Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson Rating (out of 5): ****
There are romance movies and then there’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. There’s just nothing else quite like it. I suppose that you could apply the “magical realism” trend of the 1990s, but even that isn’t strong enough; the wispy quality of those movies doesn’t come close to the bold, unfettered intensity of this one. It has no shame; nor does it have anything to be ashamed of. It wanders directly into the realm of the supernatural, but at the same time, it does not actually acknowledge the supernatural. It just is.
Ava Gardner stars as her most senses-shattering gorgeous, as Pandora, a nightclub singer on vacation in Spain. Men fall at her feet, and are helpless in her spell. One literally dies for her, and another — a champion racecar driver — pushes his prize car over a cliff for her. But even if she wants to, she cannot love these men back. One night, on a whim, she swims out to a mysterious ship anchored offshore and meets James Mason’s Hendrik van der Zee, a Dutchman. He’s an odd character. For one thing, his yacht has no crew, and for another, he just happens to be working on a painting of an exact likeness of Pandora.
Pandora is staying with her uncle Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender), a scholar. He asks Hendrik to translate a Dutch text, which turns out to be the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In the legend, the Dutchman kills his wife out of jealousy and is then cursed to wander the seas for eternity. He is allowed to come ashore once every seven years; if he can find a woman who would give her life for him, the curse will be broken. The movie shows us this legend in flashback, with Mason as the Dutchman. And so it goes. Hendrik is a romantic brooder, alluring and mysterious, but has some stiff competition from Pandora’s many suitors, including a jealous bullfighter, Juan Montalvo (Mario Cabré).
The director Albert Lewin is something of a minor cult figure, a highly educated New York man who worked briefly as a theater and film critic, rose through the ranks of the movie studios doing all kinds of odd jobs, writing scripts, and eventually directing. He completed only six films of his own. Shot independently, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is the apex of his career, a collection of all his pet themes and concerns. It’s an amazing cross between realism and fantasy, between the concrete and the misty. On one end, it’s an intelligent commentary on the Flying Dutchman legend, and on the other end, it’s a purely emotional, romantic celebration of it. The story is so silly that anything less than this full-blooded treatment would render it ridiculous.
At least some of the credit goes to cinematographer Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes), whose lush, full-color work accomplishes much the same thing, emphasizing both the reality and the fantasy of this situation. It’s precisely the type of movie that would require a test of time, and perhaps more than one viewing. Anyone looking for a straight-ahead story would be disappointed; viewers must simultaneously let go and remain alert. But now that it is nearly 60 years old, and so many other movies seem skittish and tame next to it, it’s the perfect time to dive in and swoon.
Kino released this movie on DVD many years ago — and again in 2006 as part of the Glamour Girls DVD box set — but now they have unleashed a spectacular new DVD, transferred from the 2009 restoration of the film. The Technicolor shines through and the entire presentation looks like a projected film, complete with grain. The only catch is that the discs do not include optional subtitles. Extras include a restoration comparison, alternate opening titles, trailers, stills, and a short documentary about a Spanish bullfighter.
A reformed ex-convict and lowrider car aficionado kicks his beloved son out of the house after discovering that the boy has been living a secret life in Sundance Film Festival veteran Peter Bratt’s heartfelt family drama. Che (Benjamin Bratt) is out of prison and on the straight and narrow. Still, every day is a struggle as he battles alcoholism and drives a bus in order to support his family. When the workday is done, Che and his friends, the “Mission Boyz,” pass the time by restoring junked cars to mint condition. Feared by his peers yet deeply respected as the toughest Chicano on the block, Che is the kind of guy whose entire existence is defined by his macho reputation. There’s no one in the world that Che loves more than his adolescent son, Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez), but both father and son are about to discover that love isn’t exactly unconditional. Upon discovering that Jesse has been living a secret life, Che flies into a violent rage, assaulting the boy and kicking him out onto the street. Meanwhile, Che’s attractive and headstrong neighbor Lena (Erika Alexander) challenges the ultra-macho gearhead to step back for a minute and take stock of the life he thought he had.
Reviewer: James van Maanen Rating (out of 5): ***½
When a movie, especially a small independent film, appears conventional in its approach to the material at hand, our critical establishment has a tendency to dismiss it. This is too bad, particularly where a movie like La Mission is concerned. Written and directed by Peter Bratt and starring his brother, the better-known Benjamin Bratt, the film is indeed conventional in some ways. It tells the tale of a Latino widower who labors as a San Francisco bus driver (the film is set in the city’s Mission district, which has a long and storied Hispanic past) and who is raising a good-looking and popular teenage son.
Rather than dwell on plot development (and spoil one of the movie’s initial surprises), let’s talk instead about why the conventional is sometimes a smart way to let a film unfurl. This will bring in a wider audience, of course, but also, if the movie is handled well enough, it can allow that audience the opportunity to grow a bit. If you are able, as has been filmmaker Bratt, to write dialog quite well — sounding off-the-cuff but also specific and often amusing — and to effectively link one theme (Hispanic machismo) to another (violence against women) to another (homophobia) until everything is not just connected but very nearly inextricable, then you are doing your job very well.
Further, when you are able to create a scene involving the movie’s leading “villain” (at least as close as the film comes to having such a character) and then make that scene so powerful that it upends our very notion of “villain” and forces us, as it does its main character, to re-think and re-feel to the point of actual change, this is effective filmmaking. As good as so much of Bratt’s dialog is, this climactic scene is done without a word being spoken and is all the better because of it. This is powerful, meaningful stuff, and in no way merely “conventional.”
Filmmaker Bratt has also done a fine job of casting his film, beginning with brother Benjamin (Piñero, The Great Raid)– an actor I’ve always enjoyed, who is as good here as he has ever been. From his initial scene driving the bus, we know the character is a decent guy. But soon we see him struggling with his macho aspect, where women and gays are concerned. Bratt’s struggle — one step forward, two steps back — is handled very believably, with the actor using parts of his emotional self that I don’t recall his showing us till now.
In addition to the angst on display, we also get an engaging lesson in “lowrider” car culture. And the supporting cast — from Erika Alexander as Bratt’s neighbor and possible love interest to Jeremy Ray Valdez as his son “Jes” — is first-rate. If the symbolism gets a little heavy at times, the emotional power the film wields never slackens.
Crumb director Terry Zwigoff’s first film is a true treat: a documentary about the obscure country-blues musician and idiosyncratic visual artist Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, member of the last known black string band in America. As beguiling a raconteur as he is a performer, Louie makes for a wildly entertaining movie subject, and Zwigoff honors him with an unsentimental but endlessly affectionate tribute. Full of infectious music and comedy, Louie Bluie is a humane evocation of the kind of pop-cultural marginalia that Zwigoff would continue to excavate in the coming years. Reviewer: Steve Dollar Rating (out of 5): ****½ (both)
Louie Bluie
Crumb
Consumed and driven by the bawdy vigor of good old American vernacular culture, the artists who lend their names to this pair of documentaries are such dynamos of idiosyncrasy that no one could have made them up. Newly reissued in a simultaneous one-two punch by the Criterion Collection, Louie Bluie (1985) and Crumb (1995), concern but can barely contain the outsized, wildly original personalities of charismatic African-American string band legend Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, and the cranky underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. These were the first two films made by Terry Zwigoff, a San Francisco government office-worker and obsessive enthusiast for 78 rpm recordings of pre-war American music, who also happened to play saw, mandolin and fiddle in Crumb’s own string combo, R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders.
Zwigoff is now more widely known for his later features, Bad Santa and Ghost World, which further articulated the director’s kinship with irascible iconoclasts and socially awkward connoisseurs of cultural arcana. Fans of those entertainments checking out Zwigoff’s back-catalog classics for the first time will find the square root of his aesthetic, with all its irreverence, political incorrectness, and rude zest charging up every frame. They’ll also discover a passion for storytelling and a gift for directorial self-effacement, one that allows these natural-born originals to narrate their own lives so compellingly that its easy to forget there’s a camera and crew involved - even as Zwigoff thoughtfully embroiders the narratives.
Louie Bluie is absolutely essential, and not only for anyone interested in American music, or the black string band tradition that has long been overshadowed, historically, by mainline jazz and blues. Armstrong, who died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 94, was perhaps the last living exponent of a sound that flourished in the 1920s and 30s, faded out by the end of the 1950s, and was enjoying a revival by the time Zwigoff’s film came out. (More recently, new bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops have begun playing in the style). The film begins after Zwigoff tracked down Armstrong, by then a retired autoworker living in a Detroit suburb, and started filming his recollections. Armstrong, a dapper gent with a pencil-thin moustache, a beret, and spiffy attire, is an indefatigable raconteur whose elegant speech flows with colorful, homey metaphors and rib-tickling twists of folksy logic. Here he is talking about his sidekick, Ted Bogan, as the guitarist sits next to him, barely containing himself.
It’s my greatest hope and fondest joy to talk about Mr. Bogan here, and how I brought him out of the land of the valley of the shadow. But he’s never been anything but a Casanova all of his life. And if I’m lying, I hope something big comes out of the woods and grabs me. The dude, there wasn’t a thing wrong with his looks. Women fell for the dude head over heels. We used to call him Mr. Black Gable. He had that smile, y’know? And some chick bought him a gold crown, and every opportunity he was showing that piece of gold, y’know. Women fell over all kinds a’ways about this dude. He was so greedy after women, he was like a one-eyed cat watching two rat holes.
Zwigoff seamlessly works in vintage recordings - including Armstrong and Bogan’s 1934 version of “State Street Rag” that first got him fixated on the mysterious “Louie Bluie” - archival photographs, and staged performances, along with Armstrong’s own artwork and poetry. But rather than preserve everything like fossilized specimens in the tar pit of museum-ready history, these rudimentary documentary elements are made to dance - animated by Armstrong’s vivid commentary.
An anti-Ken Burns, Zwigoff doesn’t sanctify African-American culture, he lets it speak for itself, and no one is better at cultivating his own extravagant lore than Armstrong. The violinist also is gifted in other media. He introduces the great banjo player Yank Rachell to his opus, The ABCs of Pornography, a homemade “whorehouse bible,” full of ribald stories and illustrations that constitute one man’s field guide to carnal pleasure - including its author’s fascination with the “steatopygic” female form. To paraphrase Sir Mix-a-Lot, he likes big butts and he cannot lie.
So, of course, does Robert Crumb, whose boundless fetishism and its pervasive, prolific expression in his warts-and-all comic book panels is a dominant theme of Crumb. Though Zwigoff also focuses extensively on the artist’s working-class and tragically dysfunctional family, which included two talented brothers and two sisters who are absent from the film, the Amazonian excess and graphic, exaggerated sexuality of Crumb’s copious work inspires an epic running gag and an overflow of discourse. “He made it OK for me to have a butt,” testifies one adoring, plus-size model, while art critic Robert Hughes lavishes praise on the creator of Mr. Natural, who shares some of “Goya’s sense of monstrosity.” Pity the lone feminist that Zwigoff flushes out to wag a finger at Crumb’s misogyny and his “arrested juvenile vision.” More revealing of the spindly, reclusive artist is his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s recollection: “My mother thought he was retarded when she met him.”
Released in 1995, and shot as the Crumbs were plotting an imminent relocation to rural France, Crumb thrives on the intimate revelations of a subject mostly known for being unknowable. A true refusenik, Crumb rejects just about everything that surrounds him, including the potential celebrity that might have been his as his various comic properties became pop culture icons. He hated hippies, who elected Mr. Natural their symbolic father. And when Felix the Cat was made into an animated feature against his wishes, he had the horny feline murdered with an ice pick to the brain. As if to scare society away, his comics plunged deeper into the extremes of sex and self-loathing, keyed to peculiar sort of psychic and emotional vomiting up of trauma, dread and bile - all fat asses and dripping spleen. And, I’ll say as someone whose adolescent discovery of Crumb was as transformative as reading Kerouac or dropping LSD, absolutely fucking brilliant.
Crumb finds the source of all this in childhood tortures, and somewhere under the Attack of the 50-Foot Woman sex fantasies taps into a well of melancholy that isn’t so well masked by Crumb’s too-easy chuckles when he revisits his family. Discussing his love for old 78s, he explains how: “You hear the best part of the soul of the common people, y’know … Modern music doesn’t have that sense of calamitous loss.” Zwigoff also establishes a wonderful crosstalk between the actual panels drawn by Crumb and some of the women who inspired them. Rewatching the documentary for the first time since its theatrical release, I was struck by its “old girlfriends” sub-plot, which plays a bit like Broken Flowers, with the weedy, goggle-lensed Crumb in the Bill Murray role. Except that they all seem to like him. Maybe it’s because none of their other suitors asked for a piggyback ride?
“Sex with Robert,” allows Dian Hanson, the suitably Amazonian editrix of men’s magazines Juggs and Leg Show, “was never normal.”
As the Korean peninsula falls into the hands of Japanese imperialists and countless Koreans seek refuge in the vast wilderness of Manchuria, a determined thief, a cold-blooded hitman, and a mysterious bounty hunter all vie for an elusive map that could lead them to a buried treasure from the Qing Dynasty. Tae-gu is “The Weird,” a thief who comes into possession of the sought-after map while boldly robbing a train of Japanese military officers. But at the very same time Tae-gu attacks the train, relentless assassin Chang-yi and his violent gang of bandits beset the locomotive as well. Chang-yi is “The Bad,” and he’ll kill anyone who tries to come between him and the untold treasures of the Qing Dynasty. Just as the cloud of gunpowder begins to clear, a shadowy stranger suddenly appears and rescues Tae-gu from certain death. That stranger is Do-won, “The Good.” Do-won has been chasing Tae-gu in hopes that he can capture him and collect the reward money. Now, as these three resolute strangers converge in a sprawling landscape that none of them can truly call home, they quickly discover that Korean resistance fighters, resilient mountain bandits, and the Japanese army also covet the prized map. The fight on the train is only the beginning, too, because when the stakes are this high the action is bound to get bloody.
Reviewer: James van Maanen Rating (out of 5): ***½
The Wild West: An ancient locomotive speeds along a railroad track, as the passengers in the cars behind it chat, snooze, play cards, or nibble on food. Down the aisle comes the snack-seller hawk-
ing treats, and we hear the dulcet call, “Candy! Rice cakes! Independence for Korea!” Yup: We’re long past Kansas; in fact, so much farther west of California that we’re east.
To be honest, we already know this, as The Good The Bad The Weird (yes, it is definitely meant to remind you of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) has already begun with a scene in which a sleek, handsome but slightly scary young Asian man has been given an assignment from an older, powerful and probably lethal fellow that involves the delivery of a valuable map. Then we see a scene of hawks and vultures nibbling carnage and suddenly all hell breaks loose, as bandits and bad guys of every sort seem intent on stealing that map, which you might immediately suspect to be a McGuffin.
Within minutes this bizarre and utterly captivating movie will have you in thrall. Robbery, gunfights, betrayals and counter-betrayals. Stylization that’s swift, smart and gorgeous. Saturated colors so rich and deep, you’ll swear they’re about to drip off the screen. And three leading men every bit as charismatic as the Eastwood-Van Cleef-Wallach trio of Leone’s film: Jung Woo-sung (from The Warrior, as the Good), Lee Byung-hun (from Joint Security Area and 3 Extremes, as the Bad) and Song Kang-ho (from Memories of Murder and The Host, as the Weird).
Kim Jee-Woon’s movie is a one of those art-house/film-buff/crowd-pleasers that nearly everyone can enjoy. Kim, who has earlier given us the much-praised Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life, is clearly intent on trying out all sorts of genres, and doing each to a fare-thee-well. As much as I love Korean films, I have noticed that they do tend to go on (and on). Koreans, I guess, expect their money’s worth, and this movie, at a two-hour-and-ten-minute length, certainly gives it.
I suppose you could trim the film, but truthfully, every time it threatens to dissipate, something happens — a chase, a killing, a surprise, a change of venue (underground brothel, anyone?) — that places us back on track and moving like crazy. And did I mention that what looks like half the Japanese army also wants that map. (Yes, this film has a big budget.)
Kim’s visual sense is so on-target and so much fun that you will probably sit there, as did I, happily gorging on the colors, costumes, the leading men, and one after another stunning visual set-up.
And isn’t that diving bell a little out of its usual venue? Don’t ask. Just enjoy.
Palestinian Scandar Copti and Israeli Yaron Shani collaborated on this independent drama, which examines how the troubled relationship between their countries colors everyday life in the Middle East. Nasri (Fouad Habash) is a teenager whose family is in crisis: his uncle got into an altercation with a local crime boss, and in reprisal, his cousin has been murdered. The shooters, it seems, originally intended to kill Nasri’s younger brother, Omar (Shahir Kabaha), in lieu of the cousin. Abu Elias (Youssef Sahwani), a restaurateur and respected member of the community, steps in to negotiate. Omar agrees to make a cash payment to the gangsters to prevent further violence, but since he doesn’t have the money, he raises it by dealing drugs. Abu has a daughter, Hadir (Ranin Karim), who works at his restaurant; she’s fallen in love with Omar, but since she’s Christian and he’s Muslim, they can’t acknowledge their feelings in public. Also working at the restaurant is Malek (Ibrahim Frege), a 16-year-old illegal immigrant who is looking for any kind of job to help pay for his mother’s medical treatments. And elsewhere, Dando (Eran Naim) is a policeman drawn into the chaotic life of Binj (Scandar Copti), a suspected drug dealer who has been arrested for attacking a Jewish neighbor; Dando is also preoccupied with the fate of his brother, who has suddenly gone missing. Ajami wona special distinction award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, AMG
Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson Rating (out of 5): ***
Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, teamed up to direct the crime drama Ajami. It received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film, which seems more a result of that behind-the-scenes achievement than anything that occurs onscreen. Indeed, comparing it to some of Amos Gitai’s better films (Yom Yom, Kadosh, etc.) it feels rather graceless, and compared to something like City of God, Ajami feels practically inert.
And yet the film is still effective in its own, small way. It follows several characters in five overlapping chapters, all set in one multi-ethnic section of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. It begins as a man working on a car is gunned down in the street. It turns out that the real target was the neighbor who sold him the car, Omar (Shahir Kabaha), an Arab Israeli. Worse, Omar is in love with Hadir (Ranin Karim), who is the right race, but the wrong religion; they can’t be together. There’s another revenge shooting, a botched drug sale, a cop searching for his missing brother, and another illicit romance, between a Jew and a Palestinian.
It’s a complex storyline, and it’s easy to get confused, but the directors handle it with up-close realism and even some tenderness, when it could have been a slick, slam-bang Tarantino/Guy Ritchie-type affair. The actors are all non-professionals, and they seem to bring their own real-life fears and frustrations into the material. These people are all neighbors, bound by the same geographical area, and yet they remain permanently separated by invisible lines: race and religion. The movie further separates its characters based on the law; characters are either on one side or another, and often they can’t help it, any more than they can help the other factors. Some characters are forced to deal with shady characters or drugs in order to get their lives back on track.
The co-directors are clearly passionate, but their passion sometimes fails to cut through the film itself. It sometimes feels overwritten, and a bit too distant (with too much focus on being “documentary-like”), And it runs too long. But many scenes do work, thanks to the depiction of the neighborhood itself. The place very often springs to life, buoying the story and characters at the same time. Ajami is an admirable achievement, taking simplistic, old-fashioned material and passionately adapting it to make it urgent and relevant.
Kino’s DVD includes a half-hour featurette on the non-professional actors and their experience on the film, plus deleted scenes, a trailer, and a stills gallery.
Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson Rating (out of 5): ***½
Australian actor Joel Edgerton is probably best known as the young Owen Lars in two of the recent Star Wars films. His younger brother Nash Edgerton has worked as a stuntman. Together they have made a series of short films, and now they team up — with Joel writing and Nash directing — for their debut feature, The Square, a twisty film noir not unlike the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1985). The difference here is, of course, the “down under” setting, much sunnier and more wide-open than most shadowy, nighttime noirs. But the baser human instincts can fester just about anywhere.
Raymond (David Roberts) is a supervisor on a construction site. He’s married, but having an affair with the pretty Carla (Claire van der Boom), who lives across the way. Carla is married to a loutish thug, Smithy (Anthony Hayes), who, for some reason, has a pile of cash lying around the house. Carla approaches Raymond with the notion of stealing some of the cash, and using it to escape and build a new life for themselves. Raymond balks, but for Carla, it’s the money or nothing, and so Raymond reluctantly agrees; to make the theft look convincing, he hires an arsonist (Joel Edgerton) to make it look as if all the loot has burned.
Without going much further, it follows that nothing goes according to plan, and the couple must deal with blackmail, annoying corpses, suspicious spouses, and other troubles. Meanwhile, Raymond has tried to initiate a kickback at work, which will pay handsomely. If that money can come through, it could solve everything. This is a very traditional noir, more interested in nasty twists of fate than in a happy ending. The Edgertons cook up a horrible, sludgy feeling of dread. The events of the film don’t exactly turn on a dime; they turn on near-misses, impatience and lack of attention. It may be the only film noir in which a happy family picnic with fireworks turns into a place of anxious unease.
Despite the solid plot and mood, the Edgertons don’t pay much attention to their characters, even if Raymond is a solidly built character, performed with desperation and sadness by Roberts (Me Myself I). He and Carla never seem to show much heat together, even though we see them romping in the back seat of a car. And, to be frank, the husband Smithy and the arsonist Billy look a bit too much like one another; the film doesn’t seem care enough about them to differentiate them more. A crisper, snappier approach could have covered up a lot of sins, as the Coens did with their debut. Nonetheless, this kind of crime film is not easy to make, and the Edgertons have done an admirable job with The Square.
The DVD from Sony comes with a behind-the-scenes featurette, deleted scenes, a music video, and — best of all — a terrific Edgerton short film, Spider (2007). There are optional subtitles to help Americans with the Australian accents.
Max Jerry Horovitz wants a friend. Mary Daisy Dinkle wants the same. Only problem is, Max, an obese Jew with Aspergers syndrome and a compulsion to gorge himself silly on chocolate hotdogs (a homemade recipe), lives in New York, while Mary, an eight-year-old girl with a large poop-colored birthmark on her forehead and a zeal for sweetened condensed milk, lives in Australia. Mary randomly points to a name in the New York City phone book in hopes of gaining an answer to where babies come from in America. In Australia babies are found in beer mugs, or so Marys grandfather tells her. After reading Marys letter, Max suffers the panic attack that results whenever anything disrupts his orderly routine, but a dozen chocolate hotdogs later and after some sage advice from his shrink, Dr. Bernard Hazelfhoff, Max answers Marys question. Babies in America are found in eggs laid by rabbis.
So begins the extraordinary correspondence between Mary and Max, two lonely souls, a little less lonely now. . Brilliantly animated by Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot and brought to life by the bravura voice work of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mary and Max is a bittersweet tale of a friendship between oddballs at their wits end with the world, but at peace with each other. Opening Night selection, 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Reviewer: James van Maanen Rating (out of 5): ****
My initial experience with Mary and Max – the multi-award-winning Claymation movie from Adam Elliot (whose short Harvie Krumpet won an Oscar back in 2004) — came when I asked a compatriot critic what he’d enjoyed of late. Without missing a beat he named this film and called it the best he’d seen in maybe a year. This was back in February, when Elliot’s movie press-screened as part of the annual Jewish Film Fest at the Lincoln Center Film Society. Then IFC picked it up for its Festival Direct On-Demand service, and finally – this past month – the movie made its DVD debut. None too soon: It’s a gem.
Claymation, with its penchant for built-in but enormous exaggeration and humor would seem to be the perfect medium for this story based, it is said, on fact (but please don’t let that dissuade you; this is no Lifetime movie of the week). In it, a lonely, overweight, eight-year-old Australian girl named Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Toni Collette), with a set of neglectful parents and a large birthmark on her forehead, while rifling through a Manhattan phone book she finds in the public library, comes upon a random address of one Max Jerry Horowitz (voice of Philip Seymour Hoffman, natch). Wanting a pen pal (and needing a friend), she writes to him and encloses a chocolate bar. Max, it seems, is a hugely obese 44-year-old man with Asperger Syndrome who has trouble with nearly everything that life presents. Not adverse to chocolate, however, he eats the bar and writes a letter back to Mary.
So begins this tale which goes into both expected and unexpected territory of many kinds and becomes, by its end, among the funniest and saddest tales of “outsiders” that I have ever seen. Mary’s mother, one of the great gargoyle creations of modern cinema, is as hilarious as she is awful, and Mary’s next-door neighbor, on whom she develops a crush, turns out to be, well, quite a rich and humane something-else. Max’s life in New York is done more than justice, too – from his Overeaters Anonymous group with one particularly lecherous member to his collection of Noblets (a bizarre cross between Precious Moments and troll-like figurines).
The correspondence between these two is chock full of charm, humanity and longing, while flavored with some wild humor. Mary and Max are outsiders non pareil. And though Mary is young enough to grow out of this and into some form of normalcy (she even begins to excel in certain areas), as with many whom life has marked as odd, she never quite grows out of the feeling of aloneness and being “different.” But because Elliot has approached all this with great good humor and a love of comical exaggeration, his film is non-stop entertaining, while scoring point after point about how difficult and crazy life can seem. While I don’t want to oversell this unusual movie, I don’t think I can.
In this award-winning personal documentary, filmmaker Kimberly Reed attempts to reconcile with her long-estranged brother Marc, who has seen her as a rival since childhood. Their paths diverged long ago: Marc was permanently debilitated in a car accident, and Kim left their small-town roots on a journey of self-discovery. PRODIGAL SONS travels from high school reunions in Montana to family reunions in Croatia, revealing a surprise blood relationship with Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, and other unforeseeable twists of plot and gender that wouldnt be believable if they were fiction. As all the films subjects freely open their lives to the camera, the candid, sometimes bruising footage takes a tender but unflinching look at identity and the past, examining what it means to become someone new.
Reviewer: Erin Donovan Rating (out of 5): ****½
In 2005, Kimberly Reed documented her first trip back to her hometown of Helena, Montana after moving away 20 years prior. The impetus is a high school reunion, but Reed’s nervousness about returning to her small town roots goes beyond the typical teenage angst laid on top of mid-life anxieties. During the long separation, in the years since Reed graduated high school, she transitioned from male to female and has actively avoided seeing anyone from her “Paul” years.
But her former classmates provide nary an ounce of coastal schadenfreude. While word has certainly gotten around that the former star high school quarterback is now a lipstick lesbian living in Manhattan, most of her former classmates find the transgender issue a fairly dull one. One woman laments, “None of us are who we thought we’d be when we were 18.” Another cracks a joke about ‘lady drivers’ when discussing Paul’s driving habits back in the day.
Reed has a far more difficult time with her older, adopted brother Mark. Similar to Donal Mosher’s and Michael Palmieri’s recent October Country, in Prodigal Sons we see an adopted son who, despite feeling his family’s love, is unable to ever feel he’s a part of the group. After receiving a traumatic brain injury in a car accident at age 21, Mark experiences bouts of memory lapses, extremely poor impulse control and uncontrollable rage. Unable to have a normal adult life, he retreats emotionally into his childhood. But it’s evident Mark wasn’t much happier then either.
The film shifts focus to Mark and the difficulties his family faces dealing with his rapidly deteriorating condition. There is a fleeting moment of hope when Mark is discovered by his birth mother and learns that his biological grandparents are Hollywood film legends Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. He is immediately flown to Croatia by Welles’s long-time lover and has attention lavished upon him for his previously unknown genetic legacy. He’s even invited to participate in a forthcoming documentary about Welles’s long-lost works (badumching!) However, it quickly becomes apparent that this new information about his past (along with ever-changing combinations of medications and therapy) won’t be enough to overcome a lifetime of dysfunctional family dynamics and physical damage. Soon after the trip to (unbelievably gorgeous) Croatia, separate scenes capture Mark beating Kim, strangling his younger brother and threatening his mother with a knife on Christmas Eve.
Reed weaves these two narrative threads together, one sibling who is confident in his body but experiencing constant emotional and mental chaos; another, herself, at odds with biology but with the confidence (and medical procedures) to become self-actualized. Since Reed identifies so much with the commonality in these stories, she is that much more invested in creating environments for Mark to thrive, often at the expense of herself and those around them. Prodigal Sons gracefully explores the challenges and anguish of familial responsibility in situations that modern medicine is ill-equipped to manage.
1971–Daniel Ellsberg, a top-level Vietnam War strategist, concludes the war is based on a decade of lies. He leaks 7,000 pages of top-secret documents to the The New York Times, a daring act of conscience that leads directly to Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.
Reviewer: Erin Donovan Rating (out of 5): ****
A fascinating theme emerges early on in Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: that the same circular thinking and one-upsmanship games inevitably will overtake hyper-insulated circles once their belief system come under fire. Whether they be grassroots activist groups, major media companies, the Department of Defense or the White House — the wheels come off with striking similarity and lead to some fantastic collapses.
Daniel Ellsberg began as a researcher in the State department for the Johnson administration on the day of Gulf of Tonkin incident. A true Cold War believer, his department was tasked with compiling evidence of violence against Americans in the region that would enable White House policy advisers to construct an explanation for why the war on Communism was about to be expanded. But after years of amping up reports of petty criminal acts and masking false alarms with his credibility, Ellsberg enlisted in the Marines to gain a perspective on Vietnam he felt he wasn’t getting it through high-level security intelligence briefings. He was shocked to learn that military strategists had invented investigative ground campaigns out of whole cloth and the sum of the war consisted of dropping millions of pounds of bombs on an underdeveloped nation. Upon his return he came to realize that the combination of Congress’ deference to the Executive branch and battling egos within by then-President Nixon’s team meant the war could conceivably go on until the United States ran out of bombs or the American people chose to stop it.
With the aid of his two young children, Ellsberg began copying a 7,000 page document that would come to be known as “the Pentagon Papers.” The Pentagon Papers detailed some of the exaggerations that led up to the war and expressed defense officials’ concerns with the lack of effectiveness a prolonged military engagement in the region would ever have. Ellsberg then distributed the documents to sympathetic members of Congress, major newspapers and reporters from the evening news networks. Nixon was enraged and worse yet, made even more paranoid that Ellsberg’s betrayal was potentially just a drop in the bucket and feared more dissenters with inside knowledge would go public en masse at any moment.
When charging Ellsberg (and everyone who had apparently ever met him) with espionage didn’t pan out, Nixon appointed a special task force to smear him in the press. Among other things, the team broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, stole his medical files and attempted to use them to paint him as a schizophrenic. This would be the same team that would later be involved with the Watergate robbery and would lead to Congress passing articles of impeachment and Nixon’s eventual resignation. In this case, the story being both the crime and the cover up, Nixon’s team excessively documented all of these acts — going so far as to sign his initials next to which smear tactics were approved, with the caveat of needing to be totally untraceable.
In the film, Ehrlich and Goldsmith take a three-pronged approach to showing that its subject matter is far more cumbersome than merely one man’s romantic quest to end a war. Dangerous Man is part re-chronicling of the events leading up to and management of the Vietnam war (a topic of apparent ceaseless interest, if little introspection, to the Baby Boomer generation), a biography of a man who upended a life of privilege after making a 180-degree ideological turn (hint: he met a girl) and a somewhat strained attempt to give the Ellsberg story a contemporary context about standing up to power in a time marked by great uncertainty and indifference.
Ellsberg (who narrates the film) is the biggest hinderance to that last element. He thrashes against much of the complexity of his own biography and its clear from the archive footage and his current interviews that he sees himself as a creature of near mythic nobility — failing to mention that ego and having a rich wife to fall back on probably also figure strongly into his legacy. But the filmmakers artfully (and kindly) guide the story back to providing context for the time, pushing the supporting cast of Ellsberg’s mind into the forefront.
It’s the absence of said context that renders most documentaries on this period unwatchable to anyone with the clarity of mind to know social change never happens based solely on the good intentions of a few wonderful individuals. The filmmakers delight in showing the role chaos and animosity played in ending the Vietnam war: feuds between the State department and the White House that left staffers bitter and unsupervised, the academics within conservative think tanks trying to out-leak one another once it had come into vogue to have a conscience and the tantalizing bit that the New York Times had planned on backing down from publishing the classified Pentagon Papers — deciding only to pull the trigger when they were about to be scooped by the Washington Post.
There are playful moments in The Most Dangerous Man as well: a then-junior Senator from Alaska Mike Gravel recounts the logistical nightmare of trading off a 7,000-page document before the internet; Howard Zinn (his interview recorded just days before his death) chuckling about his years as a member of a poorly organized affinity group with Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky; and Anthony Russo describing the difficulty in xeroxing a felonious tome while Ellsberg kept accidentally summoning the local police by setting off his home security system.
Louie Bluie is absolutely essential, and not only for anyone interested in American music, or the black string band tradition that has long been overshadowed, historically, by mainline jazz and blues. Armstrong, who died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 94, was perhaps the last living exponent of a sound that flourished in the 1920s and 30s, faded out by the end of the 1950s, and was enjoying a revival by the time Zwigoff’s film came out. (More recently, new bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops have begun playing in the style). The film begins after Zwigoff tracked down Armstrong, by then a retired autoworker living in a Detroit suburb, and started filming his recollections. Armstrong, a dapper gent with a pencil-thin moustache, a beret, and spiffy attire, is an indefatigable raconteur whose elegant speech flows with colorful, homey metaphors and rib-tickling twists of folksy logic. Here he is talking about his sidekick, Ted Bogan, as the guitarist sits next to him, barely containing himself.
So, of course, does Robert Crumb, whose boundless fetishism and its pervasive, prolific expression in his warts-and-all comic book panels is a dominant theme of Crumb. Though Zwigoff also focuses extensively on the artist’s working-class and tragically dysfunctional family, which included two talented brothers and two sisters who are absent from the film, the Amazonian excess and graphic, exaggerated sexuality of Crumb’s copious work inspires an epic running gag and an overflow of discourse. “He made it OK for me to have a butt,” testifies one adoring, plus-size model, while art critic Robert Hughes lavishes praise on the creator of Mr. Natural, who shares some of “Goya’s sense of monstrosity.” Pity the lone feminist that Zwigoff flushes out to wag a finger at Crumb’s misogyny and his “arrested juvenile vision.” More revealing of the spindly, reclusive artist is his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s recollection: “My mother thought he was retarded when she met him.”
