Sunday in the Park with Wolfgang

No, not that Wolfgang.  It's the name of a wine-seller, who along with several other non-professionals spent the weekends of Summer 1929 to make a film about the delights and ambiguities of everyday life and romance in a major city (Berlin).  People on Sunday (1930) is almost an unintentional classic, intended merely to earn its makers a foothold in the high-powered German film industry, which would soon become unavailable to them as Jews. 

There are many places to learn about the interesting history of the making of this film, not the least the package of goodies to be found in the Criterion release of the film and at this page.  I don't intend to go into that, nor the way People on Sunday anticipates Italian neo-realism, which is also rehearsed and rehashed in many places.  No, to me, the remarkable thing about the film is that it stills works.  It is not a stuffy museum piece, nor a mere time capsule of the Weimar Republic.  It can, against the odds, still speak to an audience.  The question is why.

Here's an excerpt, after the central foursome have been swimming and are now lazing in the afternoon summer sun.  Swimming costumes aside, they seem completely contemporary and modern.



Oddly, one of the aspects of the film which makes it most archaic rescues it from being as dated as it might be, specifically, the decision to shoot a silent film after that form had virtually died in the cinema.  But the film's silence interlocks perfectly with the other key decision, to use non-actors in the leading roles. As we know from far too much reality television, most people are pretty bad at acting, even as themselves.  There needs to be a simulation of the lack of self-consciousness and ease before the camera that makes the events being enacted convincing as real events taking place in the real world.  Delivery of dialogue requires real acting experience and training to carry off as being "real."  Liberated from having to memorize and deliver a writer's lines, the non-actors are free to simply "be," to just exist.

Second, the story is so natural as to be virtually off-handed.  There is no melodrama and no artificial "writer's humor" to be delivered.  What little story there is concerns possible pairings and re-pairings among the foursome.  Momentary jealousies, imagined slights and palpable delights.  This may be the most "neo-realistic" aspect of the film, its eschewing the conventions of theatrical drama, which dominated mainstream commercial film right through the 1950s.

Third, Eugen Schufftan's photography stays close to its subjects, dispenses with glamour and reveals the true, tousled and freckled beauty of these people.  It looks like snapshots of your friends, or at least of your grandparent's or great-grandparent's friends, who, despite your notions to the contrary, were also real people.  By ignoring fashion, it frees the film from the ravages of time.

I have to admit, that as a student of Brecht, Weill, Piscator and that crowd, it is wonderful to see the streets and byways of Weimar Berlin in its twilight moments.  One can sense how the city was a magnet for the young and the creative of that day.

Happily, you don't have to take my word for the virtues of this film.  You can view at archive.org using this link, or view it below via YouTube until it (probably) gets taken down.  Enjoy a summer Sunday in the city, preserved forever via hard work, indirection and accident.

End Of The Road

Learning to share your essential self is never hackneyed.

Seeking A Friend For The End of the World (2012) is being categorized by the lazy movie reviewing press as a quirky romance with an odd setting, but it is really a road movie, in the mode of The Road and Zombieland, both fine examples of the genre.  (Heck, the old guy Homer made something pretty good out of the form in The Odyssey.)

The essence of the form is the voyage of self-discovery.  The protagonist should have a clear, specific stated goal, but in the best road stories, that evolves into a pretext, and is sometimes abandoned altogether.  Carell's Dodge (convenient name for a man who has dodged relationships?) and Knightley's Penny (who lets people devalue her) both need to see some people before the world ends (and hats off to writer-director Lorene Scafaria for not hedging that one -- it's never in doubt that the world is going to end). But they find other things on the way, naturally.  I suppose it would be obvious that they found each other, but that doesn't feel as obvious and pre-destined as it does in most films of this kind.  (Remember The Sure Thing back in the 80s?)

In this case, some goals are achieved, some abandoned, and some are discarded.  What keeps it from being predictable might be attributed to Steve Carell's nose and Keira Knightley's teeth.  Both of them are a little "off" as romantic objects, and that helps to maintain the author's intended misdirection.  (Yes, I know Knightley can be cleaned up to be stunning, but she doesn't have to look that way all the time, which is an advantage for an ambitious actress.)  I would even dispute that they are even a romantic match in this movie.  What they are is valuable companions when companionship is really needed.

And if the structure is a bit picaresque, rambling or even just plain arbitrary, well, how organized do you expect the end of the world to be?

The best reason to see this film, especially with someone who is important to you is in order to lead into that conversation about what you yourself would do given a limited time left.  I might want to be lying face to face with my SO, but I might want to be on that enchanting beach (shown in the picture above) with dozens of people and their children laughing and playing music and eating and being baptized and enjoying being alive and by the ocean and with each other and having been alive before they were dead.  That seems like an awfully good idea, and part of me wishes the movie had simply ended there.

Places (Or Why Sad is Not Unhappy)

Ewen is not paying attention to his Happiness lessons

I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think the title of the film Beginners (2011) is taken from the British theatre idiom by which the stage manager notifies the actors that the play is about the start.  In the States, the SM calls "Places," whereas in the UK and much of the Commonwealth, the call is "Beginners."  (This is, of course, further proof that the Brits do not understand and cannot use the language that they initiated but which, since the death of Shakespeare, they have managed to complete bungle and misuse.  The proper word should be, clearly, "Beginnings" not "Beginners," unless the theater management has decided to replace the cast at the last minute with rank amateurs.)

My point is that "Beginners" signals the time when one is supposed to start.  And although it's a start, it's a place you've been before, such as the last time you performed or rehearsed the play.  Nonetheless, you start over, fresh, as if you've never done it before, surprised, dismayed and enlightened all over again.  An actor in the theater must "lose it" over and over again, every night.  It is a state of ever-renewing innocence.

And this wise innocence informs the film, from its dark yellow palette, its Wes-Anderson-like narration, the heroine who threatens to go Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but is too smart for that pigeon-hole, even a very perceptive Jack Russell terrier, who acts as mute Greek chorus.  There is a beautiful, simple clarity which drives the stark production design, the jump cuts which are surely written into the script, the rapid shifts of place and time.  Although the texture is dense, each small piece of the mosaic is eminently clear and well-defined.



Arthur does his best to see Oliver through.

Most of all, writer (and director) Mike Mills writes with a simplicity that would warm the heart of E.B. White.  That may well because Mills and his melancholy but not neurotic protagonist, Oliver, played with a lack of self-pity by Ewan MacGregor, both experience mourning as a normal natural part of life, not to be pushed away, but not to be wallowed in, either.  (Mills previously wrote and directed Thumbsucker, an agreeably quirky indie, which offered little beneath the surface of its odd premise.)
If you've heard of the film and not seen it, you probably heard of because Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award for playing a man who comes out at age 75.  And he does it wonderfully and fully deserves prizes.  But do not skip this because you think it is an old gay man movie and you've seen that one.  This is not a movie about an old gay man, it is about a young sad man.  But sad is not depressed.  Sad is simply a color in the rainbow of emotions, one we must have in order for the other colors to make sense and maintain their relationship with each other.  Sad is OK.  The trick is to come through and come out the other end.

SPOILER ALERT:  He does it.  He gets through.  It doesn't end with a music montage and everyone splashing in the ocean, but happiness is possible.

This post has more outright expression of opinion than I like, but simply put, I found Beginners one of the most elegant, poetic and overlooked movies of 2011.  There is a lot more to see here than Plummer's rightly-celebrated turn, including Melanie Laurent's mountains of charm and Goran Visnjic's enchanting child-man as Plummer's lover, the compact of secret playfulness between young Oliver and his bemused mother, well-limned by Mary Page Keller -- these are all recognizable human beings, rare creatures in contemporary film.  But most of all, there is the emergence of Mike Mills as an authorial voice in film whose future work I, for one, intend to follow.

Are you here for an affair?

I know, romantic, right?

The title of the post is, of course, that great line Buck Henry wrote for himself to deliver in The Graduate.  And of course, Benjamin IS there for an affair.

Mademoiselle Chambon (2009), on the other hand, demonstrates that when one is out to make a romantic film, it is all-or-nothing.  Dithering one's way in and out of a relationship may be realistic, but it is hardly diverting or enlightening.  Noel Coward's lovers in Brief Encounter may have been English and talkative diffident and shy, but they were clearly and demonstratively and knowingly in a relationship, conflicted as they may have been and uncertain as to how they should proceed.  The lovers in Chambon don't seem to be able to figure out what they're doing at all.

It is possible to make films, even great films, driven by things other than classical dramatic narrative structure.  There are character portraits, explorations of environments or communities.  But you can't set a story on the knife edge of a binary choice--will-they-or-won't-they?--and leave it there for 100 minutes and engage an audience.  Or at least you'd have to be a greater artist than writer-director Stephane Brize.

At least Lean and Coward knew how to sustain the tension.  The affair remained unconsummated, although they did go to an apartment which Billy Wilder transmogrified into The Apartment.  In Chambon, the lovers go to bed but it is the audience that his put to sleep.  The encounter answers no questions, reveals no information, accomplishes nothing.

There is literally one interesting cinematic moment in Chambon, and you've seen it in other films, although actress Aure Autike as the wife in the middle, executes it perfectly.  We are at a little garden party, Mlle Chambon has been invited to play her violin, and she plays a piece of particular significance to her and her lover, Jean.  Jean, who has been established as a rather uncultured and inarticulate character (another problem with the film) is absolutely gobsmacked.  His jaw goes slack and his eyes go all gooey like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.  But the way the wife sees it and makes the connection is quite wonderful, silent-film-style storytelling, and represents the one interesting moment that is not a pale shadow of Brief Encounter.

As a film buff, I can't help feeling your time would be better spent renting or buying the Criterion edition of Brief Encounter, rather than bothering with Mlle Chambon or even continuing to read this blog.  Go!  Now!

Crazy love, but not crazy enough

A couple of unrelated observations about crazy people in love.

It's Kind Of A Funny Story (2010) seems to be the official demarcation of Zach Galifianakis as a film object. It is not necessary to have a well-written role for him, or something that interesting or unique for him to do. (The height of eccentricity in this movie consists of patients wearing doctor's scrubs - Wow, is that Zany!) No, you simply hire Galifianakis to certify that your film is quirky and offbeat whether or not it actually is. It's a sad degradation of an artist who is dangerously close to leasing out what is valuable about himself to entities who don't appreciate it. Robert Benchley, one of the finest writers of light humor was an alcoholic who couldn't deal with his belief that he had drunk his talent away and spent the last 7 or 8 years of his too-short life appearing in Hollywood movies not worthy of his talent.

Where he is usually a strange and primordial presence in most films, here he gets heartfelt and sincere advice and has a balanced perspective on himself on his illness, confusing ZG with any old actor out of the casting files. I have to assume the man has tax problems.

What's worse, whether he means to or not, the mere presence of Galifianakis pulls the entire film off-balance and away from the sweet if flimsy teen romance that is meant to be the center of gravity. It's as if you cast Robert DeNiro is the kindly man next door. Not only is it a waste of resources, but everybody will be waiting for the moment when that guy next door goes OFF!

The real problem with this movie about crazy people is that it's not crazy. It does, however, have one of the best-ever uses of the "object of reconciliation." This is a hoary old storytelling device, though it usually works very well. There are lots of ways to get there, but in essence you need (a) a rift between two characters; and (b) an object loaded with significance for one of the characters, but not for the other. It is best if the object is obscure and difficult to obtain so that the character for whom the object has no meaning must go through many trials in order to obtain this talismanic thing and then present to the other at the most emotionally critical point. In IKOAFS, the object is Egyptian music which, upon being played during a party on the ward lures the hero's reclusive and depressed roommate from his room. I don't think I ever saw music used as the object and worked like a charm. Unless maybe it was a song from childhood. Rats, it's not unique as I thought. Still worked.



Elling (2001) on the other hand, does involve actually crazy people, much to its merit. It was the number one film ever produced in Norway, which is why me and all my friends rushed out to see it. (Not really.) Also, it won an Academy Award for best foreign language film.

I sought out this film because it is based on a novel which was also the basis of a spectacular Broadway flop in the 2009-10 season. (To be fair, the play was a hit in London, but in a different production). It tells the story of two men completely unequipped to adjust to life on their own being forced to adjust to life on their own. One seems to be somewhere between autistic and OCD and the other is just a plain old-fashioned foole.

And if Elling had been produced in the 1920s or 1930s, they would have just been a pair of fools. But today we give such characters a medical diagnosis and put them in realistic situations and realistically limited options for solving them. This has its rewards in grounding comedy in the plausible and the natural, but it has its drawbacks in closing off the realm of the fantastical, which was available to the great fools such as Laurel & Hardy, Jerry Lewis and Ed Wynn.

But this is not an American film, it is a Northern European film, a world of limited resources and constricted dreams, compared to the mythos of the great American landscape and dreams of freedom, success and escape which lives in every American psyche. So their adventures -- going on a car trip, having a relationship with a woman, maintaining an apartment -- are plausible and relatable, and the film is likable. But this viewer would have liked an over-the-moon adventure (as in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest), a little romance, a little poetry.

The diagnosis for both films -- terminal niceness. Could use a dash of real madness.

Brushes with greatness

Bob and Ray, the endlessly prolific radio comedians had a short run of sketches called "Brush with Greatness" with sketches like a cabdriver in whose cab Heywood Hale Broun had once left a half-finished crossword. (If you don't know who Heywood Hale Broun was, the joke may be even funnier.) There is a small sub-genre of comedy about contact between celebrities and non-celebrities. The celebrity is often fictionalized, as in The Man Who Came To Dinner, Funny People and Notting Hill, but played by an actor who closely resembles the genuine article.

This is the template for Get Him To The Greek (2010), a sloppily assembled Xerox of My Favorite Year which is meant to combine low comedy, sentiment and character development, in the pattern of the Judd Apatow comedy factory. But Aldous Snow, the Russell Brand cannot be turned into a character we care about because rather than fashioning a life story and circumstances that might have shaped a real person, the filmmakers have attempted build a person entirely out of jokes. We are supposed to believe in his real affection, attachment and need for his girlfriend, but she is an incoherent imbecile engaged in casual unfaithfulnesses making it impossible to believe anyone would care for them. (The girlfriend is played with a surprising comic flair by Rose Byrne, best known for the melodramatic Damages.)

I suppose I find it hard to care for any character played by Jonah Hill, because he is played by Jonah Hill, a squat repulsive pustule apparently made of the residue left once Seth Rogen lost weight and started washing regularly. The idea that he would have Elisabeth Moss as a girlfriend borders on science fiction, but it least it moves toward developing sympathy for him. When at the end of the film, she accedes to an absurd suggestion by Russell Brand in order to get revenge on the unfaithful Jonah Hill, it is clear the filmmakers not only can't write and create real human beings, they may not actually know any.

Some of the things I was supposed to laugh at was sex on a toilet, vomit and inserting drugs in one's anus in the middle of an airport. Here's what I did laugh at - the appearance of the actor who plays Draco Malfoy looking just as annoyed at Jonah Hill as I felt, and the appearance of Paul Krugman in a Today Show segment (and what a gang of whores NBC has become since it has been owned by Universal). The latter encounter consists of vomit-stained Jonah Hill landing on a sofa and looking surprised to see Nobel laureate Paul Krugman sitting opposite him. "You're Paul Krugman," says Hill just as we were coming to the same realization. "Yes," says Paul Krugman, doubtless wondering what he was doing in this tribute to bodily functions. I don't know why, but that was comedy gold.

Far more rewarding, perhaps because the author did not have to invent his main character is the woefully under-distributed Me and Orson Welles (2009). It does help that Richard Linklater, director of Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset, Waking Life and School of Rock, is a talented filmmaker, which Nicholas Stoller is not. Add to that the circumstances that the celebrity in question is real and the story is a more compelling coming-of-age story based on a young adult novel, and the results are bound to be better.

Welles is theater history nearly as much as he is film history, staging several seasons of classical repertoire, including a Voodoo Macbeth, a contemporary Julius Caesar, the original production of Richard Wright's Native Son and a failed Shakespeare epic Five Kings, comprised of the Richard (II, III) and Henry (IV, V & VI) plays.

The story takes a familiar pattern of a young man seeking to find his own place in the world while coming within the orbit of a very strong mentor and, as it turns out, frenemy. Zach Efron need only be reasonably intelligent and personable, and he does that just fine, and be attracted to Clare Danes, which seems pretty easy. But the sine qua non of a film like this is the actor playing Orson Welles, a role assayed in the past by (among others) Vincent D'Onofrio (Ed Wood), Angus McFayden (Cradle Will Rock), Liev Schreiber (RKO 281) and Orson Welles (The Man Who Came To Dinner, television 1972). British actor Christian McKay tops them all (including Welles). McKay vaguely resembles Welles physically, but he has the voice to the tee, as well as the brio, the arrogance, the smugness and the childish petulance of the young Welles.

Of course, Welles could get away with all this because he was brilliant, especially when he was under pressure. Realizing that, he seemed to spend his career contriving high-pressure circumstances for himself, even when otherwise unnecessary. In the film we see Welles's sharp, bold staging and playing of Julius Caesar, and a very pleasant bonus on the DVD is the inclusion of about 12 minutes of the play, most of which was unused in the final film, but is of historical curiosity and could be useful to people like me who frequently have to teach the play in school. The play also takes the trouble to identify and evoke many of Welles' collaborators, including the waspish John Houseman, the tightly wound George Couloris (the old banker in Citizen Kane), the easygoing Joseph Cotten and the ambitious Norman Lloyd (although in this case the physical casting is right, the actor conveys none of the sharp nasal projection of Lloyd, who had a long film career, most memorably as the headmaster in Dead Poets Society.) Most memorably Welles takes the brief throwaway scene of the mob engulfing Cinna the Poet and instead of cutting it, as most directors do and Welles thought of doing, building it up through staging and using contemporary stage and acting technique build it into one of the centerpieces of the play. (There's a very good textual argument for doing so, but there's not time or room to go into that now. Let us simply note that the tyranny and the fickleness of the mob is one of Shakespeare's major themes.)

The design of the film is spot-on, especially for a film which did almost no shooting in New York. Perhaps most impressive is the fakery that creates Bryant Park where there was none. I must confess I haven't a lot to say about Richard Linklater. He is a filmmaker with superb technique who does not impose a set style on his material, but as appropriate for such an eclectic artist, lets the content dictate the style. If there is something that unifies his work, it is the progress toward maturity, understanding and responsibility for one's own actions. This is well handled here by the independent character played by Zac Efron, who is temporarily seduced both by Welles and the Clare Danes character, but has enough sense of himself to avoid devastation when all the rugs are pulled out from him. Instead, he's grateful for the knowledge gained and ready to move on. And his penchant for long takes and camera movement not only serve story and setting (the theater, the ultimate long take), but of course complement Welles's own theater-based style. The film may not be great or moving or startling, but it is terrifically satisfying, and that's a rare quality these days.

And apropos of Welles's theater career, here is the only film we have of the Mercury's work in the theater, a 4-minute newsreel report on the 1936 Macbeth originally presented by the Negro Division of the Federal Theater Project at the Lafayette Theater at 131st Street and 7th Avenue:

Bald-faced killers with a toupee

I was so intrigued by the cult film Honeymoon Killers and its relationship to a real-life case in the late 1940s that I looked up two other films based on the same case. They could be interpreted as remakes or homages to Honeymoon Killers, or simply parallel films, one of which acknowledges its predecessor extensively and comes up with a rich robust re-interpretation of the story, following the earlier film sequence by sequence. The other turns its back on Leonard Kastle's film, and to some extent on the actual Beck-Fernandez murders, and takes a creative new tack with the story which ultimately fails, and renders the film inert. The question is whether that approach could ever have worked without discarding the central premise of the real-life material, and hence, the very reason to base a film on this particular case.

The actress who plays the Martha Beck character in Profundo Carmesi aka Deep Crimson (1996), Regina Orozco, is primarily known as an opera singer, which tells you something about the movie. Where the lovers Honeymoon Killers were joined in seediness, two con artists who recognized each other, in Deep Crimson they are both absorbed in a fantasy of passionate romance. Neither of them can deal with reality and are completely committed to the idea of the grand passion. Perhaps it is telling that this version of the story includes the fact in which Beck (here called Coral) abandoned her children in order to follow Fernandez. This signals that we are not going to see a gradual slide down the moral ladder, as in the earlier film, but a portrait of a grand obsession. She imagines her paramour to be Charles Boyer, or a reasonable facsimile thereof and frequently dresses in red. She is not nearly as interested in the swindle as she is in the thrill of being on the run with her lover.

Nicolas, who corresponds to the real-life Fernandez, also seems less interested in money than his counterpart in real life or in the Honeymoon Killers. He loves the sport of seduction, and his paramount concern is the condition of his toupee. (Actor Daniel Cacho looks alarmingly like David Margulies, the actor who played the mayor in Ghostbusters, not exactly the most seductive image.) In fact, he loses heart in the whole criminal conspiracy when his toupee becomes damaged beyond repair. On top of which, he seems to have inherited blinding migraines from Clyde Barrow, in a tribute to that other film about killers in love and on the run.

Where Honeymoon Killers unfolds in a clinical, almost judgmental black-and-white, Profondo's director Arturo Ripstein's camera prowls smoothly about (no handheld or even Steadicam is evident here) in the style of early Otto Preminger, with long, takes allowing the actors to move about the environment and interact with each other. Although it is Mexican, it seems much more like a Hollywood movie, reflecting the fantasy life of the two principals. In Leonard Kastle's film, Mahler seemed like an overstatement, but in Profondo, Verdi or Puccini would fit right in.

There are some interesting variations in the way the facts of the case are used. The querulous old widow who is killed with a hammer in Honeymoon gets clobbered with a religious statue in Profondo, after going through a grotesque mock wedding in a cemetery. Profondo makes more of Beck's knowledge as a nurse, although in this version she is a bad nurse, whereas in Honeymoon she was a supervisor. But when Coral promises to perform an abortion on Nicolas's girlfriend, it is clearly in order to bleed her death. But that fails and Nicolas has to do a messy job of stabbing her. And where Beck in Honeymoon does away with the surviving toddler in a cold, frozen manner, Coral does it choking back tears, angry for her inability to connect with the child who stills want her own mother, though she is now a bloody corpse in the room.

Profondo ends like a Western. Whereas the real killers and the ones in Honeymoon die separated on death row, the Profondo killers are gunned down on the plain, dying together in a spoon position, half immersed in water which might as well be blood. Finally, these lovers are victims of as big a delusion as the women they tricked and killed, and they somehow seem pathetic where the originals were repellent.

Lonely Hearts (2006) is almost a complete misfire from start to finish, beginning with its odd conceit to center the story around the investigating policemen (who barely appear at all in Profondo). It is a novel idea, and potentially compelling, given the contrast between the thriving and exciting romantic relationship of the criminal couple and the failing marriage of the policeman. But it has a couple of negative effects. First of all, it sends the film in the wrong direction. Yes, we like policeman to catch bad guys -- especially on television, where we need to see the moral order restored. But in movies, we only like it if they catch monsters, as in Silence of the Lambs. If the criminals are interested, complicated, conflicted, they are going to grab our interest and we will not want to see them caught, at least not until their story is worked out. So our sympathies work against the intended protagonist, John Travolta's cop character.

Second, it flattens Beck and Fernandez into any criminal couple on the run. Beyond the basic mistake of the story structure, writer-director Todd Robinson turns the overweight and homely Martha Beck into the glamorous and irresistible Salma Hayek, takes away her children and all her other problems, including lack of confidence. It makes Ray Fernandez pretty ordinary, too, for whereas the real man was obsessed with a very large woman who berated and dominated him, now he is in love with a sexy, hot babe. Beck and Fernandez become run-of-the-mill swindlers turned killers -- we never see their panic or sense of doom. They are scarcely individualized at all.

In addition to a suicidal wife and a girlfriend played by Laura Dern, Travolta is given a partner, played by James Gandolfini who seems to have no story function at all other than to prevent Travolta from talking to himself and to provide voiceover narration. Neither Travolta nor Gandolfini, nor Scott Caan, who performs a bad carbon copy of his father, is as believable as a cop as they are as criminals, which undermines the film. (Yes, there are films which suggest the kinship between cop and criminal, but this is not one.) It doesn't help that Jared Leto, as Ray Fernandez is so completely lacking in any distinctive personality or style, playing a generic con man when something really unusual and strange is called for.

The one thing Lonely Hearts does well is go to town on the late 40's atmosphere-- the wardrobe, music, lighting, settings. The idea is presumably to align the film with the tradition of film noir. But this story is not going to cooperate with that notion; in fact the writer has done a good deal to destroy any sort of noir structure. It could have been, but Robinson chose to write a police procedural, with some added angst for the cop. (And even here Robinson couldn't help himself changing the details of the real policeman's life -- ironic, given that the man was Robinson's grandfather.) Production design does not a film noir make.

The decision goes to the reigning champion, Honeymoon Killers, with Deep Crimson a worthy challenger. It's time for the governor to declare a moratorium on film versions of the Lonely Hearts Killers.

Wes Craven is an amateur in comparison

The Jone$es (2009) is the best suburban horror film since Dawn of the Dead -- either version, it doesn't matter -- it's just the central metaphor comparing consumerism to living after death and eating brains.

The characters in this film are living a non-life; so thoroughly that I found it difficult to contemplate living that life for even a few moments. It's one thing to be an actor and within a pre-determined environment under a special set of circumstances, tell a story by assuming a character other than one's own, for a period of between three seconds and three hours. But to have every waking moment engaged in a fiction--that is the definition of loneliness.

I am interested in cons and con men and have read a great deal of the fairly minimal literature on the subject and what strikes one--after you get past the imagined fun of seeing the dishonest get their comeuppance due to their own greed--is how lonely the life is. Con artists don't have friends--can't have friends, and can't really have a family, at least not the way normal human beings have. That is the fascination of both The Grifters and Matchstick Men (probably the two best con movies after The Sting), in which concepts of family get distorted and tortured into strange shapes due to this strangest of occupations.

So The Joneses are not real people engaged in any real activities--I am not posting any spoilers to say that these people are living product placements. They exist merely to interest the neighbors in the various things that they are consuming. The details of this conceit are completely nonsensical--there would be no way to measure cause and effect here, we are dealing in a satiric fantasy, and as an old boat builder said, pointing at a seam in the fiberglass said, "that's where they put it together and that's where it will fall apart."

OK, pretend you're a screenwriter now, and imagine you have two actors-slash-con artists pretending to be a sexy, happily married couple. What do you suppose will happen? Of course. you don't have to see the movie to know that there will be romantic and sexual confusion here. So that's one thread. Then-- your characters are advocating relentless consumerism, and to make the engine of your story go well, you have to put the perfect victims in the house next door (well played by Glenne Headley and Gary Cole, pictured above, both actors who can vacillate between likability and desperation). Weak, insecure people desperate for approval and respect, without a firm value system of their own. Great-- Moliere himself could go to town with a set-up like this.

Now--these poor marks have spent far beyond their means putting them in danger of losing their abode and being thrown out of Paradise itself. (This probably was funnier when it was written in 2005 or 2006 and we were more worried about excessive credit card debt, not a housing and banking meltdown that brought the entire economy to its knees. Additional support for my hypothesis that this had a long development curve is that 12 people have some sort of producer credit, suggesting a project which passed through many hands before receiving a green light.) What will you do with the comic situation of foolish people at the brink of ruin through their own foolishness, but egged on by your protagonists.

The Joneses chooses this moment to abandon the satiric never-never land it has lived in and jump into a facsimile of the real world, introducing real tragedy and real remorse. I'm not saying this shouldn't be done or that it is impossible. I'm guessing that a Billy Wilder, a Stanley Kubrick, a Paddy Chayefsky, a Robert Altman (especially), perhaps even an Aaron Sorkin could do it (to name the most prominent film satirists that come to mind rapidly). But writer-director David Borte does not have those skills, notwithstanding those of the under-appreciated David Duchovny, one of the most slyly funny actors on the planet.

Worst of all, the shift in tone overemphasizes the fragility of the initial premise, and leads us to think of all the reasons that this could never happen and the scheme could never work, chief among them the fact that human beings are involved.

The other principal missed opportunity, it seems to me, is in the cinematography. Not to direct over Mr. Borte's shoulder, but shouldn't the look of the film ape its central premise? Shouldn't the film look like a super over-produced shiny commercial when the Joneses are touting all their wonderful toys to their "friends" and "neighbors," a look which could be contrasted with the look of the backstage scenes? The film was a low-budget affair, probably shot quickly to accommodate the cast's busy schedules, but with some planning, the production, especially light and sound, could have been engaged to enhance the concept.

Swing and a miss, but a miss not without merit.

When did neurosis become attractive? Oh, that's right--never

I thought Noah Baumbach's The Squid and The Whale was pretty accomplished. I was especially impressed with how he depicted the effect of a father's narcissism and hypocrisy on his adolescent children. I was also impressed with Jeff Daniels's willingness to play such a horrible person without visibly judging him or trying to distance himself from the character.

Greenberg (2010) has no such merits. It has no special cinematic, literary or performance craft. I mean, the actors say their lines so they can be heard and don't crash into the furniture (or if they did, it has been edited out), but there is nothing much special here. Ben Stiller, an actor who once displayed talent on the Ben Stiller Show, but now is in severe need of someone to pick him up and throw him against the wall very hard, is slightly less irritating in this film in that his character is trying to get better. It has an interesting example of graceless grace from Greta Gerwig, who reportedly has carved out a career in mumblecore, of which Greenberg appears to be larger-budgeted example.

Other than the pleasantly and surprisingly normal Rhys Ifans, the characters are people I would pay money to avoid, especially when they try and exhibit their creativity.

So far, Noah Baumbach's film oeuvre seems about as significant as most of the fiction that used to appear in The New Yorker before it banished fiction. They're enervated, jejeune, solipsistic and use too many big words.

Spiritual quest porn

Back to basics: Movies are pictures. They do pictures well. They even do pictures of things that are better experienced than viewed: hence there are successful movies about sex and food. But pictures do not reveal depths of meaning. There is no accurate picture of the inside of the mind. Sure, you can have voice-over narration, but that still needs to be concise and pithy in a way that naturally reduces and homogenizes a complex task like a spiritual journey. As Liz Gilbert, protagonist of Eat Pray Love (2010) says to her friend Richard (see illustration), "Do you always talk in bumper stickers?" The whole script is sort of a bumper script pasted onto a Range Rover taking the viewer on a marvelous journey which is less than the sum of its parts.

One symptom of the problems with this film is that never once does it explain how Liz is living for this 12-month quest. Pains are made to tell you that her bitter ex-husband has taken all her money and her house. Let's see, broke and homeless--time to travel around the world! What?? I've been gainfully employed for many years and only just got to Paris a couple of years ago, and then for just a few days. My wife tells me that the book explains that this whole one-year sojourn was on assignment. Not only does the film omit that, but it omits any sequences indicating that she is writing. She sends a couple of desultory e-mails, but as for being a disciplined professional, dependent on her skills to make a living, it is typical of the Hollywood fantasy machine that all that icky real-life stuff is overlooked. Even worse, the filmmakers seem to be unaware that anyone would want to know such things. Or else, they just don't care if we believe in the story they're telling. (Which is a hint that they don't believe it either. Sad for a story based on real life.)

Ryan Murphy comes from television and seems to believe that filmmaking is nothing but script and acting. He does not seem to be aware of how the camera, the editor or the composer could help him tell his story--it is hard to see if his technique is invisible or non-existent.

Frankly, only the first part of the film is executed with complete confidence, as it focuses on food and sex, albeit Liz abstains from the sex herself. Nonetheless, the sexual vibes are pervasive, along with red sauce and red wine. It begins to lose its bearings when it gets to India, where everyone is eager for Liz to have a spiritual experience, especially Richard, played by Richard Jenkins, a wonderful actor who almost makes this character seem to be a person, although the writer has given him nothing but a propensity to give unsolicited advice. He has a teary monologue about being a drunk and NOT hurting his kid. That gives you a clue to the kind of stakes the movie likes to play with--everything is close to being real, but just doesn't get there.

Everyone else who has the key to spiritual enlightenment in India seems to be English--Michael Cumpsty and Sophie Thompson. But the key seems to be held by a magic elephant who appears, rather delightfully to tie up that sequence. (There is an Indian wedding, but those are getting to be a dime a dozen in movies these days.)

Finally, the film arrives in Bali and its willpower completely collapses. Liz falls into a blindingly predictable romance with Javier Bardem, who is both Natural Man and Brilliant Businessman. She shows she is now strong and independent by shying away from his romantic proposition, then seeing her spiritual advisor and then accepting. How disappointing--she learns that her problem is that she has to learn how not to be with a man all the time. So she goes out and finds a man to be with. Problem solved. It feels like a bad Audrey Hepburn movie once removed.

Which takes us to the principal asset of Eat, Pray, Love. Julia Roberts is made to be in movies. Her large expressive features are completely legible at all times, and although she is not bad at delivering lines, the movie is better when it is most quiet, focusing on food, landscapes, sunsets, ocean views and Julia's big brown eyes. It doesn't get deeper than that, but since I couldn't afford an August vacation this year, this will have to do.

Power couple

There is plenty of comment available online as to the historical accuracy of The Young Victoria (2009) or its qualities as a romance. I just want to briefly note that when it comes to trying to depict the intoxication of infatuation, so many filmmakers turn to the vocabulary of Max Ophuls.

Ophuls is, if nothing else, the master of the moving camera, mixing theatrical trickery with camera choreography. Young Victoria uses two marvelous Ophuls-like devices in a single sequence, the pivotal meeting of Victoria and her true love, Albert. First, you have to forget Victoria as the squatting humorless priggish widow one connects with the word "Victorian." Young Victoria (and this is according to my readings in history, and not just this admittedly romantic film) was a lovely young woman ready to be in love.

Victoria enters the sumptuous ballroom in a ball gown suitable for a Cinderella and is literally transported across the room toward her love. That is, without moving her feet, she sweeps toward us and toward her love, floating into a close-up--all before we even see the beloved, Albert. They join hands and dance, and as their faces and bodies grow close, the sound begins to echo and repeat into a chamber, like the dizziness you feel when you know your life is changing in that very instant. It is utterly enchanting, and carries the film through a certain amount of 19th century political positioning chatter. (There is even discussion of tariffs, which has to raise a giggle with anyone who has seen The Deal.)

The film is one of the finest demonstration of the creative use of shallow focus and the rack-focus shot. Film critics love deep focus, possibly because it was generally the exception in 35mm cinematography and mise-en-scene, and it does permit the actor to control the pace and energy of a scene, rather than the director and the editor. As the use of HD Video increases, the use of deep focus is increasing, as it is much easier to execute in digital. But shallow focus has its uses and is a uniquely cinematic tool to direct the audience's attention with precision. Thus cinematographers shooting in HD often emulate 35mm and adapt the lens so as to shorten the depth of field.

I recently saw a good example of how depth of field can be misused in the film Local Color, which I will be writing about soon. A very young man walks into frame standing behind a woman he is attracted to, but who is a bit older and who is recalling the tragic loss of her child. Although the young man is attracted to this woman, given the difference in their life experience and the emotions she is feeling at that moment, a romantic overture would be completely inappropriate and probably out of character for this sensitive young man. But a faulty choice of a long lens makes it look as though he is inches behind her or perhaps even less. Only when the scene cuts to an alternate angle one can see they are actually separated by several feet. It is possible that the director made that choice of a long lens deliberately to create an ambiguity, but if that's true it was a tonal error rather than a technical one, but an error nonetheless.

The result of director Jean-Marc Vallee's photographic choices is to convert the usual stuffy politics and hand-kissing that goes on in these movies into a story of the joining of two souls that is, if you understand the nature of true romance--not the soupy Hollywood version--a rather sexy story.