Orson slept here: The St. Regis Hotel as portrayed by Scorsese's Taxi Driver (Photo: Senses of Cinema)

Sometimes, when I look back at the volume of crap this blog comprises, I take a moment to wonder if I did not have anything better to do for the last four-and-a-half months. And then I read something like John Thurman's "Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality," (via Movie City Indie) after which I feel as though I have been brandishing the cutting cultural edge for millions.

That is not to trivialize or dismiss Thurman's work, because there is obviously some serious viewing labor behind his analyses of the allusions sprinkled through Scorsese's film (as well as Schrader's original script). But Jesus Christ: Do we need another few thousand words to say a great film stole from Citizen Kane? I mean, is it not an overcooked fact that at least the last two generations of American filmmakers owe their lives in part to Orson Welles and Gregg Toland?

Exhibit A: Thurman notes the similarites between Scorsese's introduction of Betsy (Cybill Shepard) and Welles' introduction of Rosebud (a sled), both of which bump up against close-ups of writing:

Scorsese modifies the borrowing from Kane by reversing the order, introducing the words of the text only after the flashback is shown. But, fundamentally, the two are a very close match. Both films feature a scroll over the handwriting of a personal recollection. Travis' introductory voice-over wording is very similar to that of Thatcher's memoirs. Both dissolve: Citizen Kane to Rosebud, and Taxi Driver from Betsy. Both also feature Bernard Herrmann scores, expanding similarly upon a lyrical love theme not heard since the film's start, and utilizing the harp to do so.

Then you have got Betsy's white dress and Bernstein's pining for the girl on the ferry who wore the white dress; you have got Travis clapping during a political speech while the newsmen clap at the end of the Kane newsreel; you have got Scorsese shooting and staying at the St. Regis Hotel (Welles stayed there, you know); and even some Hitchcock-snatching (another shocker) in Taxi Driver's captivity narrative.

Good eye, Thurman--totally illuminating stuff--but this is the 21st century, pal. I think the time has come to play "one degree of separation" with, say, Just Married and Scenes From a Marriage. That is the essay the world is waiting for.

Michael Showalter waited and waited and waited at The Regency, but I never arrived (Photo: IFC Films)

For whatever reason, IFC no longer includes The Reeler on its press mailing list for New York film events. Consequently, I have to report on new films like The Baxter second-hand—without having seen them, of course—from accounts far more dynamic and wide-ranging than I ever would have gleaned from speaking with the NYC-based filmmakers themselves.

Thankfully, I think I have narrowed down the best jewels to be plucked from last week's Baxter junket at the Regency Hotel (26 blocks from Reeler HQ, natch—so close, yet so far). The first (and best) comes from the old stand-by CHUD, whose Devin Faraci is obviously a longtime follower of writer-director-star Michael Showalter's work and is exactly the kind of devoted geek who—all kidding aside—really should get first crack at any of these interviews:

Q: Was casting Haviland Morris a nod to Sixteen Candles?

Showalter: No! She’s just a great actor. A great, underused actress.

Q: She was Baxtered in Sixteen Candles.

Showalter: That’s right, she’s a Baxter! That’s true. Haviland is a classic Baxter. But no, she’s just a great actress who lives in New York. Absolutely sweet, funny, charming woman.

(N.B. I can almost guarantee you Showalter will claim credit for that reference in private if he is ever asked again; he would be a fool not to proclaim such attention to detail--to not spit a la Hitchcock, "Are you kidding? I know what is happening in every frame of my films!")

The Post's coverage, on the other hand, left something to be desired. While it had enough Baxter references floating around the Web today to make you wonder if IFC reps sent a catered lunch along with their press releases, the Post's "Are You a Baxter?" quiz borders on Schiavo-level brain death. Writer Sara Stewart earns a few extra points, however, for some intrepid man-on-the-street reporting and for her inspired four-way with Showalter and his Stella troupemates Michael Ian Black and David Wain:

While he looks for that perfect, pajama-loving girl, at least the Baxter is in good company. The role may be an ignominious one, but it's far from uncommon, say Showalter and company, who riffed on real-life and fictional Baxters with zest.

"John Roberts is a Baxter. Have you seen his hair? It's parted with a snow shovel!" Showalter says.

"Teri Garr in 'Tootsie'!" says Wain. "She's a great female Baxter."

"Clark Kent is a Baxter. Superman is a leading man, but Clark Kent is a Baxter," Showalter says.

"Michael Bloomberg is Giuliani's Baxter, but he's not a Baxter himself," Black says.

"George Pataki is a Baxter, no question," Showalter says. "But Mario Cuomo is not a Baxter."

"Jorge Posada is Baxter-like," Black muses.

And so on. But what of this movie? Is it good on a par with Showalter's Wet Hot American Summer, or is The Baxter doomed to be its own Baxter—kind of a flirtatious one-off for everyone lost in the wry wit of Summer, Stella and The State? Hell if I know—my IFC screening invite got lost in the mail.

Reel Paradise director Steve James, introducing his film at Monday's premiere (Photos: STV)

You have to know that every documentarian has at least one reality TV show in him or her, and you can probably even assume that they have all at least considered shooting them since the genre surged to popularity in the late '90s. And while I would sooner swim with piranhas than watch 99 percent of reality shows, I have to say that the premise of Steve James's Reel Paradise was intriguing enough for me to drop by its premiere last night for an early look.

I know, I know--"But Reel Paradise is not a reality show," you say. Well, not by definition. But James--whose epochal Hoop Dreams is to the modern documentary what The Real World is to the reality genre--borrows liberally from both conventions to tell the tale of the Piersons, a New York family that relocated to Taveuni, Fiji, for a year to screen free movies in a village cinema. That James had the good fortune to witness a potent pop culture clash is not really in question; that the tempestuous family at the center of the clash (and thus in front of camera) is ultimately any more intriguing as the clans hamming it up on Trading Spouses is a little more debatable.

Not that any of this is James's fault. "At one point in the filming, I said to my crew at dinner, 'I feel like were making a reality documentary,'" he told The Reeler. "Which wasn't a criticism. It's just an observation. The difference between this and reality television is that this is something (the Piersons) chose to do for very personal family reasons. They weren't recruited to do this. When we got there, I tried to make as honest a documentary as I could."

What makes this difficult is that James acknowledges barely knowing the Pierson family before going to Fiji, having only some professional acquaintance with the acclaimed author and indie-film guru John Pierson prior to the shoot. John's wife Janet and their teenaged children Georgia and Wyatt were perfect strangers to James and his crew, and their strained interactions play inconsistently against their wise-ass cineaste repartee and individual vulnerabilities. Moreover, James' accomplished style?which has always relied so heavily on years of observation (if not decades, as in the case of Stevie)?seems hamstrung against the one-month shooting schedule provided him here.

(L-R) Adam Butcher, director Michael McGowan and Campbell Scott on the set of Saint Ralph (Photos: Odeon Films)

I admit that on paper, Saint Ralph might not seem like it should work. Michael McGowan's second film, which opens today in New York, is a little too neat and clean and more than a couple of shades beyond the murky line demarcating incredulity. The film showcases a 14-year-old's quixotic quest to win the Boston Marathon as a means of "miraculously" curing his mother's terminal illness—a logline that does not have the most momentum behind it in terms of pushing jaded moviegoers into theaters.

Which is kind of why I wanted to see it. It did not hurt that it stars Campbell Scott and Jennifer Tilly (as a nurse! In the '50s!), who are generally bankable commodities in just about any film they take on, or that from the story alone, it seemed like it could be just quirky enough to have "sleeper" written all over it. And life is nothing if not a series of taking chances.

In the end, I am glad I did. Sure, Saint Ralph still has its digressions, from slo-mo melodrama to a few treacly family asides. But for a film to so unapologetically take on mortality, faith and subversion in what presents itself as a sort of coming-of-age dramedy, it must first earn a viewer's faith with characters for whom they have unshakable sympathy and trust. And it has to do it fast, without taking itself too seriously. That McGowan's script is hardly earth-shattering is precisely why it works; that his cast—especially Scott and indomitable 14-year-old newcomer Adam Butcher—consistently betrays any notion of low genre expectations is precisely why it works quite well.

"If you take the basic idea of a 14-year-old trying to win the Boston Marathon, it doesn't sound that different from a Disney film," McGowan told The Reeler during a recent visit to New York. "Just because it's about a 14-year-old boy doesn't mean it's for 14-year-olds. And there are no new stories anywhere; it's just sort of the execution of it that becomes sort of the art of it, if you will.".

Bill Murray is funny, except for about 93 percent of Broken Flowers (Photo: STV)

I had a lot of questions to ask Bill Murray about his role in Jim Jarmusch's latest film Broken Flowers, which opens next week and features Murray's most understated performance to date. I wanted to hear more about his evolving tradition of restraint—how Flowers' Don Johnston builds on Lost in Translation's Bob Harris, who in turn built on Rushmore's Herman Blume, who seemed like Murray's first finely tuned, revelatory hybrid of esoterica and longing.

Then I thought about it, and it occurred to me that this tradition stretches back even further—way, way back, in fact, to Saturday Night Live. Remember Murray's turn as Paco, the Latino game show host who famously murmured: "Quien es mas macho? Senor Fernando Lamas o senor Ricardo Montalban? Lamas? O Montalbahhhhn?"

To my disadvantage, I recalled this moment on the red carpet with Murray standing in front of me. Then I choked on laughter, and that was pretty much the end of that.

I mean, I still asked him about restraint, but with Murray in full-on modesty mode, it was as hollow an exercise as his dramatic debut 20 years ago in The Razor's Edge. "I don't know," he said. "It's just reacting to what people are doing. Sometimes all you can do is stay quiet. It just seemed like the right thing to do."

But is it harder in a movie like Broken Flowers, where he performs so many protracted scenes alone in silence?

"Oh, yeah" he said, nodding insistently. "Yeah."

Four of the Vietnam veterans whose stories haunt the frames of Winter Soldier (Photo: Photofest)

OK, so The Reeler has been kind of quiet today, I admit. I apologize for this, but I have an excuse: Lincoln Center hosted a screening of the 1972 anti-war documentary Winter Soldier, which gets shown, like, never, because according to the filmmakers, neither the major networks nor even PBS are willing to touch something that so graphically addresses atrocities committed by Americans during the Vietnam War. Not that it is even that visually graphic; sure, there is some extreme contrast and grain going on in those long takes, but that is what you tend to get when you are filming with borrowed equipment on donated short ends left over from porno shoots.

That is not what I mean.

I am talking about the language—the messages conveyed by the 30 Vietnam veterans who returned to the United States after taking part in some the most vile acts perpetrated against Vietnamese civilians. A crew of 17 filmmakers (including future Oscar winner Barbara Kopple) filmed the veterans' testimony during the Winter Soldier Investigation (read: mass confession) launched in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, spent eight months editing the film and, in the end, found exactly one American media outlet for their product: New York's Thirteen / WNET.

I am not planning to review Winter Soldier, because it revealed an interesting phenomenon I do not think I have experienced in 25 years of moviegoing: The film is unreviewable. It unfolds in long, slow, terrifying fits; it hints at nothing; at its most symbolic, it represents a culture's repeated failure to learn from its own heinous historic mistakes. It is art inasmuch as it was photographed. My only technical quibble is only that it could stand to have 10 or 15 minutes trimmed out for pace. And the Winterfilm Collective of filmmakers that was gracious enough to film the gathering in the first place should never have tacked on its self-serving reunion "chat" at the end. The viewers would much rather see the soldiers reunited, and hear their perspectives on the youth their government eviscerated for the sake of future wars.

But assuming we will never have that, we have the sharp swell of emotion that simple words extract. When a recollection is powerful enough for you to shield your eyes, and when you look back up at a screen that seems to have doubled in size to accommodate the magnitude of its message, there is a certain magic in the room.

And when Winter Soldier opens its one-week run Aug. 3, it may provide your last chance for a while to genuinely feel something in a cinema. The critic in me has nothing to say—the war says it all. Watch and listen.

UPDATE (7/28/05): indieWIRE captain Eugene Hernandez has the latest on Winter Soldier's planned national tour, including stopovers in Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Stamford and Hartford.

It only took 34 years to get this picture screened around the country, so take advantage of your access or contact distributor Milestone Films if you have ideas for theaters near you where the film might run.

Well, for the Fourth of July, I plan on slow-roasting my pride and bringing it to the Touchstone Pictures potluck... Walter Salles (with Jennifer Connelly) at last week's Dark Water premiere (Photo: STV)

The summer movie season continues to trudge along by the numbers, with the latest entry in the mediocrity sweepstakes being Walter Salles' remake of the Japanese thriller Dark Water.

Now, I would not typically cover a big-budget dud when there are so many smaller, better films and events worth mentioning, but there are two things about it that got me thinking:

1) It is a New York movie all the way, complete with inside jokes about apartment hunting and commuting that will fly a few hundred feet wide of their target in the rest of the country.

2) It reintroduced a question I have been asking myself for a while: What are we supposed to do with a film that simply "is what it is"?

Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson: Real Life--Cute; The Dying Gaul--Not Cute (Photos: STV)

An eerie trend is developing. You may have witnessed it yourself. For now, let's call it the "Mid-Lifetime Achievement Award" phenomenon--in which respected film organizations honor accomplished actors or filmmakers for little more than being in the prime of their careers. Take 28-year old Samantha Morton for example, who along with Nicolas Cage received this year's Half-Life Award at CineVegas. Or Marc Forster, 36, who attended a career retrospective hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in April.

And then Tuesday night, Lincoln Center's Young Friends of Film honored Campbell Scott, who at age 43 is hardly winding down his career. To the contrary, his finely tuned performance in Craig Lucas' The Dying Gaul wowed the audience in the Walter Reade Theater. He commented on looking forward to his next directing project and staying close to New York. Life is good, so on and so forth.

So how does Scott feel about the idea of his very own "Mid-Lifetime Achievement Award"?

"You mean, that maybe it's all over?" he replied.

Exactly.

He hedged, smiled. "I don't know if I'm supposed to feel comfortable with that sort of thing, but I'll take it," he told The Reeler. "Along with the screening of the film. That makes me feel a little better."