Author: Peter Schilling

An Evening With Kenneth Anger. Friday night at 7:30 at the Walker Art Center Cinema.

Holy tapdancing cats, there’s a ton of intriguing movie choices opening Friday. Army of Shadows, the crazy Existentialist-Noir-French Resistance picture, is in town for a few days at the Oak Street Cinema (and here’s my review, from an earlier showing this summer). Then Venus is opening at the Uptown Theatre, while Anthony Minghella’s intelligent and deeply flawed Breaking and Entering is opening around town. All three films offer a fascinating night out, and the latter two are sexually honest pictures (a rarity). Of the last pair, the first is a sweet story that doesn’t pull any punches about the hungry libido of a very old man, played by Peter O’Toole, who deserves this year’s Oscar, and not just because he’s due. The role is often unappealing and brutal, and well worth watching. B & E is surprising emotionally, though it spins out of control, losing focus and relying on a horribly pat ending. But the sex scenes betwixt Jude Law and Juliette Binoche are heart-thumping and real. I guess old Jude is the only actor willing to go down on his lady love in Hollywood today…

But I would really like to point you in the direction of the Walker, who are bringing in our favorite Satan-worshipping, homoerotic short filmmaker, a man who’s influenced Scorsese (by his own admission) and David Lynch (my own observation, though you’d have to be blind not to notice the comparisons), in the guise of former child-actor Dr. Kenneth Anger. Anger might be most famous for his wicked tell-all book Hollywood Babylon, which at times is so mean-spirited and gruesome it’ll give you nightmares during your afternoon nap.

Anger will be in town to plug a new DVD collection of his works, and mesmerized theatergoers will also be treated to his films Fireworks, Rabbit’s Moon, Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandos and Invocation of My Demon Brother. Scorpio is an obvious precursor to Blue Velvet, with its soundtrack of rippin’ 50s and 60s hits, including Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”, all this playing while leather-clad bikers stroke their motorcycles, and other objects. Fireworks is startling, if only for the fact that it’s an American film from 1947, and its rampant homosexuality is shocking even today (a man has to be torn to pieces by angry sailors in order to finally enjoy a relationship). These films really beggar description, but are beautiful, moving at times, and well worth watching. I imagine that Mr. Anger will be giving us some interesting commentary to accompany them. To say the least!

In other words, if you’re interested in a movie and have your thoughts provoked, there’s a veritable smorgasbord in town–not to mention all the good stuff that’s already here.

Old Joy and Pan’s Labyrinth

Old Joy, 2006. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, written by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond. Starring Daniel London and Will Oldham.

Now showing at the Oak Street Cinema.

Old Joy begins with a phone call between friends. Mark (Daniel London) is seen talking with his old college pal Kurt (Will Oldham) about a last minute camping trip. The conversation is awkward, a discussion between two people whose relationship, you already notice, is on the wane. Mark wants to take the trip, but why? Well, perhaps it is because he needs a break–a hiatus from his pregnant wife (who wonders about this mysterious friend from her husband’s past), from his job, from his life. Mark is a man about to take a very important journey into fatherhood. He is lost, and needs to get grounded again.

Old Joy is about nothing more than a camping trip between two friends, a pair of men who met in college and had an intense friendship, of long talks and shared observation, and have since watched, baffled, as their lives divided on the road to adulthood. In the hands of Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy is a quiet, ruminative film, a small blessing for those of us battered by CGI and Big Events on the big screen, soundtracks blaring and actors strutting. Here, you walk with her characters through the Oregon forests, you listen to their quiet admissions, stare at the trees and the sky. Like a hike with a good friend, you come away refreshed, and perhaps a bit frustrated that life is not always this calm.

Kurt promises his friend Mark that there is a hot spring nestled in one of the old growth forests in rural Oregon. They drive. Along the way, they talk, just as old friends do. And Reichardt subtly, so subtly, gives us the details of these two friends: Kurt is a wanderer, utterly confused about the world he lives in, trying to figure out how to survive. He wants life to reflect the beliefs he developed in college. Mark has embraced the rush to adulthood. He has a child on the way, political talk radio fills his car–and he is the one who has the house, who has the car that runs, whose possessions don’t fill an old beaten-up van.

Kurt has lost his way literally at first, missing an overgrown path that leads to the spring. Mark shows his frustration, calling his wife, complaining to her and lying to Kurt about his anger. Unable to find the springs, they spend their first night sleeping on an old abandoned couch in the woods, watching the embers from their fire climb into the clear night sky. They talk–about nothing, and about everything.

Next morning, over breakfast, another call home, some reassurance, and then they light out and actually find the springs. Here, Kurt is in complete control, in his element, and the scenes are just beautiful, and moving. Reichardt’s camera is never intrusive, low to the ground, weighing down these scenes with a sweet gravity that we’ve all enjoyed on trips with close friends. The men relax, profoundly, and Kurt massages his friend’s shoulders, in a scene so fraught with tension–and it’s really not sexual–you’ll find yourself reeling.

Old Joy might try your patience. If you dislike the characters, you won’t like the movie at all. But if you can embrace them, as I did, recognizing yourself and your friends in both, then you will be rewarded with a powerful experience. Neither character is given short shrift here–Kurt eventually finds the springs, and he was right, they are a transcendent experience. Mark has his feet more firmly planted on the ground, and in the city, at the end, we see that he is right back in control. Kurt is lost. He will always be lost.

And perhaps that is the most heartbreaking thing about this movie, the inevitable loss of this friendship. Undoubtedly, these two will attempt to keep in touch, but they will drift. They have different lives, utterly different, and they need one another desperately. Mark’s more button-down world must have the release a trip with Kurt provides. And Kurt needs someone to help him maneuver the modern world. But these never last. Who among us doesn’t have that friend who seems to be a bit wild, too lost in this world, who won’t settle down? We travel down our road, and eventually stop seeing the landscape, the stars, or the water that rushes beneath the bridge. We scoff at those who stare, just as those who stare and wonder scoff at us for continuing to struggle, making a living and settling down. Reichardt understands there is magic in both worlds, and the division between the two is a matter of pure heartbreak.

…

El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), 2006. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Starring Ivana Baquero, Adriana Gil, Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Alex Angulo, and Doug Jones.

Now showing at the Uptown Theater.

Briefly: If your children can endure a couple of scenes of violence, then Pan’s Labyrinth is an almost perfect fable for the young ones. This is the story of a little girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, simply marvelous) who is shuffled off to a remote military outpost, where her pregnant mother Carmen (Adriana Gil) who is newly married to the vicious Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez–as complexly evil as Ralph Fiennes was in Schindler’s List). The girl falls deeply into a fantasy world, where she must perform three dangerous tasks in order to return as the princess of the underworld.

A friend told me that one of his colleagues was disappointed in the lack of magic in this film. Unfortunately, what was meant was that there is a lack of Narnia overkill–Pan’s is not the ticket for the hordes of fantasy fans everywhere seeking monsters and battles and fairy dust. True, Pan’s Labyrinth, like Del Toro’s Devil’s Backbone before it, has little CGI–you get most of it in the previews!–but it is rich with characters, plot, and metaphor. And it is sad, and hardly triumphant. But it will make you think; it will make your children think. Perhaps they will emerge shaken, and have bad dreams. And you might just have to talk them through this, have to use this little story to help them to understand this big, often cruel and beautiful world. You will have to wrestle with their curiosity, and their difficult questions. Is that so bad?

Letters From Iwo Jima, 2006. Directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Iris Yamashita. Starring Kazunari Ninomiya, Ken Watanabe, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura, and Hiroshi Watanabe.

Now showing at the Uptown Theater.

During World War II, the Marines used to tell their recruits that they were being trained so hard so that they might be able to survive the worst that the enemy would throw at them. “You live for your country,” they preached. “Let the other guy die for his.”

The Japanese soldiers in Letters From Iwo Jima were undoubtedly trained to be tough as well, but were they told to live for their country? According to my shallow understanding of history, and this film, they pretty much knew they were going to die. They dug trenches and then tunnels in Iwo Jima, scraping and clawing past the loose black volcanic dirt and into the hard rock, burrowing deep down into the island whose tactical promise seemed dubious at best. Like the Americans, many of these were citizen soldiers, bakers and horsemen, destined, we know, to die in this rotten battle.

There is one moment of crazy brilliance in Letters From Iwo Jima, when an officer abandons a unit he considers to be cowardly. The man wants to have an honorable death, so he straps some mines on his body, storms away from a group of baffled and terrified soldiers, and lays down amongst some American corpses in the hopes that a tank will plow over him, detonating the mines. Amongst the dead, in the wicked heat and stench, he waits and waits and waits, staring up at the bleak sky as buzzards circle overhead. Unbelievably, he will survive. Is he unlucky? Or, in his survival, has he found redemption?

Letters From Iwo Jima is the second of Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima saga, and, unfortunately, it is by far the weakest of the two. Letters is a profoundly noble effort, and the saga is notable if only for the fact that, just a few years ago, it probably couldn’t even have been made. Who would think that one of America’s premiere directors would make a motion picture celebrating a former–and, in many cases, still loathed–enemy? Unfortunately, Letters is a rather dull film, and worst of all, it lacks insight into its characters. The Japanese in this film are a purely American invention, a people who do not, in any way, seem to embrace their country’s philosophy. The hero doesn’t want to be there, the soldiers are not brutal, and if you go by this movie, Americans and Japanese would all just get along if only there weren’t this damn war. And its final revelation–that surviving, and finding redemption as a POW–doesn’t give us any glimpse at the still mysterious (to me, and I imagine many Americans) belief that it was more noble to die.

There is virtually no plot in Letters From Iwo Jima. What story there is concerns the arrival of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (played by the great Ken Watanabe) who is trying to instill some intelligence to the defense of this island. Contrasting this is the struggle of Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a young private, a former baker whose wife and child wait for him to return from the war–a war that we know very few returned from.

Saigo is a young man who truly does not want to be there. This kid has a fresh and friendly face, a young fellow who could be described as happy-go-lucky. Ninomiya is an odd choice for a lead actor on which the moral gravity of the film is laid upon. This guy doesn’t care about Japan’s reasons for war, wants to live, but doesn’t even possess the desperate need to survive. Mostly he’s lucky, pulled out of this jam or that by the General. He is also not a noble idiot, in the Candide sense… really, Saigo is a cipher, and Letters becomes more and more frustrating as men who do have strong beliefs–like the colonel who seeks to blow himself up under a tank–are shuffled away for us to focus on Saigo and his memories of home.

What do the Japanese think of this film? Certainly, it’s a great idea for Eastwood to show our former enemy in new light. The problem, as I see it, is that the Japanese are not at all real. Virtually all of our heroes have decent reasons for defending the island to the death–to save children, etc. The Japanese here are altogether too noble, barely getting their dander up in the face of this defeat. When an American soldier is captured, he’s not tortured (as one was in Flags of Our Fathers), but treated with the little medicine the Japanese have even for themselves, and the men come to realize that they’re very similar to this strange American. That’s well and fine, but if you’re going to show these men as being a people who would rather commit suicide than surrender, they remain enigmatic.

Great war films are intense, and in my mind great war films are also insane, and come to grips with that madness. Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now, even moments of the overrated Saving Private Ryan showed how utterly demented war can be. People went berserk during the Battle of Iwo Jima, they went mad, and when they did it was not pretty. Both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima don’t spare us blood and guts, but they do spare us the insanity of combat. Which is why Letters falls so short of being great.

Someday, perhaps, someone will make a great film from the Japanese perspective. There are great movies about the Germans–Das Boot is one. Until then, Letters From Iwo Jima serves, perhaps, as a necessary, though clumsy, first step.

Notes on a Scandal, 2006. Directed by Richard Eyre, written by Patrick Marber. Starring Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, and Andrew Simpson.

Now showing at the Uptown Theatre.

Rare is the occasion when the movie houses have a good movie in them, much less two that open on one weekend. Children of Men opened around town Friday, and so did the luscious Notes on a Scandal (Little Children did, too, but it’s horrible, despite what the other reviewers are saying). And where Children of Men is a mind-boggling, futuristic movie that manages to wow you with its story and technological thrill, Notes on a Scandal is a decidedly more old-fashioned thriller. A simple movie, with a fairly simple plot, well directed, brilliantly acted, and a great entertainment. It’s naughty, sexy, reveling in its wickedness, at times heartbreaking (but never too much so) and a thriller-diller. You’d be hard pressed to find a better time at the show.

Notes on a Scandal is the story of an aging spinster who teaches at a London school for troubled, lower-class urchins. Barbara Covett is jaded beyond belief, and Judi Dench plays her brilliantly–a combination of power-hungry schoolmarm and desperate loner who hungers for a companion. Dench’s Barbara is almost sexless, though she is clearly pursuing another woman. The other woman is Sheba Hart, a young, pretty mother of two, one an attractive teenage daughter and the other a boy with Down’s Syndrome. Cate Blanchett is Sheba, married to an older man, living the perfect bohemian lifestyle, dissatisfied and looking for something different. Obviously hoping to satisfy this desire and do some good for the world, she begins the virtually thankless job of teaching pottery to these ungrateful high-school bollocks.

Barbara wants Sheba, as a friend and as something more. Sheba, looking to fit into a difficult situation that might be more than she bargained for, aligns with the seemingly kindly Barbara. That is, until Sheba gets it into her head to have an affair with the cheeky Steven Connolly, one of her fifteen year-old students.

This is a disturbing turn that Notes on a Scandal takes, and it is to director Richard Eyre’s credit that he takes this on without flinching. The whole show is narrated with an acid pen by Dench, but the film takes a viewpoint all its own–and Dench isn’t spared anything either. The interplay between Dench and Blanchett runs the gamut, from seemingly innocent teacher seeking help, to predatory witch trying to suck the life force from this younger woman–who is, of course, hardly innocent. Bill Nighy is solid as the cuckolded husband of Sheba, and Andrew Simpson, as Steven, Sheba’s love interest, is a marvel–confident, arrogant, brooding, the epitome of a young man’s attitude in the headlights of a bizarre situation.

Notes on a Scandal succeeds because all parties have worked in conjunction with one another, not overreacting to a plot that begs overreaction, and filling their roles with verve. Dench and Blanchett are a great match, their showdown a match made in cinema heaven. Only Philip Glass’ ponderous soundtrack get in the way of this saucy film. Otherwise, Notes on a Scandal is a crack film that remains consistently entertaining and thought provoking from start to finish.

Children of Men, 2006. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, written by Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby. The incredible camera work is courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki. Starring Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Pam Ferris, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ojiofor, Michael Caine, Charlie Hunnam, Danny Huston, and Peter Mullan.

Now showing in theaters around town.

There is a now-famous scene in Children of Men, as a car filled with five people is attacked from all sides by a group of rampaging maniacs, intent on killing them. The shot is unbroken by editing, the camera literally spinning inside the car for nearly seven minutes, the audience as confused and terrified as the characters. As the scene reaches its violent crescendo, we cannot help but feel as overwhelmed as the characters; as its quiet and simply shot denouement leaves everyone stunned, both onscreen and in the silver, we are finally allowed a moment catch our breath. Notice then, that sublime and almost, in my mind, holy realization that you are witnessing a moment of pure cinematic glory.

If you were to call yourself a movie buff, a cinephile, someone whose personality takes part of its definition from the simple love of the moving picture, then you have had, at some point in your life, a moment where watching an incredible film takes on special meaning. Like any great event, you can recall with absolute precision where you were and what the day was like. That movie–whatever it is–ranks up there with a first meeting, a national tragedy, a religious moment in its impact. You are forever moved.

Children of Men is just such a movie. Reading the above (and such praise as “The Movie of the Millennium!“) may have already cured you of having this moment–for me, it’s important to be surprised by what you see, and not to go in believing the thing is a classic. But Children of Men is bleak and yet fraught with hope. It is violent and impossibly beautiful. It terrifies in moments and then, in the next breath, eases you into a sense of reflective calm. Children of Men celebrates life, friendships, and damns our crazy society without beating you over the head with a simplistic message.

Children of Men is a masterpiece. If there is a better picture in 2007, then this will go down as one of the great years in movie history.

Children of Men opens in 2027, in London, a grim and lousy world of grays and pollution and government crackdown. We begin in a beat up cafe, where the dour crowd stares up at a TV set to receive yet more bad news, that the youngest person on earth was killed in a bar brawl. “The youngest person on the planet was eighteen years, four months, twenty days, sixteen hours, and eight minutes old,” the BBC drones to a wide-eyed crowd. Theo Faron is but one of these people, pushing through the stunned to get his day’s cup of coffee. Clive Owen plays Theodore Faron with a look of permanent depression. He’s a disgruntled office worker and onetime radical, whose fighting instincts have been reduced to figuring out how to sneak liquor past the guards at work.

For those of us who haven’t gone in knowing the plot, it unfolds patiently, in the dialogue and in the background of this filthy world. There is an international infertility epidemic, and there have been no children born for eighteen years. Society is falling apart. Everyone with an agenda has his or her own terrorist group, the borders of Britain are closed tight, immigrants are rounded up into camps, and the government has the world in lockdown. Billboards advertise Quietus, a suicide kit, and remind women that fertility tests are mandatory. “The world is falling apart, but Britain soldiers on,” the tv blares proudly, but you look around at the piles of garbage, the immigrants in temporary jails on the street, the smoggy air and the sense of impending doom and it seems that a good dose of Quietus might just be the ticket.

Theo is not distraught over the death of Baby Diego, but he is a bit shook up about the blast in the cafe that nearly gave him a terrorist sponsored death. Clive Owen is weary, just waiting to die, but he’s also cool, a reluctant hero in the great tradition of the old Humphrey Bogart films. He’s not really a tough guy, but someone who won’t take shit when it hits the proverbial fan. Like most people, the lack of children has made him into a man just biding time, trying to get the most out of life from a bottle. After the blast, he skips work and hightails it to the home of a pal of his, Jasper Palmer, played with great aplomb by Michael Caine. Jasper is an aging hippie, a political cartoonist who’s retreated to his pot-filled home in the middle of the woods, hidden from the government. This is a haven in which he and Theo can go to drink, get stoned, blast the Beatles, tell jokes, and try to make sense of this fucking world.

Amazingly, this fucking world comes at us in the periphery. Cuaron assumes that we have brains, and that those brains are capable of both gathering information and responding to what we get. There is little backstory, and no explanation whatsoever of the infertility, allowing viewers to conjure up their own horrors. It is not important to know exactly why or how the government ended up growing into a totalitarian state, or what demands terrorist cells like the Fishes want to see implemented. Like everything else in this splendid flick, Cuaron assumes only that we are smart and can follow his lead. There are some striking images that remind us of the fate of this society, most notably graffiti-riddled and abandoned kindergartens, no doubt stripped of any personality by people looking to hold onto any memento of a child-filled past.

Theo ends up getting kidnapped by this ragtag terrorist group called The Fishes. Here, he runs into his old flame Julian, played by Julianne Moore. She is the leader of the group, and needs his help: traveling papers for a young immigrant girl the Fishes need to move to the coast, so that she can board a boat. Reluctantly, Theo agrees, asking a powerful cousin for the papers, with the caveat that the papers demand that he must accompany the girl in question.

The girl, Kee, is in the worst sort of trouble. She’s an immigrant and a former prostitute. And she’s pregnant with the only baby in the world. All hell will break loose around her. The chase is on.

At its heart, Children of Men is a chase film, and in that respect it is a supreme entertainment. It is also a perfect example of a movie that seeks to take the novel upon which it is based and use it merely as a leaping point into creating its own story. Cuaron is interested in using whatever technique is at his disposal–in three cases, with an extended take–not to show off, but to reach out from the screen and engage his audience. But he has not abandoned directing his people in the pursuit of dazzling effects. The performances, from the star to the smallest of roles, are filled with fascinating people, each one shaping their characters carefully, their motivations and temptations much like our own. The antagonists are evildoers, but are understandable, their needs real. No one dies without some semblance of dignity, without our tasting the loss.

At the film’s center is, of course, a baby. Unbelievably, Cuaron does not exploit the presence of this little creature. Unbelievably, because I can only imagine what Spielberg would have done with this–everyone would be googy-eyed over the bairn, and it would have been saccharine of the worst order.

Children of Men is a perfectly realized dystopia. It is about the future, the past, and especially the present. Babies have stopped being born, and for all we know, they could have just decided not to be born in this horrible world of ours. People dress the same, they drive similar cars, they love and hate the same, even, save for the oppressive fact that life as they know it will end in fifty-odd years. And yet, in spite of the wreckage we see, in spite of the violence and the sad fate of most everyone we care about onscreen–or, perhaps, because of all this–Children of Men is the most hopeful film in years. Like holding a baby, it is about the future, it is about the sweet living, squirming present, and it is a solace from the aching troubles of the world.

Die Buchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), 1929. Directed by G. W. Pabst, written by Pabst, Joseph Fleisler, Ladislaus Vajda and Frank Wedekind. Starring (and how!) Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Alice Roberts and Gustav Diessl.

Now available in a handsome DVD from The Criterion Collection.

She was a girl from Cherryvale, Kansas, that Louise Brooks. Beautiful, just beautiful. Look at her face: that’s a look that spans the ages, my friend. Girls from the 20s, girls from the 40s, girls from the 60s, 70s, 80s… well, they lose their lustre over the years. Some look plain silly. Not Brooks. Famous for that shiny black hair, but it was her smile, that smile that just melts your heart. Innocent, really innocent. I guess in real life, she was a joy, a headstrong, opinionated joy. So many men and women hated her, but those who adored her, well… My God, I’d say she was an angel, but, the way she lived, fire and sex. Maybe she was a devil. If she’s the devil I’ll take hell.

I first saw Pandora’s Box at some sort of college get together. I was mopping floors. This is what I did to keep the pen alive, I used to say. Janitor at night, tried to write in the day. Best work I was able to land were some lousy football stories about distant high school heroes. Worthless stuff, absolutely worthless.

I thought I was just a normal guy, you know? A man with dreams, a bit cultured, maybe, someone who could see and appreciate good movies and plays and music. Definitely not an obsessive. In fact, I used to laugh about those movie buffs and comic book nerds, anyone that had a passion that turned them into glassy-eyed, Dorito-eating munchkins. They used to have this University film club, and those fellows would come out of their parent’s basements to go all starry eyed over Woman in the Dunes or one of those dull Bergman epics.

One evening, they decided to show Pandora’s Box. I’ll never forget seeing the poster, and thinking, hmmm, she’s cute. I just figured it was something along the line of Cabaret, some weird movie from the 70s trying to replicate the past, make some statement about Vietnam or Watergate.

The movie begins, with some scratchy LP providing the music. I decided to take a break from waxing the halls, and I check into this seat. Figure I’ll take a nap. I’d been working my tail off, driving three hours to see one football team beat up another, coming home, writing my article for the shithole paper up north, then heading to the campus where I had the distinct pleasure to clean the floors of the learned. I settled in my seat to take a nap, thinking that when something big and bright goes on the screen, I’ll wake up, finish the job. That’s when I saw her.

My Lord, it starts right away. There she is, in that white dress, and that hair, that beautiful hair. She’s got a bottle tucked under her arm. Gin or something. There’s an old man there, with a big, silly moustache. He’s the meter reader, and she’s giving him some looks. And here’s the thing those foolish kids didn’t see: the girl wasn’t some harlot, some black widow luring poor men to their doom, no, my God, no. She was pure, in the sense that what she wanted was love. She would stare at these men, as if to acknowledge some kind of holiness in them, and then she would smile and just break your heart.

All this, in the first few minutes! I couldn’t stop watching. Lulu, as Brooks is called, is having a stormy relationship with this respected publisher, who’s got her cooped up like a bird in this apartment. Lulu is also followed around by this hideous old man, who pimped her as a child, who probably fucked the poor dear, who she, at one point, refers to as her father. There’s this brute of a man who follows the old man around, hoping to score something off Lulu. And then there’s the publisher’s handsome son, who loves her, and his friend, a woman, who is in love with this vision as well–she was, Louise liked to say, the first on-screen lesbian. Everyone wants to possess poor Lulu! And like a girl traipsing through the garden of Eden, she doesn’t see anything wrong with loving everyone.

Physical love, but it was still love. No matter how ugly the man–and some of those boys are ugly monkeys, wretched creatures, fiends of the gutter who just wanted to touch the heaven of Louise Brooks–she wanted to love them. To dance, to swoon, to be held.

That’s why I thought she was an angel.

There’s a murder in the movie. Louise holding a gun like it’s everything rotten in the world, and that’s true–guns are the antithesis of what she is, of love. She goes on the run with the son of the publisher, the son of the man she killed. Lulu is convicted, and then the men in the courtroom, locking arms, surround the girl and hasten her escape. In this city, in this courtroom, these men, beaten, ugly, full of tobacco and cheap liquor, well, for once in their miserable lives, they’re going to get near something beautiful, something angelic. And they help her flee.

But Lulu will not see a happy end. No, I’m wrong: she will finally fall in love, with Jack the Ripper of all people, dying at his hand. So perhaps she did find what she was looking for.

When I stumbled out of the auditorium, I was stunned, just stunned. I hated those students and film buffs then, talking, talking, talking, or laughing. I wanted to beat them over the head with my mop, tell them to be quiet. Upstairs, I worked in the blessed silence, with the lights off, only the warm glow of the exit signs to see if I was really even cleaning the damn floors. But it left me to my thoughts–of the girl from Cherryvale.

There was very little on video and DVD back then. Not much now. Amazingly, I bought an old projector, just to see if I could find some more pictures of hers. I made a trip to Rochester, New York, where she used to live, to the Eastman House, where many of her films are shown. It’s funny, you know, I’ve sort of lost my ability to write the garbage I used to write, so now all I can do is grunt labor. I flex my skills as an unpaid scribe on Louise Brooks sites, fan newsletters, etc. I consider myself the best of that lot, though that’s not saying much.

You’d probably say that I am a wreck. Look at me, though, I keep myself groomed, fit, and I do reckless things, because Louise would have liked that. I jump off railroad bridges into rivers, run shirtless in the winter, that sort of stuff, healthy, manly, I guess. She liked bold, confident men. But she never let them use her–she ran from Hollywood! Later, she became a writer. A girl who loved her solitude. Who loved to smile. Who loved to… well, to put it poetically, to love and be loved.

Men behave badly around her because it is her shining light that illuminates our depravity.

I try to keep a grip on this. I get out, go on dates, and no, I don’t think of Louise Brooks while I’m making love to another woman. You can’t make any money being an expert on her, and that’s not how I’d describe this feeling, this need to learn more about this lovely woman.

I take that back. I am not an expert, for who can really plumb those depths? No, I’m an admirer, a student, a gazer at the heaven of Louise Brooks. I know that I will never quite understand her.

Sometimes, in the late evenings, I wonder if I haven’t gone crazy. But then, I’m not hurting anyone. And I think of that smile, the back of her neck, her way of acting that seems to haunt every actress through history (look for it!), and I smile and am feeling good again. Louise did exactly what she wanted to in her life, from loving cheap stunt men who stabbed her in the back to ignoring the piles of money the big studios promised her. Just to dance, to keep her pride, to be in love.

She is beautiful. If there’s a heaven that is at all honest, she will be an angel. Again, that might be hell. I’m not certain.

Sweet Land, 2006. Written and directed by Ali Selim. Starring Elizabeth Reaser, Tim Guinee, Alan Cumming, John Heard, Alex Kingston, Ned Beatty, Lois Smith, Patrick Heusinger, and Stephen Pelinski.

Now showing at the Edina Cinema (and a few others around the Twin Cities).

Someday I’ll be wise and watch movies like Sweet Land when they actually arrive at our theaters, and not months later. Maybe I’ll even review them in good time, in the hopes that my meager words will convince someone to avoid such highbrow garbage like The Good German and turn to this little movie. For Sweet Land is an absolute joy. Just as a bite of fresh bread reminds us of flavor and the blessings of wheat, salt, water and heat, then Sweet Land reminds us, visually, what it is to fall slowly and deeply in love, of the power of friendship and community, of hard work and of the world that surrounds us. Amazingly, the filmmaker, Ali Salim, read Will Wheaton’s short story “A Gravestone Made of Wheat”, fell in love with it, but decided to make a real movie out of the tale, and not some narrated silver screen reenactment. He eschewed moving his production to a distant land, choosing instead to stay in the story’s locale, where his talented cast and crew could walk the farmlands of our flat state, their footsteps heavy with the rich mud. Selim has an eye for people who struggle and fall in love under dark, late-summer clouds, framed by stalks of dry corn. If you seek a picture to make you experience such emotions, if you are aching to encounter a work of art that will remind you of life and its abundant, though small, pleasures, if you’re hoping for movie that has all the surprise of an old picture falling from the family bible, then Sweet Land is your movie.

It is the story of a young woman, Inge (Elizabeth Reaser, just stellar), who comes to rural Minnesota to meet and marry Olaf (a handsome Tim Guinee), a Norwegian farmer. Unfortunately for the both of them, she cannot locate her immigration papers, and, even worse, is part German. This is especially troubling in the wake of World War I, and the community, mostly from Nordway, and with their uptight ways, dislike the German peoples, often wondering, aloud, if she’ll try to spread subversiveness, or even prostitution to their quiet hamlet.

The town pastor (John Heard) will not allow a wedding to take place; the girl will have to sleep at a friend of Olaf’s, Frandsen. Frandsen (Alan Cummings) is a friendly, child-like fellow, another farmer, saddled with debts, but wth the treasure of a lovely wife and nine fine children. Inge quickly grows tired of sleeping at Frandsen’s place, amongst his wife Brownie (Alex Kingston) and in a bed with the nine kids, sharing bathtubs and shoving feet out of her face each night in bed. So she steals away to live at Olaf’s house, walking across the midnight fields beneath buzzing Northern Lights to take a private bath in Olaf’s kitchen. After all, they would be betrothed were it not for the pesky preacher and the prejudices of the community. They agree that, in the interest of propriety, he’ll sleep in the barn while she takes his room. And makes him breakfast and strong coffee. Which gets the bees buzzing in the townsfolk’s collective bonnet.

There’s not much more than this in Sweet Land. For the Good Lord’s sake, it is an especial pleasure to see a film with great acting, beautiful photography, and strong sense of its story. Selim has tremendous confidence in both his story and his audience, avoiding beating us to death with excessive crane shots and a soundtrack to force us to feel. Moments of great gravity are left for us to figure out: Inge and Olaf clearing his many dozen acres of corn is shot with a simple camera style, the long, empty furrows reaching out to a distant horizon behind the two, who are nothing more than filthy and happy with their triumph. I shudder to think what a ‘greater’ director would do, say, Terrence Malick or Spielberg. Undoubtedly, one would drown us in sunsets, the other sugarcoat that scene with a John Williams score and an edgy camera (not to mention a boatload of sweet-faced urchins). Selim’s film moves patiently, building the subplots with the care of a farmer trying to coax his beans to grow in a hot summer, his characters flexing their personalities without distracting from the considerable tension. At times cliches spring up–there’s a subplot involving a banker busting a farmer’s land for a past-due mortgage–but the people in this film respond strangely, as people do, to these crises, looking irritated as twists of fate interrupt their lives and loves and concerns, and then moving on. History is present but doesn’t turn into a lecture–there’s a socialist, the first tractor, responses to the War to End All Wars, but in each instance they are skillfully weaved into a plot whose sole concern is to illuminate the lives of these fascinating people. Lovely.

Sweet Land is being touted locally and in Los Angeles, where it is filling theaters to the rafters. I was surrounded by eager patrons, most of whom were elderly, including a lady who couldn’t stop grunting and groaning at the action that unfolded, irritated, say, by the things a banker said, or someone’s inability to make a good cup of coffee. Sweet Land is a movie made by decent people for us decent people–a movie that does not patronize like local don Garrison Keillor and his “above average” Lutherans from Wobegon. Here, Selim chooses to allow struggles to define his characters, and if there’s a joke, they’re in on it as well. Where Keillor is cynical and distant, Selim is hopeful, real, and empathetic. Perhaps that is why its immigration message is so appealing to the Hispanics of Los Angeles, who are also seeing this film in droves. Sweet Land is specific to Minnesota, it is a story of farmers and Norwegians and Germans. But it is also the story of immigrants, the story of the struggle to make life work, and resonates to every one of us who has ever walked beneath a stormy sky, who has ever ached for a good dinner made by a loving hand, or has fallen into a frustrating love that might go unrequited for whatever circumstance. And with its close, of Olaf and Inge waltzing on a perfect summer’s day, you might just find yourself thanking your lucky stars for Sweet Land, for your own memories, and for the lovely magic of your friends, family, and the one you love. I ask you: What more do you want in a movie?

“I don’t quite get it–Apocalypto is about Iraq and George W.? When? Bush is cutting the heads off liberals? The Blue Man group? Jaguar Paw is Barack Obama? The Spaniards are the Islamic terrorists?

“If Gibson weren’t such an unholy square, I’d say he was smoking some pretty serious shit if that’s what you get out of that mess. I mean, holy living shit, you’re really putting a lot of meaning inside a guy getting his head cut off…”

…

“So I heard that Children of Men is about the future, man, when women can’t have babies, you know, but Clive Owen is this guy who figures out, by getting blitzed on this strawberry ganja, how to get preggers himself. So that’s what the title’s gigging on, you know, men having wombs, men having babies, and the whole freakin’ society goes gay, man. Shit, I don’t know who the hell would wanta see something like that…”

…

“Happy Feet. I’m telling you, what is it with these penguins? They’re ubiquitous. March of the Penguins, Madagascar, now this. And I guess Happy Feet’s as much of a polemic as An Inconvenient Truth. Maybe if Al Gore dressed up like a penguin, he’d be the President!”

…

“Yeah, I took Mom to see The Nativity Story. Who would have thought the life of Christ could be so boring!”

…

“That was so awesome! In Casino Royale, Bond plays Texas Hold ’em. I play Texas Hold ‘Em, man! And ‘member, ‘member when we were playing for a case the other night, and I won, man, and the guy betting, what’s his name, didn’t have the case or the money for the case, shit, that was just like that La Chiffon guy from the movie. Awesome! I’m like James Bond, man!”

…

“Don’t care if it’s the book, that awful old cartoon or this new movie–which isn’t so bad. Charlotte’s Web will make me cry and cry and cry, always and forever. And I’m so glad that there’s something in this life that still moves me enough to cry…”

…

“Jennifer Hudson deserves an Oscar for Dreamgirls. The girl is fat, and us fat girls need heroes with Oscars. She was beautiful, a beautiful fat girl, and what happens to her is awful, just because she’s fat. So she better win. I think that would be good for fat people.”

…

“No one understands Almodovar. That’s why his movies never make any money outside of New York. And I have to say that sometimes I see one of his movies when I’m not in Manhattan, and you know what, I really don’t get them. It’s like you gotta be in a big city, with the whores and gays and trannies to understand. This Midwestern city life just isn’t attuned to his stuff.”

…

“Good German. Good Shephard. Having seen both, I’ll tell you that I’m starting to wonder if a movie has the word ‘good’ in the title, it means exactly the opposite…”

…

“Rocky Balboa? Rocky Balboa? You want to have a nice dinner and see Rocky Balboa. Really? You know, maybe it’s time we should have a talk about where this relationship is going…”