Tonight’s the night. Gonna be allright.

This evening marks the beginning of the 44th New York Film Festival and the entire city’s abuzz with pomp and pageantry. Reverse Shot will be there, covering the only accurately-named major festival in town (since when was 34th and 8th in Tribeca?). As far as we’re concerned, it’s the only game that really matters. Even if each edition always brings a handful of disappointments, among their selections are a number of the films we'll be talking about for the next year so why wait?

Nick Pinkerton on opening night pick The Queen.

Jeff Reichert on Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach.

Michael Joshua Rowin on Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako.

We’re going to do our best to keep this coverage coming in as close to real-time as possible, so keep checking the site for updates. Enjoy.

Starting this weekend, as the New York Film Festival begins its annual run of what's meant to represent the best in international films, handpicked by a select (and mercifully smart) group of critics and programmers, the debates over what merited inclusion in such a distinguished showcase will begin. Although often crammed with too many Upper West Side blue-hairs who bought their tix in bulk and have showed up addle-brained and with shopping bag in tow (I recall an altercation I had with an elderly upper west sider, who had dressed up in his Sunday best and then proceeded to stand IN FRONT OF ME during...Tropical Malady), Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall for two weeks becomes a lively arena for strong opinions: bombarded directors at Q&As, loud groans of disapproval, sometimes followed by angry seat-bolters. Whether the films selected for such a small yet prestigious festival deserve their placement will always be beside the point (recent unwelcome infiltrators like Palindromes and Free Radicals keep the fest balanced at least); time-wasting will always be a part of any festival.

Just next door at the gloriously comfortable, vastly more movie-friendly Walter Reade Theater, right alongside the main program, is the official NYFF sidebar, this year honoring the 50th anniversary of the legendary distribution company Janus Films, with all new 35mm prints. There's no chance of seeing a dud here: as any movie-lover knows, that Janus symbol, the two-headed coin that pops up before the film, is an irreducible stamp of quality.

Janus, founded in 1956, was the sole reason that Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut nagged their first U.S. viewers, yet for future generations the company's legacy encompasses even more. For those of my age, inclined towards seeking out quality foreign cinema while sequestered in a suburban town, the Janus coin didn't connote theatrical experience. Rather, more often than not, my stack of weekly library films--my first discoveries of Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman--would be emblazoned with the mark of Janus. My experience of The Virgin Spring, La Strada, and Rashomon was not in some glorious movie house of yore (I didn't make it to the historic Brattle Theatre, the birthplace of Janus, till I was much older, even though it was only forty-five minutes away), but rather on my miniscule, 13-inch television set, while sitting in my creaky rocking chair. Even after watching so many of these classics in their pristine DVD transfers, and even now that I can finally see a number of them in their "full glory" on the wide, intimidating screen of the Walter Reade (and beyond; the series is touring the country afterwards, from Boston to DC to San Francisco...go to janusfilms.com for more information) I cannot envision one frame of any of them without remembering this specific intimacy.

If you're in the area, the series is a must. "50 Years of Janus Films" will be showing a host of films that aren't readily available on DVD, including Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame De..., Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters, and Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, alongside the tried-and-true classics, none of which I ever tire of, from Truffaut's The 400 Blows to Bergman's Wild Strawberries. So, let's say this Saturday night, you've got a ticket for the latest trendy American indie at the NYFF...do yourself a favor and scalp off that Little Children ticket for some extra cash (yeah, we get it, the suburbs are a hotbed of pedophilia and infidelity...parents are just like their kids.....zzzzzzzz), and waltz over to the Walter Reade for a showing of Renoir's Rules of the Game instead. You'll feel better about yourself in the morning.

The ever-growing number of Reverse Shot staff writers and contributors doesn’t stop at Reverse Shot or indieWIRE. And we can’t always get to cover everything we want in either of those two outlets, so here’s some great reading to start off your week, courtesy of a few of Reverse Shot’s most faithful longtime contributors, about some recent and upcoming films. Good job, all!

Andrew Tracy on Babel in Cinemascope
“The Perros formula, yielding diminishing returns in 21 Grams (2003) and impasted over what should have been the stark and clear movement of the inexplicably acclaimed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) has been carried to its logical culmination in Babel—if only it would culminate. But like any genre, Arriaga’s bag of tricks can be opened again and again. If connections themselves are all that matter, are their own meaning regardless of the actions performed and meanings created in the points they connect, then any given set of actions and locations are equally valid.”

Nick Pinkerton on Mutual Appreciation in Stop Smiling
“The gambit of Mutual Appreciation is to set a film somewhere that is, for all of its intrinsic ridiculousness, a totally unique social bathysphere—and to ignore that singularity entirely. To make a film about milquetoast personalities in a neighborhood of “characters”; to concentrate on middle-class quarterlife angst at the exclusion of Williamsburg’s bizarre class tensions (that is: systematic poverty vs. slumming; authentic dives vs. affected shabbiness).”

Jeannette Catsoulis on American Blackout in The New York Times
“Interviewing Congressional leaders, journalists and regular voters, Mr. Inaba begins by addressing the Florida debacle of 2000, arguing that behind the exhaustive coverage of hanging chads and faulty voting machines lies an underreported and more complex story of black disenfranchisement... It’s a methodical compilation of questions and irregularities that deserves a wider audience.”

Nicolas Rapold on Renaissance in the New York Sun
“This Renaissance even with the reliably sexy premise of retailed immortality, is enacted with a script patched together from generic cop movies. Other recent animation experiments have matched theme to form: the expressionism of Sin City with its base urges, the squiggly vision of A Scanner Darkly with its drug paranoia. Devoid of mood or attitude, this detective story is repetitive, the rigid-faced characters lost in the hailstorm of sleekness.”

Michael Joshua Rowin on The Black Dahlia in Stop Smiling
“Take for instance De Palma’s latest, The Black Dahlia. Both J. Hoberman and a friend/colleague have expressed disappointment that the film, to use Hoberman’s words, “rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).” One can’t dismiss that point, and it’s even least among the film’s flaws. And yet there’s so much to admire in this gorgeous, ridiculous, irreverent, disturbing, incoherent mess of cinematic brilliance.”

Jeannette Catsoulis on All the King’s Men in Las Vegas City Life
Zaillian's decision to transpose the book's setting from the 1930s to the 1950s—presumably to appeal to those whose historical awareness lumps pre-1950 in the same category as the Stone Age—is ideologically disastrous. Willie Stark is a child of the Depression, not World War II; his cracker pride and hatred of old money, his populist rhetoric and evangelistic campaign style, and his notion of how the world works are all products of a very specific sociopolitical system, one that had changed dramatically by the 1950s and the beginnings of mass media.”

Adam Nayman on Tales of the Rat Fink in Cinemascope
“The title refers to Roth’s most famous creation, a drooling, degenerate, pea-green rodent who was, briefly but genuinely, the most successful anti-establishment cartoon character of all time. (He’s most commonly and succinctly described as the “Anti-Mickey Mouse”; Roth actually conceived the character as an antidote to Disney’s big-eared poster boy.) As brought to life by Mann and his ingenious, Sheridan College-bred animator Mike Roberts, Rat Fink is the film’s borderline-insane mascot, grunting and grasping his way through slapstick interludes that comprise the story’s connective tissue.”

Michael Joshua Rowin, interviewing Old Joy’s Kelly Reichardt in Stop Smiling
“It’s not only one of the best films of the year, but perhaps the only American film of the year to superbly demonstrate the true aesthetic heritage of the term independent.”

Nicolas Rapold on The Science of Sleep in L Magazine
“As such it’s the latest entry in the booming romantic tradition of childlike solipsism, which presents emotionally stunted man-kids as eagerly as past generations churned out child-wives.”

More on that one from our weekly Reverse Shot round-up at indieWIRE, this edition by a particularly daunting trio: staff writers James Crawford, Kristi Mitsuda, and Elbert Ventura.
Happy Monday.

Hail all ye kingmakers: Romania is officially the new hotbed of international art cinema.

On the heels of Cristi Puiu’s lacerating The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, comes Corneliu Poromboiu’s lighter, but no less accomplished 12:08 East of Bucharest. Where Lazarescu could be argued as having politicized the body to offer a critique of contemporary human relations, Bucharest literally deals with the body politic as refracted through a motley group of characters and their questionable involvements in the 1989 revolution which ousted Ceausescu (at 12:08 PM). Hugely pompous Virgil Jderescu hosts a local access television program, and has scheduled for the day of the film a look back 16 years (a comically arbitrary number) to question whether or not protesters in their sleepy town (East of Bucharest) participated in the revolution, or merely followed in its wake. His equally arbitrary guests are Manescu, town professor and drunk, who recasts himself as the hero of the day, and old man Piscoci who seem notable only in that he’s asked by those in his apartment building to play Santa Claus.

The final forty minutes of this brief work are devoted to Jderescu and his two guests fending off questions from callers in a hilariously run down studio. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a filmmaker do so much with so little, but Poromboiu milks three setups (played as the studio cameras) for comic gold, even as the broadcast touches on politics, revolution, the Romanian character, and the brutal evisceration of one man’s reputation. It’s a hugely dense and precisely choreographed sequence—the amount of information parsed through what is usually a rather hokey device is astonishing.

But this is not to say that the film lives and dies here. From its opening moments Bucharest announces itself as a major work, proceeding without hurry or any apparent desire for our full comprehension through a series of apartment interiors as our three heroes prepare for their day. The deft mixture of comedy and pathos is immediately present, as is the director’s eye for small details, all of which are tied up nicely as the narrative wears on. This is a thoroughly considered work, and features one of the more graceful bookends you’re likely to find on film. This one’s a total keeper.

The critical exhaltation of this week’s premiere of the abysmal Aaron Sorkin gabfest, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, established once and for all that you don’t have to be “smart” to be “smart.” By transplanting the same eye-darting rhythms and stilted cadences to a behind-the-scenes look at an L.A. Saturday Night Live-ish show, Sorkin proves that he doesn’t care to delve into other worlds so much as project the same fetishes onto everything he does. He’s the anti-Altman: there’s no sense of discovery in his work, and the world becomes one like-minded pool of scatterbrained egos.

I only bring this up because I tremble at the thought of this tired retread becoming an acclaimed award-winning show, praised for its “truth” and “timeliness” and, yes, of course, yawn, “wit” (if you don’t think that word is overused, think about how many things are actually witty…go ahead, name a few), while Christopher Guest’s upcoming For Your Consideration is accused of being old-fashioned or dated. Having heard the mixed reviews coming out of Toronto, it seems that a Guest backlash is forming, and the chosen line of attack is that it’s not relevant or parodic enough…not about Hollywood today…now! Having seen the film, I should note that it should be quite obvious that it’s not aiming for trenchant satire: For Your Consideration isn’t “smart” in that boring way that Aaron Sorkin’s mile-a-minute, dime-a-dozen dramadies are, brimming with behind-the-scenes shenanigans that are supposed to lend them instant cred. No, For Your Consideration is boldly anachronistic, a wonderfully old-fashioned comedy both in the tradition of Jewish and SCTV sketch humor. Its level of “satire” is something akin to Martin Short’s Primetime Glick—a compliment, indeed. And in its breaking away from the constraints of the mockumentary form (a post-credits crane shot (!) announces the rejection of the talking-heads-n-handheld formula, which had been slightly boxing in the Guest troupe in his previous outings), For Your Consideration frees up the tremendously talented actors to riff and improv their way through a fairly straightforward narrative.

One thing Guest hasn’t left behind is his focus on his characters’ very tangible hopes and disappointments, which are perhaps more magnified than ever this time. And talk about game, these people are on fire here: John Michael Higgins’s pompous Choctaw-idiom–spouting publicity agent, Jennifer Coolidge’s demented glamour-puss producer, Parker Posey’s neurotic actress, Don Lake & Michael Hitchcock’s “Love It/Hate It” TV film critics, Fred Willard & Jane Lynch’s monstrous Extra!-ish co-announcers—For Your Consideration scats and bops from one hilarious moment to the next. This is no claws-out, insider-y, poison-pen letter to Hollywood à la The Player: this is a wonderfully inelegant mix of verbal and slapstick highs. And its focus on the buzz-making “world wide interweb”’s (as per Higgins’s parlance) control not over the minds of the money-counters but over the hearts of the actors/filmmakers themselves, adds a significant emotional layer of identification between the critical establishment and the artists at their whim (Shyamalan could only wish to accomplish this so slyly). Representing the fragility of this bond is Catherine O’Hara, whose incredible work here (hitting just as hard as her one-liners and physical shtick hit are her moments of heart-rending pathos, often within the same scene) will probably not be recognized come awards-time due to the general bias against comedy in the Academy and elsewhere. Don’t believe the hype (something this film would definitely agree with): For Your Consideration is a treat. More on this film closer to its release.

I can't think of a better way to remember the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who passed away earlier today, than with a few of his most indelible images.

Cries and Whispers

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Fanny and Alexander

Something rather special is finally coming your way. It seems rote to criticize the summer movie doldrums and whine about big budgets, sequels and remakes, the need for bigger-faster-better…but let’s face it, there’s been some serious critical apathy this year, and we’ve been fairly guilty of it as well. I mean, The Descent was good and all (certainly the best underground freakish cave-dwelling bat-men movie of 2006 so far), but it still left us craving a little something more. Enter Kelly Reichardt. We brought you a preview of her gentle, melancholy Old Joy right here on this blog way back in February, and now it’s finally hitting New York theaters, so if you’re around these parts, we’ve been telling you to see it for SEVEN MONTHS!! Now, on the occasion of its release, we offer to you an an interview with Reichardt from staff writer Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega on the main site, as well as a weekly indieWIRE three-way devoted to the film. Touching, restrained, quietly political, yet surprisingly unburdened by strict aestheticization, Old Joy is simply a pleasure. Read on….

By now, every cinephile, and perhaps even some casual moviegoers, have heard that Janus Films’ Mizoguchi series is the most essential cinema currently playing in New York Theaters. So if you’re in the city, and especially if you’ve only seen Ugetsu there shouldn’t be any excuse for not running to Film Forum. What else are you gonna see? Gridiron Gang? Little Miss Sunshine? Come on. Pared down to about six films, the series is anything but complete (he made over 80 films, stretching from the silent period to the late Fifties), yet the result is a primer for this most elegant and emotional of Japanese filmmakers; each film is a revelation. My own revelation this weekend was my first viewing of Mizoguchi’s devastating (natch) Life of Oharu, a throat-grabbing lullaby of suffering, the propulsive, quiet forward trajectory of which would be categorized as Bressonian if not for Mizoguchi’s oft penchant for melodrama. Here, as in Sansho the Bailiff, the mix of the two sensibilities, of restrained fatalism and narrative catharsis, results in a terribly delicate portrait of impending doom: a late 17th century woman’s journey (no, freefall) from lady-in-waiting to aged street whore, detailed in those always impressive Mizoguchi tableaux, marked by quiet camera movements, tilts, pans, or graceful slides which reveal just a little more in the shot than you previously expected. What’s most impressive, even dazzling, about the wretched, sad little Life of Oharu is that Mizoguchi manages to make this epic tale of humiliation into a consistently engaging, almost novelistic panorama: each sequence, though describing just one more notch in the ever tightening belt of one woman’s elongated process of dehumanization and diminishing sense of self, maintains its own discrete sense of morality, justice, and episodic resolution. Also impressive is that Mizoguchi’s camera keeps a safe distance from Kinuyo Tanaka’s powder-pale Oharu throughout (there are no close-ups to tell us how she’s feeling; we glean it from the unimaginable circumstances surrounding her), while still managing to create something almost unbearably intimate through her placement in the frame. Whether surrounded by tall, swaying trees, or the confined walls of her various masters’ domains, Oharu, though denied individuality, treated as more a societal fixture and nuisance, maintains dignity. Although Mizoguchi doesn’t accomplish this as blatantly as Fellini did in Nights of Cabiria (Mizoguchi might not have gone for that whole “Circus of Life” thing), he also ends his tragic heroine’s journey with a song, here an isolated prayer.

Mizoguchi’s films will be playing at Film Forum through the end of the week, and then the series will travel to Pleasantville, New York’s Jacob Burns Film Center on September 29, the Detroit Institute of Art on October 29, and Chicago’s Music Box Theater on November 17. For more information, click here.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHConquistadorsAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
MakesRequieumForADreamLookSweetAsShitHAHAHAHAHAHAHADarrenAronofskyHAHAHAHAHAH
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHTreeOfLifeAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHughJackmanHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHARachelWeiszHAHAHAHAH
AHAHAMonkeyBrainsHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHPseudoBuddhistCrapHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHDidIMentionConquistadorsAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHAWhew.

It’s late here at the Toronto Film Festival, but before I pass out, I think it bears mentioning that large sections of The Fountain feature a bald and pajama’ed Hugh Jackman lotusing his way through outer space in an intergalactic snow globe that carries the precious tree of life. And that he’ll often levitate out of said snow globe into one of two narratives: a half-hearted conquistador quest for Eden at the behest of the Queen of Spain (Rachel Weisz) and a modern-day medical drama where he’s researching ways to stop brain tumors in monkeys because his wife (also Rachel Weisz), of course, is dying of a tumor. By the end of the film, our hero’s learned the limits of his own abilities as a mortal, the larger interconnectedness of things, and that if one stabs the tree of life and drinks its nectar plants will grow out of your belly and mouth.

And no, I’m not making any of this up. The Fountain is truly one for the ages.

Surely, there are good points to be made about the basic irrationality of the MPAA, as an extension of American priorities, and certainly, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, manages to make a couple of them. But no amount of self-righteous huffing and puffing, not to mention tedious sub-plotting, can disguise the fact that this is one silly little movie, and one hell of a cheat. Somewhere in between the self-satisfied trading of ratings board horror stories between Dick and the filmmakers of Orgazmo and A Dirty Shame, I started to recognize This Film Is Not Yet Rated’s fruitlessness. Completely ignorant of the ebb and flow of film history and the shifting mentalities of sexual mores, this post-Michael Moore doc just spins its wheels for ninety-something minutes before hitting a brick wall. Basically a litany of whiny talking heads featuring the cast of Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes interspersed with a cutesy private detective pursuit of the secret society of MPAA raters (a shadowy collective of American moms, dads, and the odd preacher, who sit in judgment of every major release the American public sees), Dick’s film might have made an innocuous reality TV series on IFC (which is how it might have originated). That the film has been pumped up by critics as some sort of strong medicine to a moribund, hopelessly puritanical ratings system makes it nearly unwatchable.

Dick chooses to reveal the names and license plate numbers of all of the MPAA watchers who his amiable L.A. private dick uncovers in her searches. Not only does this make for rather tedious viewing, it couldn’t possibly have any sort of political or social effect whatsoever. Revealing their identities is more of a ‘nyah nyah’ local news investigative report tactic…by using this narrative as a distraction technique, Dick completely pulls the wool over his audiences’ eyes so that they don’t notice that he hasn’t proposed a single, solitary workable alternative to the current ratings system, in effect since Jack Valenti instituted it in 1968. It’s repeated that an NC-17 is the box-office kiss of death, yet did a filmmaker like John Waters really expect his clit-happy, felch-ful A Dirty Shame to receive a (let’s face it, kid-friendly) R? He must be living in a fantasy world; which is how most of these filmmakers come across. Rather than bemoan our inextricably corset-bound American values (“It’s so much better in Europe,” they say…really well how about China? Iran?), why don’t they detail the various ways in which films can be rated based upon content as a means of revising the strict parameters of the MPAA. Certainly, there should be strict demarcations between adult films and children’s films: All pencil-stached John Waters can come up with is that kids are internet-porn obsessed these days… so what’s the dif, daddy-o?

Additionally, Dick shoots his own few good points in the foot thanks to subtle elisions and quick-cut brevity. For instance, a montage comparing gay/lesbian NC-17 sexual encounters with their heterosexual R-rated counterparts is certainly welcome and such double standards require a serious outing. Yet it’s unfair to use a film such as Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin as an example of the MPAA’s bias: the clip shown is of a shirtless Joseph Gordon Levitt topping one of his johns, and it’s compared with a straight correlation. Yet wasn’t Mysterious Skin tagged with an NC-17 for its extremely upsetting and, if not graphic, highly evocative portrait of child molestation? And even if the rating really hurt its box-office take in the long run, do theater-hopping teens really need to be exposed to it?

It’s a moral conundrum of course, and one that requires serious debate, not the type of one-sided haranguing that would get you reprimanded on day one of high school debate club. One numb-skulled interviewee actually goes so far as to try and discredit the MPAA by condoning government intervention instead. I’m sure anyone with a brain and a heart can safely agree that we should be lucky that such a thing doesn’t happen here; the MPAA, far from a perfect organization, was established partly to prevent the government from exerting its influence. Now that Dick has revealed the MPAA member’s names (which will probably result in nothing more than a collective shrug), perhaps he can propose a workable solution, so that stifled “artists” like Todd Solondz and Jamie Babbit can break into the Poughkeepsie mall’s Regal 12.

A burnished autumnal Los Angeles past, overacting middling talents gesticulating with half-empty bourbon glasses, cops making references to Ralph Meeker: yup, Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland is another noirish Hollywood paean to itself disguised as a disillusioned attack on that hollow dream factory. Marshmallowy and mush-mouthed, Ben Affleck presides over this overwrought concept movie with the alacrity of a lottery winner, yet all the grace of a tipsy kangaroo. While we at Reverse Shot eagerly await next week’s Hollywood nightmare, De Palma’s The Black Dahlia—sure to outdo Allen Coulter’s unimaginative private dick drama shot for shot in the visual department, at least—we took a pit stop in Hollywoodland this week on indieWIRE. Consider it the iceberg-lettuce-and-thousand-island-dressing salad preceding De Palma’s filet mignon.

The person who came up with this.

http://www.doublefeaturefinder.com/

It's like a Christmas Miracle.

"Bow down before me!!! For I am Todd Field….King of the Cinema! I have accomplished everything that every other filmmaker has ever tried to do….mwhaaa haaa haaa!!!”






Sorry we’ve been gone so long; movie matters, like international film festivals, and personal matters, like buddies’ weddings, took precedent over snarking about film for the past week. So, thanks David Poland, thanks, for busting in on our calming blogless sojourn with your utterly nutsoid tomfoolery. We had heard some pretty reliable inside information, from someone we at Reverse Shot think is one of the greatest film critics working today, that Todd Field’s upcoming Little Children was, frankly, a festival du merde. Nevertheless, we were willing to keep an open mind. After all, for all its third-act shenanigans, Field’s In the Bedroom was a rather effective little splash of New England local color, nicely evocative and detailed, and of course, there was The Spacek. So we’re still curious about the director’s Kate Winslet/Patrick Wilson/Jackie Earl Hailey (!!) follow-up; but whatever well-wishes we had were nearly dashed this week by Poland’s “Movie City News” review, which in trying to get viewers excited, might have not only scared them off, but sent them screaming, running to their DVD collection, and throwing out every single fucking movie they’ve ever watched. Because, seriously, after this, what movies could possibly worth watching anymore?

“One could easily assert that Little Childrenis the film that Ang Lee and Alan Ball and Robert Redford and Paul Thomas Anderson and even Woody Allen have been trying to make for a long time.”

Hmm, really? It seems that those directors make films with wildly different subject matter, from different milieux, and oftentimes different countries. Well, okay, if you say so, David. But wait:

“Others, like Alejandro Inarritu and Steven Soderbergh and Alexander Payne and Cameron Crowe and Jim Brooks and the Coen Brothers are working on similar canvases, but are too interested in entertaining to go somewhere quite this dry and relentless (though they often come close and achieve greatness on different levels).”

Well, you’re going out on some limbs there, but I see, I see…okay, so PT Anderson and Redford maybe do stuff on dysfunctional families, okay….and well, Inarittu makes those interconnected type dealies, while Crowe and Brooks have made movies…about….characters who….say things, and….do stuff, too. Yeah, and the Coen Brothers. Well, yes, I can see that, maybe. There’s some eccentricity there, maybe. Okay, David, I’m still with you.

“I love me some Malick, but he wants to let the wind blow through our hair and to allow us to reflect on ourselves even as we watch his movies.”

Yes, Malick, his free-floating elliptical films about American history are very much like those of Soderbergh. Okay, so Malick, Crowe, Brooks, Inarritu, Coens, Ang Lee….yes, yes I see a pattern forming…these are, well, they’re dramas? Yes, they all fit in the DRAMA genre. Whew. Oh, you have more to say, David?

“In England & Ireland, Jim Sheridan and Alan Parker and Neil Jordan and Mike Leigh have gone here and have probably come closer to this work in defining their cultures than American filmmakers previously have…”

What, no Tom Shadyac? Well, apparently, there is ONE filmmaker in the history of film Field has able to already equal in some way:

“But the one filmmaker whose voice is clear and clean in Little Children, aside from Todd Field, is Stanley Kubrick's.”

Ah, it’s all clear now.
P.S. The nuttiness doesn’t stop there:

“I keep finding myself singing Pete Seeger's "Little Boxes," currently enjoying renewed fame as the theme song of Showtime's first great non-niche series, Weeds, to myself when I think of this film...

There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.’”

Incidentally, I caught a glimpse of Poland coming out of the screening of Little Children immediately after it ended and quickly snapped a photo.

I asked him what he thought of the film’s Oscar chances. (I gathered from his spittling and this guttural “hyuck hyuck hyuck” sound he was making that he was predicting many nods!)

It’s time to add another entry to the list of films whose titles say all that needs saying. Reconfigure the letters in Babel only slightly, and you’ll capture the essence of this globe-trotting work, the third part of some rudely shoehorned post facto trilogy that includes Amores perros and 21 Grams. So disheartened was I by the put-on nihilism and general vacuity of Perros that I sat 21 Grams out entirely, and I entered Babel with more than a few reservations, but with a vague hope that a filmmaker who seemed to show signs of some unified aesthetic sensibility in the midst of the intellectual bankruptcy that marred Perros might do better.

I won’t deny that Babel represents an improvement on Amores perros, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worth 142 minutes of your time. Set across three continents (Africa, Asia, North America) and following four stories, I’m sure Babel was conceived as some sort of grand statement on global interconnectedness, but it’s realized more along the lines of a sixth-grade thought exercise: If a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, will there be a tropical storm in the Caribbean? This isn’t a movie that attempts to riff off disparate stories and themes in search of a broader perspective—Babel’s game is all about winnowing global complexity and human experience down to silly narrative contrivances. Somewhat thankfully Iñárritu withholds the crucial, wholly ridiculous, link that binds the Japan-set portion of the narrative to the other stories until mid-way through the film, and this at least offers an hour of near-credibility before we become aware of how entirely hokey a contraption Babel is.

Populated with a host of archetypes (a teenaged deaf-mute volleyball player trying to puzzle out her sexuality amidst the sensory overload of Tokyo being the most ludicrously overdetermined, if most compelling anyway), Babel might have fared better if it worked harder to foreground its entirely artificial nature. Iñárritu’s only real concern at this point seems to be narrative mechanics, so I’m not sure how he reconciles that with his insistence on all the registers of realism tremulous camera work, non-actors, and location shooting can provide. The initial minutes of the film amongst the goat herders of Morocco has a nicely lived-in quality that reminded me more than a little of Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, and I’d have been happy to watch this movie at feature-length, but its not long before we shipped off to San Diego, then back to Morocco, then Tokyo, and so on. Some of his cuts between locales work smoothly, others are too obviously telegraphed, but if Iñárritu had never tried to connect the stories narratively at all, this might not have been an issue.

But, people buy this kind of stuff, and in great quantities. I can’t say I’d rather folks pay money to see You, Me, and Dupree, but I can already smell the hosannas that will get dropped on the lap of this “ingenious” and “mind-bogglingly complex” work. I’m sure no one will report on how two of the four sequences involve young girls exposing themselves, but, hey, who’s counting, right? I’ll admit that in a fall bursting with contenders (Forster, Shainberg, McGrath, Condon, Scott…does Tom Shadyac have a film?) Babel might barely register on the overall scale of offensiveness, but still…