PETER KEOUGH

Review: Milk

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:21:21 GMT

Van Sant's gay of reckoning
Van Sant's Milk of human kindness

VIDEO: The trailer for Milk

Interview: Cleve Jones. By Peter Keough.

Few films have caught the zeitgeist as serendipitously as Gus Van Sant's trenchant, teary Milk, a bio-pic of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk. The first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, Milk (Sean Penn) was murdered on November 27, 1978, along with the city's mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), by Dan White (Josh Brolin) after Moscone refused to let White rescind his resignation from the city's board of supervisors. The film resonates not only because the release coincides with the anniversary of Milk's death but because of an unfortunate repetition of history.

In 1978 Californians voted on Proposition 6, which would have banned gays from government jobs. Earlier this month, they voted on Proposition 8, which forbids same-sex marriages. Milk's campaigning helped defeat the former. So why did the latter win? Perhaps this movie might prod some into reconsidering why they voted for Prop 8 and inspire others into renewed efforts to campaign against it.

For that reason alone Milk demands to be seen. More important, in its first 40 minutes or so, it provides a textbook description of how to create a grassroots movement. Most likely, however, the reason the film will seduce audiences and woo Oscar voters is that it's a juicy and manipulative melodrama and a powerful tearjerker.

Van Sant starts off conventionally enough, with Milk taping an autobiographical statement to be listened to in the event of his death; that's followed by archival news footage of the shootings. Then we flash back to his pre-activist days as a closeted New York office drone who, on his 40th birthday, in the arms of new-found love Scott Smith (James Franco), decides to move to San Francisco to do something in his life "to be proud of."

Newly bearded and long-haired, Milk and Smith open a camera shop in the fledgling gay enclave of Castro Street. But it's not quite the promised land: the established businesses and the police force are virulently homophobic. Milk organizes the gay community, and boycotts and unlikely alliances with the Teamsters and others produce the powerful political movement that puts him in office and defeats Proposition 6.

Review: Australia

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:41:29 GMT

Baz Luhrmann's Oz and ends
Baz Luhrmann's incontinent Australia

VIDEO: The trailer for Australia

Australia | Directed by Baz Luhrmann | Written by Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood, and Richard Flanagan | with Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, David Gulpilil, David Ngoombujarra, and Lillian Crombie | Twentieth Century Fox | 165 minutes

If the cows had just gotten on the boat, I'd have been satisfied. But that wasn't enough for Baz Luhrmann. He has at least another hour to go in his motley epic Australia, and we hadn't even made it to World War II yet. I guess Baz must have said to himself, the movie's named after a continent, there's got to be more to it than that. So bring on contrived plot complications and the Japanese Imperial Navy.

A pity, because had he showed some restraint, he might have made his best movie yet. Of course, if he'd showed some restraint, he wouldn't be Baz Luhrmann. At its best, Australia is an epic farce, like The Sundowners with CGI effects and the goofy tone of Luhrmann's own Strictly Ballroom. Or a cross between Red River and The Wizard of Oz.

Which is kind of what you'd expect from a screenwriting combination that includes Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean), Ronald Harwood (The Pianist), and Aussie novelist Richard Flanagan. Just don't take this film too seriously and it's a rollicking good time. Give it a little thought and the result is the endless catastrophe that is the last third.

The part I enjoyed starts out with the most engaging and animated performance from Nicole Kidman since To Die For (1995). Her Lady Sarah Ashley struts about in her jodhpurs with Kate Hepburn authority, plucky and proper and a bit absurd. Brewing war clouds be damned (it's 1939), she's heading Down Under to retrieve her dawdling husband from his cattle ranch, Faraway Downs. Once there she finds Lord Ashley with a spear in his back, the ranch near ruin, and ruthless cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) ready to buy it all up wholesale. Her only recourse is to drive a herd of cattle across the wastelands to the western port of Darwin. Alone.

Unless that mad dingo, "The Drover" (Hugh Jackman), will help her out. At home only on the Outback mingling with Aboriginals, the Drover despises the hoity-toity lady, and the feeling is mutual — though her expression when he pulls off his shirt suggests what direction this relationship will take. They come to an agreement and put together a misfit squad of riders that includes a lovable drunk (Jack Thompson), a matronly Aboriginal woman (Lillian Crombie), Drover's sidekick (David Ngoombujarra), and Nullah (the adorable Brandon Walters), a magical, mixed-race waif who does double duty as a voiceover narrator.

Interview: Cleve Jones

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:12:58 GMT

Retro active
Harvey Milk's protege Cleve Jones on the movie, Obama, and Prop8.

VIDEO: Peter Keough interviews Cleve Jones

Few of us get a chance to relive our youth, let alone with Gus Van Sant directing and Emile Hirsch as our stand-in. That's one reason Cleve Jones is happy, as Milk — the bio-pic about the San Francisco city supervisor who was the first openly gay man elected to public office — opens today (November 26), one day short of the 30th anniversary of Harvey Milk's murder. As you'll see in the movie, Milk turned the young Jones onto politics back in the '70s, and the protûgû has since kept up the good fight, as one of the founding creators of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the '80s, and more recently in the campaign against California's Proposition 8, which calls for a ban on same-sex marriage. But that last is one reason Jones isn't happy: unlike Proposition 6, a ban on gays in government jobs that Milk helped defeat in 1978, Proposition 8 passed, along with similar initiatives in three other states.

You played a role in the film?
I have three cameos. I played Don Amador [an activist friend of Milk] calling with the news of winning in LA [to defeat Proposition 6], and then I'm slumped over a cocktail in a bar when Emile Hirsch bursts in and says, "Out of the bars and into the streets!" And then I'm also on stage clapping when Sean as Harvey gives his speech at City Hall.

Is that a beginning of a movie career for you?
Oh God, I hope not.

What's it like in the scene when your younger self comes in and confronts who you are 30 years later?
It was poignant and eerie and odd, but it was also great fun because all of our cast and all of our crew were so excited to be part of this project, and there was this great sense of family. We all became friends, and we've remained friends. Everyone was so respectful of Harvey, of the neighborhood, and of the movement. I'm 54, and this is the most wonderful year of my life — truly, it's just great.

Did your first meeting with Harvey happen as it did in the movie? [Young Cleve dismisses Milk as too old and square.]
It is very accurate. I didn't take Harvey seriously at first. He was this character always running for office, and he had a ponytail, and I wasn't that interested in electoral politics. I thought we needed a revolution. I'm more hopeful today. I'm excited and inspired by Obama's victory.

Simple blood

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:56:07 GMT

Twilight puts the life back into the undead
Twilight puts the life back into the undead

VIDEO: The trailer for Twilight

Twilight | Directed by Catherine Hardwicke | Written by Melissa Rosenberg based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer | with Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, and Cam Gigandet | Summit Entertainment | 122 minutes

As far as the undead are concerned, zombies are out and vampires are back in. The animated carcasses of the lumpen proletariat rising up to devour their oppressors have given way to the gorgeous, invincible revenants who live on the blood of the masses. As in the last election, Joe the Plumber loses out to the elitists.

You could also say that Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of the first of Stephenie Meyer's series of four YA bestsellers, triumphs because girls are turned on by boys who are bad for them. Or because all outsider adolescents want to believe they're not really losers, they're of superior breed. Mainly, though, the movie works because Hardwicke and her soon-to-be-iconic leads take the sex and death and immortality hokum that's as old as Bram Stoker and make the undead live again.

The ultraviolet-like lighting, so eerie with pale faces, does help. It flatters Bella (Kristen Stewart, like a younger, sadder Winona Ryder), a smart and lonely 17-year-old depressed about moving from Phoenix to live with her divorced dad (Billy Burke), the sheriff of tiny Forks, Washington — which is probably just down the highway from Twin Peaks. It's clear she doesn't get outdoors much, and her deadly-nightshade appearance might be what attracts the unwanted attention of the goofball cliques at her new school. Outdoing her in pallor, though, if not in their arrogant good looks, are the Cullen clan: superjock Emmet (Kellan Lutz), haughty blonde Amazon Rosalie (Nikki Reed), Cesare the Somnabulist look-alike Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), goth pixie Alice (Ashley Greene), and haunted demigod Edward (Robert Pattinson), five model-perfect stunners whose heads lift from their table like those of a pride of killer cats as she enters the cafeteria.

Her eyes lock only with Edward's, however, and well they might. His are ink-black and thirsty, fringed by semaphore eyebrows. Pattinson is as close as we'll ever come to a bloodless reincarnation of James Dean. Edward plays hard to get, and he finds Bella hard to get, but after a rocky start, they realize they can't stay away from each other. For Edward is indeed a catch. In addition to his beauty, grace, and intelligence, he and his siblings are scions of Dr. Carlisle (Data look-alike Peter Facinelli), their "dad," who is saintly and appears to be rich as Croesus. And what does this beast see in Bella? He finds her . . . delicious.

Whiz kid

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:57:40 GMT

Slumdog Millionaire is a magical misery tour
Slumdog Millionaire is a magical misery tour

VIDEO: The trailer for Slumdog Millionaire

Interview: Danny Boyle. By Peter Keough.

Maybe Danny Boyle's previous film, Sunshine, bombed because even though it took place on a spaceship hurtling toward the sun at mind-boggling speed, nothing really moved. No such problem with his latest, which is set in a grubby Mumbai police station over the course of an hours-long, sometimes brutal interrogation but spins off like a fireworks display across years of history in one of the world's most densely populated and flamboyant cities from the point of view of one of its most downtrodden and irresistible denizens. Like Boyle's best film, Trainspotting, motion is everything — a compulsive flux of image, chronology, point of view, editing, and sound. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't allow for much comprehension along the way, and in retrospect it remains implausible and manipulative while still making elegant sense.

The young man getting the third degree is 18-year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), the slumdog of the title and the unlikely winner of the top 20-million-rupee prize in the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. The host of the show (Anil Kapoor), no Regis Philbin, wonders how an uneducated ragamuffin could achieve what PhDs have failed to do; he may also fear that the contestant was getting more popular than the host. In any case, he turns Jamal over to the cops. After rougher treatment fails to produce a confession of cheating, the police inspector (Irrfan Khan) just asks Jamal to explain how he arrived at each answer.

And so a simple but exhilarating structure falls into place as each question proves a talisman that whirls the film into Jamal's sometimes hideous, sometimes wondrous, always photogenic past. It's like an MTV version of The Arabian Nights by way of Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay. The first question (about the star of a popular Bollywood movie) sets off a raucous chase scene with potbellied cops pursuing an army of urchins through the parti-colored squalor of Mumbai's Dharavi slum. It includes an astounding aerial shot of the tiny figures sprinting through the endless vista of hovels (Boyle has a knack for urban desolation, as in 28 Days Later), and it culminates in a slapsticky immersion of the hero in a cesspit.

A Christmas Tale

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:02:23 GMT

A twisted Christmas stocking
Maybe Charles, who died of leukemia three decades ago, at the age of six, knew what he was doing.

Interview: Danny Boyle

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:04:09 GMT

Slumdog slumming?
Danny Boyle goes to extremes in Millionaire

Whiz kid: Slumdog Millionaire is a magical misery tour. By Peter Keough.

Talk about Jeopardy. After Jamal, a teenage orphan from the Mumbai streets, starts winning it big on India's version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, the cops grab him and work him over with waterboarding and electrodes to find out how he knew the answers. And you thought Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link was tough.

Nonetheless, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire aspires to be a feel-good film while remaining graphically honest about the corruption, poverty, and injustices of its setting. Maybe after the enraged flesh-eating zombies in 28 Days Later and the feral junkies in Trainspotting, Boyle found the mobsters and beggars in the sprawling shanty town of Dharavi downright life-affirming. Or maybe he just brings a kinetic rush to whatever subject he chooses, and a mordant humor that somehow stays upbeat. Whatever, you still have to ask, is he himself slumming by touring Third World misery for our amusement?

THE FILM STARTS WITH POLICE TORTURE, AND IT HAS A SCENE WHERE A KID'S EYES ARE PUT OUT. ARE YOU SURPRISED IT'S SUCH A CROWD PLEASER?
I do these Q&As and people say, "I nearly walked out when the kid was blinded." Yet they clearly forgive it by the end of the story. It's not like the movie avoids letting you know what it's like there, what things go on there, but still, people forgive. I think it's like India, because though some of it is unforgivable, yet you do forgive it.

There are some extraordinary things going on there: the police are corrupt, the infrastructure is inadequate, there's lot of things for them to tackle. There are these terrible extremes, and it's one of the reasons that good storytelling can go on there. But they are connected, not separate. We tend to separate our extremes. If they build a tower block [in India], at the bottom of it is a slum, where the people live who built it, and the people who live in the tower block don't try to chase them away, they feel connected to those people who live underneath. This idea they have, of destiny, can to our eyes look really passive and very accepting, but it doesn't actually work like that. You see kids who have had their hands chopped off to make them better beggars — you actually see people like that, people come up and knock on the car windows, and you can see that their hands have been cut off! But by accepting that, you are connected with that person. It's quite difficult to explain; you sense it when you're there, really.

Quantum mechanic

PETER KEOUGH — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:24:45 GMT

Little Solace for Bond fans
Little Solace for Bond fans

VIDEO: The trailer for Quantum of Solace

Quantum Of Solace | Directed by Marc Forster | Written By Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade based on a story by Ian Fleming | With Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, and Judi Dench | Columbia Pictures | 106 minutes

When a chase sequence near the beginning of this latest Bond film arouses less excitement than the horse race it's intercut with, you know something is missing. Likewise when it seems Bond (Daniel Craig) himself wouldn't make as hot a date as a mechanic waiting back at the shop to work on his bullet-riddled Aston Martin. Fans of 007 expect two things from their product: an appealing hero and satisfying action sequences. Quantum of Solace, inexplicably entrusted to Marc Forster (The Kite Runner), fails to deliver either.

Take the opening sequence. The film follows up last year's far superior Casino Royale with Bond, still pissed over the death of the seemingly treacherous Vesper, zooming off to Siena with a fleet of Uzi-sprouting BMWs (Quantum may have cost more per frame than any film ever, but it compensates by challenging the product-placement record) in pursuit. Later, another chase springs up on foot involving repeated leaps across red-tiled rooftops, and it just can't compete with the traditional Palio that's being run at the same time.

The reason? Like nearly every filmmaker these days (one exception: Paul Greengrass last year in The Bourne Ultimatum), Forster confuses meaningless cutting and shaky camera work with excitement. The result is action wallpaper that blurs what's actually happening, an assault of kinetic visual noise devoid of the physical logic and wit that engage an audience's intelligence and not just its viscera. Maybe directors should look back at how previous filmmakers handled elaborate action sequences — say, Buster Keaton.

As for Craig's Bond, last time out he was muscular, rough, brooding, and deep. Now he's just muscular. His motivation is revenge, the conflict is with duty, but the expression is vacant. His heart was broken moments before in film time but a year ago for those of us watching, and I, for one, couldn't connect the dots, probably because Forster was more interested in obliterating them in the hail of the 200,000 blank rounds of ammunition used in the making of the movie.

Leviathan

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:54:21 GMT

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 may be the Great American Novel
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work, the 912-page opus 2666 .

DIABOLICAL: Bolaño’s tantalizing, often unfinished digressions are part of his genius.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work (he died in 2003, age 50), the 912-page opus 2666. His book, however, does have a circumference of sorts, a circular narrative that begins, like his previous novel, The Savage Detectives, with academics (in Detectives they were poets) searching the wastelands of the Sonora province of Mexico for a legendary writer and ending . . . well, it's hard to say, somewhere in that general vicinity. It offers innumerable passages that cohere into a sense of immanent revelation, some of them contained in single multi-page run-on sentences, before dissolving like blowing sand. Like Moby Dick, it confronts the nature, the ubiquity, and the elusiveness of evil. And as such it can also make a claim for being the Great American Novel, both North and South.

The academics' story is told in the first of five sections, "The Part About the Critics." They include four literature professors from different European countries, three men and a woman, who share an obsession with Benno von Archimboldi, a mystery author who over the decades has turned out novels with titles like TheLeather Mask and Bifurcaria Bifurcata. Little is known about him except that he is Prussian and very tall and that he served on the Eastern Front in World War II. The quartet attend conferences on Archimboldi and engage in passionate discussion, and their bonds heat up into something more than Platonic. At last, following up a lead, they head to Mexico where a sighting of the octogenarian legend has been reported.

Sounds deadly? Not when every page veers off on a tantalizing, often unfinished digression — like the one about the painter whose masterpiece is a canvas adorned with his own severed hand — or includes tossed-off descriptions of the everyday like "It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness." [9] Or when the quartet arrive at their destination, Santa Teresa, a fictional city where — as in the real city of Ciudad Juárez, on which it is based — hundreds of women, mostly workers in local factories, have turned up raped and brutally murdered, a serial-killing spree that's been going on since 1993.

Word play

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:57:53 GMT

Doomsday is just a state of mind in Synecdoche, New York
The end of the world has always appealed to movie audiences, no more so than now that the prospect is looking more and more likely.

VIDEO: The trailer for Synecdoche, New York

Interview: Charlie Kaufman. By Peter Keough

Synecdoche, New York | Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman | with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Samantha Morton | Sony Classics | 124 minutes

The end of the world has always appealed to movie audiences, no more so than now that the prospect is looking more and more likely. Maybe it’s easier to ponder the demise of things in general than oneself in particular. In his hypnotic, infuriating, punishing new film, Charlie Kaufman tries to re-create both experiences. No fun date at the movies, it’s the very opposite of escapist entertainment. There’s no way out of Kaufman’s mind and its morose delectation of decay and doom, except via death. I can admire the film’s philosophical ambition, its formal ingenuity, and its in-jokes that repeated viewings will, I’m sure, never exhaust. But as for enjoyment, well, something is missing.

Maybe more of the surreal humor that filled Being John Malkovich with ebullience. Or maybe characters who are more appealing than Caden Cotard. Played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a hysterical variation on his character in Savages, with a nod to Steve Coogan in Hamlet 2, Caden has the thankless task of heading the drama department in a small college in Schenectady, New York. His wife, Adele Lack (designated shrew Catherine Keener), is a narcissistic artist (her microscopic canvases are one of the better running gags) who can’t stand her husband. She eventually flees with their child, Olive, and her lover, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Berlin, where she enjoys a triumphantly successful career.

Caden, however, still has options. For some reason, women can’t get enough of him — maybe it’s his penchant for weeping before having sex and then proving impotent. Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works the box office at the theater where Caden’s student production of Death of a Salesman is being staged, is interested. So are the MacArthur people, who honor him with their $100,000 “genius grant.” Encouraged by Hazel, Caden sets out on a lifelong, unfulfilled love affair, and funded by the grant, he heads to New York City to begin his lifelong, unfinishable magnum opus — re-creating his life on a giant set in an endlessly expanding vacant factory.

Sin city

PETER KEOUGH — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:17:31 GMT

Sex and drugs rock the Boston Festival of Films from Iran
Sex and drugs rock the Boston Festival of Films from Iran

BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME: Like Abbas Kiarostami, Hana Makhmalbaf focuses on children.

“The Boston Festival Of Films From Iran” | Museum of Fine Arts | November 7-30

Everyone in Tehran is down-and-out or taking dope or getting divorced — or all three. Or so this year's Festival of Films from Iran at the Museum of Fine Arts would suggest. Previous festivals have touched on the discontents of the big city before, but now Western-style anomie and other ills appear to have become a universal malaise. Likewise, Western styles of moviemaking have made an impact. Fewer filmmakers imitate the studied, long takes of such Iranian New Wave filmmakers as Abbas Kiarostami; instead, they opt for recognizable American genres rendered fresh (or absurd) by indigenous Iranian elements.

Leaning to the absurd side is the broad comedy Ali Atshani's Banana Skin (2008; November 21 at 6:15 pm), in which a workaholic stockbroker finds his busy schedule interrupted by death. Overlook the subtitles and Tehran trappings and it's like a play-by-play reprise of Ghost Town. This bizarre cultural disorientation alone makes the film worth watching.

More on the fresh side is veteran director Dariush Mehrjui's Santoori: The Music Man (2007; November 14 at 7:45 pm, with Mehrjui receiving the Ilex Award for Lifetime Achievement), which recalls Walk the Line with a junkie Iranian dulcimer player instead of a pill-popping American country-music legend. Ali (an intense, bearded Bahram Radan) transfixes Tehran audiences with his mournful, self-pitying ballads and the flurry of his tiny hammers playing the title instrument. Among those who fall under his spell is his beautiful wife, Hanieh (Golshifta Farahani). But Ali loves the santoor more than anything else — or is heroin his real heart's desire? Before she hits the road, Hanieh condemns her homeland, a country whose hypocrisy, corruption, and cruelty (Ali's family disowned him because of his love of music) drives its greatest artists to drug addiction. Ali's subsequent downward spiral is one of the most harrowing and moving depictions of despair to be seen on screen.

As is the bottoming out of the hero of Behnam Behzadi's Before the Burial (2008; November 15 at 3 pm). Siamak (a bearded, intense Alireza Aqakhani), a dissident recently released from prison, leaves his bus-driving job with a mission: before his birthday, which takes place in a few days, he'll avenge himself on those who turned him in years ago, when he was a medical student, and then kill himself. But a kooky young girl interrupts his vendetta, charming him with her tales of being the princess of a remote island. The relationship is quirky and oddly erotic, and before it can descend into the maudlin, it takes a haunting, near-mystical turn.

Interview: Charlie Kaufman

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:31:10 GMT

Straight poop
People either love or hate Charlie Kaufman.

Word play: Doomsday is just a state of mind in Synecdoche, New York. By Peter Keough.

People either love or hate Charlie Kaufman. When he appeared a few weeks ago at the Harvard Square Theatre to present Synecdoche, New York, the crowd loved him. Maybe because they felt they knew him, or even were him — and who's to say they weren't? Those who praise his films and those who condemn them agree that they're self-reflective to the point of solipsism. Synecdoche, the first feature he's directed (his screenplays include Adaptation and Being John Malkovich), won't change any minds. Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gets a MacArthur fellowship to put on a play and then spends the rest of his life trying to re-create his life in New York City as a stage production, an endeavor that involves re-creating his re-creating of his life as a stage production, and so on.

"I'll be here to answer questions after the screening," Kaufman told the crowd before the film started. "If anyone is here." He needn't have worried.

Althought some audience members got testy when you didn't interpret the movie for them, basically they worshipped you.
The worshipping part, I don't know what it means, exactly. The thing that the guy said at the end last night [something to the effect that Kaufman was God] — it was nice. Especially because I was really depressed last night, and I was not looking forward to doing that thing. It's hard for me to be traveling by myself, doing this for a month, and I'm exhausted. The reaction to the movie has been — I never know what people will say, whether they will be angry with me or if they'll be responsive like that guy.

Sometimes it's the same person.
No, that hasn't happened, not that I've been aware of. I've heard that people can sometimes hate the movie and then can't get it out of their head. I've heard people say that, or they see it again, these are the critics who have seen it at festivals, and then they start to feel something about it that they didn't before.

B List rewind

PETER KEOUGH — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:54:29 GMT

Boston Phoenix film critics salute The Fly , King Creole , and The Conversation in The National Society of Film Critics latest tome.

Every few years or so the National Society of Film Critics, which includes in its roster the Boston Phoenix critics Chris Fujiwara, Gerald Peary and Peter Keough, publishes a collection of its members’ writings on a particular theme. The latest, edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson, is titled The BList: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love (film critics are not noted for their brevity) and more or less focuses on that underappreciated and under-budgeted genre of films referred to as B movies. Coinciding with the book’s release, the Brattle Theatre has put together a five day series that starts with a panel discussion on November 5 and includes screenings of some of the films, such as The Fly (1958), Son of Kong (1933) and Pick-up on SouthStreet (1953), under consideration. To give you a head start on the topic here are some of the essays contributed by the above-mentioned Phoenix writers.

The Fly
Kurt Neumann, 1958
by Chris Fujiwara

Gerald Peary critques Elvis Presley's King Creole.

Why The Conversation is a B-list movie, Peter Keough explains.

Kurt Neumann’s The Fly succeeds by playing off the respectable against the outrageous, introducing the grotesque and the absurd within a carefully defined context of the familiar. Unlike David Cronenberg in his 1986 remake, Neumann steers The Fly away from tragedy and toward black comedy (which seems to have been what George Langelaan, the author of the short story on which the film is based, had in mind).

It’s appropriate that the film should feel distant and somewhat cold; that so many scenes should take place in sumptuous or banal domestic settings under bright and even lighting; that most of the compositions should be medium shots (their impersonality accentuated by Neumann’s rather doctrinaire use of CinemaScope). Everything in the film seems designed to convince us that its hero and heroine, scientist André Delambre (Al Hedison) and his devoted wife Hélène (Patricia Owens), are unremarkable and uninteresting, and that the world they live in is normal and boring. As a result, what happens to them seems all the more outrageous, unwarranted, and absurd--an assault on the values they stand for. André invents an apparatus that disintegrates objects, moves their atoms through space, and reintegrates them. Unfortunately, when he transports himself through the device, his atoms get mixed with those of a fly, with the result that he comes out with the fly’s head and one of its forelegs, while the fly gets his head and one of his arms. André destroys his machine, burns his notes, and persuades the horrified Hélène to crush his body in a hydraulic press.

White on black

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:05:24 GMT

Lance Hammer’s Delta dawn
Lance Hammer’s minimalist melodrama pushes William Faulkner into the 21st century or relocates Russell Banks from the Northeast to the Mississippi Delta.

VIDEO: The trailer for Ballast

Ballast | Written and Directed by Lance Hammer | With Micheal J. Smith Sr, JimMyron Ross, Tarra Riggs, and Johnny McPhail | Alluvial Film Company | 96 minutes

Interview: Lance Hammer. By Peter Keough

Lance Hammer’s minimalist melodrama pushes William Faulkner into the 21st century or relocates Russell Banks from the Northeast to the Mississippi Delta. Yes, Ballast comes top-heavy with comparisons; they range from Robert Bresson to David Gordon Green. But the world Hammer records with a hand-held vérité style — one inhabited by enigmatic characters played by local non-actors, and seemingly cut off from history and current politics and events — possesses an oneiric identity of its own. Detailed, dense with atmosphere, unfolding at a dreamlike pace, it draws on universal experience, on mythic meaning. But one persistent question does trouble the film’s spell. Is it right for a white outsider to impose his æsthetics on a black community?

For most viewers, however, other questions will be more pressing. Like, who are these people? How are they related to one another? And what’s going on? In a scene that might have been taken from Affliction, a worried white neighbor (Johnny McPhail) visits the modest homestead next door. He recoils from the foul smell inside, and he gets no response from Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), who’s sitting catatonic on a couch, after he discovers the body in the bedroom.

A suicide attempt, a long stretch in a hospital, and a parallel story about troubled 12-year-old James (JimMyron Ross) and his stressed-out single mom, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), subsequently unfold in an elliptical narrative, and it takes some effort to figure out how it all connects. The dead man is Darius, Lawrence’s twin brother; Marlee is Darius’s bitter and estranged wife, so James is Lawrence’s nephew. Pulling them together is the property left behind by Darius and the uncle’s grudging concern for wayward James, who has gotten himself in over his head with a gang of local crackheads. That and maybe some deeper, unspoken compulsions and repressed memories of past turmoil.

This underlying yearning and grief, more mood than emotion, overshadows the complicated plot, which never quite coalesces or resolves. The occasionally unintelligible dialogue contributes an air of secrecy to what’s going on. And the archetypal elements — the twins in particular — suggest an abstract interpretation. Is this a variation on Freud’s take on the Narcissus myth, in which Lawrence must purge himself of his immersion in his own self-image — twin Darius — in order to develop as a person and turn his energies outward to the world and to others?

I’ve Loved You So Long

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:59:50 GMT

A crass and pretentious soap opera
So which portrayal of a victimized woman will win an Oscar this year?

Interview: Lance Hammer

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:07:08 GMT

Delta force
Some filmmakers seek to penetrate the mystery of human existence through cinema.

White on Black: Lance Hammer's Delta dawn. By Peter Keough.

Some filmmakers seek to penetrate the mystery of human existence through cinema. Others would like to churn out a blockbuster, establish a franchise, and make more money than the GNP of Uruguay. Lance Hammer is more the mystery-of-human-existence kind of guy, a preference perhaps confirmed by his years working in the studios as an art director on films like Batman & Robin. He takes the art of film seriously, and his debut feature, Ballast, a mood-heavy, meticulously detailed but oddly dreamlike tale of a broken African-American family living in the Mississippi Delta, acted mostly by non-professionals from the region, has earned a Best Director nod at Sundance and four nominations from the Gotham Independent Film awards, as well as exuberant critical praise and comparisons with such masters as Robert Bresson. Heady stuff, but in person Hammer is just a modest, regular guy and a genuine idealist.

You got your filmmaking start working on Batman & Robin. Was it the nipples on the Batsuit that drove you to make your own movies?
I think it’s fair to say that. The truth is that when I was 19 years old, I became a cinephile. I went away from my childhood house for the first time to live somewhere else, in Tucson, Arizona, and a new-found independence was expressed by venturing to the arthouse cinema. I saw [Wim Wenders’s 1987 film] Wings of Desire and was overwhelmed with joy and sadness and I couldn’t believe that film could move somebody in this way, that you could be so poetic and say something important about the human psyche and the existential longing for something you can’t have. And so at that point I wanted to make films, but I didn’t think it was a realizable goal, so I studied architecture instead, and that kind of led me into art directing. But all this time I’ve been a cinephile. So I began to be fearful for my soul as an art director, working on these industrial films that are totally empty of meaning.

Breakfast With Scot

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:21:32 GMT

Chaste, and lacking wit
Laurie Lind’s fuses Three Men and a Baby, La Vie en Rose , and every other gay rom-com ever made.

W. gets a B

PETER KEOUGH — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 02:42:30 GMT

Josh Brolin prevails over Oliver Stone’s shaky portrait

VIDEO: The trailer for W.

Putting up W's: Screen depictions beat around the Bush. By Peter Keough.

As a journalist, Oliver Stone doesn’t have his five W’s quite in order when it comes to his investigation of George W. Bush. The “who” gets high marks, particularly in the performance of Josh Brolin as the title initial. More than imitating a person, Brolin embodies a process, the transformation of a black sheep fuck-up into a fuck-up who is the most powerful person in the world. He never attains the stature of hero or villain; neither does he ever achieve the kind of self-consciousness that can mean redemption (even for those born again).

But he is a likable guy who’s trying to do good despite his limitations. Maybe it’s because Sarah Palin has put the bar so low, but this Bush seems to have credibility, and he evokes sympathy. Not understanding, however — the “why” is never answered.

Partly that’s because Stone’s film appears to be a quickie job, like a celebrity biography rushed to press to capitalize on a scandal before the notoriety can go cold. It’s a pastiche, with brilliant moments and leaden clunkers in equal number, uncertain in tone and point. Holding it together is Brolin’s mastery of his character’s uncomprehending drive and certainty.

His W. starts out as a Delta Kappa initiate naked in a vat of ice and being force-fed vodka by frat brothers at Yale in 1966. Cut to post-9/11 and he’s the 43rd president, presiding over a cabinet meeting in the White House as his speechwriters and advisers struggle with the phrase that would eventually become “Axis of Evil.” The room looks like a Halloween party where you try to guess what actor is playing which disgraced administration member. There’s Toby Jones in an uncanny likeness of Karl Rove, Thandie Newton uncomfortable as Condoleezza Rice, Jeffrey Wright as Colin “Party Pooper” Powell nay-saying his colleagues’ bellicose certainties, and a creepily convincing Richard Dreyfuss lurking in the shadows as the inevitable Dick Cheney, the puppet master — or enabler.

What Just Happened

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:11:46 GMT

Half-baked insider parody
“There isn’t a film there,” Ben tells the screenwriter. Sounds like What Just Happened .

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

PETER KEOUGH — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:30:42 GMT

A slight but sometimes affecting trifle
The relationship between fathers and daughters is complicated enough without being further strained by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.