Tree of Life: Overwrought Masterpiece by the Elusive Terrence Malick

Hailed by critics as both a work of genius and pretientious twaddle - and by some as both - Terrence Malick's Tree of Life is certainly a film of amazing ambition, cinematic brilliance, poetic storytelling, and yes, a self-indulgent exhibition, at times, of visual cliche. I can only think of one movie in recent memory that comes close to Malick's intent to use film to create an ecstatic, religious meditation on the meaning of existence - Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful.

But where Biutiful is unswerving, dark, distressing, and mystical, Tree of Life is graceful, poetic, meditative, and expansive. So expansive, in fact, that Malick decides, about twenty minutes into the film, to give us a visual narrative taking us from the big bang to the birth of the main character. He's trying to connect the whole of life, you see, along this unbreaking thread of cosmic existence. Not for naught has the movie been compared to Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It's not just the cosmic slide show: The wide-angle shots of rooms, dinner tables, and attics also convey the same sense of human spareness in the universe as did Kubrick's film. We witness all the characters as if through a dream, or gauze, or the haze of fading memory.

Existence is summed up in this film by Jack - the main character - who is played by Sean Penn as an adult (whose context is unfortunately stripped a bit too bare) and by the marvelous newcomer Hunter McCracken as a young boy. In fact, all the three young boys - a band of brothers being raised by an organ-playing, electrical plant worker in the 1950's south (Brad Pitt) and his waiflike but devoted wife (Jessica Chastain) - are wonderful, and their horseplay and affection is an amazing recreation of the freedom and wonder of childhood. In many ways I could have thoroughly enjoyed this movie for the family dynamic exposed in between the big notable scenes of galaxies forming and ghosts assembling on the beach, and done without all the big, controversial effects.

Except that Malick is after something else, here - not so much story as poetry, and to do so, he needs to pepper this movie with big spiritual themes. The stated themes of nature and grace, of course, but also the conflict between water and glass (water, which moves with the grace of nature, and glass, which both separates us, freezes us in time, and allows us to see through). It seems that has we have grown up from the tree-filled back-yards of our 1950's youth, when we would frolic in the fumes of DDT or on the shores of ancient lakes, we have been encased in more and more glass - not only have the windows in the houses gotten larger and more sleek, we work in an urban world of glass towers where a single tree is a rarity. There is also the implication that our human dynamics were set down long ago as part of the course of nature. The pose of the two dinosaurs who appear on a stream - one holding down the neck of the other, who is lying disabled - mirrors the pose of the father when he grabs the mother, holding her tight until all the fight leaves her body. This is risky but powerful stuff, the kind that can take your breath away.

At the same time, there's that beach scene, with all the dredged up religious symbolism. I appreciate that Malick is working in a religious tradition (he sites the trials of Job throughout the film). But the movie is most ecstatic, in my opinion, when he leaves traditional religious symbolism behind and delves more deeply into his own personal eye: the shots of a streetlight on the family lawn, or the impressions of a baby looking out the window at his mother. The cumulative effect is like that "Star Trek" episode where Picard lives an entire life in a few short minutes: we get to experience, in the memory of Jack, the particular time and place of growing up in a particular house on a certain street in a specific southern town: a town with tensions between races, with wide lakes and open fields for boys to play in, with a certain house that itself is like a character stitched into memory and now passed away like Jack's beloved brother or his other family. It is an almost Faulknerian sense of time and place and Malick captures it with brilliant emotion and love.

We also get to experience those very specific people - the father (Pitt here gives perhaps his best performance) and the mother, their specific conflict and how that turmoil, the yin and yang of life, passes down through the generations. Their complexities - the love and hate tied up together, the resentment and blessedness - are far far from the black and white characters of our summer comic fare and the kind of human portrait that cinema used to be so much better at.

Could Malick have used a less indulgent sensibility, a better understanding of the adult Jack and the feelings that drive him, and a more thought out ending? Certainly. But then, it's hard to end a story about existence - and we might not have gotten a film as brilliant as this one is.

Beginners: Gay Dad Teaches Son About Love

What a great little film this is, and a real respite from summer-movie gore and sci-fi - if you need a break from that sort of thing.

Beginners is one of those films about life and love, but with a unique perspective: Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, the straight son of a gay man (Hal, played by Christopher Plummer) who comes out in his early Seventies after forty years of marriage. Plummer is spot on as the man who sheds his formerly straight skin to explore the gay world for the first time, with all the enthusiasm of a teenager.

Hal only has a few years to savor his new life before he's struck with lung cancer, and Oliver has to care for his father to the end, as well as hold the secret of his terminal illness from Hal's lover and friends. Meanwhile, Oliver himself has no knack for girls, until he find one - Anna, played marvelously by the illuminated Melanie Laurant - whom he hopes will be the one to stay.

A film like this lives or dies by the story telling, and the writing here is fantastic - pointillist and impressionistic, jumping through time, and filled with metaphor and keen observation. Here are just a few of the things I loved in this film:

• A cute Jack Russell terrier (I'm a sucker for dogs, aren't I?) who speaks to Oliver in long, erudite sentences translated in silence.
• Again silence as Anna has laryngitis when they first meet, and they have to negotiate their first date with hand signals and a small pad of paper.
• Oliver's voice-over narration, which peppers the world with things as they are: a kind of scrapbook of life that is a poignant counterpart to his father's inevitable dying.
• Oliver's mother, a woman who is unhappy but not defeated, and just quirky enough to leave Oliver with a botched up view of himself and the world.
• The childlike way in which Hal discovers himself in the gay world, and the role reversal that takes place between himself and his son - with Oliver taking care of Hal, yet still, or perhaps more than ever, learning important things from him.

All this is great and I wish the central relationship - between Oliver and Anna - could stand up to everything else going on around them. Both of them are supposed to be a little sad and broken, yes (Oliver sketches these portraits of people he calls "the sads"). But it's all a little bit too precious, especially seeing as how savvy Oliver is about his life, his own predilections and desires.

I supposed that can be forgiven when one is treated to such keen observation everywhere else. If there's one movie that I would gladly say is for everyone this summer - young or old, gay or straight, fearless or feckless - this would be it.

Win Win – A Feel Good Reality Check

Paul Giamatti is on a roll these days. Here’s another lead role that carries a movie of wonderful warmth and charm. In this case, the timely story of a struggling lawyer who takes legal charge of an old man, suffering dementia, in order to earn his monthly caretaker's stipend, and ends up inheriting care of his grandson, whose wrestling prowess revitalizes the whole town.

The theme: how to seize control over one’s life against the everyday forces that keep us down – whether they be the economy, uncaring parents, or one’s own fears of failure. Giamatti’s lawyer, Mike Flaherty, is struggling to feed his family, trim the dead tree in the yard, and keep the heat on in his office in eye of the Great Recession when the opportunity comes along to earn an extra $1,500 a month. It’s not a lot, but just enough to make a difference. All he needs to do is bend his ethics a little bit and lie to the judge in order to receive custody of the old man, and his monthly stipend.

But as soon as he does, into his life walks the man’s grandson, Kyle. Kyle has problems of his own – his mother is a druggie who deserted him – and he’s come to live with the grandpa, whom Mike has surreptitiously moved out of his house into a nursing home. Mike and his wife (played with Jersey flare by Amy Ryan) takes in the wayward grandson and slowly coaxes him out of his shell and onto the wrestling floor (Mike happens to coach the high school team). Mike and Kyle are clearly kindred spirits and each begins cheering each other up. When Mike and his friends discover that Kyle is actually a wrestling star from Ohio, a secret weapon for their home team, everyone begins to find their passion again; it even looks like this losing team could go to the finals.

But it’s a relationship built on a lie – Mike told the judge grandpa wouldn’t be put into a home – and even before Kyle’s mother comes back into the picture, we can see where this plot is going.

Yes, it’s a kind of Breaking Away story, using sports as a metaphor for self respect, and we’ve seen a version of this movie every decade or so. But what makes this story rise about the predictability is how perfectly rendered the characters are – both by the script and the actors – and how much we fall in love with all of them, and want everything to work out. (Shall I also confess that, like Kyle, I’m from Ohio, and like Mike, I live in New Jersey, and so I also related to the little details of local color?) Mike is a bit devious but he’s also a stand-up guy – he sincerely cares about his charges as a coach and worries about his family. Kyle is just the opposite: all cool, tattooed teenager and superstar jock, but hiding a sensitive, non-judgmental heart. It also inverts the typical plot, making Mike the hero and Kyle the foil – and so it’s the younger teenager whose cool stoicism and sincere openness wins the hearts of those around him; he’s the sturdy center of the movie who needs to be won over by the imperfect adults, and who has to teach the older men about self respect and rising above tough times. It works.

I was skeptical about this movie at first. Shlubbing around seems to be an occupational hazard for Giamatti characters (casting Jeffery Tambor as his assistant coach doesn’t help that impression), and his best friend – a typical divorced Jersey dude played by a middle-aged Bobbie Cannavale – is a bit of a type. But newcomer Alex Shaffer, as Kyle, brings exactly the right kind of sweet dudeness to counteract this bunch (Fast Fact: Shaffer used to be a high school wrestler). What’s so interesting is how intimidating the middle-aged shlubs seem to the kids, and how intimidating the athletic kids seem to the middle aged middleweights. Everyone has something to learn.

That everyone does so is of course a bit corny, but such sentiments in these trying times are not such a bad thing. Through their tiny acts of taking in strangers, showing kindness, and showing respect, each of these characters helps the others just enough. Us Jews have a saying for this accumulation of tiny kind, personal gestures – tikkun olum, or “repairing the world.” This movie does exactly that in its own, sweet way.

The Conspirator: History Lesson for Modern Politics

I’m a big history fan so I couldn’t resist seeing Robert Redford’s The Conspirator – about the trial of Mary Surratt, one of the accused southern conspirators who helped plan the assassination of President Lincoln and assist John Wilkes Booth's daring escape.

The movie starts out as any good historical drama should: on the battlefield, with union soldiers hunkered down in a bunker taking heavy artillery. One of those soldiers - Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) - protects his wounded buddy, Nicholas (Justin Long), while waiting for help to arrive.

I would have loved to have gotten more texture about the war, but this scene is meant for one purpose only: to establish Aiken’s bona fides as a war hero and Union loyalist. It lasts a few minutes and that’s all.

Next we’re swept forward to the evening of Lincoln’s assassination. Those who aren’t history buffs may forget that the assassination wasn’t simply the actions of a lone, disgruntled southern actor taking out his anger on the President. It was a carefully planned coup involving several players that targeted not just the President, but the Vice President and Secretary of State as well. The conspiracy is well underway and we get to see with great fanfare the re-enactment of that fateful evening, including Booth’s ill-fated leap to the stage shouting “Sic Semper Tyranus!” (thus always to tyrants) as well as that botched attempts on Vice President Jackson and Secretary of State William Steward. The evening of the assassination is fascinating, with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) taking control and closing off the city to hunt down the conspirators. This, it seems to me, is real drama.

Unfortunately, writers James Solomon and Gregory Bernstein only want to give us the barest bones of what happened, since their real interest is getting us as quickly as possible to Mary’s trial, and setting up Aiken as her reluctant defense attorney (just as we saw with the British in the HBO "John Adams" mini-series, Mary’s best defense is to have an unassailable paragon of the other side - a Union war hero - represent her, even if he’s at first loath to the task). Booth is hunted down and killed, but the other members of the plot are rounded up and tried. One of those members – John Surratt – can’t be found, so his mother (who runs the boarding house where the plot was hatched) is accused instead, and brought before a military tribunal to stand trial.

And this is where history ends and modern metaphor begins. The calamity that is the assassination of Lincoln and simultaneous Southernist attacks on the Executive Branch of US government is portrayed with all the terrorist coordination of 9/11 (even the idea of synchronizing the attacks for maximum terror seems thoroughly modern) – and the trial of Mary Surratt is clearly a stand-in for our own Guantanamo Bay and military tribunal of prisoners of war. The principals even get to argue the same great debate that we hear on our Sunday talk shows: should justice come swift and hard to rally a shocked and scared nation (Stanton), or must we hold to our values and the constitution even in the face of terrible crimes (Aiken)?

Though the trial of Surratt is factual and the situation a clear parallel, I sincerely doubt that any such discussion in 1865 took place with so modern a phraseology about constitutional values and travesties of justice. Putting the script into an archaic idiom would probably not have helped matters any, as the movie is singularly focused on examining this fine point of legal debate. Still, listening to this script, one cannot help but feel the words dovetail more with 2011 television than eighteen century dialect.

Aiken eventually turns around – no longer loath to represent a woman he believes to be guilty, he soon becomes her most ardent defender, even when it threatens to undo his reputation and end his relationship with his betrothed. This transformation is pre-ordained by the Sunday Schoolhouse nature of the plot, so little time is spent demonstrating Aiken’s change in attitude, it simply comes about when the script demands it.

What disappointed me about all this was how interesting the event itself was, and how thoroughly period the costumes (what I love about historical drama), and yet, all that is but background for what’s essentially a courtroom morality play. I would have loved to have opened up this story and really found out more about the conspiracy, the passion of defeated southerners, and the peculiarities of eighteenth century Washington. Instead we get a kind of "West Wing" in top hat and tails, and the metaphor for Guantanamo Bay and modern-day terrorist trials is all we can focus on.

Though clearly there are parallels between the plot to kill Lincoln and our own 9/11 (the movie points out all of them, even a kind of eighteenth century version of the Terrorist Alert system), I would like to point out to the writers that there are differences, as well. For one, Mary Surratt was an American citizen. For another, we had already been in a long war of brother killing brother that had resulted in the deaths of more Americans than anything since. For a third, the terrorists of today have at their disposal the ability to obliterate millions of people in the blink of an eye. In 1865, it was difficult for anyone to travel more than ten miles in a single day. I mention all these because the movie fails to really let us understand the peculiarities of its generational dilemma and let us draw the conclusions about today for ourselves.

I also mention it because, perhaps unintentionally, this movie has me sympathizing just as much with the older “hang-em-all” Secretary of War as the young man impassioned with constitutional values (perhaps you can also credit this to a gusto performance by Kline, who illustrates Stanton's hard-headed reasonableness all too well). In a way, it’s also an old man versus young man argument: young men can afford the luxury of preserving their ideals; old men have to be satisfied with merely preserving the peace. It’s no surprise if I tell you Mary Surratt’s eventual fate, but I have to say, I wasn’t even convinced by this movie that she was wronged.

Which to me speaks to the movie’s core problem. It wants to both be a historical intrigue as well as a cautionary liberal's morality tale about suspending the constitution in times of war. The lessons from one, however, aren’t as simple as the lessons from the other. I loved this movie when it surprises even itself with the messy, complicated character that history – when really understood – inevitably provides. But when it lapses into modern day liberal bromides, it’s as boring as a Sunday morning sermon.

Barney's Version: Life and Love in Jewish Montreal

I was surprised by this movie. Sweat, tender, soulful and expansive, the film covers the entire life of a Montreal Jew coming of age in the Seventies and Eighties, and has the texture of a novel. Giamatti gives a multifarious turn as the title character going through life and learning about love, marriage, friendship, regret, and guilt.

The film is in fact based on a novel by Mordecai Richler. Our story opens with Giamatti’s character – Barney – as a sixty-something drunk crank calling his ex wife. His ex’s husband answers the phone and Barney teases him mercilessly. Next morning, Barney’s daughter shows up to gently reprimand him since Blair – the new husband – has had a heart attack. Barney laughs at this and takes some perverse pleasure.

But the movie then quickly moves into the past – into a flashback that becomes the long sequence of Barney’s life leading up to this point – and we find that he wasn’t always a crank. As a young man living in Rome in 1974, Barney’s a serious but fun-loving writer hanging with three male artist friends and a woman whom he has gotten pregnant and promises to marry. The movie then proceeds to tell the story of this marriage, Barnie’s friends, then his next marriage (to the Montreal equivalent of a “JAP” or Jew American Princess – a JCP I suppose but that’s harder to pronounce), and finally, the marriage to the love of his life, a woman that he meets at his second wedding and proceeds to chase down over the course of his JAPPY marriage.

What I love about this movie is how right it gets its time and culture. The Eighties wedding to his second wife (played with perfect pitch by Minnie Driver) is lifted right out of photo albums I’ve got of growing up in a Jewish Midwestern home in this period. Even the tuxes have the right powdery blue and the band plays the right mix of Haava Nageela and elevator music. Barney’s family tsoris is all pitch perfect too: his father, an ex police-man, is the right type of loud, blue-collar Jew that can’t take the condescension from Barney’s wealthy, showily religious father-in-law.

Barney clearly loves his father as well (played with wonderful chutzpa by Dustin Hoffman), and as the story goes on, the movie deftly uncovers the emotions between fathers and sons (I related deeply to the scene where Barney discovers his father has died). What the film does better than anything is use the rhythms of Barney’s life to create gentle rhymes – such as when Barney’s own son goes through his angst and then caring for him as he goes senile; or when Barney realizes, at the very end of his life, what one of his young friends meant when he said he’d rather die early but spectacularly (in this scene near the end of his life, Barney has had dementia for a while, but upon hearing that his friend…whom everyone had thought had drowned in the river…had actually suffered from what looks like “injuries from a sky-diving accident,” he becomes lucid enough to realize what had actually happened all those years ago).

The movie covers a lot of time and it does so well. Occasionally it does lapse into the uncannily literary and compress what’s a lifetime of emotion into a few short scenes – for heightened metaphorical effect. That’s to be forgiven given that the ambition of the film is really to encapsulate a life, and it does so with marvelous feeling and recognition. It also captures well the progress of time and culture, and the evolution of a Midwestern Jewish enclave from transplanted tradition into a modern, integrated society.

I could not end this review if I also didn’t talk about Barney’s great love – his third wife (played by Bond villainess Rosemund Pike) – whom he courts with all irrationality. This great love of Barney’s life goes well for a while, but like all things, it does not last. Giamatti brings a marvelous comic tone to these antics, at times on the edge of hysteria or mania, but always showing his heart on his sleeve. In some ways the movie really reminds me of The World According to Garp - perhaps the title is even a bit of  Jewish homage to that much more white-bread version. As in Garp, the other characters provide humorous and doleful context and life lessons for our flawed hero. As Barney loses his memory in the end, he begins to lose as well his touch with all the things that have gone wrong, until he is left with a fantasy, the core of his love, and no grasp left on reality. This focus on memory, dementia, and regret makes this movie also a study about nostalgia and the role of memories in shaping our lives.

As I get older, I appreciate this theme of nostalgia and memory more and more. To be honest, I found this movie hard to forget, even days later. There’s nothing remarkable, really, about Barney’s life, other than that he is one of us, and he lived it. But in examining the ordinary life, Barney’s Version tells us a lot about our own. This movie has won numerous awards, and may sound like something esoteric and maybe even a little serious. But it’s really quite fun, and oddly unforgettable.

Biutiful: Stare Into the Deep if Dare

This is the first movie that I've ever given five stars to and at the same time, am warning you to stay away.

This brilliant film from accomplished director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams and Babel) tells the story of Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a Barcelona native who's diagnosed with cancer and given just weeks to live. More a visual poem than Hollywood narrative, Biutiful, weaves a half-magical tale of Uxbal's unraveling life. He lives with his two young children in a lower-middle-class apartment near the main tourist center of town, where he makes his living hustling between the various factions that survive in the crooks and crannies of urban life: the black Africans who sell knock-off handbacks and drugs to tourists; the crooked cops who take Uxbal's money to look the other way; the immigrant Chinese who make the handbags in a basement sweat shop. Uxbal tells none of his family or business acquaintances of his diagnosis - and neither does he tell his ex-wife, a recovering drug addict who re-enters Uxbal's life just as he is prematurely leaving it.

If all of this isn't depressing you already, that's because you aren't listening to Iñárritu haunting score, watching his Kodachrome cinematography of muted blues and grays; listening to the spare poetry of Uxbal's mumblings and incantations as he tries to insure the care of his children and connect with the people around him. Iñárritu wants to take us deeply into both life and death, in a way films rarely dare to, and he wants to open up our experience of what it means to be human on planet earth.

Uxbal also has a special gift - he can commune with the dead as their souls are departing the body - and the effect as illustrated in this movie borrows from horror-movie tropes (a la Paranormal Activity) and turns them on their head: instead of startled, we're deeply disturbed and disoriented, as if we'd literally - and not in a movie way - seen a ghost. Iñárritu clearly borrows from the Spanish literary technique known as magical realism as these scenes of supernatural spectators mingle with ordinary reality in order to take the story to the boundary between life and death.

Biutiful is both beautiful and unforgiving - Iñárritu's unsentimental look at life offers us none of the usual comforting platitudes we usually get in films about the young and the dying. Uxbal's final weeks are both disorienting and painful. Even in the one moment when he does reach out and tell someone he's dying (it takes place in a disco, in one of the film's most heightened disoriented scenes), he's met with cold rebuff: such talk is not the stuff of daily life, and the woman can't tell if he's serious. If he is, then - as with most of the pain of life - her only reaction can be to ignore him and look away.

Uxbal searches the remnants of his life for some connection: with his ex-wife, with his children, even with the blacks and Chinese he does business with. Even as he looks for some act of kindness to bestow upon this harsh world (yes, there are enough intimations of Christ-like sainthood and suffering here for a Catholic to love), Uxbal's efforts sometimes backfire, and sometimes to his horror. As his policeman-on-the-take friend sees it, we're all just here to get our cut, even Uxbal. Iñárritu wants to make sure that the movie - like life - gives no real hint of whether there is any salvation to be had, any reward for our faith, or if the policeman is right, and all we can make of existence is cynicism.

This really seems, then, a movie for our time. Not only is there no religion, no family, no economy and no government in which to place our faith, we can hardly even trust ourselves. The one thing Uxbal does seem to be searching for is a connection with a father who died before he was born, a young man he never knew. But even his father's body is being dug up from its grave as they tear down the mausoleum to make way for a new condominium.

I warned you this movie was bleak. At the same time, there's no denying it's beautiful. Iñárritu's imagery is amazing. The scene as Uxbal enters the disco to find his brother and tell him of the latest tragedy has to be the most effective use of emotional disorientation I've seen on film in thirty years. Even as he has blood on his hands, women dance around Uxbal with their faces transformed into huge breasts, his brother and friends laugh and drink, and the disco music spins the scene around. It's as if we - and Uxbal - are aliens watching human life from another world, barely understanding the rites and rituals we see every day.

This strangeness is ultimately what Biutiful is after, and it gets to it in the most original way possible. By the time Uxbal comes to the end of his journey, we see what a human life leaves behind, stripped of the pretense of religion, the straight jacket of moral order, and the numbing in-authenticity of modern truisms. One by one, Uxbal's relationships with the world fall away. What remains is a strange kind of poetry, one we make from the half-recognized shards of our own lives, and a vague sense that in some small way, our presence in this world may be remembered by at least one person we leave behind. In showing this, Biutiful may be the first movie that shows us what our own death might really look like.

Looking at that is not for everyone. But if you have the strength to watch it, Biutiful will leave you forever changed.

Howl: Alan Ginsberg's Poety Brought to Life

Unlike that big Hollywood sissy film called The Mechanic - which has played to wide audiences as a seeming action thriller - another movie about gay men that came out recently has gone largely unnoticed. I'm talking about Howl, a semi-animated, mostly autobiographical re-enactment of the Alan Ginsberg poem, starring the ever more incredible James Franco as Ginsberg.

We'll be seeing a lot of Franco at the upcoming academy awards, and his nomination for 127 Hours. And maybe his 127 Hours nomination is not just for that film alone, but also for his remarkable performance in this film, a much less Hollywood friendly fantasia about a gay poet. Franco practically disappears in his performance as a young Jewish poet coming out in 1950's New York, getting the gestures, intonations and mannerisms of a young Ginsberg so down pat that we feel like we're actually a part of the Fifties beat scene, watching an entire movement coming into being based merely on the lusts, dreams, and desires of a few rootless young men.

Howl sets up as his dramatic focus the trial of Lawrence Ferlenghetti - the publisher of Ginsberg's poem who was put on trial for obscenity in 1957. The movie gives us all the elements of a standard courtroom potboiler, with "Mad Men"'s John Hamm playing the defense attorney and stalwart character actor David Straithairn playing the prosecution (unfortunately, Straithairn is such a big liberal that his bad-guy prosecutor comes off as more confused and befuddled by the text than genuinely offended).

All that courtroom stuff is merely expository. What the movie really wants to do is re-create Ginsberg, which Franco does perfectly, while giving Ginsberg's life story: his infatuation with Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, his own process of coming out and coming to terms with Fifties conformity and youthful rebellion. It uses this autobiographical background as punctuation for Franco's narration of the poem, accompanied by animation inspired by the poems imagery, such as that fabled "Moloch":

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the 
              loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy 
              judger of men! ...

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! 
              Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long 
              streets like endless Jehovahs!

The animated Moloch is what we might expect (it's based on work by illustrator Eric Drooker), but adds powerful visual imagery to the language recited and re-created by Franco. The movie also proceeds to tell us not only how lines like "a thousand blind windows" were inspired, but autobiographical background of Ginsberg's time in a mental facility, which inspired lines such as

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland 
     where you're madder than I am ...

I'm with you in Rockland 
     where you accuse your doctors of insanity and 
     plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the 
     fascist national Golgotha 

So what we really have here is an excuse to interpret what is, perhaps, the most popular American poem. Even in our less-literate generation, few people haven't heard the opening lines,

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
              madness, starving hysterical naked, 

For those who want to get beyond those few stanzas and get a full understanding of this cultural touchstone, Howl provides not only the historical and biographical background, but a unique imagining of how film can interact with literature.

Another Year: Lifecycle of a Family

Mike Leigh’s smartly written Another Year stands out in a season of great movies for its studied portrayal of the “inexorable” aging of a British family and their friends, relatives, and hangers on.

This is a film that could well have been a novel, and though it is not the usual cinematic escapist fare (there are no spies or car chases, no “meet cutes,” no ribald affairs nor sordid entourages), it is a film relentlessly about our own real lives, and will greatly reward the eager cinemaphile.

Tom and Gerri Hemple are the sixty-ish couple in question. Tom (Jim Broadbent) is an engineering geologist (he “digs ditches,” as the family likes to tease with their insistence on disillusionment). Gerri, meanwhile, is a psychotherapist, dealing daily with difficult, unhappy recalcitrant patients. She doles out patient, sage advice (such as if you aren’t sleeping and are depressingly unhappy, you may need more than sleeping pills). “Why don’t you give that a think, won’t you?” is her standard retort when she ends up against the impenetrable barriers that the unhappy people around her erect to prevent themselves from dealing with their terrible truths. The two have managed to have a happy marriage for nearly thirty years, and it’s obvious that they both complement each other as well as have long ago worn away each other’s rough edges (Tom’s directness, earthiness, and temper has been modulated by Gerri’s self-reflection, deliberateness, and criticism – he encourages her freer side and she keeps him well regulated). With their quiet, paced, educated lives, their house filled with nick-knacks, books and Italian cooking, we see that they, in effect, are us: Baby Boomers (or nearly) who have seen three decades of social and political change and who are now nearing the autumn of life entrenched in the comfort of each other’s company.

The two have sired a son with what seems like the perfect combination of their traits: he’s both enthusiastic and tempered, a public advocate who approaches his job with gusto, but who privately remains a bit mysterious and self-satisfied. He presently has no girlfriend (when one finally does appear, Gerri comments, “he’s a bit of a dark horse, that one”). The trio, it seems, can do no wrong.

Perhaps this is why they have attracted friends who seem to be complete messes, and whose lives, in contrast, are studies in mistakes and regret. First there is Mary, Gerri’s co-worker, who has developed, over the years, an inappropriate obsession with Jerry’s son (as compensation for her own ruined relationships, she senses that she is aging quickly and is over-ready to attach herself to the nearest breathing male). Then there is Tom’s friend, Ken, whose boyhood friend has recently passed away (as has his wife) and whose college exploits are taunting memories. Ken has let himself get overweight and over-emotional and is a “there but for the grace of god go I” rebuke to Tom the way that Mary’s desperateness gently rebukes Gerri’s life.

There’s also an evil double for Joe, the son: a nephew named Rodney who proceeds to terrorize his father (Tom’s brother) after the death of his mother. Rodney resents the ministrations of Tom and Gerri as their natural understanding of what to do and how to handle the situation seems to be a rebuke to the anguish he wishes to languish in. In a brilliant moment, Joe and Rodney end up staring at each other after Rodney goes on a tirade and drives out all the guests from his father’s reception for the recently deceased mother. “What are you staring at,” says Rodney belligerently, just itching for a fight, in one of the movie’s few tense moments. “You,” says Joe - he holds Rodney’s gaze a moment longer, long enough to say, “I could take you,’ then averts his eyes, saying “but I won’t.”

The Hemples, then, and even their son, are a perfect measure of assertion and demureness, just enough to get through life's turmoils and challenges with a meager level of happiness, dignity, and bemusement. All that perfected modulation can't save some of the friends and family around them, whose self-absorbing unhappiness blinds them to the steps they need to take.

What’s lovely about this film is how it keeps all these characters in balance – the patient and mannered happiness of the main family (which we clearly see requires work to maintain – they way they maintain their share of the communal garden) – and the desperate, unhappy lives of the less fortunate friends and family around them. The film doesn’t really judge any of these characters, and it’s clear that their relationships are as complicated as real life. Tom and Gerri may administer to their friends, but they are also fiercely protective of their own family, and who they let in to the family isn’t just anyone (as is made clear by Katie - Joe’s new girlfriend – who’s spunky intelligence qualifies her for immediate acceptance, whereas Mary finds herself summarily tossed out after nearly thirty years). Perhaps they lead on their friends a bit too much; perhaps their friends take advantage a bit too much. Perhaps Gerri presses facing up to reality a bit too hard; perhaps her ability to do so is what has kept this family together and on track. Like life, all these contradictory thoughts seem well to be true.

I saw this movie while vacationing in the desert, and like a desert, the quiet subdued drama may be misleading. There are two main blow-ups (the second one well prepared), but a lot more said in the quiet moments of casual conversation, character study, and interaction. Like desert vegetation, a lot is here if you look for it. More than any movie in recent memory, Another Year slows down the drama and focuses on characters enough to really capture the inexorable patterns of friendship and family, or our real lives.

The Company Men: Tribulations of the Great Recession

Last year, Up In The Air gave us the dark comedic corporate side of the story. This year, The Company Men picks up the other side of the story and tells us what happens to all those millions of white collar workers laid off in the Great Recession.

The movie tells of three men at different stages of their career, all working for a major transportation conglomerate called GTX (rebranded a decade or so ago, like KFC, from its origins as a more humble, more local Massachusetts ship building facility). Ben Affleck plays Bobby Walker, the 37-year-old MBA, hot-shit director of sales who is laid off in the first round of downsizing. Chris Cooper is Phil Woodward, the seasoned, fifty-something Senior Vice President who gets let go in the second round. And Tommie Lee Jones is Gene McClairy, one of the top senior management working under his college roommate, best friend, and CEO, James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson).

McClairy fights Salinger every step of the way during this corporate "downsizing," acting as the moral voice defending the employees and integrity of the company, until he becomes a casualty himself. This sets up Salinger as the movie's heavy: the super-wealthy, overpaid, unsympathetic CEO who just wants to raise the company stock price (admittedly, it's a good idea to do so to prevent a take-over and even more painful cuts, but this point gets glossed over). Salinger is building a new, extravagant high-rise corporate headquarters in downtown Boston, and would rather let people go than give up his extravagant lifestyle, his corporate perks, or that marble inlaid office building.

I understand why the movie has to do this - it needs a heavy to keep the drama focused - but by painting Salinger in one dimension and making McClairy the only voice of sympathy, the movie backs away from the complicated issues that drove the downturn. CEO pay is excessive and pointing fingers is justified, but this tactic seems unnecessarily reductive. We're treated to a constant backdrop of financial news and Presidential oratory about the ongoing recession, which is the movie's strategy to broaden the issue from that of a single company and its asshole CEO to a larger economic context, and while it's a nice technique, it just isn't enough to give this story the depth it needs.

What the movie has going for it, however, is its acute sensitivity and portrayal of male ego, age, and class. Bobby and his wife inhabit a well-furnished, modern, suburban home on his up-and-comer $160K a year salary; but that's a mere apartment compared with Phil Woodward's extensive house, itself just a burp on the lawn of McClairy's sea-side mansion. At the bottom of this rung of American commercialism, which seems intricately connected to male self identity, is Bobby's brother-in-law, Jack (Kevin Costner), a carpenter who seems to be the only man in this story - besides Salinger - who isn't getting laid off, and who lives in a small, two-bedroom house which is the one where everyone seemingly wants to hang out. You know where this movie is going - Bobby has to learn to swallow his pride and accept Jack's help - and soon, it seems, everyone in the story is working for Jack. Ironic, since construction was hit hard too in the recession, but since Jack is meant to be the blue-collar moral rock of the story, we'll let that slide.

Bobby and wife also need to give up their nice house and their meager dollop of privilege and move in with their parents, but all this humble pie seems to be making Bobby a better husband and father.

It's a hard subject for a movie to take on and do well - and I commend this one for doing it. All the performances are as nuanced as you'd expect from such a cast of fine actors, even if the pattern of angst, disbelief, acceptance, and faith is bit a predictable. It's a typical down-and-out-then-pick-back-up Hollywood story, especially with the Hollywood ending. But along the way it paints a realistic view of the pain that many Americans have been going through. It also gives a poignant picture of the decimation that has happened to American manufacturing. I would have liked more from it - more chances, more complexity to the issues, and more unexpected insights - but the movie does its work.

Somewhere: Hanging Out in Sophia Coppola-land

While Blue Valentine may be considered an actor's showcase, Somewhere, the new movie by Sophia Coppola (director of Lost In Translation), is clearly a showcase for its director.

Coppola has developed a unique style – a kind of modernized Italian neo-realism, or Andy Wharholism, with the camera as a watchful eye. Her scenes are drawn out and interminable, immersing you in the full moment of time: the smoking of a cigarette, the breezes of a California afternoon. She has patience enough to let us catch so much of the mood of the scene that you can practically feel the soft dappling of the California humidity on your skin as you watch the characters lie about by the pool. During these scenes Coppola is training you to focus your attention on all the details that eventually tell this story: the character's expressions, the background surroundings, the sounds and sensations of their insulated, time-absent, esoteric celebrity world. It’s such a departure from modern style, with its MTV-inspired crash cutting and Michael Bay bombing soundtracks, that you want to track down the young Ms. Coppola and give her a big hug. This is the pure pleasure of cinema, and she seems to be the only person left on the planet who appreciates it.

As in Lost in Translation, Somewhere is intrigued by the idea of celebrity – by its trappings, its absurdities, and ultimately, its meaninglessness. This time, instead of a more experienced, world-weary actor, she focuses on a younger-but-aging world-weary actor, Johnny Marco (played with perfect pitch by Stephen Dorff). Johnny spends most of his time at the Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles, a famous celebrity hangout, receiving private lap dances from models, hanging out with sex-starved groupies, smoking, drinking, and generally waiting about for the next phone call from his manager, which will tell him what interview or makeup session he needs to attend next.

The movie opens with what looks like a road, and a car coming along it…until we see the same car going back along another road and disappear in the other direction, then hear its engines, and see the same car come roaring back on the first road into the frame again. It’s a trick of perception, see – what Coppola is filming is really a circular race track, not a straight road – and even though we get the joke on the first loop, she makes us sit through three more for good measure.

That’s basically her strategy through the entire movie: first observe the humor, then see the pathos, then keep going and going until you have to admit the point. Coppola manages to find the right poignant absurdity in all these tedious routines – from the blond twins who perform for Johnny in his bedroom (just enough out of sync and with little enough booty showing to be at once pitiable and captivating) to the process of creating a plaster cast of Johnny’s head (which we are taken through in thorough detail, lavishing every slurp of plaster the makeup team lathers on his face). That cast is for a mask to make Johnny look like an old man, but we’ve pretty much gotten the picture from the start – Johnny is bored with his life and afraid of growing old in his aimless state – but Coppola is going to be merciless in holding our gaze to every little excruciating moment that Johnny has to live through.

She also manages to make this far from boring for us, since Johnny lives in an intriguing, rarefied environment of absurd celebrity. A young wannabe actor asks Johnny whether he trained formally or studied any method. The answer is no: he just fell into it, like he seems to be doing with all of his life. That falling leads him to start taking care of his daughter from a former marriage (when her mother needs to leave town), and the two of them get whisked off to a celebrity reception in Italy. Here Coppola makes the most of celebrity absurdity as Johnny is feted and adored in a language he barely understands: if the meaningless of it all hasn't been driven home before, it certainly is now.

Fortunately, there is someone in Johnny's life who doesn't take him as simply an asset to be whisked this way and that: his pre-teen daughter, Cleo, played with wonderful unpretentious by Elle Fanning (younger sister of Dakota). Elle caters to all the small details - whether it be dressing up nicely for a televised event or making eggs Benedict for breakfast - that Johnny ignores. That attitude of care eventually becomes infectious for Johnny, and in the movie's one moment of progress, he gives cooking his own plate of spaghetti a try.

But Coppola isn't going to let this film end without keeping it as ambiguous as she can. That unswerving devotion to not telling us what anything means may be, in fact, what keeps this film, and perhaps Coppola's work to date, from rising from indie-film darling to broadly popular greatness. It's clear from looking at both this film and Lost in Translation that Coppola sympathies with the young woman's point of view of an older, famous, cynical, father figure: she paints that father figure with love, obsessive attention, and tenderness. But I think we've gotten the full picture of that subject now. For her next trick, I'd like to see her move on.

These are both miraculous movies, road maps of film making that shouldn't be missed. But now that Coppola has become a master of her own style, if she can next find a subject of broader relevance and weightiness, she will truly become one of the industry's most valued artists.

Blue Valentine: Anatomy of a Doomed Love

Blue Valentine isn’t nearly the heartbreak that it could have been, but this inventive, spare film nevertheless manages to be about a whole lot more than the simple breakup of a couple. For one, the inventive story telling, which jumps back and forth between the beginning and end of the relationship, provides a powerful point/counterpoint rhythm to this couple’s tale. If you’d re-arranged the story and told it with a straight timeline, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or meaningful as it is.

Much of the meaning of the movie, in fact, comes out of not knowing what you don’t know about this couple. As their few days of disintegration progress, you’re filled in with critical missing pieces of back story that shed light on conversations and arguments. For example: when Cindy, the wife, accidently runs into an old acquaintance in a convenience store, an argument ensues about why she didn’t mention this to the husband right away. You get the current about jealousy, but it’s not till later – nearly the end of the movie – that you get the full sense of what that scene imports.

Once you know the entire sequence of events and all the facts of the story (that is, once the story ends), it’s obvious why these two never would have lasted. Theirs is the kind of young-person’s relationship or first marriage (or whatever you want to call it) that’s all too common. But from the outset, you don’t know that…the movie immerses you in this couple’s ignorance about themselves (as well as in the extended pressures of their economic and cultural status), and that, perhaps, is its unique genius. When Dean accidently meets Cindy at an old folks home where they are both taking care of elderly wards (Dean takes care of an Army vet he happens to be moving; Cindy takes care of her grandmother. Both of these old people provide convenient mirrors to their own aimless young lives that they are trying to understand), they “meet cute” and – given the violence of Cindy’s previous boyfriend and the loneliness of Dean’s life – they’re immediately smitten with each other.

Riding along the top of this movie – and propelling it along – are the two magnificent performances from Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. Without these, you would have a thin movie indeed, and both deserve the Oscar nominations they will hopefully receive. The “present” moment in this film opens three years after they’ve been married. Their dog escapes its pen in the yard…a few hours later, Cindy finds it dead on the side of the road. The movie allows the two actors to fully express the complex emotions of this event – from recriminations to sadness to tenderness and finally, perhaps, a kind of resignation, as each of them mourn the dog both in their own individual way, and also as a couple.

As a dog owner, I found that heavy handed but nevertheless effective. That dog is their dead relationship, and over the next 48 hours the two of them do their utmost to revive it, going through the same sequence of emotions. Dean rents them a hotel room at a couple’s getaway (the “Future room,” ironically, considering that future is what these two have little of). Like most men, Dean is making his version of a genuine attempt at intimacy, one that’s physical. But like most women, what Cindy wants isn’t sex but talk: she needs them to discuss the weighty issues that have gone unresolved between them.

What results is an hour and thirty minutes of yeoman’s acting, interspersed with flashbacks and bits of history. Almost like a stage play, the story introduces its themes: differences between male and female intimacy, living up to what it means to be a man or a woman, fear of repeating parent’s mistakes, differences between class. Designed to provoke discussion, the movie sets up a prism whereby the viewer might justify one character or the other based on one’s own class or gender. That’s why it’s worth seeing with someone with whom you can discuss it afterwards, and in this great couple’s argument, decide who was right.

But as I said at the start, once you know everything, it’s pretty obvious how they got here – if not to them, then to us. That obviousness, I feel, takes away from the puzzle of viewpoint the movie is trying to create. If the couple had been older, or their problems had been less of a cliché, the discussions about the relationship might have carried more weight.

Nevertheless, the movie is fascinating, and both Williams and Gosling are hard to take your eyes off of. Their performances raise this common relationship to an uncommon film, which is a true actor’s art.

Black Swan: Arty Dive

Well, I’m going to disagree with the great majority of critics on this one. While it’s racking up raves and notoriety for its arty approach and dancing from Star Wars heroine Natalie Portman (as well as its lesbian scene – thrown in to draw in some straight men, no doubt), I believe Black Swan is what we in polite circles call pretentious twaddle. (If Twaddle was a dance step, my movie companion – a former ballet dancer – said, this movie would be full of it).

I fully get what this movie is trying to do. The movie itself – ostensibly about a too-perfect, overly coddled New York ballet dancer who could finally get the chance to move from the core to the lead of Swan Lake, if only she could find her inner sexually liberated “black swan” – is itself a modern retelling of Swan Lake. Portman’s character, Nina Sayers, is the white swan. Mila Kunis plays Lily, the new dancer from out of town, or the black swan. And Thomas Leroy (played by Vincent Cassel - perhaps you'll recognize him as the French art thief from Oceans Thirteen), is the producer who ravishes his female dancers. He's Prince Siegfried and perhaps Von Rothbart as well, there to bring out the sexual yearnings of the white swan. Just like Swan Lake, the white swan is upstaged by the black swan; and the events in the lives of the dancers are meant to parallel the original story. The parallel is a rather lose one, until the final scene, where we’re presented with a puzzle: was this ending just the imaginary Swan Lake inside the story, or is the story now Swan Lake? The curtain comes down without telling us about whose reality we’re in at this point: another great twaddle move (since the movie has played with reality so much, it hardly matters by this point).

Add to the art-house ending all and sundry psycho-sexual thriller clichés as the story drapes this ballet. Nina is not only coddled and child-like, sleeping with teddy bears in her late twenties, but protected by a too-attentive and jealous mother. She’s a personality on the verge of a psychological splitting, imagining that she sees her sexually liberated self coming towards her in a subway, and the movie plays with doppelgangers, hallucinations, and of course, what’s real and what isn’t. All this seems to be more in service of titillating us with reality fake-outs and Natalie Portman pleasuring herself on camera than of any great story.

Personally, I liked the dancing and staging, though my dance experienced companion was squirming at Natlie Portman’s moves. “A real dancer would never have this dilemma,” he told me, referring to Nina’s trouble mastering the more sultry and sexy Black Swan part. “By the time someone is ready for a lead they would easily be able to play these two different roles.” That ruined the entire premise of the movie for him, though not being a dance expert myself, I was willing to give the story a pass on this point. For me it was, however, just more evidence that this movie is more about arty pretention and the idea of seeing Portman turn into a sex temptress than it is about anything real.

While I wouldn’t say the film is terrible – some great work has gone into staging the dance numbers, even if my friend thinks Portman’s work doesn’t quite rise to believable professionalism. I just can’t go along with those who find some deep meaning in the film. To me, this is exhibit A for those who complain that the art world can, at times, be without content and simply about pushing psycho-sexual buttons. If you want to see Portman push those buttons, by all means, don’t let me deter you.

The King's Speech: Oscar Caliber

From afar it seems like it can’t be much, this movie about a king who stutters. It sounds like that other indie film about a disabled King and the attentions to his impediments, about the ministrations of subjects and the vanity and fallibility of royalty, a very narrow, Shakespearean thing indeed. But with its fine performances – Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, and Helena Bonham Carter should all be remembered at Oscar time – and its perfectly written, tidy three-act script – The King’s Speech delivers what is oftentimes the hardest thing to do: a straightforward, well-told story, rich with many layers of meaning.

The movie opens in the late 1920’s, with the invention of radio and the imperative that King George as well as his two boys – the older David, and the younger Bertie – deliver a radio speech to the subjects of the realm. The problem is that Bertie has a stutter…such a severe stutter that he’s unable to utter nary a word of his speech, both to his own mortification and the embarrassment of his father. His wife, Elizabeth, deeply feels Bertie’s humiliation. Seemingly the one person in the family who wasn’t born to – but has mastered – the protocols of royalty, she seeks out to discretely, and with proper disarming etiquette, find Bertie some help in the speech department.

First, I have to pause and say that I love this role for Carter. Typically a Harry Potter witch or Tim Burton harpie, it’s exciting to see her open up and play a person of grace and magnanimity, albeit with her typical wry wit and breezy ministrations. She’s playing against type, and it makes the performance all the more interesting.

In fact, Rush and Firth are also playing against type – as we shall see – and this may be one thing that imbues such a seemingly simple story with so much tension.

From here out, however, I must note a SPOILER ALERT. If you haven’t seen the movie, I suggest you skip now to the end if you want the plot to remain a surprise.

When Elizabeth does encounter Rush’s Lionel Logue - a speech therapist (don't you love the name "Lionel Logue" for a speech therapist?) who advertises an unconventional manner – it takes a bit of convincing, as he recognizes her royal highness right away. He will only take on the prince as a client if he’s allowed to do his typical treatment, which is to essentially treat Bertie not only as an equal, but as a friend, as well.

So the first thing that The King’s Speech does is turn typical class distinctions on their head. It’s prince Bertie who is bone-headed, stubborn, and ungrateful, while Lionel needs to show both the patience and perseverance of the better man. In essence, Bertie is not only taking speech lessons from Logue, he’s also learning how to be a better King. This is where both Rush and Firth play against type, with the normally stand-up Firth needing to show flashes of anger and impetuousness (as well as hidden royalty, ready to be shaped) and Rush bringing the type of humble, middle-class, confident “menschness” that one would hardly expect from the man who plays characters like Pirate Barbosa.

It’s a good thing that Bertie is taking these lessons, too, because something else is going on in the background of this story: the rise of Hitler, and the approach of World War Two. If the country goes to war, a great King is going to be needed.

Unfortunately, Bertie’s older brother – David – isn’t up to the task, something which becomes all too clear when he starts taking up with a loose American woman who has sympathies with the Nazi party. If we know anything of history, and even if we don’t, we can see where this affair is going to lead Bertie.

Yes, Bertie’s overbearing father eventually dies…and David abdicates the throne…all on the eve of the outbreak of war. So Bertie is to be sworn in as King, though his lessons with Lionel have hit something of a snag.

And this is how something as simple as conquering a stutter becomes a stand-in for the heroic efforts that all men are called upon to perform in trying times such as these. Bertie has his own calling – to deliver the speech that will buck up and galvanize the nation – and his own inner demons to conquer in doing so. He’s found a willing partner in Lionel, if only he can see past his own class prejudices and personal demons to accept his help.

Thus the double meaning of the title. The King’s Speech is not only the manner of his stutter, but also the text of content that he must deliver to an anxious nation. That speech could easily determine Britain's ability to endure the blitz. In this way, then, the King’s determination to conquer his stutter is symbolic of a nation’s courageous efforts to endure the war. His acceptance of Lionel compared to David’s impetuous marriage to a commoner symbolizes the conflicting ways in which Britain begins to emerge into a modern, less classist age. And there are many other things, to boot – too many for a simple movie review.

**END SPOILER ALERT***

That’s a lot for a little movie ostensibly about a stutter, told in an unpretentious, classic three-act style. But this movie carries it all off without a flaw, shining a light on this fascinating time and this interesting man. Come Oscar time, I expect it to carry at least a Royal flush of nominations.

Harry Potter / Deathly Hallows 1: The Ending Begins, At Last

There's a beautiful scene in this movie, the seventh movie in the Potter franchise, in which an old fairy tale is explained. The tale is of the Three Brothers, who encounter the deathly hallows and are each given a gift from Death. The scene is narrated by the father of one of the familiar characters, but for the first time in this series, it's illustrated as a two-color line animation. The animation is amazing, the story told is riveting. If this were the only scene in the entire movie, I'd be giving this film five stars.

Unfortunately, the scene is preceded by about two hours of standard Hogwarty fluff (if you've sat through the first six films there's no need to explain what I mean by that). This movie, however, is decidedly different from those that have come before. For one thing, it's slowed down - having decided to spread the last J.K.Rowling book into two separate films, the filmmakers are able this time to let us spend more time with the characters, and scenes are allowed to play out with some humor and intricacy. It's just too bad that these three young friends - Harry and his pals Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley - aren't more interesting. The actors often stand and react much longer than seems natural, as if operating their bodies via remote control. I couldn't tell if it was due to the stiff dialogue, or just their exhaustion at playing these same, unchanged, unevolved characters since they were ten years old.

The other thing that's different is the absence of the school, Hogwarts. This time, the war with Voldemort is on full-force, and Harry and his friends are fugitives, whisking from one forest or glade to the next as they seek out the many horcruxes needed to destroy the evil lord (I'm surprised they weren't simply called mcguffins) and evade the death dealers who are after them. The film has a much more serious, adult tone (the actors are all grown up, for one thing, and  the characters are all in mortal danger, for another), and war has come to the witches and warlocks of England. This war has decided tones of World War Two - with Nazi-like uniforms worn by Voldemort's minions when they take over the Ministry of Magic. There are also tones of Lord of the Rings (in the scenery and swords) and Voldemort reigns over his kingdom of ever-present evildoers, hunting down Potter like the Lord of Mordor.

There are very blue and gray tones in this film, and I found that both a bit fascinating and after a while, annoying. I was distracted by blue/gray sweaters, cups of hot chocolate, blue/gray birch trees, November barren beaches while Potter and company flee from danger. How many scenes of still, quite forests symbolizing approaching war and death must we sit through? I can't believe there are actually seven horcruxes in this series and Potter has to go find and destroy them all. He had me with the second, and that was a few films ago. Even Potter's friends are tired of it, and Ron makes a big show of wanting to give up and go home.

I was ready too, as perhaps stretching this story out into two films is a bit more than it can take. Once we get to the story of the Deathly Hallows and the death dealers finally catch up to the Potter gang, the story starts moving again. And then of course, just as it gets going, it stops: so you can wait for part two.

They are certainly milking this series for all they can get. I'll admit, with its allegory of war and references to Nazi-style racial purity, this may be the best Potter film yet. And that animation of the Three Brothers is strikingly new and beautiful. But after seven of these outings, I just want this story to get to the end, already.

And by the way, don't take my four stars as too definitive. It gets four because of that animated sequence. The rest of the film is decidedly three, at best.

HumpDay: Mumblecore Cock Tease

The phrase "all cackling and no eggs" was never more appropriate than it is for this indie flick, about two straight pals who decide to make a gay porno for the local "Hump Day" arts festival.

The mumblecore movement - so dubbed in 2005 - centers on improvised conversations of 20-somethings, often talking in bed either before, during or after sex. Actually not necessarily even that...as mumblecore could be really about anything, even the Arab / Israeli conflict, as long as it's chatty, freeform, and "life-like."

HumpDay is written by the female director Lynn Shelton, one of the rising mumblecore directors, who also directed one of this season's "Mad Men" episodes. Everything in this film is set up to explore just how deeply a modern male friendship - and the semi-sexualized homoerotic banter between two straight friends - might actually go. One could say that this is a "bromance" taken to its ultimate logical conclusion.

Ben and Anna are an average, somewhat happily married twenty-something couple for whom the romance has recently worn off. When we meet them, we find them negotiating sex, planning to have a baby, and going about their daily routines with absent-minded habituation. They hardly notice each other, even as they entertain their personal endearments and halfheartedly complain about the daily annoyances of living with another human being.

Into this stasis walks Andrew - Ben's old friend from college - who still seems to be living the swinging single life, breezing into town to knock on their door at 2am and open up the nearest bottle of whiskey. Andrew is just the tonic the married Ben seems to be pining for: a happy-go-lucky blast from his youth. There's also...somehow...the least bit of some kind of sexual tension between the two, as their hugs and stares into each other's eyes go on just a moment longer than is comfortable for either.

Of course, one thing leads to another, and Ben soon has Andrew ditching Anna's carefully prepared pork-chop dinner and partying with Andrew's new-found bohemian friends (a pair of lesbians and a few other assorted artists and hangers on). Excellent scene, thinks Ben, and he's hooked on Andrew's partying, ambi-sexual world before you can say "homosexual tendencies." When Andrew's lesbian friends tell Andrew about the upcoming arts festival - Hump Day - Andrew sarcastically suggests that he and Ben should make a gay porno as an art piece. "I'd do it," says Ben, half facetious, but half serious, wanting to explore where this thing might go. "Yeah, so would I," says Andrew, and the two of them both know the other really wants to do it, even though several more minutes of (presumably) heterosexual posturing must go by...and even a few more scenes...before each finally decides that the other is serious.

This is certainly no gay porn, where the two straight guys suddenly find themselves hopping into bed. Most of the movie really consists of Ben and Andrew talking about whether they really want to do it, if they would do it, and - finally, when they eventually get around to deciding to do it - how they would do it (which takes forever to negotiate and ultimately...well, you get the picture). I've never seen two dudes talk so much about whether they want to have sex with each other. Clearly, this is an urge that neither can really explain (although the scene where they do try to explain it to each other - Ben has, apparently, some past homoerotic attraction to a video store clerk that he needs to understand, and Andrew thinks that gay sex will make him a better artist - is the best in the film). There are, indeed, some great moments that come out of the interactions between these two actors, and the improvisation does give this movie a certain introspective, semi-titillating, expectant flavor, like a freshman dorm at 2am...but there's not quite enough consistency to make all that conversation worthwhile.

I know that this movie is intentionally leading us on a bit of a merry chase - and that the scenes are all, in fact, improvised - but for such build up, the ending is a decided let down. Neither Ben nor Andrew really work out what's driving them, though they do manage to discuss it in every conceivable way possible.

Was I really this chatty at twenty-nine? It's hard to believe, but then, that's the device of this film. Young people these days seemingly have a lot to talk about. One has to wonder how long these two would have gone on talking, however, had they actually started any kind of real relationship.

Fair Game: Political Thriller with a Point of View

Fair Game, the based-on-real-life political thriller from director Douglas Liman (Go, Bourne Ultimatum), wants to make you really, really mad at the Bush administration. It does so passionately and with detailed emotional drama, and it succeeds in its goal quite well. This is the first movie in a long time that immediately made me want to sign up to volunteer for a cause.

In case you haven't heard about the movie, this is the dramatization of the Valery Plame (Naomi Watts) / Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) story. Plame was the CIA agent who was outed in the press by Scooter Libby, in revenge for her husband's New York times editorial undermining the Bush case for war against Iraq. The movie retells the real-life events from Plame's point of view. As an undercover CIA operative, not only was her career was destroyed out of an act of political malice; dozens of her "assets" (CIA-speak for ordinary people trapped in unpleasant situations that the CIA has conned or connived into becoming informants) are left in mortal jeopardy - and many killed - when Plame's cover is blown. The public exposure of a CIA agent isn't only a rather un-American and stupid thing to do; it's also rather illegal. Libby was sentence to two years; Bush commuted his sentence, and the investigation ended there, even though reporters (and the movie) suggest there were clearly other White House players involved.

The movie opens with an involving tour-de-farce of Plame's daily operations, which in the wake of 9/11 take her from south-east Asia to Iraq, where she is deeply involved in extracting information from Iraqi scientists on their weapons programs. When the CIA wishes to track down rumors of yellowcake (fissionable nuclear material) being sold to Iraq from Niger, she suggests her husband, a former ambassador to Niger, as a good candidate for the mission. Like a dutiful husband, Wilson makes the trip to visit his old contacts, and determines the rumors of a sale are false - the alleged sale would have involved over fifty semi-tractor-trailers; if that much material was being transported through the villages, someone in Niger would have noticed.

But as we know now, the Bush administration wanted to paint a picture that Iraq had WMD's after all. They ignored Wilson's report and found a single CIA analyst willing to suggest that aluminum tubes purchased by Sadam might be used as part of a nuclear program, despite all the evidence that Plame, Wilson, and the CIA had assembled saying that Sadam had no active WMD program going. When Bush announced the purchase of yellowcake in his State of the Union speech, this was too much for Wilson, who knew the truth, and felt he had to speak out.

All of this is public knowledge, but we haven't gotten inside the point of view of Wilson and Plame so deeply before. The film goes to pains to point out the evidence supporting Plame's and Wilson's story: the trip to Niger is no boondoggle (the water in the hotel hardly runs); Plame is an excellent agent (she handles her "assets" with the required professional mix of empathy, suspicion, and efficiency); and they have an ordinary, suburban marriage that gets put to the test when the power of the White House is brought to bear to smear their names. The movie is certainly one-sided in its portrait (there is no sympathy here for the Bush march to war), but necessarily so, as it's main mission is to arouse anger not simply at the treatment of Wilson and Plame, but at the public abuse. The White House has clearly lied to the public in order to lead us to a disastrous war. Wilson...and later Plame...are the only people trying to blow the whistle. We might have sympathy for what was done to them. But we should be even angrier at how the country was misled.

As a political screed, then, the movie is quite a success, and a definite recommendation (these amazing crimes and intentional deceptions of the Bush administration really need to be better known by the public). It's no surprise to find Penn, one of the better spoken Hollywood liberals, leading the charge, and he delivers his lines with the passion of a real politico. As a dramatization of a couple in crisis, however, it often skips feverishly past moments that could use better contextualization: Plame's quiet adoration of her father (Sam Shepard); Wilson's insensitivity to his wife's situation; Plame's eventual decision to break with her code of CIA silence (Watt's line, "they can't take my marriage," is perhaps the most powerful emotional core here). We get all the right moments, but they're delivered with the telegraphed urgency of a political blogger on a soapbox. One wishes, a bit, for a Spielberg here, who could delve into the political and moral morass of something like the Arab / Israeli conflict and emerge with a complete human portrait as well as a point of view. It would also help to contextualize the war itself, and the dire consequences for both our country and Iraq.

But clearly, the film does its job well. It made me mad as hell. If the Democrats don't have the guts to investigate the Bush administration, at least directors like Liman and actors like Watts and Penn have the courage to make this movie. That's the most re-assuring thing I've come across in the past two years.