SHATTERED GLASS

The movie is going to be placed in a line of films about journalism and journalists that goes back to the beginning of talkies. The wise cracking reporter and cigar chomping editor were staple characters in the Thirties when reporters went to Hollywood to become screen writers. THE FRONT PAGE, Ben Hecht And Charles McArthur’s play and film (remade by Hawks as HIS GIRL FRIDAY) was a biting satirical take on cynical reporters who cruelly abuse anyone for a sensational story. Capra often used reporters as central characters, toughened idealists and evil publishers, manipulating a gullible mob (MEET JOHN DOE, MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, and IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT).

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN was a landmark film about journalists as heroes, doggedly chasing down the conspiracy behind Watergate that threatened to destroy our democracy. For a time, investigative journalists became stars, and ironically, SHATTERED GLASS is the extreme evolution of that fact.

Among the greatest horrors of life is the suspicion that we cannot discover the truth in our increasingly complex and data saturated world. We rely on institutions to develop systems to do it for us. The Law, Religion, The Family, Science, Education, Government, Art, Journalism — these are the central institutions we have designed to provide us with understanding of our world. Distrust in institutions leads to cynicism, rebellion, depression, anarchy.

A President cheats, lies and covers up; a writer plagiarizes; a priest, teacher or coach lusts for choir boys; parents are faithless; a historian invents sources, steals passages, invents a vita; a lawyer suborns perjury and the police plant evidence; an accountant cooks the books; a scientist fakes experiments; students cheat on exams. Each time the cost is enormous, the cost to trust and to the faith we must share in our institutions.

Of course no system is infallible. All of them break down and should not be trusted at face value. There have to be checks and balances. Each system must self-police, and each institution must check the others.

Insidious pressures are placed on the practitioners in each institution, pressures which militate against The Truth. The most insidious is the competition for attention. We live in a crowded society, in which we are forced to make a mark that separates us from others by showing excellence or at least “brilliance.” We claim to reward the best and the brightest.

Often in our world, the ability to amuse and to entertain are the elements that elevate one from the crowd because entertainment is the commodity that the audience in any field seems to value above all others. The most entertaining in any field will “succeed” because entertainment “sells.” Sensational entertainment sells the most. Therefore, each institution develops its stars that dazzle us with their special brilliance. But to become a star entertainer, it is tempting to cheat and that risks bending the truth until it shatters.

This movie tells the example of an institution in which it spun out of control. Steven Glass was a star writer for The New Republic, a political and cultural magazine that prides itself on being an influential speaker of The Truth. Its systems for vetting articles by its young, bright, competitive writers claimed to be the tightest in journalism. Fact-checking and close scrutiny by multiple editors were thought to insure authentication of its published stories. But the system was flawed.

it relied in its core on the assumption that no writer (especially one who appeared to be brilliant, self-effacing, charmingly nerdy, and sensitive) would make up a story out of whole cloth, and it assumed that if he possessed detailed notes which contained the quotes and sources he relied on, then the article would be okay.

What it ignored was that a person desperate for stardom would be able to mask his fabrications because his inventions were so entertaining, his affect is so believably charming, and his personality so seemingly brilliant and sincere, that his peers and superiors wanted just as desperately to believe him.

The story is told in a straightforward manner. Glass’s transgressions are revealed one by one as doubts begin to rise. The first doubt is generated, in ironic appropriateness, by a competing magazine, upset that Glass beat them to a story.

As they begin to find flaws, they see a chance for their own fame by exposing the fraud. Even here, the exposing writer on the scent jealously guards his story from colleagues eager to share the glory and fame that might result from the resulting exposé of a competing magazine’s errors. The film only hints at the danger that the truth will again be distorted and that this writer is no better or different from Glass.

It doesn’t happen here, due to the efforts of one character in the story, a hero in the traditional mold of movie heroes. The newly appointed editor of The New Republic, Charles Lane, played solemnly by Peter Sarsgaard, is an outsider in his office. He has replaced a charismatic figure, who was revered by the young staff writers and editors, including Glass. He is distant, serious, and as he pursues the truth, they see him as unsupportive of their friend and co-worker. He has to keep reminding them that the truth is what they are supposed to be pursuing.

An important subtext in the film is the issue of maturity. Glass in the person of actor Hayden Christenson, is a troubled young man. He is twenty-three, writing for a magazine that influences public policy. He has been rushed to stardom too soon. The balance of ambition and integrity that comes with slow development and acceptance of adult responsibility has been neglected.

Glass is not prepared for failure, so he has resorted to cheating. He needs to keep producing brilliant work. When he can’t, he makes it up. We recognize his kind. He was one of the very bright students, parents with high expectations; his brilliance is his key to acceptance and he must perpetuate it at all costs, even though deep down he knows he is a fraud. There is some of him in all of us.

THE DREAMERS

This recent Bernardo Bertolucci film (US theatrical release,, 2003) was an extraordinary experience for me. Felt as if I was watching something I could have lived in a dream. Hard to explain the why's. I didn’t have all of the precise experiences set forth, but felt that I could have, at least in fantasies. Has elements that are spooky, considering what I have been doing lately - reviewing my life, trying to recapture passions that once drove me. Spooky because the movie is filled with familiar references that moved me at a similar stage in my life. It is about things I used to value and now recall with fondness: love, movies, songs, politics, ideas, yearnings. It evokes the innocence of my youth and a time which was a turning point for my generation, when a breakthrough seemed possible, before the world cracked-up. There are conversations that I seem to recall having almost word for word.

Spooky and weird, because in the movie, two songs are played which I have been thinking of lately in completely different contexts: “La Mer” and “Je ne Regrette Rien.” When they played in this movie that I was feeling such a connection to, I was shocked, as if this movie was channeling some deja-vu moment for me.

It is about a naive young American student (played by Michael Pitt) who goes to Paris in 1968 to study French but ends up spending most of his time watching films at the Cinemateque Française. The French were very serious about film and politics, the New Wave in full bloom, and old American movies and pop culture values dominated thought, urged as a blueprint for the generation.

He becomes involved with a guy (Louis Garrel)and a girl (Eva Green) who are twins. The menage relationship is reminiscent of JULES AND JIM, and the three leads are even physically similar to the threesome in Truffault’s classic. They share a strange, erotic bond in an apartment while outside, the “Paris Spring” events occur - student demonstrations led by filmmakers become violent and spark a near revolution, all while these three are self-absorbed, indulging their passion, losing their innocence. It is a metaphor for what happened to us - through our sexual explorations, our search for identity apart from our parents. It is full of wise and funny insights to the pretentions of youth, the self-deception of innocence and passion. The erotic elements and “incestuous” teasing involved are vivid and multi-layered metaphors for the emotions of the time.

I watched it again with my 24 year old son, curious about his reaction to it. There was a certain uncomfortable silence as the story came to its highly charged erotic parts — a father watching such a movie with his son can’t really avoid the embarrassment of these issues. But in the end, he said he “liked” the film, and we watched both of the documentaries attached: the explanation of the political context and the “making of” trailer, which I think he enjoyed even more.

The movie inspired an argument between us which began about the New Wave. My son said he found films by Truffaut and Godard to be oddly “detached” and “unfeeling,” ironically less moving than the American movies of Hawks and Huston which they “quoted,” while still being just as “sentimental” (a word that has a pejorative connotation for us — as in Greg’s commentary about movies like THE MALTESE FALCON, which he argues is sentimental because of its adherence to “a code of honor” over self-indulgence).

I tried to explain that in the context of the time, the Italian Neo Realists and French New Wave movies that came to us in the late ‘50's and early ‘60's were shocking because of the newness and audacity of style and subject. The filmmakers had absorbed American anti-hero values in the B movies they watched, which were at odds with Hollywood’s product at the time, and synthesized the lessons into a new form. The stories and characters were at the fringes of society, non-conforming, borderline criminal, risk-taking, sarcastic, freeing themselves from social norms.

The next morning I went online and read a number of reviews of the movie. I found that the critics of my own age, like Ebert, treasured the movie as nostalgia, while the younger critics were hung up on the explicit sex, and the flawed naivete of the characters. One was critical that Bertolucci “copped out” about the implicit homosexual and incestuous elements. Another was irked that the characters were pretentious and self-centered, called them “psychotic.”

It strikes me that young viewers are embarrassed at watching a movie about their parents’ youthful indiscretions. The 60's is today a subject of ridicule by this generation and there is plenty of good reason for that. The overwrought emphasis on drugs, sex, clothes, hair, politics, film, rock and roll, as serious bases for revolutionary philosophy seems silly in retrospect. Some of these “ideas” moved into the mainstream, and others proved to be destructive dead ends. Either way, they seem archaic foolishness to this generation.

The fact of pop culture as the dominant force is taken for granted as the background noise of life for teens and young adults. Nerds and geeks may be fixated on certain aspects of it, but most simply live in it without much thought to its effects.

The movie is about the point in life when children rebel against their parents, an inevitable and healthy snipping of the umbilical chord. In Bertolucci’s words, they “transgress,” and begin to deal with the consequences. One critic commented that the movie makes modern young filmgoers uncomfortable because we now live in a time that is more akin to the ‘50's, a conformist and repressive age which the ‘60's rebelled against. The movie is all the more subversive because of this, and of course, that is what “Art” is supposed to be about.

Those thoughts led me further to re-view JULES AND JIM (1962) and BREATHLESS (1960), both now on good DVD's with commentaries. As with all great classics, experiencing them at different times in your life breathes new life to your appreciation.

I came to these films later than some. One of the reasons for my tardiness is the fact that I was in between generations; pre-boomer and post pre-war. As a result I always have been a bit of an outsider to my rough contemporaries. In music, my teen formative era was the 50's of rock and roll, after a childhood of parental influence by swing, standards, show tunes, Sinatra, which I have still admired. The Beatles broke when I was 21, so my perspective was less idolatry than “adult” appreciation. In high school, my stab at “cool” had been toward Miles, Ahmad Jamal, Monk, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.

The same is true of other cultural influences: drugs (I was lost between post-alcohol and pre-marijuana); sex (my teen years were influenced by pre-sexual revolution fears and pre-feminist prejudices.

When it came to movies, I was raised on televised re-runs of films of the 30's and 40's, discovered Bogart, Huston, Hepburn. My teen rebellion against my parents’ tastes was first played out in TV wars. Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen were my mildly subversive counter-culture alternatives to their Ed Sullivan and Jack Benny. Lenny Bruce was my “South Park.”

It was not until I came west in the mid-1960's (and my early 20's) and met a very special girl and her friends that I was introduced to foreign films. The crowd had part time jobs in movie theaters and the social life of the group revolved around going to movies, talking about them, absorbing them. They were into foreign movies in a big way.

Especially this certain girl. She was different from other girls I had known. She saw herself as an outsider, un-American. Born in Russia, she had come from France when she was eight; at 12 she was too tall, thus impossibly different. By embracing her “Russian soul” and French affinity, she had carved out an exotic “style,” which she made into a signature. On trips back to France to visit her cousin, she had acquired courant French pop tastes: Macias, Brel, Aznavour, Piaf. it was easy to sub her for Jeanne Moreau, easy to imagine our little group as minor variants of Jules, Jim and Catherine.

My own predilection for over-analysis led me to find crucial significance in these films and the radical cultural changes in politics, movies, music, clothes, sexual attitudes in the mid/late 60's. This was earth-shaking stuff and, although by nature and age, I was somewhat separated from the more adventurous aspects, it was inspiring to feel its effects.

Now, renting and re-viewing JULES AND JIM, I am struck by a few things. First, I am more aware now of the political and social points of the movie. It is set in the period between @1913 and 1933, a time of enormous social upheaval. The characters begin as youthful, naive, idealistic Bohemians, freeing themselves from the strictures of the past in matters of art, sex, roles, politics. Catherine is what we now call a liberated woman. War separates them, ages them, makes them edgy about the future, accelerates their fatalism even as they grasp at their hopes for continuing their pre-war youthful ideals of love, camaraderie, and ideas - ideas that resonated to a draft age young man in the mid-60's.

The movie, released in 1962, was a scandal at the time, condemned by the Legion of Decency. It was a reaction against 50's conformity in content and style, and anticipated the free love experimentation of the 60's and the feminist movement of the 70's.

Ironically, internet reviews accompanying the 2002 release of the movie on DVD by modern young critics is full of tsk-tsks about Catherine’s selfishness and madness, misunderstanding the core of the movie as “about a menage-a-trois” which, one critic pompously observes, we now know is disaster prone.

Catherine at the time I first saw the movie, @1965, was already a legendary character. As realized by Jeanne Moreau, she was an intriguing enigma, unbearably sexy yet dangerously fatale. She was to be a blueprint for Bonnie in BONNIE AND CLYDE and for many women to come. Truffaut, as critic, labeled Film Noir, which always featured a femme fatale, who would ultimately destroy her lovers, who were drawn to her flame despite their toughness. These elements — of doomed love — were natural to the French, to whom it is always better to have loved and lost.

My first viewing of BREATHLESS was a shock: here was Belmondo identifying with Bogart, the way I had done when I had first seen MALTESE FALCON on TV when I was 12. BREATHLESS was one of the first movies I saw that made me scratch my head, wondering what was the intended deeper meaning. I was in high school then, and parsing art was always the goal. But “Modern Art” like this was different; you just felt and absorbed it rather than analyzing it. Yet, Godard’s (and all the New Wave movie makers') later works confirmed the serious political and social content at the heart of this Art, which was modern in its style of story telling, but which was coherent in its deeper content.

Watching it 45 years after its release brings a new perspective to its genius. The movie is revolutionary, not only because of jump cutting which offended the Establishment at the time and influenced all later movie makers. It is revolutionary in its ideas, too. Godard is commenting on the dominance of American pop culture over traditional French culture in the post war era. American cars, movie images and values, even the ideal of beauty – Jean Seberg, her hair in gamine cut, still looks wholesome and American.

Another issue I now notice is the solution to the enigma of Patricia’s betrayal of Michel. Most of the film’s story line seems to focus on what will happen to Michel, who killed a cop, steals cars and acts like a typical film noir anti-hero. Her call to the cops, admission to Michel, and his fatalistic reaction to all of this has been reduced to a perfunctory nod to the obligatory femme fatale by Godard, who was, it is said, really more interested in the style than any point to be made by the story’s climax.

To be sure, that is generally true, and in a film as intentionally rough as this, it is possible that Godard was unaware of the ramifications of his instinct. Yet, there is an undeniable social truth that he has hit upon, no matter if he stumbled on it. The anti-hero is a pre-war model; but the American Woman after World War II was about to come into her own as the dominant power in pop culture. For all his self-proclaimed toughness, the male is doomed by the woman he loves. He will die to impress her; she will betray him to discover if she loves him. “Men love women; women love money,” the romancier tells reporters, including Patricia, who responds with a coy smile.

"Well," she may be thinking, "Maybe not money, but power, bien sur."

EYES WIDE SHUT

Stanley Kubrick’s last movie is typical of his life work in several ways. Like his other films, it is engrossing in the barely accessible sense of “depth” of its theme and character insights, fascinating in its meticulous structure and carefully crafted images; at the same time infuriating in its methodical pacing and occasional incomprehensible moments filled with silences and stares. It is tempting to believe that when Tom Cruise ("Dr. Bill") stares broodingly into the distance that he is thinking deeply, but it is also suspiciously like the way a cat will stare darkly at you — just before falling asleep.

It is impossible to separate Kubrick’s work from his own working style, which is so famously infuriating. He was truly an auteur, controlling every aspect of his production, seemingly at the same time so cherishing (or fearful) of his films that he never wanted to finish them. Like a writer who refuses to finish his book, he had a hard time letting go. In fact, in this case, he died just before the release, as if dying in childbirth.

Like many artists, Kubrick was such a stylist and his images seem so personal and therefore indecipherable, that it is difficult to know whether his thinking is profound or just muddled. It is tempting to believe that because he was so fastidious in his preparation and execution that he must have been striving for just the perfect metaphor, trying to make all the right choices before being satisfied with the result. Yet, it is also possible that his hesitations and changes were due to indecision and absence of ideas. Perhaps his vision was uncertain. Maybe he lost his focus of the theme by concentration on the edges and threads.

It might not diminish his art to learn that he worked by trial and error, groping for his instinctive and possibly accidental discovery of the satisfying image, twist, reading, music, lighting. Like Bob Dylan, he is the kind of riddler who tantalizes the audience continuously with his stories. They often seem to be filled with symbolic images, plot turns, dialogue, that demand interpretation. Eventually, one has to ask whether the gaps in exposition are intentionally obscure, or are due to an absence of coherent and consistent vision.

At its heart, this film is a rather mundane tale of marital ennui – an attractive, apparently perfect couple, with looks, style, wealth, intelligence, domestic bliss – and a hollowness in their lives. The wife ("Alice" played by Nicole Kidman) is unfulfilled, unnerved by her husband’s smug attitude. He takes her loyalty for granted, and she cannot stand it. She discloses to him her sexual fantasy about a handsome stranger and it hits him in the solar plexus. He proceeds to spin out of control, flirting with his own fantasies for 24 hours. The plot spins Cruise into a wonderland of bizarre sex cult / party scenes, temptations of seedy sex opportunities. In the end, he is a pretender (complete with mask); nothing happens to him, and he realizes that his wife has never acted on her dream / fantasy of infidelity. They resolve to stay together, perhaps a bit less secure (less smug) about the perfection of their love, but better for the honesty and insecurity. A loving kiss in a toy store fades us out.

Like a soft-porn film made by a traditional Hollywood filmmaker, the film teases us, plays with our knowledge of cinematic convention and our own fantasies. We are led into a mood which strongly suggests impending violence and risk; dangerous perversion is hinted and sexual tensions are created but never consummated. Nicole flirts with a comically suave Continental seducer -- and leaves him. Tom is almost abducted by two sexy models -- but is called away. Tom is called to treat an overdosed, nude bimbo of his host (director / actor Sydney Pollack) -- and walks out with the girl apparently better. After his wife’s hurtful revelations, he wanders the night seeking his own fantasies, and encounters the bereaved daughter of a dead patient, but he ducks when she throws herself at him. Then he picks up a hooker who tenderly offers herself to him, but he ducks away again. When he goes to great lengths to enter a sex orgy party at great risk to his safety, he escapes without harm and without sex.

In the end, he is guilt-ridden without apparent reason for guilt. He is frustrated, and we have to think why. The answer seems to be that his only guilt is that he has long repressed his emotions. He is a doctor, who is trained to separate himself from his feelings for his patients. He has also separated himself from anxiety about his wife, and perhaps worst of all, from his own feelings of insecurity. Only after he has been hurt by his wife’s ridiculing revelations and his failures to confront risky behavior, and is manipulated into fear and guilt about possible responsibility for a death, does he break down and open up to the person he professes to love. It is not new ground in films – the theme of shocking a stiff character in order to stimulate love is as old as boy meets girl. It has been the subject of pornography, screwball comedy, farce, horror, spy, thriller genres over and over again.

Kubrick’s visual skill is revealed in the scenes between Cruise and Kidman in the confines of their bedroom. He focuses on Kidman’s lithe body as it moves around the bedroom, bending, stretching, mugging, as she recites her dream to her rigid husband who sits coiled and nervous on the edge of the bed with his square jawed dark cat look. She is incredibly seductive and convincing as a sexually sparkling package. Yet, her tale is a standard female fantasy of the 70's, popularized as the zipless fuck by Erica Jong. The tall dark stranger seduces without words, without any messy relationship. Long understood as the frustrated female’s strike against the confines of masculine security, it is by now a cliche. Yet it seems here to be the catalyst at the core of Kubrick’s message.

The nude and semi-nude glimpses of women’s bodies and sex acts and talk and seductions are slick and in the end, a titillation. So too is the aura of impending danger a tease. So too are the endless scenes of city walks, taxi rides -- tense build-ups to empty letdowns -- nothing bad really happens. The sinister masks and hoods of the party-goers are a false excitement – just some more titillation.

Yet, that may be the point Kubrick is groping for. We create our fantasies to satisfy our human need for insecurity. Our dreams create drama for our lives, situations to stimulate the emotional juices that we consciously suppress in our mundane living. It is also a commentary on the purpose of film -- the creation of the dreamlike fantasy world – the grand illusion including actors pretending emotions, pretending to make love, images and sounds to make us think and feel uneasy. It is what Kubrick has done so well.

In the end, we still do not know whether the film is a stylish cliche or an unsettling and profound work of art.

THE ISLAND

I saw this summer, 2005, blockbuster aspirant in a theater. In prime time on a Saturday night, the theater was almost empty. So empty that a woman sitting a few seats away asked me if she was in the right place. I told her she was, but on reflection the morning after, I should have said no.

I hadn’t done my homework before entering the theater. Max had read the New York Times review, and knew the director’s previous work. He is also 24, with age appropriate eyes, ears, and tolerance for the sights and sounds of eye and ear splitting video game action.

Max knew that this was a Michael Bay film. Bay began as a director of music videos and commercials. He was not annoyed therefore by distracting product placements, the glossy photography of cars, use of actors as models, slick though pointless cutting. While the old man in me moaned about the jittery incoherent camera work, which I took to be ersatz “action,” Max had no problem with it. He knew that Bay’s feature resume established a Michael Bay style: BAD BOYS (and BB II), THE ROCK, PEARL HARBOR, and ARMAGEDDON. Max thus expected to see and hear less than subtle scenes with the tried and true conventions of the genre: exploding cars, interminable chases, implausible spectacular effects and stunts. Originality and subtlety are not part of Bay’s resumé.

Of course, after the movie we debated. I decried the overkill of sound and fury. Max observed that this was simply the inevitable evolution of trends established by classics such as NORTH BY NORTHWEST. He might have added BULLITT and many others. I objected that the difference was that this movie lacks the essential elements that made those chases, explosions and effects work: originality, tension, wit, and surprise. Max parried that the action genre no longer requires these elements. That is a different movie genre altogether. Audiences now do not have the patience for those kinds of slow developing action set pieces.

Max, the analytical screenwriter, surmised that the script was a patchwork of probably uncredited script doctoring. The more successful scenes include Steve Buscemi’s characteristic rants, Scarlett Johanssen’s career first sex scene, and a few other obvious patches. I read later that Steven Spielberg produced the movie, and “supervised” the script. It shows, as there are ghosts of MINORITY REPORT sprinkled throughout.

The theme and plot of THE ISLAND are also derivative. It includes ideas and images previously used in movies from the 1970's. George Lucas’ THX 1138 involved Robert Duvall’s escape from a white uniformed conforming perfect society which banned drugs and sex. In LOGAN'S RUN, Michael York, as “Logan 5," fled a supposed post-cataclysmic perfect conformity-imposed underground world along with a sexy companion. COMA was a Michael Crichton directed movie about harvesting organs from comatose patients. It goes further back than that, of course. The “Eloi” in H. G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE were young, innocent humans who were raised for food by the race of subterranean “Morlocks.”

All of that is okay. Hollywood has always honored plagiarism, better known as “quoting” or paying “homage” to its past.

Here, as Max (and several reviewers) noticed, there is a submerged political message. The sci-fi issue explored is the inevitable evil of “cloning,” stem cell research, and other contemporary issues that stir religious controversy. The POV of the movie seems to be contrary to the supposed liberal bias of Hollywood. By showing the danger of rampant science capable of growing clones for eventual transplants for the benefit of the selfish elite, it argues the conservative side.

Of course, this may also be a “Humanist” argument, favoring the individual against corporate greed, but nothing so serious is explored. By burying the issue within the confines of this kind of action flick, any serious consideration is of course made irrelevant. The audience in this atmosphere is precluded from any deep thinking by the sturm and drang. This is well within the Spielberg tradition. He did the same with MINORITY REPORT and A.I.

DOWNFALL

This is the most disturbing movie I have seen in a long time. I knew it was going to be. The story of Hitler’s final days in the Berlin bunker has been told many times in dramas and documentaries. Cable had already played the 2002 documentary about the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s young secretary, on which this movie is largely based. I had heard that this production is entirely German and had heard the controversy about its portrayal of a “human” side to the worst person who ever lived. I dreaded either a caricature or an apology. I didn’t want to hear “mitigation” for this paragon of the worst of the worst.

I put the disc in the player and began, fully expecting to be nauseated and angered at what I would be watching. In the early scenes, my finger wavered over the “ff” and “stop” buttons as I listened to the grating German dialogue, watched the adoring faces of the toadies that surrounded Der Fuhrer. But almost against my will, I became engrossed in the tale. It was like watching a Shakespearean tragedy with characters that possess apparent human traits, but act out of some gravitational madness that causes you to watch it as if you are seeing a slow motion chain reaction car crash. It is a horror movie about a madhouse, in which the characters seem possessed and even the innocent sane people deserve to die.

These are not the people who were inspired by rhetoric of a charismatic, optimistic leader in 1933. In the start, the German audience was arguably vulnerable to nationalistic slogans about regaining prosperity, national pride, honor. Nor are these the ones who hopped on the wagon in the early years of the war, when victories stirred patriotic blood. By the time this movie covers, it was apparent to all but the densest and most fanatical followers that Hitler was leading them to nothing but complete destruction.

Who was left by April, 1945? The hardest of the hard core at the center, in the bunker. And a few foolish airheads who blinded themselves to anything but the stardom of their employer. Yet even they were human, not just mad dogs or molls as in some 30's gangster movie. Some deeply upsetting psychological effect is occurring. The bunker mentality is evident, including a fatalistic self-deception that is hard to understand. I shudder to say it smacks of a “Masada” syndrome.

In one particularly chilling sequence, Joseph Goebbels’ wife Magda calmly smokes a cigarette while sleeping potion is prepared. She adoringly coaxes her six little blond children to drink and later calmly cracks open poison capsules in each of their mouths, covers their bodies and retreats to play solitaire until Joseph fetches her to shoot her and himself. Frau Goebbels is seen as a true believer in her husband, Nazism, and an idolator of Hitler, saying she could not bear for her children to live in a world without National Socialism. But how potent is the ideology, religion, charisma, or pathological delusion that can overwhelm a mother’s love for her children?

As the Russian army squeezes the battered city, we see boys and girls suicidally fighting for The Cause. How can they still believe? What was the allure Hitler had that was so gripping for so many? Is the answer pathological, political, spiritual?

The overall unreality of the behavior of these people is startling. Traudl Junge, as depicted, is not like Magda Goebbels or Eva Braun. She is a secretary, a sweet and pretty woman of 22, who insists on staying with her Fuhrer until the end. Why? How can she admire him so much that she is willing to die with him? Because he is a good boss? Because he patted her cheek and smiled at her? Because she feels some loyalty to this fatherly old man, no matter how mad he often seems to be?

In a preface, we see the now aged Traudl telling us that she has asked herself those questions many times over the next 50 years. Her conclusion in an epilogue is a bit trite, befitting a decent person who is not very bright, certainly no intellectual. She insists that she discovered the extent of Hitler’s criminality only after the war, and now feels she was “wrong” to admire him, “naive” to have ignored his apparent destructive evil. She admits that she should have and could have taken the effort to doubt, to ask questions, to find out the truth for herself.

In an interview added to the DVD, the author who worked on Traudl’s memoirs with her relates that Traudl married a soldier on Hitler’s staff in 1943 (something not mentioned in the body of the drama). He had asked to be assigned to the front and died there. Before leaving, he told his young wife that he had to leave because he found himself agreeing with everything Hitler said and had ceased to think of himself as an individual. Traudl did not understand what he had said until long after the war when the truth struck her. She never remarried.

The movie makes Hitler something of an enigma, like PATTON or LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Bruno Ganz alters his face and body in subtle but alarming ways to evoke emotions as he alternates from an avuncular gentle man to a raving, fearsome monster and back again.

He is kind and considerate to his help: the young secretaries, cooks, his dog, his loyal attendants. He is wildly paranoid, lost in magical thinking about victory in the face of logic, blames everyone but himself. When his generals repeatedly urge that he consider the civilians of Berlin in his actions, he raves bitterly that the German people deserve to die because they proved themselves unworthy of him. He is a twisted Christ figure, preaching that the meek must die because they are unfit. He shows personal compassion for his secretary, but declaims that compassion is a sin when dealing with The People.

There are other things that are troubling. While Hitler’s words are evil, his face is pathetic. We are moved to be moved by his dilemma. We are led to admire the heroism of the German soldiers who are willing to fight to the last man against the enemy, the Russians. This patriotic military quality is an aspect of our own value system and The Alamo is not an inapt analogue for the bunker. The suicides by some (especially the officers who have failed to dissuade Hitler from his delusions about victory) are strangely depicted as heroic, as a Masada like act of defiance against an enemy.

As David Denby of The New Yorker commented, “Who cares about their honor? By adding pathos to the collapse of Nazism, the filmmakers have come close to nostalgia...”

We also see an anomalous figure, an SS doctor who is humane, sanely insists on surrender to stop the suffering, heroically strives to save innocent lives. Possibly this is based on a true character and incidents, but does it misrepresent or unfairly soften the reality of the viciousness of the SS?

Though a balanced view is attempted, the overall emotional mood of the endgame of the war is as a tragic defeat rather than a liberation from the nightmare. If this is part of the dialogue that the German people are having 60 years after the event it is somewhat troubling.

2046

I’ve often been critical of movies that flaunt the director’s artsy “visual” prowess while neglecting or disdaining the essence of story telling. In turn, I’ve been criticized for this bias by those modernists (or post-modernists, if you prefer) who, weaned and comfortable with the abstract, do not need coherence or “meaning” as part of their art.

David Lynch is the most popular current exponent of non-linear, non-narrative films which rely on the unhinging sense of mood to dominate the viewer’s landscape. Discomfort and confusion are not unwanted, rather, are useful tools to capture the viewer’s emotions. BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE both benefitted from this magic to keep the viewer dizzy. The effect in both films was to force your focus and enhance tension.

Historically, the director most imitated in this form is Hitchcock, and the movie most responsible, VERTIGO. Hitch was the most intuitive and intelligent commercial filmmaker of his era, a master of making images that forced his audiences into uneasy exploration of their deepest fantasies.

Wong Kar Wai does a similar thing with 2046, even more than his previous movie, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, to which it is a kind of sequel. He too is dealing with a man’s obsessive love for a woman. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), in the first film, was a newspaperman living in a shabby Hong Kong hotel. He was separated from his wife by emotion, distance and work. In his loneliness, he encountered an attractive and also lonely woman, Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung). Chow discoverved that his wife and Su Li’s husband were having an affair. They spent most of the film falling in love with each other and barely avoiding consummation. In the end she left.

The bare bones of the story was secondary to the mood: the garish colors, lush romantic Western musical score, and over all, noir elements abounding to abet the fatalistic aura of doomed romance. Its province was the lighted and shadowed night, populated by forlorn losers, habitues of night clubs, clinging to the women of the night.

Now, we have Mr. Chow, some time later, embittered by loss and his haunted memories of it. He looks like Bogart in his slouching suits and posture, ever present drink and cigarette, his espoused cynicism which he wears like Rick Blaine prowling his Casablanca café before Ilsa returns. But he is much more articulate than Rick ever was. Chow is a writer who has turned his memories into sardonic fiction. 2046 is the hotel room in which his great love resided and it is also the year that Hong Kong reverts to China, and the setting of a sci-fi story into which he interweaves his memories.

Wong (voiced by his character Chow)is too sentimental and too intelligent to really be a noir or Lynch or even Hitchcock clone. He is saddened by the inevitability of lost love, observes clinically that lack of timing is often fatal, understands that once love is lost, it can never be forgotten, recaptured, or repeated. He also knows that the loser is doomed to re-cast his lost love in a constant and futile search for the past.

Wong’s directorial style is to keep his actors off balance as much as his audience. He films without a script, demands multiple takes to strip away technique and bare true emotions. Like Hitchcock he concentrates his attention on the women in his movies, weaving voyeuristic scenes choked with obsession and scenes of cruel rejection.

Because the grip of memory is his theme, his women all have troubled pasts, lost loves, mysterious sad auras, which add to their allure. Gong Li (a great star in such classics as JOU DOU, FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE and CHINA BOX) plays a gambler that Mr. Chow meets in Singapore. Zhang Ziyi (of CROUCHING TIGER..and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS) is a Hong Kong “hostess.” Both have lost lovers, both attract Chow. One rejects him, he rejects the other. There are other women, the daughter of the hotel proprietor who yearns for her forbidden boyfriend, a “dancer” who is murdered by a jealous lover, and Maggie Cheung re-appears briefly. Chow uses all as fodder for his “fiction,” admits that he feels more comfortable in that world than in reality.

As in MULHOLLAND DRIVE some characters, scenes, repeated references, remain obscure. Perhaps they are like Dylan’s personal lyrics, or strands of abandoned movements. The mood is so intoxicating and images so riveting that you easily excuse any discomfort as just another part of life that lies just beyond your reach. like your lost loves.

WEDDING CRASHERS

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are part of the new hip “in” group responsible for the brand of commercial humor currently in vogue with Hollywood’s favorite demographic. Owen’s brother Luke is “in” as is Ben Stiller and Will Farrell. Bill Murray is the father of the genre - see CADDYSHACK and GHOSTBUSTERS. Irreverence is their only essential, with its associated borderline tastelessness about sex and other social conventions that adults might find outrageous. It is collegiate humor, modeled on a now "classic" template: ANIMAL HOUSE.

This is the boys-behaving-badly-but-cutely school of humor and it can be irresistible, for about the length of a skit on SNL, where most of the practitioners did their undergraduate work. Give them a clever premise and they will rock us --- for about 15 minutes: as in OLD SCHOOL (guys approaching 30 try to recapture their wild frat days), or STARSKY AND HUTCH, (spoof on 70's TV show); RON BURGUNDY (obnoxious 70's local TV guys), DODGEBALL (ESPN spoof with dorks funning themselves).

The hallmark of these crazy guys is that they are meant to be featured players, not the central character in any movie. In small doses they are all fine, but by Act 2, our underwear bunches. When they have to fall back on some kind of plot twist and resort to romantic comedy conventions, they are in serious trouble.

Bill Murray is the only one who was able to escape the genre, re-energizing his persona to carry a movie by himself. Beginning with GROUNDHOG DAY, he morphed into a star by toning down his frantic self into someone who approached a human being. Adam Sandler is trying to do this now in PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, 50 FIRST DATES and SPANGLISH. (Steve Martin was the original "wild and crazy guy" in the SNL skits, but his film career began more on the Jerry Lewis model than a collegiate wise guy.

The fact is that despite the seeming “hipness” of these “new” faces, their movies are more traditional than their born yesterday audiences admit. In this film, Vaughn and Wilson recall traditional buddies like Crosby and Hope in the ROAD pictures and Curtis and Lemmon in SOME LIKE IT HOT. One is the foil for the other — the wacky sidekick shills for the straighter guy-who-gets-the-girl guy.

Another essential element of the traditional formula is to dump the wackos into the pompous country club family of the love object (here played by Rachel McAdams). A weird father is helpful — DeNiro in MEET THE PARENTS and Christopher Walken here. Hilarity must ensue, and the uptight heroine must be lured away from her “acceptably” pompous boyfriend by the sexy wildness of our hero. The boring boyfriend character is as old as the parts reserved for Ralph Bellamy in the screwball comedies of the 1930's. It is also helpful to have the usual cast of minor characters: a bored and libidinous mom, a scatalogical senile grandma.

The hook of this movie is the idea that these guys get laid by crashing weddings, latching on to sex-starved girls made vulnerable by the inherently romantic atmosphere. The first act montage is a funny bit — an extended SNL premise that is milked for variations: ethnic and sexual. Of course, the outrageous and irresponsible behavior is fun while it lasts — and for Wilson it lasts until he finds the “right girl.” We are now in the traditional sitcom rules of romantic comedies. One of the oldest conventions of the genre requires the untangling of the initial deception that got the couple together.

Wilson's whining voice gets annoying fast, and Vaughn's rapid-fire neurotic wisecracks misfire too often. But of course, Will Farrell makes a cameo appearance to remind us of what great comic actors can accomplish.

FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY

The sources for the first full length movies were The Bible, plays, and novels. Comic strips and comic books were soon discovered. Cross pollination between radio, television, and motion pictures soon followed, and is still common. Video games adapted to films assure marketing tie-ins for action films, and that also is a two way street. Remember the arcade version of STAR WARS?.

The graphic novel is a natural in this evolution, providing a ready-made blueprint for scenarists, production designers and directors. Films like THE ROAD TO PERDITION and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE dramatize the graphic novel source in a "real," though stylized, world. But now, digital technology permits movies to be utterly faithful to the source, wholly re-created by the computer graphic artist.

The material world is completely discarded. Now the digital effects world is the entire milieu, the dark graphic novel the storyboard. Actors, who began life in film as silent pantomimists, now are models, playing in front of green screens on bare stages.

Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino combine their adolescent nightmares and wishes for apocalyptic anti-heroes and femmes fatales in this movie which one critic called “film noir on steroids.” Their art draws from many obvious sources: pulp novels of the Mickey Spillane spitting blood with dialogue school, Japanese anime and martial arts cut-em-ups. There are homages to Bogart (Bruce Willis) and Robert Mitchum and Victor Mature (Mickey Rourke) and Ralph Bakshi’s COOL WORLD. There are hard-core porn tease references, depictions of cannibalism, child molestation, castration and other amusing forms of dismemberment, corrupt police, and priests.

Stylized is not a strong enough word for the look. The world they create is spectacularly vivid, so loyal to the look and feel of Miller’s graphic novels that it is simply a moving picture book of the novels, lacking only balloons for dialogue. Considering how bad much of it sounds, that might have been a better choice.

The cast of actors, freed from constraints of sets or other connections to a real world (like human motivations and emotion), create abstract images of characters. Actors like to be tools in the hands of directors and production designers who will put them into a world long after their scenes are done. They like to give long speeches, whether in voice over narratives with a flat hard-boiled cynicism that is supposed to sound like pop poetry, or in tough sounding dialogue of threat and vitriol, using the 40's noir patois. They all want to be Bogart and Mitchum.

Really good actors are drawn to the project in addition to those mentioned. Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, Carla Gugino, Jessica Alba, Michael Madsen, and others. They have a great over-the-top time play acting. Actors after all are also kids playing pretend games.

I have long since given up howling the complaint that some critics keep up: that this is heartless entertainment that has given up any pretense to edify, uplift, or even tell stories. The mood is all there is; gothic horror, film noir essence, repeated and pounded into us. Violence and mean spiritedness so stylized that its inhuman extremes are irrelevant.

Revenge and rage are all we have left, not at the edge of our society, but right in the center. Like Romans in the Forum, we watch and cheer the gladiators tear each other apart. Great fun. We’ve come a long way in two thousand years. Can’t wait for Sin City 2.

HAVOC

The teen risk genre has been around a long, long time (e.g.: OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS from 1928). HAVOC is comparable to the legendary James Dean’s iconic REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. The same theme is explored and exploited: teens — bored with middle class lives, self-absorbed parents, hypocritical adults, and their irrelevant education — take risks with sex, drugs, violence, music. When we look at REBEL today, we are struck by the tameness of the rebellion. The dress, hair, speech, attitudes of the characters all seem pretty ordinary to us. The sex is more implied than overt, and as befitting the then courant interpretation, is full of dated references to Oedipal issues, coming of age sexual tension and gender role confusion.

In REBEL, made in the mid-1950's, the white middle class kids try to act like contemporary “delinquents” with knife fights, and games of chicken with their hot rods, resulting in a death. They get into trouble with the law and their parents have to rescue them without understanding them. They get counseling from adults who don’t get them, and they ultimately find solace only in touching each other. Surviving these tumultuous years is not for sissies, as proven by Sal Mineo’s death.

HAVOC updates the story to Palisades High in suburban L.A. in 2005. Our heroine is Anne Hathaway, forcing a break from her Sandra Dee PRINCESS DIARIES persona, by joining a gang fight, getting stoned, baring her luscious breasts and giving a blow job in the first 15 minutes. She is one of a gang of white gangsta wannabes who look pretty silly in hip-hop sweats and gold chains, talking trash. Every girl is a “ho’” or “bitch.”

Following the REBEL template, Anne’s pal, played by Bijou Phillips, has gender issues — she’s in love with Anne, and of course, she is the one who will not survive, emotionally that is. She follows her self-loathing heart by agreeing to sex with three “real” Hispanic gangsters, only to break down and later cry rape. Anne must then do the right thing, the liberal thing by telling the truth to save the Hispanic gangster. The end is muddled, with Anne’s white bread gang trying to raid the East Los ‘hood with guns, managing only to terrorize women and babies, then encountering revenge seeking Vatos while driving by. The screen blacks out and we hear shots.

In a sense, this little straight-to-video B movie outdoes the overpraised and bloated CRASH in exposing the same theme, the apparently irreconcilable worlds our cities have become. The white kids want to "make it real." This film doesn't quite do that, but, like the drive-in teen movies of the 50's, it works better than the adults, who still don't "get it."

JARHEAD

Every war must have its war movie document, and though the ground action in Gulf War I in 1991 lasted only 4 days and yielded relatively few American casualties, it deserves its moment in the blazing desert sun. Here, it gets A List attention. Based on a memoir by Anthony Swofford, the screenplay is by William Broyles, Jr. (CAST AWAY and APOLLO 13); direction by Sam Mendez (AMERICAN BEAUTY and ROAD TO PERDITION); editing by Walter Murch (APOCALYPSE NOW), starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Saarsgard and Jamie Foxx.

They have all done their war movie history homework. There are references to FULL METAL JACKET and PLATOON here in the cruel badinage among the troops, from gentle teasing to vicious cuts — not much of the namby-pamby WWII buddy crap we used to be fed. (See, e.g., such classics as A WALK IN THE SUN, 12 O'CLOCK HIGH, BATTLEGROUND, THE STORY OF G.I. JOE.)

And there is a cruel difference, too, in the ironic outcome — none of our heroes get to fire their weapons against the enemy. One of the messages of the movie is exposed in a climactic scene when “Swoff” and “Troy” are assigned the job of sniping an Iraqi officer in their colonel’s (a cameo by Chris Cooper) hope that killing the officer will cause the remainder of the Iraqi unit to surrender. Just as the boys get set for the shot, they are countermanded by a major who calls in an air strike to obliterate the enemy. Troy rails at the “injustice;” they have been trained, gone through hell and unbearable tension during the wait for the war to begin. Now, they are denied the “honor” of killing the enemy.

It is a moment that underscores the difference from previous war movies and previous wars: war as a test of individual courage under fire, face to face with a man on the other side, is gone. Modern war is mostly hi-tech killing long range without soul, without honor, without manly satisfaction. The “jarhead” is a proud Marine, trained as a killing weapon in the tradition of his service, as we are reminded — of Iwo Jima and Tarawa — a rifleman, a knife fighter, a member of a unit of warriors. All useless now.

Sam Mendes’ previous films showed a keen interest in the male dilemma, whether it was the useless feeling middle aged family man in AMERICAN BEAUTY whose youthful dreams have vanished, or the father in ROAD TO PERDITION who must kill to protect his son from his own murderous past. The dilemma of young men of our time who want to be war heroes is not an unworthy chapter to add to the history of war movies.