it's a first-class chiller.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

The oft-maligned "The Family Man" (2000) stars Nicolas Cage as a Wall Street tycoon who is given a glimpse of the life he might have led if he hadn't left his college girlfriend behind to study international banking in London. I think it's by far the most successful attempt in recent years to put a contemporary spin on "It's a Wonderful Life."

Everything about this movie has genuine warmth and smarts, whether it's Don Cheadle's daring portrayal of a street-tough guardian angel or the affectionate satiric vision of the New Jersey suburb where Cage finds himself trapped -- or liberated -- with a wife (Tea Leoni) and small daughter.

Cage makes his natural eccentricities work beautifully for the character; the daughter thinks he's an alien who's replaced her real father, and Cage shapes his performance around the notion of an alien becoming human. Leoni has never been better on the big screen: She's the epitome of passionate and playful domesticity.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

With a title like "Comfort and Joy," why doesn't Bill ("Local Hero") Forsyth's wonderful 1984 comedy crop up more often at revival houses or on TV during the holidays?

It stars the invaluable Bill Paterson (above) as a Glasgow radio star, Alan "Dicky" Bird, who, during his run-up to what could become a very depressing Christmas, acts as the mediator in a gang war between two Italian ice cream barons, "Mr. Bunny" and "Mr. McCool."

After his girlfriend moves out on him, he's left feeling unimportant and wanting to do something more serious than an AM chat-and-platter show. He falls into this ice cream war simply by following a saucy lass in a Mr. Bunny ice cream truck the way Alice followed the White Rabbit.

When he regains his self-respect by mediating the ice cream war, it's not because he devalues his DJ job in favor of more muckraking (none of his investigations turn up on the radio). Rather, he begins to understand the ameliorative effect that something as lowly as his radio show can have on those who live in his city.

People want to know what he can tell them, even if it's simply that a BMW is the ultimate driving machine.

What he experiences, and what Forsyth so delightfully conveys, is a Dickensian change of heart. Forsyth seems to be saying that if everyone could do the job he's best at -- could see it whole and see it through -- then the city would be a better place.

On Christmas morning, having no family obligations, Alan agrees to take the early, early shift. As he sits alone while a young assistant brings him a piece of cake, he reassures his listeners that he's having the time of his life and promises to tell them the worst jokes they'd ever care to repeat. In the not-quite dawn, we get a bittersweet but glowing Christmas image: a Bird's-eye view of peace on earth and good will toward men.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The most haunting Christmas movie -- haunting as in "not easily forgotten" -- may be "The City of Lost Children" (1995).

The film's pivotal sequence features a half-dozen sinister Santas and a Christmas party gone rotten. That's when this movie definitively captures the peculiar comic horror that occurs when adults take beloved childhood rituals and symbols and use them in bad faith.

The chief villain is a mad scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork) who's aging prematurely because he's incapable of dreaming.

A group of mechanical-eyed thugs supply Krank with city kids for a Frankenstein-like lab on an offshore rig, where he infiltrates their slumber and grabs their dreams for himself. Happily, by the end, innocence triumphs. (That's one reason this film offers prime holiday viewing, at least for hip households.)

This picture was co-directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of the hit "Amelie" and that under-appreciated masterpiece, "A Very Long Engagement." This, too, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a gorgeous amalgam of 19th- and 20th-century fantasy.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

The greatest Christmas scene in movies comes from one of the greatest movies ever made, Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" (1937).

Near the end of this classic about French prisoners of war in a World War I German camp, the characters of Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) and Marechal (Jean Gabin) escape and find sanctuary on the farm of a German widow (Dita Parlo). On Christmas Eve, they show their thanks and love by making a Christmas tree out of a pine limb, putting together a manger out of wood and cardboard, and sculpting Jesus, Mary and Joseph from potatoes.

"Oh! The Virgin Mary!" exclaims Elsa, the widow, in surprise and pleasure.

"Baby Jesus - my blood brother," muses Rosenthal, a Jew.

When Elsa rouses her daughter Lotte from sleep with the proclamation "Father Christmas has come," you feel that she's speaking the truth.

No sentimental excess mars the emotional perfection of this scene -- Lotte's response to the sight of the potato-based holy family is that she wants to eat Jesus. (She settles for Joseph.)

And when the hale, gruff Marechal tries to say "Lotte has blue eyes" in German, you know that his attraction to Elsa has bloomed into romance and that his feeling is reciprocated.

Under the spell of Christmas, love bridges gaps of language and nationality in the most miraculous scene Jean Renoir ever directed. 

Posted by Michael Sragow at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Jafar Panahi was arrested in March on the grounds that he was making what the Iranian cultural minister considered an anti-regime film about the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Panahi supported Mirhossein Mousavi.) Panahi had been invited to serve on the Cannes jury, and he received fervid support from festival participants, who turned his absence into an accusation of injustice hurled at the Ahmadinejad government. Juliette Binoche, who won the best actress award for Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” (a French/Italian/Iranian production, filmed in Tuscany), even used her acceptance speech to plead for Panahi's liberation.

That protest at Cannes sparked an international outcry that helped get Panahi out of jail on bail.

But London's Guardian reported this week that Panahi has been sentenced to six years in prison and banned from making movie for twenty years.

In August, he had told an interviewer, "When a film-maker does not make films it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail."

Panahi's "White Balloon" won Cannes' Camera d'Or prize in 1995. But I vastly prefer his 2000 movie "The Circle," which really puts an audience in the shoes -- and more to the point, under the shawls -- of Iranian women caught in age-old traps at the time of the fresh millennium. We are with these characters as they dodge police because they lack permits to be in public, and beg for bus fare to get out of town; as they flirt with or practice prostitution; and as they wrestle with the fate of daughters who are sure to disappoint families and a society in which men rule. This movie is a terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a special pleader.

Panahi generates understanding and intense sympathy for females who are unattached, and thus vulnerable. (That's Nargess Mamizadeh in "The Circle," above.) 

In the Iran of this movie, single women are caught in a series of Catch 22s. They are unable to live in a city without family backing or a student ID card, and unable to leave it without family backing or a student ID card. They are forbidden abortions and denied help for children.

The movie's pull also comes from the modulated energy and intuition of Panahi's fluid, humanistic style: his characters' shifts of expression have the potency of other directors' explosions.

There's a conceptual beauty to the way he runs his cast through spiraling corridors or byways. And the movie is leavened with the tough, wise humor of a hardscrabble milieu. Indeed, in its own straightforward way, the movie carries the black-comic charge of a feminist Kafka: it's a nightmare of misplaced authority that shows women trying to scurry unseen through a world where every man is a potential tyrant.

The film was put out on DVD in 2001; you can still find it on-line and at cinema specialty stores. 

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Auteurs
        

The restoration of the Senator Theatre hit a snag on Saturday when its new operators, James 'Buzz" Cusack and his daughter, Kathleen Cusack, received notice that the Maryland Historical Trust would not award them 2010 historic tax credits.

"We're very supportive of the effort to preserve the Senator Theatre," J. Rodney Little, director of the Maryland Historical Trust, said in an interview Tuesday. "In another round they may have come out in the winners' circle. It’s just this time around, with the amount of money we had, and the projects that came in, it did not rank as high as others."

This year the Trust had a budget of "$11 million and change." It received 36 applications requesting $40 million. Little said the failure of the Cusacks' project to secure a grant was "a reflection of the fact that we didn't have enough money. The Senator certainly is a very significant building. But all 36 were listed on the National Register of Historic Places."

The Trust "only had enough money to get through the projects making the top ten," Little said. They included the renovation of the Sheppard Pratt Gatehouse and the Algonquin Building and the redevelopment of the Crown Cork and Seal Machine Shop.

"The process is highly competitive," said Little. "All were good projects. If an application wasn't considered significant, it was returned."

Buzz Cusack said on Tuesday, "I thought it was up to the governor to make the final decision."

Little said, "“Since 2004, we do, after we make our initial ratings or rankings, make them available all the way up the line for review and comment. In that time our ratings and rankings have never been changed, by either of the two governors in office since 2004.”

The Cusacks have also applied for tax credits from the Department of the Interior. But Buzz Cusack said, "As I understand it, they look to the states to refine the projects; they consider whether an application receives state support."

If the governor accepts the Trust's recommendation, how would it affect the future of the Senator?

Buzz Cusack wouldn't specify beyond saying, "It at least limits how far you can carry the preservation and renovation effort.”

Posted by Michael Sragow at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Senator
        

Marc D. Evans is co-founder of Intrepid Pictures and co-producer of "The Raven," an ambitious pastiche thriller starring John Cusack (right) as Edgar Allan Poe. Last Friday he took time off from the intense final weeks of shooting  to fill the SUN in on the state of the production.

First off, he said, this is meant to be a sweeping, popular historical suspense film. "It’s in the same genre as films like 'Sherlock Holmes' or 'Sleepy Hollow' -– not quite as dark and serious as 'From Hell,' but more commercial, with a little dose of 'Se7en': You follow a killer through a series of crimes, and you’re rooting for someone to save the day, save the city…”

The "Sherlock Holmes" analogy fits because the movie rests on Poe's pioneer status as a mystery-writer who composed seminal detective stories before Arthur Conan Doyle created Holmes. Evans said, "That’s really a great piece of all this. Here is one of the first mystery detective thriller writers and he’s basically put into the exact situations that he’s written about in all these stories. That’s what immediately hooked us. It’s been fun to play with that.”

Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare wrote the script as a team: “They’re kind of playing with factual history. It’s set in the last few days of Poe’s life, when he was unaccounted for, for some period of time, before he turned up incoherent and died shortly after. Our story takes that and accounts for what happened. It starts with his return to Baltimore in this period. About the same time a series of killings starts, and the killer is using Poe’s stories as inspiration. So Poe is first a suspect and must work with a Baltimore police inspector to solve a series of crimes, not just to clear to clear his name, but because his fiancée is kidnapped. We took a little bit of artistic license!"

As for the exotic production sites: “It’s a US-Spanish co-production, shooting in Budapest, Hungary, and in Belgrade, Serbia. That’s quite a tangled proposition, but it’s been great. Parts of both Belgrade and Budapest stand in for Baltimore...Before [co-producer] Aaron Ryder brought the project to us [at Intrepid], he had scouted and done a budget for a Baltimore. At one time he was very interested in shooting there. But given the realities of how we put movies together, it was not affordable. Because of the costs of doing the movie there, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we had to do with the money we had. It’s often a frustrations for financiers or producers. Obviously, parts of Baltimore would have worked very well. But as with anywhere else, some of the places we would have loved to shoot for Baltimore 1849 don’t exist any more."

When co-producer Ryder and director James McTeigue did their location scout in Baltimore, Evans said, “They had two goals: 1. Figure out if we could make the movie there. 2. Get some inspiration for fleshing out the for the story and a feel for some of the places where Poe spent his time in the city.” So Baltimore remains a big inspiration for the film, even though, due to financial considerations, it became "a blend of Belgrade and Budapest."

Evans said, "We shot three weeks in Budapest (starting November 9), the rest in Belgrade. We hope to finish here in the next couple of weeks. We used places in both cities that have architecture of the period. We’re trying to lend the story a proper feel without trying to replicate the city exactly. We’re using visual effects to enhance the locations that we found here to create the waterfront and harbor of the city.”

John Cusack plays Poe, and Evans said “It's hard to imagine anyone else playing him. He’s everything you can imagine in Poe: brooding, intense, macabre but also wry and funny and all oft those other things you expect from that kind of human being."

Right now "The Raven" is "in Belgrade …it’s all of 15 degrees and snowing. We’ve got a couple of weeks left. We’ll spend about five months finishing the film, in post-production, and we’ll be finalizing distribution plans and figuring out a good release date for the movie. We consider this a wide-release commercial film. It could play at a festival like South by Southwest or Toronto, but the main thing is getting this out to the widest possible audience."

AP photos of John Cusack as Poe, on location in Budapest, by Bea Kallos

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Upcoming
        

Disney wasn't asleep at the joystick when "Tron: Legacy" (right) opened last week and the original "Tron" was nowhere to be found.

According to the New York Times, the original's director, Steve Lisberger, has been preparing a remastered version for a forthcoming "Tron"/"Tron Legacy" Blu-ray and DVD.

Deluxe bonus boxes and gift sets are keeping marketers' hopes alive that there will be a profitable niche for discs amid the boom for "streaming content" and movies on demand. Disney is betting that a double-feature release will be more lucrative a few months from now than a "Tron" reissue would be right now.

In the meantime, intrepid Baltimore DVD-renters can put themselves on the waiting list at Video Americaine. (Scott Brown, manager of the Cold Spring Lane store, says that he also carries the "Tron" VHS tape -- although that will require a wait, too.)

But how important is it to see the original "Tron?"

Even Tronster Hartley, the computer-game designer who changed his name from Todd out of love for the original movie, said that, before "Tron: Legacy," many people who made the connection between "Tron" and his name had forgotten the plot and characters and remembered the cool stuff, like the "light cycles."

He also said, "'Tron' provides such inspiration for me that I watch the DVD once a year. I bought the DVD, and then the special-edition DVD, and I even contemplated trying to buy a print and showing it at a small theater."

Of course, "Tron" helped inspire Hartley to enter the computer-game world. For fans like him, seeing "Tron: Legacy" in IMAX 3-D must be like mainlining digital sensations.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: DVDs/Blu-Rays
        

Maryland's own Edward Norton, Matt Damon's co-star in the cult gambling favorite "Rounders" (1997) -- a virtual paean to Damon's poker face -- remembers that production as one of the happiest and easiest in his career, and has called Damon, "just a stone-cold good actor. I don't want to say facile - what's the positive word for facile? He's incredibly agile. You can go over here or over there, and he's right with you. ... "

Let's hope they're both getting ready for "Rounders 2."

Harvey Weinstein has put "Rounders," along with "Shakespeare in Love" and "Bad Santa," at the top of a list of films he hopes will provide sequels for a new agreement between Miramax and The Weinstein Company.

As of last Friday, the only talents he had talked to so far from any of the original movies were Damon and Norton.

"Rounders 2" would give Norton a chance to do another intelligent genre piece while he's gearing up for more ambitious projects like his adaptations of Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" and Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage."

In the original "Rounders," he and Damon generated a smart, unpredictable chemistry; the film alternated, engagingly, between buddy movie and anti-buddy movie.

I bet fans would turn out to see them play poker again or even take up another game.

Is this one sequel worth waiting for?

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

If prize groups gave out an "If" award (thank you, Rudyard Kipling) for a performer who keeps his head while all about him are losing theirs, this year it would have to go to Mark Wahlberg for "The Fighter."

The fact-based movie is a raucous, energetic boxing story that has been compared to both "Rocky" and "Raging Bull."

How could it not be? With Wahlberg as good-guy underdog fighter Micky Ward and Christian Bale as his destructive, ex-contender crack addict half-brother, Dicky, it's as if Rocky and Jake LaMotta were siblings -- and had Ma Barker as a mother.

Their mom (Melissa Leo), who sets herself up as Micky's manager and Dicky as his trainer, is an Oedipal nightmare. It's almost too good that Micky's brother is named Dicky, because, as in the old Smothers Brothers routine, Mom really does love Dicky best.

With working-class Lowell, Massachusetts as a backdrop the movie has the kind of true grit that guarantees awards these days more than the wit of "True Grit."

Director David O. Russell pitches every scene so high that the film threatens to become more wearying than entertaining or enlightening. It's an honest crowd-pleaser, but it really isn't in the same class as "The Social Network" or "The King's Speech."

The one who keeps you watching is Wahlberg. He pulls off a feet-on-the-ground character by playing him close to the vest.

He portrays Micky as a man who starts out as a patsy, then keeps withdrawing from the family melodrama around him -- and quietly working on the greater game of manhood -- until he's in a position to set everything right.

And Amy Adams, as Micky's lover, partners him fiercely but also beautifully. She makes the battle over a man between his mother and his girl as charged as any prizefight.

Micky's reticence isn't always heroic -- he lets his girl fight some key battles for him -- but it is always credible. And Wahlberg follows through on it in the ring, with patience and wariness and surprising power.

If the whole film were better keyed to its hero, Micky, instead of its antihero, Dicky, Wahlberg would be duking it out with Colin Firth and Jesse Eisenberg for best actor honors. Instead, Wahlberg is doing what Micky does in the movie: making everyone else's success possible.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Performers
        

Journalism junkies -- Head's up! As they say too incessantly on cable these days, this is "breaking news." 

Prepare to put your Friday-night news wrap-up on the DVR on January 21 and instead jaunt over to Falvey Hall in MICA's Brown Center, where the Maryland Film Festival will be asking, "Are documentary-makers the new journalists?"

The festival has put together an all-star panel to debate the question, including Oscar winner Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side"), Oscar nominee Rachel Grady ("Jesus Camp"), and Emmy-winner Stanley Nelson ("The Murder of Emmett Till").

The "Today" show's Meredith Vieira will host the evening, drawing on 35 years of broadcast experience, including stints as a "60 Minutes" correspondent and anchor of "CBS Morning News."

For the evening's full schedule (it starts at 6 p.m.) and box-office details (tickets start at $90) click here.

Photo by Richard Drew

Posted by Michael Sragow at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Film festivals
        

Julie Taymor’s "The Tempest" (opening today at Landmark's Harbor East) is a triumph -- a new vision of the play in which everything that is original and surprising also feels inevitable and true. What makes it equally subtle and sweeping is Taymor's uncanny ability to fuse visual and verbal poetry and weld seemingly opposite dramatic forms – as she puts it in a beautiful new “Tempest” book, “from visceral reality to heightened expressionism.” And she does this while preserving and enriching the core story.

Taymor's casting of Helen Mirren as a female "Prospera" instead of the usual male "Prospero" is inspired, not gimmicky. In this rendering of Shakespeare, Taymor and Mirren’s Prospera became Duke of Milan when her husband died. She was deposed when her brother spread the rumor that her scientific studies were “dark arts.” Saved by her people, who pushed her out to sea in a bark, she has made a barren island her home and raised her daughter Miranda there for a dozen years. Her only help has been the sprite Ariel and the island’s enslaved native, Caliban, the son of another exiled sorceress (an evil one).

Mirren's prismatic Prospera -- enchanting and menacing, sage and savage -- helps Taymor root the almost reckless, always exhilarating comedy and drama of this “Tempest” in the heroine's dueling impulses. Her daughter’s exile weighs on her conscience. She has creative urges, like marrying Miranda off to the King of Naples’ son, though the monarch betrayed her. But she also has destructive drives, like wreaking vengeance on the men who plotted against her, including the King and her own brother, when she summons them to her shores.

As Taymor explained in an interview this week, the way Prospera hovers at the brink of “the alchemical transformation – the change from white magic to black magic,” sums up “the condition of human beings at the moment. We have the power to be so intelligent and artistic and procreative and all that. Yet we’re just as easily able to slip into the dark side of our power and destroy the earth. That’s why this ‘Tempest,’ any ‘Tempest,’ is so right about the condition of humankind.”

Taymor starts the movie with a dissolving sand castle, suggesting that “civilization as we create it will fall to nature no matter what.” Taymor matches that image at the end with Prospera’s books drowning in the sea. “I had a Shakespearean scholar tell me that [the books falling in the water] were the saddest image ever seen, that the books dissolving in water – we’ve just lost them. And I feel that’s true. The notion of poetry has gone out of our culture. It’s become a little bit obsolete. What we think of as realism or naturalism has taken over the power of what your imagination can create. It’s not just with reality TV. There’s something about the expediency and immediacy of numbers and words, like with texting and the Internet, that the time it takes to concoct and create an elegant sentence or a line of poetry is useless now.”

But Taymor isn’t hopeless. She still sees poetic vitality all over the world, whether in the wizardly yarn-spinning of African griots – “the storytellers who weave images through the labyrinth of words” -- or the improvisatory comic brilliance of Russell Brand, who plays the jester in her “Tempest.”

Her own art gives hope to the rest of us. She's imbued her "Tempest" with the vivid, haunting textures of a tangible dream.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Auteurs, Classics Illustrated
        

Gifts for live-action visual comedy and sophisticated slapstick have been rare in movies ever since the disappearance of the silent clowns. But Blake Edwards had the talent to invent crackling lunacy that tickled the funny-bone and provoked belly-laughs with precise yet antic choreography.

When he and Peter Sellers created the maladroit Inspector Clouseau in "The Pink Panther" (1964), they took viewers by surprise with a blend of pratfalls and cosmopolitan elegance. If you've never seen it -- or haven't in 46 years -- pay tribute to Edwards, give yourself a break and watch this movie.

Set mostly in an Italian ski resort, it's a combination caper film and Cuckold Soup: both Sir Charles Lytton (David Niven) -- in reality, the notorious jewel thief, "the Phantom" -- and Lytton's con-artist nephew (Robert Wagner) woo Clouseau's wife (Capucine) while the inspector tries to prevent the theft of the fabulous Pink Panther diamond. By the end, even the gem's owner, the exotic Princess Darla (Claudia Cardinale), conspires against him. But Clouseau proves to be clumsy and unsinkable.

Brilliantly riffing on the character's stilted bearing and intense self-seriousness, Edwards and Sellers turn Clouseau into an archetypal figure -- the man of injured dignity who won't admit that any damage has ever been done to his pride. Under Edwards' direction, Sellers' eccentric, stop-and-go slapstick style hilariously frays the edges of the most elaborate set pieces. The movie provides a pleasant snowy dream of the high life, but what audiences love is Clouseau wagging a finger that lands in someone else's nose, or cooling off his burnt hand by stuffing it in a friend's stein of beer.

In their next Clouseau outing, "A Shot in the Dark," Edwards and Sellers exploited the character's weakness to perfection. From the hem of his spotless pale trench-coat to the rounded peak of his hat, Sellers' Clouseau was, like many of us, a man of many ill-fitting parts, struggling to keep them together and hoping to appear unflappable. He pulled off pratfall miracles with homely props like a letter-opener or a globe. No matter how ragged some of their later Pink Panther films became, you could count on Edwards and Sellers to deliver at least one or two bits of genius.

Edwards boasted diverse achievements in his long career. He gave Audrey Hepburn a daft and deft romantic showcase in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." He wrote the script to the first-class service comedy "Operation Mad Ball" (before directing his own hit military farce, "Operation Petticoat"). He brought high style to the TV private eye when he created "Peter Gunn." He tackled alcoholism head-on and elicited one of Jack Lemmon's most moving performances in "Days of Wine and Roses." But I don't think he ever topped his work in the first "Pink Panther" and "A Shot in the Dark." These days moviemakers sweat to concoct comic "icons." They should study Edwards' work with Sellers to see how it is done.

AP photo by Neil Jacobs

Posted by Michael Sragow at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Auteurs
        

Early in 1982, word began filtering out in Los Angeles about an unusual film by one of the world's most successful moviemakers. After his smash "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (a spectacular rebound from "1941"), Steven Spielberg, had shot, under the cover name "A Boy's Life," an atypically intimate fantasy that was said to be extraordinary. Because I had covered "Raiders" exhaustively and enthusiastically for Rolling Stone (at a time when "1941" had temporarily soured the media on American movies' great prodigy), I was invited to a very early screening.

The movie was "E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial." I called the Rolling Stone editors in New York to tell them I loved it, that it would never stop running, and that we had to cover Spielberg again.

The response was, "It's too soon. We've been very good to Steven."

I was sure they'd change their minds when it was screened for them. But the reactions got even more peculiar. Beyond the usual editorial second-guessing ("liked the first half, hated the second" --or vice versa), the movie provoked a hilarious box office prophecy: "It celebrates kids who still ride bicycles. Teenagers drive to the movies. They won't go to see their younger brothers glorified."

A week or two later, I discovered the editors' underlying rationale. "There's only room for one sci-fi smash per summer. This summer it's going to be 'Tron.'"

And they had already locked up special cover art with Jeff Bridges in his "Tron" outfit. 

Now, labeling "E.T." a sci-fi movie is a tad reductive, like calling "Grand Illusion" a war movie.  At any rate, the mass audience that summer wound up embracing not only "E.T." but also a sci-fi epic called "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan."

Not "Tron."

By May, the buzz for "E.T." had grown so loud that my editors couldn't ignore it. I flew to New York to interview Spielberg in a hotel room when he was on his way back from showing the film at Cannes.

The piece was delayed another two weeks so the magazine could run a Sylvester Stallone cover story ("Rocky III" had just enjoyed a huge opening).

Spielberg and Rolling Stone ultimately came up with the memorable image of E.T. reading news of his success in the trade paper Variety. That cover, and the movie, became classics.

As for "Tron": like another summer of '82 also-ran, "Blade Runner," it acquired a slow-building but fervent cult. (I am not a fan of either film, or of the "Tron" sequel.)

In an interview with Jerry Stahl for Rolling Stone's "Tron" cover, Bridges quipped, "I just hope the movie doesn't turn out to be just an ad for a video game."

Bridges also said, "I took the film seriously because I saw that it was breaking ground, as far as state-of-the-art special effects. That was the most exciting thing for me."

That's the true legacy of "Tron."

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

When was the last time a movie provoked a public figure into becoming, well, more public?

"The Social Network" has catalyzed more wide-ranging and ambitious coverage of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg in the last eight months than he attracted in the previous five years -- and may well have prompted the booming billionaire to try to explain himself to everyone from The New Yorker to 60 Minutes.

What's extraordinary (and hilarious) about the long piece naming him Time's Person of the Year is that it's so upfront about being a puff-profile response to the portrait of Zuckerberg in "The Social Network."

That's doubly funny because people like the New York Times' Virginia Heffernan see the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg as a piece of covert hero worship.

Actually, "The Social Network," starring Jesse Eisenberg (left) as Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake (right) as Sean Parker, is more profound and entertaining than any biopic slanted pro or con. It does what "Citizen Kane" did for its day. It depicts how new media reflect and exploit the curiosity and the shallowness -- the strengths and the weaknesses -- of creators and users alike. For fans of ambitious, cutting-edge, popular movie art, it will be extremely satisfying if "Network" does what "Kane" couldn't -- and sweep the Academy Awards.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: At the Megaplex, Auteurs, Awards
        

But if "Spider-Man" is, as Taymor says, especially based on mythology, one Marvel title is very especially based on it -- Marvel's remaking of the Norse thunder god into the Mighty Thor. In the Marvel version, Thor's father Odin tames his son's hubris by wiping his mind clean and giving him a mortal identity.

It's hard to tell from the trailer exactly how the movie handles Thor's origins, but we do see Odin casting out Thor from Asgard because of vanity, cruelty and greed. With actors like Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins merrily emoting away, and Kenneth Branagh at the helm, I'm psyched.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The Netflix switch from a DVD-rental model to streaming content continues to panic movie and TV companies. 

The key paragraph in Tim Arango's recent New York Times interview with Time-CEO Jeffrey Bewkes came midway through: "Mr. Bewkes explained that in the late 1990s the media industry embraced Netflix as a new distribution outlet for renting DVDs — without foreseeing that the company would eventually accelerate the decline in the sales of DVDs, which for years had been the lifeblood of the film industry.

"Now, with its success online, Netflix has raised fears that consumers may stop paying for cable television — the much-debated phenomenon of cord-cutting."

A market research site named In-Stat yesterday headlined a new report on the phenomenon, "Internet Delivered Video Growth Continues to Drive Physical DVDs into Double Digit Decline."

Does all this research and prophesy jibe with your experience of how people have been watching movies in 2010? Do those of you who stream your movies still rely on both discs and cable? Do you see them going away?

AP Photo by James Collins

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: technology
        

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globes -- the entertainment industry's most ludicrous example of a contest winning national recognition simply because of a splashy awards show -- roused derisive laughter even from reporters covering the nominations this morning.

When Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie were announced as contenders for best actor and best actress in a motion picture musical or comedy for "The Tourist," snorts of disbelief crackled over the airwaves. ("The Tourist" was also nominated for best motion picture musical or comedy, as was the equally lambasted "Burlesque.") By contrast, Emma Stone's name drew applause when announced in the same category for "Easy A."

Who knows? Maybe the Hollywood Foreign Press didn't nominate, say, Jeff Bridges over Depp because they just didn't get the 19th-century American wit of "True Grit" or realize that it is in many ways a comedy. (Depp was also nominated for "Alice in Wonderland.") But how could they nominate Jolie over, say, Helen Mirren in "Red" or "The Tempest?"

Aside from ignoring "True Grit," Mirren and other worthies, the Globe nominations largely reflected conventional wisdom with well-earned nods to my own critical favorites "The Social Network" and "The King's Speech" and evidence of surging support for "Black Swan" and "The Fighter" (I'll see these two when they open in Baltimore on Friday). 

But the "Tourist" and "Burlesque" nominations make it a good time to clarify who exactly is in the HFPA. Peter Howell of the Toronto Star wrote the best recent rip on the group about a year ago: "Current HFPA members include real-estate agents, car salesmen, showbiz publicists, hairdressers and even a few journalists. All that is required to maintain membership is permanent residence in Southern California (so much for 'foreign') and a mere four published articles per year, often in obscure publications that aren't freely disclosed.

Howell continued, "The HFPA pretends to be a democratic operation, but it operates mainly in the dark, revealing only the names and the 55 countries represented by its members. (There are four Canadian members, one of whom, Ray Arco, also represents Denmark.)

"Membership is strictly kept below 100, making it easier for studio publicists to court them with dinners, private screenings and valuable one-on-one celebrity interviews. New recruits are added rarely and only with the sponsorship of two active HFPA members. Any single member can blackball an applicant for whatever reason."

Posted by Michael Sragow at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Awards
        

From "Hairspray":

"Would you ever swim...in an integrated swimming pool?"

 "l certainly would, lggy. l'm a modern kind of girl. l'm all for integration."

For that exchange alone, vote for John Waters over Michael Phelps in the latest round of the Baltimore Sun's Celebrity Smackdown.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Auteurs
        

Will "The Chronicles of Narnia" continue as a big-screen series? 

Despite the overseas box-office boom for "The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader," the question won't be answered until the producers and 20th Century Fox see how the film performs domestically through Christmas.

But producer Mark Johnson was bullish on its prospects last week. He was keen to follow up "Dawn Treader" with either "The Silver Chair" -- to showcase the funny and talented Will Poulter "("Son of Rambow") as Eustace Scrubb -- or "The Magician's Nephew" -- to bring the charismatic, brilliant Tilda Swinton center-screen again as Jadis.

"That's what's really fun about the series," Johnson said. "Different characters take over each film. You can really play with it."

Johnson also liked the idea of adding different directors to the mix. He compared Michael Apted doing "Dawn Treader" to Alfonso Cuaron making "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."

But will he be able to play this way next year? By New Year's Eve the Narnia movie team should know whether they're still in the game.

Photo by Phil Bray of (from left) Georgie Henley, Ben Barnes, Laura Brent, and Skandar Keynes in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader."   

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: At the Megaplex
        

Watching Alex Gibney's splendid documentary "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer" over the weekend, I realized that no other American moviemaker has done so much first-rate work in the past five years.

This year alone, in addition to "Client 9," he created a film version of Lawrence Wright's one-man show "My Trip to Al-Quaeda," as well as a segment of the anthology film "Freakonomics," and the eye-opening "Casino Jack and the United States of Money," a thrilling and bleakly funny analysis of Jack Abramoff that traced the corrupt lobbyist's roots back to "the conservative revolution."

Gibney often takes on topics that seem to be familiar and then, through a combination of shoe-leather journalism and pop-Brechtian showmanship, produces movies that are as emotionally involving as they are revelatory. "Client 9" is infuriating in a good (and maybe even a great) way. It gives Spitzer his due for tackling the fraud and corruption of Wall Street and Albany, as New York state attorney general and governor, without making excuses for his sex scandal or for the failures of leadership that prevented him from weathering that scandal. (That's a shot from Gibney's film: Spitzer with his wife Silda as he announced his resignation as  governor.)

Gibney's Spitzer film puts most print and online coverage of his subject to shame at both the micro and macro levels. The quality of Gibney's interviews (with Spitzer, his fat-cat enemies, and even Spitzer's preferred call girl) is matched only by his ability to keep them all in perspective. He inspires you with Spitzer's quest to root out the white-collar crimes that have become a social epidemic. You leave the film outraged by a society that would rather read about Spitzer's trysts with prostitutes than his tilts with ruthless CEOs.

The Motion Picture Academy has put "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer" on the preliminary list of fifteen nominees for best documentary. I hope it makes the final list of five -- and reaches ever-widening audiences. It relates in intriguing ways to that other terrific documentary and Oscar rival, "Waiting for Superman." It says that the problems of America's feckless corporate greed, like those of its malfunctioning public school system, can't be fixed by a single man or woman of steel. Spitzer thought he was a Superman, and fell to earth.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Auteurs
        

David Fincher's "The Social Network" continued to rack up best picture and other top prizes at year-end awards over the weekend, most notably at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. (For a full list of the latest prize rosters, click here.) That's not surprising, given its unanimous acclaim.

What is surprising: The one performer who received similar praise and massive multimedia coverage for the first two-thirds of the year -- Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film versions of the Millennium Trilogy -- has not been winning the best actress race. (That's Rapace, above, as Salander in "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.") Last weekend all she earned was a "breakthrough" award from the New York Online critics.

Is this just another case of shortened memory span?  Did Rapace peak too early, clearing the way for Natalie Portman in "The Black Swan?" Are critics reluctant to honor foreign films that are as frankly commercial as these adaptations of Stieg Larsson's best-sellers? Or are the voters saving their love for Fincher's version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?"

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Awards
        

Carey Mulligan lost the competition to play the English-language version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," but won the plum role of Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby."

You can savor her artistry in her breakthrough movie,  "An Education," today and tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. at the Columbia Film Society at Howard Community College (10901 Little Patuxent Parkway; 410-772-4856).

Mulligan (pictured in a still from the film) plays a British schoolgirl who finds release from her constricted home life and monotonous academic prowess when a charming, cosmopolitan, but worrying and mysterious adult (Peter Sarsgaard) takes her to concerts, galleries and nightclubs in London and Paris.

She and Sarsgaard partner each other excitingly and perfectly. Mulligan was a blank on the screen in Oliver Stone's abysmal, relentlessly expository "Wall Street" sequel. But usually she can bring even a wisp of a character to an unexpected bloom. She could be the ideal movie Daisy.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Performers
        

I recently had the intense fun of recording commentary for "Mantrap." It's an ebullient Victor Fleming masterpiece to be released on DVD this fall, in a box set of Westerns that's part of the "Treasures from American Film Archives" series of the National Film Preservation Foundation. "Mantrap" is a scintillating and ultra-contemporary romantic comedy, starring Clara Bow. In its own way, it's as funny as Fleming's "Bombshell," and his handling of an anarchic triangle with Bow as a Minneapolis manicurist turned backwoods wife, Ernest Torrence as her trader husband, and Percy Marmont as a vacationing New York divorce lawyer equals the director's work with Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Mary Astor in "Red Dust." Series curator Scott Simmon spearheaded this project, which will feature a new musical accompaniment by Martin Marks and the MIT Music Department. Even in her Canadian-frontier homemaker guise, you can see in this still the live-wire charm that made Bow the It Girl.

The AFI Silver's "Directed by Victor Fleming" series follows up its dazzling early-December Jean Harlow-Ingrid Bergman double-bills with a slew of classics not yet on DVD. They include "Test Pilot," the most daring and enduring of the Spencer Tracy-Clark Gable buddy films, a huge influence on "Only Angels Have Wings" and a multiple Oscar nominee in 1938; "The Farmer Takes a Wife" (1935), a piquant piece of Americana about the fading prime of the Erie Canal, featuring a charming romance between Janet Gaynor as a canal-boat cook and, in his movie debut, Henry Fonda as a reluctant boatman; and "The Virginian" (1929), the movie that both introduced to sound films and immortalized the strong, silent type of Western hero -- in the unmatched form of Gary Cooper. For a full schedule, click here.  

Posted by Michael Sragow at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: local screenings
        

Harvey Weinstein vividly fleshed out the story of The Weinstein Company's successful appeal of the NC-17 rating for "Blue Valentine" on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today.

Appearing with superstar attorney David Boies, who with former Miramax general counsel Alan Friedman helped him argue before the MPAA board for an R rating, Weinstein said that the NC-17 had "penalized" stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams and their director, Derek Cianfrance ("in the John Cassevetes mold!") for their "brilliance" at making an oral sex scene seem real -- something radically different from the fantasy sex scenes in films like "Basic Instinct." (That's Williams and Gosling photographed in New York yesterday, above.)

In a "my son the mogul" aside, Weinstein said that his mother had always wanted him to be a lawyer and that Louis Nizer's "My Life in Court" was one of his favorite childhood books.

Weinstein explained that the turning point for "Blue Valentine" came when Boies inspired him to take the movie straight to the people the MPAA ratings were supposedly designed to serve and protect: American parents.

They organized a screening of 300 heartland moms and dads, in Kansas City. 70 per cent of the audience said that the proper rating for "Blue Valentine" was R.

The appeals board overturned the original rating in a rare unanimous decision (14-0).

Weinstein was bullish on indie-film prospects this winter, also plugging his company's leading Oscar contender "The King's Speech." The ratings board resisted Weinstein's bid to change the rating for that film to PG-13 from R.

"The King's Speech" has been rated R for the uproarious and cathartic spectacle of King George VI spouting profanity as part of his speech therapy.

Filmmakers run from NC-17 ratings because it limits their audience: Many theaters and video outlets prohibit NC-17 films; many TV stations and newspapers won't advertise them.

The more adult your rating, the more limited your potential viewership.

After awards season is over, shouldn't the Weinstein team's next step be to question the general insanity of a system that punishes the mature handling of adult content, whether comic or dramatic?

Photo by Donald Bowers

Posted by Michael Sragow at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Moguls
        

Hardly any 24-hour period goes by without fresh evidence of John Waters' creative warping of pop culture. A few hours ago, for example, the creator of "Evil Bong 3-D: The Wrath Of Bong," Charles Band, proclaimed that his film will be released in "Sniff-O-Rama" -- a relative of "Odorama," the scratch-and-sniff card system that Waters used to bring smells ranging from flowers to feces to his 1982 film, "Polyester." (That's Divine, right, and Tab Hunter in a publicity still for "Polyester.") Show your gratitude to Waters for keeping showmanship alive by supporting him in Round 2 of the Sun's Baltimore Celebrity Smackdown.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Auteurs
        

I was savoring the gutter period flavor and nihilistic comedy of Alex Cox's "Repo Man" (1984) when a relatively hip Sun editor passed by the video room and asked what I was watching.

When I told him "Repo Man" -- tonight's entry in the Gunky's Basement series at the Charles (it goes on at 9 p.m.) -- he curled his lip and said, "That's not too good, is it?"

It took me a minute to realize he was thinking of "Repo Men," the 2010 sci-fi action thriller about organ repossession starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, not "Repo Man," Cox's cult classic starring Harry Dean Stanton as an old-school auto repo man and Emilio Estevez as the repo boy who ends up pursuing a Chevy Malibu with dead aliens in the trunk.

It's a low-rent time capsule of a movie about an era in which the culture was turning so generic that grunge could seem like the only apt response. "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are," says a repo-company mechanic. "Repo Man" is modest and unique: a bleak yet cheerful and amusing piece of punk Los Angeles graffiti.

Movie still from "Repo Man," starring Emilio Estevez as Otto Maddox, courtesy of Universal Pictures

Posted by Michael Sragow at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: local screenings
        

The villains in the wonderful drama "The King's Speech," about King George VI (Colin Firth) and his speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), are mostly internal -- like the fears and demons that lead the King to stammer -- or seen only in newsreels -- like Adolf Hitler.

The most unsavory character we get to spend bad-quality time with is a Baltimorean: Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American whose hold on King Edward VIII led him to renounce the throne. (That's the real Simpson, right.)

If your view of Simpson's story was limited (as mine was) to dim memories of her lover's testimonial to their bond in his abdication speech, you'll be shocked by the picture of them here.

Edward gave up his crown to marry a twice-divorced commoner (in the movie's view, a giddy socialite, or social climber) and avert a constitutional crisis. The bare facts once made them both seem admirable to naive, uninformed, baby-boomer schoolchildren like me.

But as played (splendidly) by Eve Best and Guy Pearce, they're feckless, selfish and vulgarly hedonistic. And they're soft on fascism, to boot.

She glories in dominating a prince and then an emperor while taking at least one other lover and accepting at least one flattering gift from the Nazis.

He thinks he's behaving as the ultimate knight gallant while registering to his family as a basket case.

The Sun's Frederick Rasmussen reported in 1986 that after they married and became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, they bought a plot at Green Mount Cemetery. (They ultimately ended up in the Royal Burial Ground near Windsor Castle.)

That's Eve Best, right, with her "King's Speech" director, Tom Hooper; as Wallis she pours her evident high spirits into romantic domination. It's a witty, hair-raising tour de force in a film that's full of transcendent performances.

Photo of Eve Best and Tom Hooper by Stephen Lovekin

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Awards, characters
        

Kathleen and James "Buzz" Cusack's plans to continue operating the Senator Theatre as a commercial first-run movie house while adding a restaurant, crepe shop and an additional auditorium with a second screen won approval Tuesday from the city zoning board.

The Cusacks sought to continue using the Senator as a movie theater with the addition of a restaurant in a vacant space on the northern side of the property. They also requested a variance to expand to the western edge of their rear lot – adjacent to a residential zone – in order to accommodate their second theater. Baltimore City Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals officials informed the Cusacks of their decision Wednesday.

"We are grateful for the overwhelming show of support by the community as well as the board's gracious approval of our requests," Kathleen Cusack wrote in an e-mail. "We continue to look forward to the future of the Senator."

At the hearing, Kathleen Cusack produced 30 letters of support from individuals and neighborhood business and community organizations. Michelle LeFaivre, speaking on behalf of Elsinore Village, and city councilman Bill Henry, also appeared in support of the Cusacks.

During the session, the board's executive director, David Tanner, acknowledged letters sent by former Senator owner Tom Kiefaber and Laura Perkins objecting to insufficient notice for the meeting. But the board noted that proper notice had been given under the rules. (A sign announcing the meeting had been posted at the Senator since late November.)

The Cusacks must still firm up their financing for the expansion. Last summer they filed applications for federal and Maryland tax credits with the Department of the Interior and the state preservation office. They expect responses by the end of the year.

Though they've earned approval for their general concept from Baltimore City's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, the Cusacks must still win that group's endorsement for their detailed plans.

In the meantime, Kathleen Cusack said today, "We've been thrilled to be playing the Harry Potter movie. It's helped get the word out that we're open for business and generate excitement for the theater."

"All Good Things," starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, will follow Harry Potter into the Senator on Dec. 17. "True Grit," starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin, will be the Senator's Christmas attraction.

(Pictured at top: The Senator Theatre. At bottom: Buzz Cusack outside the theater. Baltimore Sun photos by Lloyd Fox.)

Posted by Michael Sragow at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Senator
        

Yesterday, a computer-game designer told me that he wasn't excited about "Tron: Legacy" until he read that Jeff Bridges would appear in it.

The reason wasn't that Bridges starred in the original "Tron" 28 years ago.

It was that "Any time Jeff Bridges acts in a film, it's worth seeing."

It's a kick to realize that Bridges' fan base extends to the tech crowd all fueled up for "Tron: Legacy."

Bridges has been delivering empathetic and inspired performances ever since "The Last Picture Show" (1971).

With "Tron" opening December 17 and "True Grit" December 22, this could be the biggest season yet in Bridges' four-decade film career.

My favorite Bridges movies include John Huston's "Fat City," Lamont Johnson's "The Last American Hero," Steve Kloves' "The Fabulous Baker Boys," Walter Hill's "Wild Bill," and the Coen Bros.' "The Big Lebowski."

What are yours?

AP photo by Dan Steinberg 

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Performers
        

Also, paradoxically, back to earth.

Blanchett has been a superb performer, but she badly mauled Blanche DuBois in Liv Ullmann's clunky production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" a year ago, despite all the starstruck raves she received in Washington, D.C. and New York. It was as if Ullmann and Blanchett thought they could avoid any dramatic imbalance between DuBois and her crudely charismatic antagonist, Stanley Kowalski, by making Blanche equal parts noble victim and bawdy camp. Neither fit into Tennessee Williams' poetic conception of the haunted,  valiantly witty, lyrically sad character. The final spot-lit tableau of Blanche Agonistes (in a slip) was a howler.

As Galadriel the elf in Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Blanchett pulled off the near-impossible -- portraying an ethereal figure with strength, without breaking a bead of sweat. It's smart for Jackson to bring her back for his version of Tolkien's "The Hobbit," though she doesn't appear in the book, just as it was shrewd for the "Narnia" moviemakers to bring Tilda Swinton's White Witch into "Voyage of the Dawn Treader." Characters and performers like these imbue fantasies with flesh-and-blood electricity. For this Blanchett fan, it will be a relief to see the actor relax into her natural greatness.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Performers
        

I was on leave when it opened, but after the harrowing events of the last 24 hours, the next movie on my rental list is "Ladder 49" (2004). 

This salute to Baltimore's firefighters left Roger Ebert "thoughtful and sad" and "surprisingly affected."

Stephanie Zacharek, then at Salon, admired "the way it suggests the texture of a firefighter's daily routine. We see the guys hanging around the firehouse, flipping through magazines or playing Ping-Pong, or out doing the grocery shopping, dressed in those big pants and boots, their suspenders drooping around their knees. Somehow, the sheer ordinariness of that aspect of their jobs makes the risks they take seem that much more affecting."

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly may have summed it up best when she said the movie honors "lives similar to those of so many who died on the homeland front lines not long ago," adding that "a beefed-up [Joaquin] Phoenix and a reined-in [John] Travolta balance each other believably, playing men made interesting and poignant by their averageness rather than by their eccentricity and magnetism."

She concluded, "'Ladder 49' is set in Baltimore -- which, following 'Homicide: Life on the Streets,' 'The Corner,' and 'The Wire,' is turning into the on-screen poster city for grit, wear, and resilience. This is no bellowing 'Backdraft,' nor does it need to be. Under the circumstances, 'Ladder 49' provides illumination enough."

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: DVDs/Blu-Rays
        

Who has done more to make Baltimore fascinating?

He has fueled the city's force as a funk-magnet with films from "Pink Flamingos" to "A Dirty Shame" while also turning it into America's lowdown urban sweetheart with "Hairspray."

He's an impassioned advocate for fearless Baltimore TV and cinema, whether David Simon's "The Wire" or Matthew Porterfield's "Hamilton."

An irrepressibly witty raconteur and master of the one-man show, he also revealed himself, with his book "Role Models," to be a superb essayist and an earthy-elegant belletrist.

He even inspired Justin Bieber to try out a pencil mustache.

Now it's time to show your gratitude. If you're on the fence, just think of how much fun it will be to hear him respond to his victory. Vote for John Waters here. 

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Auteurs
        

Oprah Winfrey's latest choices for her book club -- two Charles Dickens novels, "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations" -- should also spur sales and rentals of some terrific Dickens movies.

Top of the list is David Lean's 1946 production of "Great Expectations" (watch the opening sequence, above). As well as being a model adaptation, this story of a young working-class hero forced by breeding and circumstance to take on an artificial role -- upwardly mobile snob -- is a piercing and original piece of moviemaking.

Lean builds to the convict Magwitch's shocking appearance before the boy in in the churchyard with an ominous audiovisual crescendo: atmospheric shots of Dickens' "bleak place overgrown with nettles," echoes of the wild marsh and the wind rustling spookily through the trees -- then the sudden rattle of the prisoner's chains.

Later, Lean makes palpable the morbid obsessions of Pip's sometime-sponsor, Miss Havisham. When she catches fire in her rotting bridal quarters, and Pip smothers her blaze with a tablecloth that holds the long-festering wedding cake, it splits in Pip's grasp. The camera follows the remnant as Pip frantically gathers it up, underlining the vanity and horror of fixation.

The 1935 version of "A Tale of Two Cities" isn't in the same class as a movie. But it ably compresses the story of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror -- and the brilliant, alcoholic British lawyer, Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman), who (above) opens himself to redemption when he attends a midnight Christmas service with the beautiful and virtuous Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan).

Younger moviegoers who watch Colman's Carton for the first time, or older ones who see this superb performance again after a decade-long span (as I recently did), will find his gallantry and cynicism equally vivid and startling -- and as modern as the noble volatility of Robert Downey, Jr. in "Iron Man." (Downey could be a great Sydney Carton himself.)

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: DVDs/Blu-Rays
        

"Facebook" founder Mark Zuckerberg's review of "The Social Network" last night on "60 Minutes" went beyond his publicized pronouncement (above) that the film got his T-shirts and sandals exactly right and his motivation for creating Facebook exactly wrong. (He did not, he insisted, created Facebook to meet girls, because he was already dating his long-term girlfriend at the time.)

The most revealing moment actually came after Lesley Stahl questioned Zuckerberg about his Harvard schoolmates, the Winklevoss twins, who insist that he stole their idea, betrayed a working agreement, and continued to mislead them even when he was working out a settlement with them.

Zuckerberg complained that the movie made it seem as if the Winklevoss' lawsuit had been a big part of Facebook's history, when in reality it took up two weeks of his time.

"It was never a big deal," he said.

And that's just the response you'd expect from Zuckerberg after seeing "The Social Network."

In "The Social Network," the filmmakers use the Winklevoss' allegations (and those of former Facebook partner Eduardo Saverin) to tell the story of a boy-man who swats away, like so many gnats, all competitors, inferiors, and non-Facebook-obsessed partners and "friends."

The movie doesn't say that he spent more than two weeks worrying about the lawsuit. It suggests that he should have.

On the up side, Zuckerberg did take his whole staff on a fun field trip to see the movie opening day. He noted that the film has whipped up a broad fascination with Facebook (and himself). And he applauded the movie's surprising inspirational qualities -- its ability to excite young people about starting up companies or studying computer science and math.

The film's producers should pull a Zuckerberg and run the positive quotes in their Academy campaign. The costume designer, Jacqueline West, was robbed of awards for her epic work on David Fincher's previous great film, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

She deserves to win this time for assembling a wardrobe that Zuckerberg said could be hanging in his closet.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: At the Megaplex, Awards, characters
        

Which brings me to a frequent complaint -- why don't specialty companies or studio boutiques open their biggest titles all across the country instead of starting in New York and Los Angeles and then dribbling them out? With the Oscar buzz and national media coverage that it's been generating since September, a movie like "The King's Speech," with Colin Firth (above), could have cleaned up in cities like Baltimore over Thanksgiving -- and could maybe even have boosted the November box-office haul to its record 2009 heights.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 6:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: At the Megaplex
        

Every now and then, the National Board of Review gets things right.

It happened when "Quills" won best picture in 2000, when "Good Night, and Good Luck" won it in 2005, and when "No Country for Old Men" did the same in 2007. It happened today when "Social Network" took four top prizes: best picture, best actor (Jesse Eisenberg), best director (David Fincher) and best adapted screenplay (Aaron Sorkin).

The NBR's next-best ten pictures are: "Another Year," "The Fighter," "Hereafter," "Inception," "The King’s Speech," "Shutter Island," "The Town," "Toy Story 3," "True Grit," and "Winter’s Bone." 

Lesley Manville ("Another Year") won best actress; Christian Bale ("The Fighter") and Jacki Weaver ("Animal Kingdom") gave the NBR's best supporting performances. Chris Sparling's script for "Buried" won best original screenplay.

"Toy Story 3" won best animated feature. The cast of "The Town" won for ensemble performance. Jennifer Lawrence of "Winter's Bone" nailed the breakthrough performance award. "Of Gods and Men," from France, took best foreign film. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, co-creators of the documentary "Restrepo," won for best directorial debut, and Sofia Coppola earned a special award for "Somewhere." The "spotlight award" went to Sylvain Chomet and Jacques Tati for "The Illusionist."

Photo of Jesse Eisenberg (left) and Joseph Mazzello in "The Social Network" by Merrick Morton, AP

Posted by Michael Sragow at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Awards
        

Dueling headlines on today's New York Times' movie pages: "Conspicuously Sparse in Sundance Competition Lineup: Movie Stars," next to: "Hope for Small Films During Oscar Hoopla."

The Sundance article frankly set out to find some theme, any theme, in a diverse slate composed almost entirely of little-known and unknown talents. The theme, naturally enough, turned out to be the absence of big names.

But if Sundance continues to be the most potent launch pad for American independent movies, how long will these competitors remain unknown?

If you get past the pictures of Natalie Portman and Annette Bening on the Oscar hopeful story, and the coverage of parties for Portman's "The Black Swan" and Bening's "The Kids Are All Right" (that's Portman, right, at her film's New York premiere), you discover that the big winner at the Gotham Independent Film Awards was the star-less "Winter's Bone."

Last year, "Winter's Bone" just happened to win the grand jury prize and best screenplay award at Sundance.

Despite the decade-long chic for independent films, Sundance is best known not for showcasing marquee names, but for turning unknowns into stars.

Photo by Evan Agostini

Posted by Michael Sragow at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Film festivals
        

A week from today, Wesley Snipes will enter the Federal Correctional Institution McKean in Lewis Run, Pennsylvania, to serve a three-year sentence for tax evasion.

Last night it struck me that his last knock-out performance was in the 2002 prison boxing film "Undisputed." It spawned a couple of terrible straight-to-DVD sequels, but the original is a winner.

The tale is simple: A heavyweight boxing champ named Iceman (Ving Rhames) lands in the slammer and discovers that the quickest way out is to fight the prison program's boxing champ, Monroe (Snipes).

But the director, Walter Hill, and his co-writer, David Giler, visualized it with thoroughness, toughness and complexity - this is one battering ride that doesn't cheat on the moral hairpin turns.

"Undisputed" presents Rhames' Iceman as a bludgeoning behemoth convicted of rape. His one article of faith is his rock-bottom belief in his own pummeling strength. You know exactly what he means when he asks an interviewer, "Hey, look at me ... what would I got to rape anybody for?" -- and how much he doesn't understand.

Snipes' Monroe is Iceman's opposite: Sentenced to life imprisonment because of a passion-killing he committed with two lethal weapons -- his fists -- Monroe has figured out how to survive by living within himself and focusing on being a champion with integrity.

Hill and Giler give Monroe the same bit of business Sam Peckinpah gave Steve McQueen in the penitentiary opening of "The Getaway" -- building a bridge out of toothpicks -- and Snipes imbues Monroe with the understated, acutely aware cool of McQueen in his prime.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Auteurs, DVDs/Blu-Rays, Performers
        

With "The Hurt Locker," Kathryn Bigelow earned comparisons to the modern master of finding character in action, Sam Peckinpah. She did the action her own way, imbuing today's jittery hand-held techniques with ferocious emotional intelligence and a keen intellectual command of her subject (a bomb-defusing team in Iraq).

But Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, were also echoing the Michael Mann of "The Jericho Mile" and "The Insider" and the David Simon of "The Corner" and "The Wire" in their marriage of hard-edged journalism and incisive dramatic techniques.

From a report in The Wrap, it sounds like they'll go even farther in that direction with a new film set on the criminal borderland of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.

Tom Hanks will star in the movie, which has been called both "Triple Frontier" and "Sleeping Dogs" (I vote for the former title).

It will be great if Hanks really stretches for this crackerjack directing-writing team. Especially if Bigelow and Boal do what they did in "The Hurt Locker": immerse their actors in reality and inspire them to live by their wits for the camera.

Filming starts in mid-March. Can't wait.

Photo of Bigelow at the Charles in 2009 by Barbara Haddock Taylor

Posted by Michael Sragow at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Auteurs, Performers
        

The news didn't make the Boston papers, or any paper -- word only started drifting out on the Internet in mid-October -- but an important citizen of Munchkinland died a couple of months ago.

Olga Nardone, a Sleepy Head and member of the Lullaby League, went to her final rest on September 24 in Newton, Massachusetts. At 3' 4" she was often called "the tiniest Munchkin," though that's difficult to prove. She was 17 when Victor Fleming filmed "The Wizard of Oz" in 1938 (she was born June 8, 1921).

In a famous publicity shot of the Munchkins (above), the six-foot-two Fleming, standing next to Judy Garland and producer Mervyn LeRoy, looks straight at Nardone, and she beams back, poised as a dancer. (Fleming is holding Toto.)

Indeed, under the name Tiny Olga, Nardone danced in vaudeville, in a duo with another six-footer, the brother of her dancing teacher. Fellow Boston native Ray Bolger, before he was the Scarecrow, was her dancing teacher's friend.

She didn't know what picture she was up for when she got a call from an agent in 1938. "I didn't even want to go," she said in 2007. "But now I'm glad I went!"

When I was putting together my biography of Fleming, "Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master," she told my research associate, Kurt Jensen, "I was talked into it." She said, "My sister [Olinda] came with me because I told my family I wouldn't go unless my sister came." Her dancing teacher, Mildred Sacco, went along too, and served as a coach for the whole troupe.

Olga, Olinda and Miss Sacco stayed at an apartment, not the Culver Hotel, the scene of legendary offscreen shenanigans. But Olga was a key part of the on-screen myth-making.

Clad in a nightgown, she is the first Munchkin we see rousing to the sung command, "Wake up, you sleepy head/Rub your eyes/Get out of bed/Wake up, the wicked witch is dead." She's one of five Sleepy Heads who've been slumbering in a bird's nest. She and the other four were put there, she explained, "Because we were the only ones who could fit in that little nest!"

She was also lead ballerina in the trio of dancers from the Lullaby League, who perform on toe as they welcome Garland's Dorothy to Munchkinland.

A practiced professional, she pulled off her airy flourishes without much rehearsal. It took her a while to see the finished film, she said, "because I was back on the road already."

When I called to invite her to a book-signing party a year ago, she was too tired or ill to come to the phone. I wanted to thank her for her help.

But I also wanted to hear her real voice and regional accent. (Munchkin dialogue and songs were recorded by seasoned radio or cartoon voice performers at a slow speed, then played back at normal speed for that high-pitched Munchkin sound.) She resisted public interviews, so few knew how her Bostonian vowels affected her Oz pronunciations. Jensen told me she sounded a bit like Teddy Kennedy on helium.

In "Oz" she speaks with her posture -- and her toes. In the Lullaby League, she dances for Dorothy, and for the ages.

Photo courtesy of Willard Carroll

Posted by Michael Sragow at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Performers