Author: Peter Schilling

The Shop Around the Corner, 1940. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch; written by Miklos Laszlo, Samson Raphaelson, and Ben Hecht. Starring James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Frank Morgan, Felix Bressart, Joseph Schildkraut, and William Tracy.

Available at DVD stores, your public library, and hopefully in whatever paradise we’ll find in the afterlife…

Did Margaret Sullavan finally kill herself in 1960 because life would never match The Shop Around the Corner? Did Frank Morgan, Felix Bressart, Joe Schildkraut and William Tracy all succumb to the melancholy of life, unable to touch the magic of this sweet little film? Did they watch the movie in darkened rooms, alone, wondering to themselves about missed opportunities? Or did they sit with another, their faces silvered, holding hands and inching closer as the film rises to its inevitable, heartbreaking (and heartwarming) climax? Did Margaret wonder which of the many people who breezed through her life could have been the one to give her what we all seek? When we finish with this movie, when the videotape is rewinding or the DVD has ceased to spin, we have to ask ourselves: can life ever match The Shop Around the Corner? Keep looking for answers… and watch the movie.

For those of you who are sick and tired of the great It’s A Wonderful Life–which is an amazing film, in spite of its being bear-hugged by corporate bastards–you could do no better than finding a copy of The Shop Around the Corner, which, in my mind, is the greatest Christmas gift a filmmaker ever left the world. It is about what Christmas really means, and that doesn’t mean gifts or gatherings or even the reason for the season, H.R.H. Jesus Christ. It’s about love: which is really what the whole religion’s about anyway, isn’t it?

Director Ernst Lubitsch’s little world spins in Budapest during the depression, in a gift shop called Matuschek & Co., run by the grumpy Hugo Matuschek, played by the Wizard of Oz himself, Frank Morgan. The film begins as the employees gather on the sidewalk, waiting for the store to open. The setup is deceptively simple: there’s seething Alfred Krelik, captured by a young Jimmy Stewart, himself the greatest of the long-suffering men, already in a slow-boil, suffering from indigestion. There’s his cheapskate pal Hugo Pirovich (Felix Bressart, just fabulous), the irritable delivery-boy Pepe (William Tracy), and the louse Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut)–all actors who bring real moxie to their small roles, and make this little comedy run like a well-oiled music box.

Alfred Krelik’s got a sweet secret that he confides in his good friend Hugo: he’s engaged in writing and receiving beautiful love letters from an anonymous woman who makes his heart flutter and his soul snap in the wind like a kite up high. She is amazing, and she makes his humdrum world seem so worth living.

Now enter Klara Novak. Margaret Sullavan fills this role the way a gust of wind fills a tree and makes its leaves shudder, a girl with the wide eyes, quick to scowl and argue, a woman who can look so young when she’s happy, drained and aged when misery falls upon her. She speaks, as one critic says, “like singing in the snow”, and it’s intoxicating to soak in all the conflicting energy that flows from her, all these years later. Klara desperately needs a job. Alfred claims that Mr. Matuschek can’t afford her. Old man Matuschek disagrees (or rather, is tricked by the wily Klara into disagreeing and hiring her), and from then on Sullavan and Stewart are at odds, loathing one another, sniping, grousing, and unbeknownst to them, falling in love.

For Sullavan’s Klara also has a secret: she’s engaged in writing and receiving letters from an anonymous man whose words make her feel alive and her heart beat faster with every envelope, her soul flitting about like a light and living thing and not some rock upon which the world’s troubles can rest.

Of course, Stewart and Sullavan are the letter writers. Of course, nothing in the world could ever get these two cranks together. Of course, their mutual hatred is part of what will make them such a lovely couple at film’s end. In the meantime, Mr. Matuschek believes, correctly, that he is being cuckolded, and he believes, incorrectly, that it is his most trusting and loyal employee, Alfred Kralik. So Kralik loses his job on the same day that he discovers Klara is the one writing him the letters. That same night Mr. Matuschek tries to kill himself when he discovers his error, but is saved. Kralik and Klara meet in a hilarious scene in which he knows the truth but doesn’t let on. In the end, all is well: Alfred and Klara are together and deeply in love, Pepe the delivery-boy is finally a clerk, and Pirovich is together his wife, son and little baby. And Mr. Matuschek–lonely, wifeless, rejected three times for dinner from different employees–finally encourages the new boy, a young dope who doesn’t seem to have a lick of sense about him, to join him for a dinner of goose and cucumber salad on Christmas Eve. “Oh boy, Mr. Matuschek!” the kid says. Oh, boy, indeed.

And yet, The Shop Around the Corner is terrifying and fraught with anxiety. There is scene after scene of some of the most touching moments in film history: Klara reaching into her mailbox to look for a letter that is not there; Alfred happily looking to get the raise he deserves from Mr. Matuschek, the man he looks upon as his father, only to be fired (in a scene so damn real it makes your throat ache); Mr. Matuschek, realizing his error, walking amongst the sheet covered store, floating in sadness and looking like a ghost; the way that everyone goes from appearing alive to dead in a heartbeat–all because of love. Love between husband and wife, between fathers and sons, between friends. Love is the reason for the season to Ernst Lubitsch and the folks of The Shop Around the Corner. These people who argue and bicker and laugh behind each other’s backs, well, they love one another. And yet they are all so close to never seeing one another again: leaving the job, a letter lost, almost dying by your own hand… I cannot think of a film that so acutely observes, as David Thomson writes, “the fear of good people missing their chances”.

The laughter is intense in The Shop Around the Corner because the pain is equally so: you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that jumps so nimbly between both. The film contains, like all great stories, a lesson: Matuschek & Co. is your own home, it is the place you work, the bars you frequent, your community. Ignore these lessons at your peril.

As you watch this movie, think of those moments in your life when you might have missed your chance, or cling tightly to the one that you truly love. When Jimmy Stewart pins the red carnation to his lapel to show tragic Margaret Sullavan that it is he who is her true love, inch closer to that person, touch them, let those feelings overwhelm you in the silvery light of the screen, the multicolored hue of your Christmas lights. This is Christmas. And laugh, a bit nervously perhaps, just to release the tension. Each one of us can look back at moments when a different drive, a different movie, a different step would have altered the happiness in our lives… or just the opposite, given us what we so desperately long for. If you’re lucky, you have found the red carnation on each other’s lapel, and Christmas has meaning. I wonder: had Ms. Sullavan?

Volver, 2006. Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar. Starring Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, Chus Lampreave, Antonio de la Torre, and Carlos Blanco.

Now showing at the Edina Cinema.

As a strong, hot wind rages in a La Mancha graveyard, as groups of determined women scrub and brush down the marble headstones of the men who have proceeded them in death. The women have their hair pulled back, their skirts rustle in the harsh, hot winds of La Mancha and they work, work, work, struggling to keep the dust off the headstones, which is a task of almost hilarious futility for all the wind that rages through the countryside. The men are at rest, enjoying what Borges described as sleep and indifference. Alive, the women carry on, laughing, crying, haunting, farting… and carrying the weight of this miraculous world on their shoulders. This is Almodovar’s world.

Volver is the latest film by perhaps our greatest living filmmaker, and though it’s a slight movie by his lofty standards, lacking perhaps the intensity and surprise of classics like Talk to Her, it is nonetheless a supreme entertainment. Ostensibly a murder mystery, an homage to Hitchcock (with a score that reminds us of Bernard Herriman) and Mildred Pierce had it been really a picture about women (and not eventually dismissive of strong women), Volver is like many of Almodovar’s films–informed by movies, by art design, by color, by theater, but most of all, and most importantly, by the torrent of emotion that grips each and every character and undoubtedly the director himself. Volver is melodrama, but it is never turgid. Volver flatters its female characters (some of whom are murderers), relies on some bathroom humor, gives us great bursts of bright color, and suggests, most prominently, that murder and incest take a backseat to the vicissitudes of friendship and family. It is one of the best films of the year, and a movie whose technical accomplishments, sharp writing, and spot-on acting would have made a lesser director shoot to the front of film magazines and art-house accolades in an instant. As it is, since we’ve become accustomed to Pedro’s work, Volver is likely to vanish from theaters in a few weeks, forgotten for the doggrel that takes up space and counts as decent filmmaking.

The plot is as typically bizarre as anything that springs from the mind of Almodovar: three years prior, a house fire killed the mother and father of Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and Soledad (Lola Duenas). Their parents were a supposedly happy couple who were locked in a loving embrace as the flames devoured them. After polishing their folks’ headstone, the girls, with Raimunda’s daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) in tow, go to visit their addled aunt, sister of the deceased woman. They discover that this poor lady believes that she is being visited on occasion by the ghost of their dead mother. A childhood friend, Augustina (Blanca Portillo) whose mother disappeared on the same day, lives across the street and attests to the hauntings. Returning to Madrid, Raimunda and Paula run afoul of the husband, a drunken, masturbating soul who tries to screw his daughter one night in the kitchen. The girl responds by driving a knife into chest, killing him. Like Mildred Pierce before her, Raimunda will not allow her daughter to hang for this crime–instead, she cleans up, hides the body in a freezer (later to be buried on the riverside with the help of a local whore), and opens her own restaurant.

Ignoring its deeper meanings, Volver is, above all, a blast. Its plot twists are pure Almodovar, nearly ridiculous events that are at once shocking and hilarious, like the murder punctuated by Cruz having to tuck her husband’s cock back into his pants, or explaining away a smudge of blood on her neck to a male neighbor as ‘female troubles’. Indeed. Kisses are amplified into loud smooches, tears flow like the mojitos Raimunda serves at the restaurant, memories are shared with wide-eyed glee, and in no time we find ourselves caught in the friendships of these women, hoping for their emotional success–even if it means getting away with murder. Almodovar is on record that he consider’s Cruz’ bustline to be the greatest in the world and films this treasure with as if it were the most beautiful sculpture in Europe–a wonderful concession for a gay man to give to his heterosexual audience members. Little scenes stand out–the sisters sitting opposite their cancer-stricken friend, offering them pot while the daughter lounges on a chair, and the mise-en-scene is startling for its beauty. At their Aunt’s funeral, Soledad and Augustina are the ‘primary mourners’ and walk into a room and are converged upon by fan-fluttering ladies dressed in black, shot from above, like moths attracted to a loving flame.

There are murders and incest here, but unlike, say, Hitchcock and Pierce, Almodovar is intrigued only by the way these women survive such turmoils. And in how they learn to forgive and move on. Ultimately, Volver–Spanish for ‘The Return’–is a film of forgiveness. Pedro has returned to the La Mancha that rejected him, his actress Carmen Maura has returned to his loving fold after a notable split many years ago, and the characters have returned to caring for the people who have hurt them, from the mother to even the man who is murdered, carefully buried in a spot that he once loved.

There has been a number of critical backlash against Almodovar’s seeming disregard for men in his films, especially here, and yet I can’t help but wonder what the fuss is all about. This is a film about women, just as Apocalypto or Flags of Our Fathers are about men. Penelope Cruz’ tough stance against the murder of her husband is little different than Apocalypto’s Jaguar Paw’s fighting to return to his wife, who isn’t anything more than a womb trapped in a hole in the ground.

But Almodovar’s intense respect for his characters makes this film shine brighter and with more joy than anything I’ve seen this year. From the senile, beautiful old Aunt that he lovingly frames behind shiny glasses, to the dignity of her friends, including a whore, not with a heart of gold but who is interested in her neighbor’s life and seeks to get ahead herself, honestly and with dignity. This, in spite of a plot whose inner workings hinge on incest, murder, lying, and all the other bittersweet confections in Almodovar’s chocolate box. In the end, however, mothers and daughters fight and forgive, and the ghost is a creature of nearly unbearable kindness. Volver is a beauty, a film that wears its kindness proudly on its sleeve.

The best and worst films of 2006.

We critics like to play our little games at the end of every year, whereby we bestow certain movies the gift of being shortlisted as the best (or worst) of that particular year. Of course, this is always a personal choice, influenced by the tastes of the writer, but written as if part of a great canon that will be taught in hallowed halls for years to come. Usually, we like to slip something in that comes as a ‘surprise’–in my case, perhaps, that would be Slither–as if to indicate we’re ahead of the curve in some respects. I can’t speak for other critics, but I imagine everyone wishes they could have recognized, say, Blade Runner as the classic that it would turn out to be, or like Pauline Kael, see the new Bonnie and Clyde in 13 Tzameti. It’s a sincere hope of mine that something I’ve pegged as a best of will settle, like a leaf on the soft mud, and harden into something that will be studied in years to come.

But it’s certain scenes in a picture, in conjunction with a feeling, or a moment of sublimity, that helps to make a film endure. I’ve chosen to list the films that moved me this year, remembering certain parts, certain responses I overheard, or my own particular feelings when confronted with an arresting image: a subtle gesture, a breast exposed, some gore, a reaction on a character’s face to witnessed gore, the irritable grunt behind me to something that is not quite satisfactory. If you’re still reading this site after this year, you know that this has been a personal journey, watching these movies. This is what I encountered in the dark over the last year, the best in movies in 2006, in somewhat chronological order. (The worst are at the very bottom):

The World’s Fastest Indian–fun film that prompted my neighbor, an elderly gent obsessed with making a steam-powered motorcycle, and a pal who is in love with engines himself, to tear up over Anthony Hopkins’ small victories.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada–Tommy Lee Jones’ melacholy western, which seems to be all they make anymore, but an exciting film with a strong ensemble cast…

Eight Below starring the critically beleaguered Paul Walker, an actor whose range is probably as limited as a hermit crab’s, reacting to the abandonment of his dogs as if they were really his…

The Monster of Phantom Lake is a local black and white b-grade movie that’s lots of fun, and is usually screened with its director and producer in tow. Also, I sat next to one of the pretty stars, dressed to a ‘T’…

Slither features zombies, space aliens shooting spikes into people’s guts, a guy pumping baby slugs into a white-trash woman, slugs that burrow into people’s brain’s through their mouths, no nudity, lots of gore, and healthy lack of respect for anything except the genre…

In The Bridge, one of the Walker’s Marshall Plan films, a pair of soldiers waltz together on a tarmac to the music in a teddy bear, one of the most striking moments I saw this year…

Don’t Come Knocking is as beautiful as a paint truck colliding with an ice cream vendor. This colorful mess was written by both Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard, who penned it in Shepard’s remote Minnesota cabin, which eventually was taken over by Japanese beetles. Some great music in this movie that will probably never end up in a soundtrack…

Brick suggests that the noirest of all worlds in America today is the local high school. What kid wouldn’t want to have been a dork shamus like Joseph Gordon-Levitt…

L’Enfant, the relentlessly bleak Palme D’or winner by the Dardenne Brothers, took a perfectly melancholy morning, a cold, rainy morning, and left me thinking, holy shit, there but for the grace of God go I…

United 93 transcended Rush Limbaugh’s blowhard urgency and relived the horrors of September 11, without being a polemic. Marvel at Ben Sliney, playing himself, who, at one moment, looks to a screen filled with literally thousands of little dots representing airbound planes and taking the leap to ground them…

The Proposition is a western from Australia about flies. The damned flies crawl over everything, sticking to the sweat on a man’s brow, his back, and tickle the lips and ears of every filthy, compromised man. This vision of hell was unjustly overlooked, it’s violence more intense and real than anything Mel Gibson has ever accomplished. With the great Ray Winstone in a performance that should not be soon forgotten (but has been forgotten already, for the most part)…

The Da Vinci Code is unquestionably the best comedy of the year, with the best line: “I’ve got to get to a library!”. With its seething albino monk (a performance as great as anything from Monty Python), snarling Frenchies, lengthy explanations of Jesus’s progeny, piles of riotous backstory, and Hanks as a long-haired professor, there’s no better comedy than this…

Drawing Restraint 9 is a pointless, shallow, yet hilarious film involving Vaseline sculpture and sake toasting whalers…

Water is a classical story of a young girl, widowed at age eight, who finds herself in an ashram, to live the rest of her life as a mourner. The ashram is something out of Dickens–poor, each character clinging to dreams, the most beautiful prostituted out to keep the ashram afloat (and to keep the head woman in her eats). Beautifully shot, acted with verve by all the women, Water is another film that is ignored–and if it were made in the U.S. would have been an Oscar contender…

Scoop is certainly one of Woody Allen’s lesser films, but don’t tell that to the audience I encountered–charmed by Scarlett Johansson and her luscious boobs (as Allen undoubtedly was) and by the old man’s Catskills shtick, Scoop was a blast, a film I hope never to see again, as the joy I encountered was lightning in a bottle, and will never be recaptured…

Cache is a small, quiet film, lacking a score, and seems, at times, static. But, good God, there’s no movie I’ve seen this year (or in my memory) that is so disturbing. About terrorism, about our place in the world, about the secrets we’re all guilty of hiding. I saw it in Saudi with a 12 year old who couldn’t keep his eyes off it–this is a kid with the usual 12 year old tastes, who’d been enjoying the new Pink Panther over and over until Cache came on–and had to leave at the one scene of extreme violence. Perfect for an American in Saudi, but nothing that helped me to sleep on a sleepless vacation…

Nothing is resolved in Richard Linklater’s cynical duo, A Scanner Darkly and Fast Food Nation, two nearly classic American films whose studio hadn’t a clue as to how to market them. Both movies vanished, lost now to the afterlife of DVD and, hopefully, the imaginations of filmgoers uninterested in palliatives for their spiritual and political questions. With Altman dead, will anyone recognize Linklater as the successor–and, often, superior–to that acclaimed filmmaker? He’s better with his actors, trusts his audience (which Altman never did), and doesn’t shy away from hard endings…

Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo never found its audience, in part because it is a severely uneven film, at times a powerful indictment of conditions at Guantanamo (and the conditions) that brought poor souls to Guantanamo. But the scenes of the three men–the real people–who endured these years, is worth watching, their testimony and good manners reflecting their deep faith…

Army of Shadows, that existential French resistance noir masterpiece, finally hit U.S. shores after thirty some years of languishing in some French warehouse. Watch for the big, black cloud of nothingness that envelopes the protagonist, the meaninglessness that’s more acutely threatening than the Nazis themselves…

Little Miss Sunshine is a fun movie, uneven and cliched, but boasting one of the best ensembles this year. “You’re not speaking because of Friedrich Nietzsche?” asks Steve Carell, who plays the #1 Proust scholar in the United States is one gem; every scene with Alan Arkin and Abigail Breslin is also to be cherished…

The Descent dumps you into dripping caves with white faced ghoulies, a horror flick with just enough intelligence and economy to make it a midnight staple…

The Science of Sleep. Oh, beloved Science of Sleep. Do not see this film alone. Watch it locked in the arms of someone you love and want to make love to, as it provokes your laughter, strengthens your soul, riles up your loins, and deepens your faith in other people and in movies that make you feel alive. Michael Gondry loves you and wants to people the planet with children borne from the love that his movie has made…

Hollywoodland is a near-classic noir, filled with weirdos and shot in a sun-bleached land, but was upended by its weakness for backstory. However, in making the thing a real mystery, in which a man’s murder or suicide is not the point–the point is that he’s lost his soul–gives the film a subtle grace…

Dead Man’s Shoes is a small British film that never managed to get into theatres. It’s a B-Movie to be compared with Ulmer’s Detour: gritty, violent, and with its finger on the pulse of those lousy good-for-nothing little towns that exist here and in Britain…

Skid Row is the best film I’ve seen this year, part of Phil Harder’s showing of found footage that he’s collected and curated over the years, a handmade film of tremendous beauty, by the King of Skid Row, Johnny Rex. Mr. Rex filmed his charges, drunk, fighting, dancing, smiling and toasting the camera, all of this in glorious color and narrated by the King himself…

Flags of Our Fathers, the first part of Clint Eastwood’s two-part Iwo Jima series, is about what it really means to be a soldier, one of the very few films that can ever make that claim. It’s closing, with the boy soldiers swimming in the sea after a grueling battle, is as poignant as anything ever shot in a war movie…

Infamous got screwed. This wonderful and exciting picture was the second of the Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood films and far superior to the first. Toby Jones deserves the Oscar for being the wind-up toy that was Truman, but he’ll be lucky if he gets his paper nomination…

The Last King of Scotland gave us a rollicking first half and Forest Whitaker’s whacking take on Idi Amin–part Godfather, part Charlie Parker, pure evil and entertaining all the way…

For Your Consideration had a few dozen hilarious gags, gave us Parker Posey and Jane Lynch, kept the audience buckled over, but was strangely forgettable…

Jesus Christ, 13 Tzameti is the movie that every young filmmaker should study. Cheap black and white to create a haunting world of betrayal and distrust, the look of fear on the face of the protagonist as a gun is cocked to his head, a puff of smoke rising from a forehead, and a simple plot that will grind down your molars to stubs…

Jamestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple is a powerful documentary, culling together some amazing footage and heartbreaking interviews, including an elderly woman, crying and mourning the loss of heaven. The film does not defend Jones, but nor does it damn his followers as kooks; rather, they are beautiful people seeking a better world…

Volver is certainly one of Almodovar’s lesser films, but one of his minor masterpieces would validate the career of a hundred filmmakers. A film of considerable beauty, referencing Hitchcock, Capra, and Mildred Pierce, Volver makes the bold suggestion that the melodrama of those films is not as important as the flutterings of a human heart…

When I’m damned to hell, these will be the films playing in the Beezlebub Cineplex, over and over with only diet Sprite and unbuttered popcorn:

Friends With Money–hateful, shallow film about shitty people.
Kinky Boots–boring, unsexy Full Monty rip-off.
The Notorious Bettie Page–I walked out of this dull, zombified flick that hadn’t a clue about its subject.
Down in the Valley–incomprehensible art-house, Oscar begging-flick with Ed Norton as cute Travis Bickle like character who is loved by those he shoots in the stomach.
Ask the Dust–a part of Robert Towne’s What The Fuck Was I Thinking series, a pointless adaptation of one of the best novels ever written about So. California. Starring a pair of hardbodies in Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, who play unattractive bums.
Mission: Impossible III and Superman Returns–To hell with the people who made these dull corporate time-wasters.
The Illusionist–decidedly unmagical film with Ed Norton trying again to get an Oscar nomination. Manages to make Paul Giamatti look awful.
Talladega Nights–Gotta have that NASCAR money, so this movie can’t cut to the bone, instead making its few funny jokes ramble on and on and on. Wastes its female comedians shamelessly.
Al Franken: God Spoke and An Inconvenient Truth–two lengthy political advertisements that took up space at the art-houses (space that could have been better used Dead Man’s Shoes or 13 Tzameti). Save this crap for the conventions, or PBS…
Factotum–Matt Dillon and Marisa Tomei as bums? Please…
World Trade Center–a real life Towering Inferno, only twice as dull.
Death of a President–Could have killed this president from utter boredom.
The Departed–marks the sad end to the Scorsese who used to take chances, used to cast small, decent actors in key roles (like, say, Ray Winstone over Jack Nicholson), and who used to know how to make his extravaganzas exciting.
Borat–Hateful, predicatble, and uncourageous film about how stupid certain people (frat boys, Southerners) can be. Sacha Baron Cohen seems like nothing more than an asshole.
Casino Royale–The best Bond in years–as crappy as the 70s Bonds, is a half an hour longer, and takes itself so much more seriously… which is something you should never do with James Fucking Bond.

Apocalypto, 2006. Directed by Mel Gibson, written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia. Starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Bird, Carlos Emilio Baez, Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Taracena, Rodolfo Palacios, Fernando Hernandez Perez, and Maria Isidra Hoil. Among many others…

Now showing in theaters around town.

From the sermons of street critic Guy Fresno:

Roll up, roll up! The end is nigh! Behold before you the coming Apocalypto, ladies and gennulmen! Witness the toothy Mayans! Bold and bloody sacrifice! Hearts torn from chests–still beating! Young children sewing up gashes with fire ants! Underwater birth! Roll up, roll up for a spectacle like you’ve never seen before! Unless you’ve seen Southern Comfort, Deliverance, any number of John Ford and lesser westerns, Predator, or… well, anyway, Apocalypto is P. T. Barnum meets D. W. Griffith meets Mad Max! A time is guaranteed for all!

And, behold, innocents, Mr. Mel isn’t merely interested in a night’s entertainment! No, siree, Goodman Gibson is a prophet as well! Yes, Apocalypto, is as arresting as Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire, is nearly as bloated, and is twice as alarmed about the current path our country is taking. Mel takes us on a journey into the deepest parts of the jungle, except that the jungle is the city and the forest is the land of Nod.

Apocalypto is the story of a band of gentle wandering warriors who love to fuck their wives and kill pigs with big huge sticks. The village is a place of idyll, where everyone laughs at the impotent and they pause every now and again to make somber speeches about the nature of fear and responsibility. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is the hero, he’s got a wife named Seven (Dalia Hernandez), a huggable little boy and a baby on the way. Suddenly, the village is invaded by a band of warriors from the city, all tattooed and decked out in skulls, gritting their teeth and scowling like city folk do. They burn the village, rape the women, and tie everyone up to a pole to sell in the big city.

Except for Seven and the boy. Jaguar Paw lowered them into a dry cenote to hide, with the promise that he will return. Of course, he’s carted off to the city. So there’s your plot.

In the meantime, we get a treacherous ride through the wilderness. Fighting a stream. Almost falling off a cliff. Meeting a diseased young girl who augurs the end of times. Finally, our band of ragtag villages sees the hopelessly immoral city-dwellers, get painted blue, and then hauled up to the top of a Mayan pyramid, where they get their hearts carved out, their heads hacked off, and their bodies tossed down steps and into the screaming crowds below.

Awesome, huh? People, you may recall that Gibbson brought us The Passion of the Christ, a heartwarming and appetite-reducing film about the sufferer in all of us. For Gibson’s never content just to show you some guy’s eyes widening as he stares at his own heart, still beating and bloody… no, he’s trying to teach us a lesson in our story. And the lesson is this: there’s no fucking way in hell you can ever make an independent film in Hollywood, not without some serious dough.

Look, look, look. You there, you think you’re gonna write a screenplay and make that thing fly? Think again. Unless you can weasel your way into Sundance, fool, then you ain’t goin’ nowhere. For it’s clear in Apocalypto that the evil Mayans represent the studio heads, foolish souls, with their strange religion and warlike ways, sitting atop the citadel, pulling out the creative soul (hearts) and intelligence (heads) from artists like Gibson and hurling them into the masses below. If the studio heads want art, they don’t look to the villagers and their peaceful, religious ways, but to the freaks in the city, chattering and doing their drugs. Hell, it’s the guys like Gibson, the Jaguar Paws, that get sacrificed!

But Jaguar Paw is able to escape thanks to a blessing from God (in the form of an eclipse, and thank you Mark Twain). Like Gibson borrowing the story of Christ to cement his ability to make epics like Apocalypto, so Jaguar Paw is able to use a blip in the sky to piggyback on people’s shaky faith, and run free. And he gets to suffer, man! Mr. Paw ends up being impaled twice before he can save his wife. In the meantime, he’s able to lure a bunch of the nasties into the jungle, where he lives in harmony and can kill them with snakes, frogs, sliding into second base, and disemboweling with a boar-killing apparatus that Walter Hill invented long ago.

But it’s OK that the movie’s derivative, people! We all borrow from the prophets that walked before us!

In the end, poor Jaguar Paw has collapsed on a beach, and then, there, in the galleons that have emerged from the foggy sea, we see the influence of Europe, Godless Europe! on the American Film Industry. No, that one doesn’t really make sense, but perhaps Gibson’s trying to test our faith. No one ever the seers are crystal clear.

Brothers and sisters, listen to the message of the prophet! This is independent film, people, the money came right out of Mel’s pocket, and much of that came from you fundies who went in droves to see Christ’s flayed into jerky strips. Behold the black jaguar, chewing off the face of whatever studio films happen to open opposite Apocalypto! Marvel at the baby, the birth of honest filmmaking, in purifying water! Be amazed at the nearly 3-D effects of arrows and spears shooting through the thick jungles, the intellectuals unable to reach the target of the honest souls, as Gibson has done!

Then again, maybe the thing’s just as insane as the looney shouting at you in front of a movie theater.

The Late Show, 1977. Written and directed by Robert Benton. Starring Art Carney, Lily Tomlin, the great character actor Bill Macy, Eugene Roche, Joanna Cassidy, and John Considine.

Who’s making noir anymore? Foreigners, maybe, immigrants from a decaying Russia come to France to ply their trade, or Austrians eager to shake us by the nape of the neck, make us tremble in our sleep. But who gives us the seediness that hides just beneath our well-tended lawns? Or the menace that lurks in every 9-to-5er, the soul who’s tired of the same grift, day after day, and thinks, maybe I ought to try one stab at the good life? Over the years there’s been some little noirs that have come our way, things like Fargo and A Simple Plan, clean and well-lit and brilliantly acted, but they aren’t messy enough, aren’t real. Noir, at its best, got the weariness, the ugliness, the migraine grind of the day. It got that you had to eat, and often you didn’t eat well.

Look at The Late Show. I don’t know how, because this little treasure isn’t available at most Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos. The library doesn’t own it, and neither does Cinema Revolution, though they should. It’ll never play in a theater–we don’t have a repertory theater anyway, and even if we did, this is the last film they’d show. The Late Show is noir. Dark edges and a complex plot whose job it is to obfuscate life for the poor saps who have to endure its vicissitudes. Like 70s films it is a grungy admixture of the goofy, trippy, melancholy, the horrifying and the sad, and doesn’t shirk from the minutiae of life. Our hero does his laundry, has problems with ulcers, gulps Alka Seltzer, and, like the other characters, wonders just what the hell is going on in the world. And why everyone has to make it so damned complex.

Even better: it is about how noir has altered life, how Raymond Chandler and Co. have made Los Angeles in their own image, and, good or bad, we cannot escape.

Art Carney plays Ira Wells, a once great detective and now semi-retired curmudgeon living in a boarding house in L.A. One evening, while watching garbage on TV, his partner stops by with a bullet in his gut, and dies on the bed. At his pal’s funeral, he’s approached by Charlie Hatter (Bill Macy), a grifter friend of Ira’s, who’s there to introduce old Ira to Margo Sperling (Lily Tomlin), a true space cadet, who needs someone to track down her kidnapped cat. Ira has no interest in hunting down lost felines, but of course he gets wrapped up in the case, which eventually involves stolen stamps, affairs, fencing, porno houses, and murder.

Carney is an old man, aching, waddling down the street to wash his clothes in a dumpy launderette, trying to make ends meet. His friend, Charlie, has a seedy office where he wears the hats of talent agent, realtor, detective… anything that’ll land him a lousy buck or two. And Margo is a talent agent, seamstress, one-time actress, the usual L.A. kook. The Los Angeles they live in cannot quite escape its past. The ghosts of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, wander the streets and the empty homes, infusing the characters conversations, their movements, their dreams.

The movie is funny and has its rough spots: a few too many car chases, a couple of clunky spots of dialogue. But its humor we’re all familiar with, if we’ve ever tried to scrape out a living doing something we don’t like, working the telemarketing lines, knocking on doors, anything with sales. We’re all looking for the grift that’ll make us respectable. Ira stayed respectable for 31 years and all he’s got to show for it is a bad gut and some pennies in the bank. In the end, we’ll all be dead, just a plot in one of the massive graveyards that add some greenery to the city. Maybe that’s the point: be a gumshoe, be a grifter, turn the good life upside down because that’s what life’s all about. Chaos. Whatever happens, in the end, we all find peace.

The Nativity Story and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple.

The Nativity Story, 2006. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, written by Mike Rich. Starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub, Ciaran Hinds, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Stanley Townsend, Alexander Siddig, Joe Pesci look-alike Nadim Sawalha, Eriq Ebouaney, Stefan Kalipha, and Farida Ouchani.

Now showing in theaters around town.

In Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story, there is a moment where Mary, played by the normally combative Keisha Castle-Hughes, receives a vision from an angel that looks, as my colleague pointed out, like something from Xanadu. This heavenly creature has long flowing curls and radiates with the glow of Olivia Newton-John magic, and kindly tells Mary that she’s going to be impregnated with the son of God. But Mary doesn’t seem altogether baffled; she does not seem angry; she doesn’t question whether the wine has gone to her head, whether this is a demon, anything–she merely accepts that this is an angel, and she’s about to become the Virgin Mary. All in a day’s labor, I guess.

The Nativity Story is a visually arresting film and is chock full of very good and very decent actors from varying cultures and races (Hardwicke and Co. should be lauded for avoiding a Charleton Heston or Jim Caviezel in any of the roles). It is also stultifying, a film whose tedium grates after about an hour, and one whose spiritual power can almost be matched by a Christmas card at your local Hallmark store.

The story is the right from your Bible-school: Herod rules Israel with an iron fist, taxing the living hell out of the Jews, taking their land and their children if the poor folks fail to pay their tariffs. Hardwicke gives us an excessively idyllic scenario and, as is the tradition in Hollywood today, ladles on the verisimilitude: there are scenes of winemaking, of cheesemaking, of housemaking, and etc. Mary is a happy, devout, and headstrong–her arranged marriage to Joseph (Oscar Isaac) gives her the serious grumps. According to Jewish law, the couple must wait one year before shacking up together and consummating their marriage.

Of course, it’s going to be one tough year. Mary will be out in the olive groves when our angel comes, and afterward, decides in the meantime to visit her aunt Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), an elderly lady who is bearing the future John the Baptist. Joseph is concerned that Mary won’t come back to him to start a family–he can tell that she’s displeased with an arranged marriage. But off she goes, and aunt and niece laugh and share prophecies and all is well… until Mary returns home, not a little pregnant.

The problem is that none of the characters seems overly troubled about any of these plot twists. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie in recent memory that so often explains its tension away through dialogue. “Mary, you could be stoned for this!” her father warns her upon her return, when she’s great with child. It’s important to hear this, because nothing we’ve seen suggests anything more than mere displeasure. Her family can only screw up its face at the news, Joseph ruminates for only a moment before deciding to accept her pregnancy, and the townsfolk who supposedly want to beat her to death simply turn their noses when she delivers cheese to their door.

The Nativity Story is clearly a response to the bloodletting of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, so much so that it seems almost as though the filmmakers also thought that excessive tension was to be avoided as well. It also appears as though the studios were busy eyeing the box-office take of The Passion, and trying to remind Hardwicke that Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ was a bomb–for the innocuousness of Nativity Story eventually devolves into a spectacle worthy of the 1950s religious epics. Herod, played by the normally brilliant Ciaran Hinds, does little more than gnash his teeth and make evil pronouncements, while his evildoers ride through villages in slo-mo while the holy people wail. When the three wise men–who, at this point, have been a trio of happy bickerers, carrying on as if they were on some kind of sitcom–arrive in Bethlehem, the star that shines down on the baby does so with the subtlety of a Hollywood arc lamp announcing a new strip club. Despite the so-called realism of the film, Joseph and Mary, despite sleeping outdoors, fighting rivers, and barely eating, look gorgeous in the manger, their hair perfect and clothes unstained.

Most tragically, though, is the question of faith. At one point, upon seeing the arc lamp illuminating the baby Jesus, one of the three wise men turns to another and says, “How is your faith now?” But faith in The Nativity Story is never questioned. From a business-perspective, it’s true that being as controversial as Last Temptation means nothing but bad press and miniscule box-office, but this movie seems almost intent to offend no one. Oddly enough, Castle-Hughes was well-nigh brilliant in Whale Rider, a similar role, really, as a girl who provokes and eventually transforms her community by being the next in a line of chiefs, who at that point have been all male. Her performance there was combative, confused, and touched with moments of humor and pathos. Her Mary is a cipher, a woman who seems to have more trouble accepting that her husband was chosen for her than God himself is going to impregnate her. Would it be too much to show her buckling at times under the yoke of this responsibility? Or to have the family infuriated, as opposed to simply appearing slightly irked? Or have the Jews so riven by the forces of Rome that they’ve become so entrenched in their faith that visits from angels have become commonplace? Or perhaps that Rome might appear too much like a current superpower, and the Jews too much like another devout culture moved by its religious beliefs to resist? If the filmmakers wanted to avoid all controversy, they succeeded. But even Mel Gibson courted controversy, and his movie, grotesque though it may be to some of us, will be watched by its faithful years from now. The Nativity Story seems almost afraid of its subject, unwilling or unable to touch even a modicum of the passions and beliefs of its time.

…

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, 2006. Directed by Stanley Nelson, written by Marcia Smith.

Showing for one week only at the Oak Street Cinema.

Most of us know the story of the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones, the man who led over 900 confused souls to their death by poisoning in Guyana in November 1978. For some of us, the images–of the dead, face down on the grass and holding one another–have haunted our consciousness for decades. I still have bad dreams every once in awhile, still recall the newscasts that conveyed the popping of the gunfire that killed a cameraman and a congressman, the bodies of young babies between their parents making me wonder what in God’s name could people do to one another, when they think they’re working in God’s name.

Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple is not, in cinematic terms, a great film. It is probably not a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen, although watching it on a cold night, huddled with dozens of other curious people, might make this intense film even more intense. The strength of Jonestown lies in its utter respect for its subjects and its expert weaving of interviews with the numerous footage at hand. Jones and his followers could be presented as freaks, as people who were somehow a part of the San Francisco hippie culture who took a serious nose-dive into insanity. I would guess that many people looked upon these folks in that manner–I did, until a New Yorker profile of Jones’ sons years ago changed my mind. Here, the director, Stanley Nelson, shoots his subjects with patience, and allows them to reveal, carefully, in their own time, just what brought them to Jones and kept them in his clutches. The pain that resonates from these subjects is palpable to the point of almost being too much to bear–by the end, it would take only the most hard-hearted and cynical person not to fall into a wealth of conflicted feeling and tremendous melancholy. We see a man who could not stop his wife and baby from drinking poison, but who could not drink it himself, and must live with this decision for the rest of his life. An addict for whom the Peoples Temple saved his life. And moments that seemed truly like bliss, where a group of kind and caring people tried their damndest to make this earth, this life, a place of considerable joy. The result is a moving film of a people sickened by what they saw going on in the world around them, and who were taken in by a man who was, at one point, moved by his faith, bent by paranoia, ruined by society, and by a hunger for control. And as one of the survivors breaks down and weeps, mourning that the notion of heaven, either here or in the afterlife, has left her completely, we are left with the chilling understanding that sometimes the reach for absolute faith can leave one tumbling into an abyss.

Casino Royale, 2006. Directed by Martin Campbell, written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and the ubiquitous Paul Haggis. Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Giancaro Giannini, Jeffrey Wright, Isaach De Bankole, and Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, who seems obliged to poke his ugly mug into all the big-budget movies.

There’s a moment in the opening of Casino Royale, when our hero, James Bond, is shown dispatching his very first victim in the sink of a public lavatory. Shot in black and white, the blacks as rich as India ink and the whites as glaring as a flash bulb, the scene is notable for its wretchedness, and an early signal that this isn’t Pierce Brosnan’s world anymore. Apparently, a double-0 agent must waste two enemies before reaching such exalted status. The aforementioned kill is shown in flashback, and now our hero, played by Daniel Craig, sits patiently in the office of his next victim, who assures him that the second kill is easier. Actually, he tries to assure Bond, but is blown through his chair by a single bullet before he can finish that sentence.

Of course, if Martin Campbell had any wit about him, this opening scene wouldn’t have been in monochrome, but in the sun-drenched technicolor of the 60s, taking us back to the real beginning. But no one has ever accused a Bond film of excessive imagination.

Casino Royale is supposedly a return to the old-style Bond, the “literate” Bond from Ian Fleming’s potboilers. As it stands, it is not a stretch to say it’s the best Bond in ages, though context is everything: there has literally not been a decent bond since Sean Connery flexed his golden torso in Thunderball, which itself was nothing but fluff. But the comparisons should end there, for Connery’s Bond was at least a product of its time, its politics somewhat reassuring to the zeitgeist of the 60s. The new Bond seems content to give us creaky imperialism, the usual idiotic women, gadgets that, in this world, now seem like nothing any third world country with a few bucks doesn’t own. Worse, Casino Royale has an overlong plot, ham-handed direction, and makes the especially tragic mistake of being, quite simply, in its second half, the most dull big-budget film of the year.

After the hideous credit sequence has run its course, we open with the usual gangbusters: Bond is sweating away his afternoon in some tropical locale, this time Uganda, watching a mongoose and a cobra fight to the death while a fire-scarred villain waits for his opportunity to make some shady deal. Soon, their cover is blown, and Bond races after the bad guy in a spectacular chase through a construction area… killing scores of innocent Ugandans, whose lives, considering their lack of close up, seem to be less worthwhile than the mongoose or snake. The bad guy is an amazing creature, possessed of the dexterity of a flying squirrel and Jackie Chan, leaping and pirouetting off girders, elevators, cranes, you name it. Finally, Bond chases him down, waltzes into an Embassy (from who knows where), shoots the villain down and razes the building.

What justifies such wanton behavior on the part of the British government? Apparently, this Scarface was a terrorist, which is enough for us. The new Bond tosses the ‘t’ word around with more aplomb than the Republicans before election day. Who the hell is this Ugandan guy? Instead of the story of a man who undoubtedly grew up living in abject poverty, who turned into a terrorist and somehow managed to morph into this gravity-defying creature, we get… James Bond. And how he learned to love martinis and lose his soul.

The story is the usual silliness: an uber-villain named Le Chiffre, who weeps blood, makes tons of money by arming the world’s terrorists. Somehow, it is suggested, he made a figurative killing off 9/11, apparently by unloading boxcutters at a low rate. Anyway, Le Chiffre’s latest plot was thwarted by Bond, in a chase scene whose best moments were stolen from The Road Warrior. Having lost his shirt, Le Chiffre must win back his money in a high-stakes Texas Hold ‘Em tournament in Montenegro. Bond is the best card player, so naturally he’s called upon to prevail. Along the way he meets the supposedly intelligent though regally daft Vesper Lynd, played by a beautiful woman named Eva Green, who is slathered under some of the worst makeup since Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Worse, Green is an actress with the range of a sock puppet, draining what little life there is from this film in every scene. Eventually, Bond beats Le Chiffre, is abducted and has his testicles whacked (literally), and finds a traitor in his midst.

The film is being called ‘dark’, in that Craig’s Bond can be seen brooding, is testy, then falls in love with Ms. Lynd, and has a supposedly grim ending that references Titanic, of all films. Of course, a decent filmmaker can use lighting and camera angles, set design and editing to suggest despair, so it’s difficult to feel the angst in a film so harshly lit and pedantically shot. The film takes its sweet time going anywhere, and then just when you begin to get bored, screenwriter Paul Haggis steps in to pour syrup on the audience. Bond falls in love, Bond loses girl, Bond becomes jaded. Two and a half hours later the film comes to a close, and you wander out stunned, wondering just when you’ll stop being fooled by the hype and watch something original for a change.

Earnestness is the raison d’etre of Casino Royale, which is a real shame, because there’s so much you could do to tweak this ridiculous scenario–from Britain’s always failed attempts at outdoing its American counterparts on the foreign policy front, to the fact that nowadays your average teenage hacker has better gadgets than Bond and Company. Not to mention the fact that maybe they could give Bond a woman who is a real foil. Perhaps a lesbian. Or perhaps Bond could be black.

God forbid this franchise should acknowledge the 21st century.

The old Bonds reassured us and gave us some needed confidence during a cold war that had everyone on the edge. We often forget that the first three Bonds were testaments to ingenuity–they were big moneymakers made on virtually no budget whatsoever. From Russia With Love could be considered the most literate, and even it had a sense of camp that was evident in its day. We can look now at the dopey blondes and brunettes that hung on Connery’s every smirk, but what do these silly women and their swinging bustline do for us today? Vesper Lynd isn’t fun or funny, and her barbs lack bite (and she certainly isn’t brainy). Above all, why should we give a rat’s ass about James Bond, about his development as a killer and a man, his learning not to trust people, or even about his dispatching villains, most of whom are from third-world countries? If Uganda’s the worst you can throw at us, you might as well resurrect S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

Judging from its box-office take last weekend, this series will be around for a long time, the machine pumping out these witless packages every two years. But if it’s nostalgia you want, rent the originals. If it’s action you want… I guess you could still rent the originals. See Casino Royale if you’re a Bond addict, if your DVD player is broken, or you’re stuck in a small town and it’s a choice between this and, say, Happy Feet. Or read the book. Your own imagination can certainly do no worse.