Sometimes political correctness can get in the way of appreciating a movie. Nowhere was this more in evidence than yesterday when I went to watch Jonathan Glazer's Birth. It seemed like the audience (infantile audience, is what I thought when I was watching the movie) just could not get beyond the fact that a thirty-odd year old woman had just fallen in love with a ten year old boy who claims to be her dead husband (reincarnated, of course). When Kidman and Cameron Bright (who plays the boy) get into a tub together, the theatre was awash with screams, shrieks, nervous tittering and loud shouts of "NO!! NO!!". I mean, please.

The point of this rant is that it reduced the affect of the movie for me, even if it did not destroy it altogether. Birth is above all a movie of rich brooding atmosphere, that is enhanced by Jonathan Glazer's glacial pacing and Alexandre Desplat's plangent score. Realizing the controversial nature of their material, Glazer and his collaborating screenwriters have constructed their mise-en-scenes with deliberation, with lots of care being taken to see that the movie does not seem exploitative (think Gaspar Noe's Irresistable or Bruno Dumont's TwentyNine Palms). In doing so, they have made a conscious choice to drench the movie in atmosphere as opposed to emotions. (I shudder to think what the finished screenplay must have looked like. The movie is so full of pauses and long silences that its a wonder that Glazer didn't screw up.) In a virtuoso opening, the camera tracks a hooded figure running in the park while the background score signals unease. At the end, as the jogger falls to his death in a tunnel, the camera tracks out and we fade out to a shot of a baby just emerging from the birth canal. Its perfect. In another brilliant move, the camera stays on Kidman's face for a tight hard close-up for more than two minutes as the opera rages around her.

There is something about Kidman so that when she smiles, the smile strains to reach her eyes, probably something to do with her cold sculpted beauty and albaster skin. Her performance here somehow reminded me of her turn as Grace in the superlative The Others. She is tightly controlled here and along with Cameron Bright, she absorbs the movie's atmosphere so that it seems to be emerging right out of her. Bright's performance here is the opposite of Eamonn Owen's spell-binding turn as Neil Jordan's butcher boy but just as effective. Somehow Glazer has directed Bright to the point of stillness and the young boy rises to the challenge. I'm not sure that Bright has the same remote quality that Kidman has, when he smiles during the film, he looks beatific, almost saintly. It would be hard to take Birth seriously without Bright; indeed, he makes the leap of faith required to believe subject matter such as this easy.

Which brings me back to all the carping critics. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon says that "Birth is the kind of movie that keeps alerting you to its resonant emotional undertow without actually having one." Zacharek misses the point, I think. Glazer and his collaborators, in an effort to avoid the relentless melodrama that a plot like this entails (think of the horrible Ghost), have instead taken a step in the other direction. They've constructed a motion picture without an emotional undertow, a mood piece that encourages a viewer to meditate. The Manhattan that cinematographer Harris Savides conjures up is like no Manhattan that I've seen. Its cold, wintry and a little distant. Even the only scene of Kidman walking in a crowd is subtly anesthetized by its silence. But the mood is fragile, Birth needs rapt attention to absorb it completely, which is why I was so irritated by the reactions of my fellow-viewers.

Other critics have simply dismissed the movie as paedophilia or at least more benign variations of it. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, normally the voice of reason, gave up on the movie after the bathtub scene. Its interesting that Gleiberman recounts that scene as "When Kidman slithers into the bathtub with her young husband ..." when in fact, it is he who "slithers" in with her (if Bright's character ever did anything in the movie that even remotely resembled slithering). The local Phoenix New Times Birth calls it "the nuttiest apologia ever for pedophilia". What exactly are we talking about here? Is this an objection to a 38-year old actress and a 10-year old boy actually being in a bathtub together during the shoot? Or are we objecting to the themes? Like I said before, political correctness may not be such a good thing after all.

Though, if there's something that sinks the movie, its the cop-out ending. By the (seemingly) hurried incorporation of a subplot (involving Ann Heche, no less), the movie simply takes the easy way out of the tantalizing possibilities that it's first three-quarters brought up. I thought it was a shame that the film-makers never thought of the interesting metaphysical possibilities that their "twist" had. (In the movie, the 10-year old Sean discovers that he can't be the "real" Sean since the real Sean apparently loved another woman more than his wife.) But I guess, they finally ran out of ideas.

Is it any wonder that I liked the soundtrack of Garden State more than the movie itself? Zach Braff's debut is definitely impressive but the movie is so bereft of an anchor that it wanders around a seemingly endless space accompanied by a litany of gorgeous pop-songs. Again, not a bad thing but where is the theme, that director's vision that connects together the dots into one spell-binding weave? Perhaps the theme is "offbeat". Word has it that Baff kept a little scrap-book which he filled with all the bizarre news that he read in newspapers. That he felt like putting all of those anecdotes right into the first movie he made, seems to me an indication that he was desperate and maybe, thought about making an making an offbeat indie movie as an end in itself.

Consider this. At home, for his mother's funeral service, a relative offers him a shirt made from the same material as the curtains in the bathroom. Cut to Braff watching himself in the mirror wearing a shirt thats matches the shower curtains to a T. This does get some cheap laughs but the seeming lack of connection between anecdotes is a little wearying. In another scene, on an odyssey-like ride with his friend (played by Peter Sarasgard) we glimpse a hotel where everyone (including a cop) is watching a couple have sex through a hole in the wall. Braff's main failure as a writer-director is that he inserts far too many non-sequiters in the hope of being "interesting" but he fails to concentrate on the most interesting sub-plot of all: the romance between his character and a pathological liar called Sam played with bewitching sweetness by Natalie Portman.

I never thought I'd say this about Portman after watching her sleep-walk through two of the star Wars prequels (Her "Oh, Annie ... "s in the Attack of the Clones brought down the house everytime) but she's like the light that shines through this movie. The first meeting between Andrew and Sam takes place in a neurologist's office and she invites him back to her house. That meeting (which concludes with them burying her pet hamster together) lasts around 15 minutes in the movie and it is alive - alive with a kind of dramatic weight that the rest of the film never attains. Garden State is an entertaining wisp of a movie but like its title, it is purposeless and uncohesive, a failure of the Braff the writer-director.

Ken Tucker has a thoughtful article in New York Metro on the whole Stewart-Carlson fracas. I first saw the Daily Show (and South Park) when I lived in Boston (with three white room-mates). The Daily Show was something they all watched regularly and pretty soon, I was a fan of the show as well. (South Park took a lot more of getting used to; it's in-your-face style redefines the whole notion of in-your-face.)

It had bothered me when I watched the video (I've seen it at least five times now) and Tucker articulates it: Can Stewart have it both ways? Can he toss puffballs to the guests on his show (and say "Hey, this is a comedy show after all!") and then criticize cable news shows for miserably failing in their duty to public discourse? If not, then what middle-ground should he pursue? After all, he is a comic. Tucker has a smart line at the end of his piece:

So this is the dilemma Jon Stewart now finds himself facing: Is he the Emmy- winning “monkey,” idol to millions of young couch-skeptics, or the thoughtful partisan satirist who’d like to be a player in the national discourse? It would take a genius comic to pull off both roles. But for the moment—his moment; his make-or-break moment up until the election—I’m sad to say, my money’s on the monkey to win out.

I'd say not. It strikes me that Stewart just might manage to pull it off. After all, how many people can lecture cable-news show anchors so sternly and yet be so funny?

I read Anna Quindlen's "One true thing" when I was at Columbia. It was one of the two books that I read, novels without far-reaching plots, whose focus is more on relationships than narrative. The second was Stephen McCauley's "The Object of My Affection" which was so so soooo different from the movie that I'd seen before. I'd liked the movie well enough, it had deepened my appreciation for Jennifer Aniston, who I think, (and still think) is an unparalled comic actress. But the book itself, with its exploration of the lifestyle of a gay kindergarten teacher and his (pregnant) room-mate lives beyond these two (albeit endearing) protagonists. Its instead a funny, tender look at relationships and how they can't be slotted, about how the world is alive with infinite possibilities. (God! Whats happened to me? I can't believe I'm writing such sentimental rubbish!)

Reading "The Object of My affection" didn't lessen my liking for the movie, I only saw them as disparate, focussing on two different things. I saw the movie version of "One True thing" yesterday and I was dissapointed. That book above all, is about the relationship between a daughter, Ellen Gullen, and her cancer-struck mother, and what she learns anew about her parents as she moves back in with them to take care of her mom. The daughter has always admired her father and somehow looked down on her mother for her lack of intellectual glamour and her homey attitude to life. Now she learns that her mother is not who she thought she was. The book is, in a way, about the misplaced contempt of feminists for the stay-at-home woman. I liked the novel, it had an understated tone and above all, seemed to be sincerely written.

The movie, directed by Carl Franklin, instead of being about the mother and her daughter, focusses more on the travails of a cancer-struck patients and their relationship between their care-givers. Ellen and Kate rarely talk in the movie and the film never quite captures the change in Ellen's thinking. Still, the most damning thing about it is way the movie treats the father, George, who in the novel, comes off as selfish, slightly narcissistic but still undeniably human. In a middle-brow tasteful production, such as this, the director is ambivalent so most of the movie is devoted to showing how selfish the father is and yet in the end, he's made to rattle off a monologue about how his wife was his "one true thing". This is so cynically absurd and so transparently false that it almost destroys the movie. (If I'm not mistaken, in the book, that particular statement comes from the narrator herself, that her mother was the "one true thing" in the world). The novel ends on a somber note, with an almost impossible-to-bridge chasm that separates the girl from her father. The movie's ending is again a cliche (literally) with Ellen and George talking about daffodils and flowers (instead, as we should note, about Steinbeck and Whitman), while the camera zooms out.

I found Streep's performance (she was nominated for an Oscar for this), rather actorly, full of little tics and mannerisms but still somewhat opaque. William Hurt, not surprisingly, cannot overcome his badly written role. On the other hand, Renee Zellwegger grows into the part slowly but surely. She's a limited actress, and certainly, like Streep, Moore or even Kidman, she can never dissapear completely into her part. I found her unconvincing in the beginning, it seemed like the Dorothy Boyd of Jerry Maguire, had been transplanted into a WASPy New England milieu, and she doesn't seem like a publishing-type New York yuppie at all. But in the end, it's she who holds the movie together and her performance is nuanced, muted and ultimately great.

Is there a better poet for romantic love than Cameron Crowe? I finished watching Singles just now and this completes the Crowe ouevre for me. I've loved all his movies: Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous. The only stumbling block, was Vanilla Sky, which had Crowe adapting from Alejandro Amenabar's Open Your Eyes. Constructed as a philosophical piece of science fiction, it never quite worked and confirmed for me, that what Crowe does best is romantic comedy (and also that Penelope Cruz, whatever her charms, should stop speaking English and quit English-speaking movies altogether). But wait, I'm being unfair to Crowe here. The truth is that Crowe's movies go far beyond romance. In the words of A. O. Scott, he is perhaps the least cynical film-maker we have today, who wears his heart on his sleeve (and in his movies). His movies are forgiving, generous, innocent and sweet. Just like him.

Crowe was a music journalist before turning director and music, particularly rock music, is central to his films. But he also has a way of drawing upon his experiences that makes his movies deeply personal; to speak, his films are his way of meditating on life. In Almost Famous, a deeply resentful band-aid rebukes star-singer of the band Stillwater (played by Billy Crudrup), "What do you know about being a fan? To love some silly little piece of music so hard that it hurts." Thats Crowe speaking and to him, being a fan is important, life is about loving something so much that it hurts. I responded immediately when I heard that line in the movie, its as close as one gets to the heart of being a fan.

Crowe is a film-maker who is romantic without getting sentimental; he is also unabashedly preachy without being sanctimonious. His best film, Jerry Maguire (and probably one of the best romantic comedies ever made), is about a man, a sports agent, who rediscovers that life is not all about money and power, but instead about connecting with people. Put like that, it sounds as sanctimonious a piece of Hollywood puff as they come. But every time the final monologue begins ("We live in a cynical world. A cynical world. And we work in a business of tough competitors. ...."), I get this lump in my throat.

One of the reasons that I like Crowe's movies is that they are populated with people I identify with, middle-class young men and women with little or no financial worries who are nevertheless grappling with issues of their own. Here he is closer to Whit Stillman, whose talky wonderful trilogy of Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco remains one of my favourites. Still, Stillman never got to the heart of romantic love the way Crowe does. (In a scene from Maguire, Dorothy Boyd says about Jerry Maguire, "I love him for the man he wants to be. And I love him for the man he almost always is. I love him. I love him!!) Romantic montages take on a life of their own in a Crowe film. He is probably the only film-maker who really really REALLY believes in the redemptive power of rock music and romantic love. And the two may even be inter-related. We just might never know.

I just thought I'd do my version of the hottest story on the weekend: the dust-up between Jon Stewart and the hosts of CNN's crossfire. (For those who don't know yet, Stewart called Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson "partisian hacks" and then called Carlson a "dick").

The first thing about Stewart is that he's funny (intentionally, i think) even when he's being dead serious. His earnest "Why do you argue?" was hilarious. When he told Begala and Carlson to "Stop", I was in splits. And when he said "coz they're h-h-hurting us ..", I was almost rolling on the floor laughing. And of course, there was the way he pulled Carlson's leg about his bow-tie. ("How old're you?" "Thirty-five" "And you wear a *bowtie*!!!!") .

Whether Stewart had any business telling the hosts of Crossfire to stop "hurting America" when he himself runs a faux comedy news program is something I am still confused about. Yet the fact remains that his main strength is as a comic. And he is severe on politicians and "hacks" simply by being funny. What is sure though is that Tucker Carlson made an utter fool of himself on the show. Paul Begala wisely tried changing the subject. But realizing that Stewart meant business, he restricted himself to giving a half-hearted defence of his program. ("I think of it as debate.". Stewart retaliated by calling it "theater".) Carlson, on the other hand, tried taking the attack to the other side. But he ended up in the laughable position of comparing CrossFire to the Daily Show. The striking thing about Carlson was how querulous he managed to sound. He was angry - and showed it in the most childish way imaginable. (" Do you go to people's homes for dinner and lecture them like this? Man, I wouldn't like to have dinnner with you". "I'm sorry Jon, I think you're funny on your show, I just don't think you lecture very well". "You need to teach at journalism school, I think." To each of these remarks, Sttewart replied with unbelievable ripostes.). This may seem strange but Carlson reminds me somehow of that epitome of phallic male narcissism: Tom Cruise. What Carlson probably resented that day about Stewart was not his criticism of CrossFire but rather his own loss of face. That probably was the reason he took to the attack and came off worse in the bargain.

It also seemed to me that Carlson and Begala were a trifle condescending to Stewart, which must have probably incensed him more. (Carlson: Be funny. Please, please, be funny. Stewart: I'm not your monkey). I also disliked Carlson's in-your-face confrontational style ("Couldn't the Democrats find anyone better than Kerry? Was he *all* they could come up with?"). I thought that he was using this style to strike the jokes up a notch but apparently this is how he speaks. And now I know why Stewart called Crossfire pure "theater". This is no way to conduct a rational debate. Which is what we need today.

Postscript: Incidentally check out this page with Carlson's response to Stewart's criticism. Frankly, it bothers me that these hacks cannot even respond constructively to criticism. If journalists don't, then how on earth do we expect our politicians to act on the criticism they receive?

I was just thinking today about how my list of favorite actors includes no male actors but only actresses. I mean, I love Ewan McGregor's work (plus he's cute too), I think he's not given credit for some of the amazing roles that he has done (and I don't mean the Star Wars trilogy). But there don't seem to be any male actors (besides McGregor) that I can recall at the moment whose work I really really admire in, say, the way I admire Julianne Moore's work. (And I've written about that in this blog as well). I think Sean Penn is over-rated, not because I dislike his work (I loved his turn in Dead Man Walking and I - almost - liked his turn in Mystic River) but because I think he's too ostentatious an actor; he eclipses the movie itself unless he's kept on a tight leash. Russell Crowe? Yes, but again he's too flashy. Anybody else?? Right at this moment, I can't think of any.

But my list of actresses goes on expanding. Julianne Moore, of course, is the best actress today, for my money. But I like both Cate Blanchette and Kate Winslet's work. And Kirsten Dunst is slowly but surely rising up my charts. Isn't it amazing that she's managed to be in two great movies this season? There was her solid supporting turn in Eternal Sunshine (the best movie so far this year) and there was her splendid turn as Mary Jane Watson in Spidey 2. In Crazy/Beautiful, which I saw recently, Dunst hits notes that exceed the movie itself. It's not that the movie is bad - it's a fairly conventional movie that tries to be a little different from all the others - but just a little. Some of the dialogue is just screamingly bad: in one scene, Dunst asks her father, "Why would you do that to me? Don't you think I am worth loving?". I am just amazed that dialogue such as this is even considered realistic. But Dunst all but carries it off. At the end of the movie, she even has a cringingly bad speech ("I know there is something beautiful in all my imperfections, the beauty which he held up for me to see") but she nails that too. And she manages to hit the right notes in Bring It On too - a nice little movie where I was able to look beyond all the short skirts and little blouses (for reasons you probably have guessed) and appreciate it. I saw her in Wimbledon recently where she's paired with the natty Paul Bettany. I don't know why but I am a sucker for the foppy-brit-meets-glossy-hard-American kind of movies and I liked the way Dunst portrayed a rising ambitious tennis star. Is at any wonder that she's the female lead in Cameron Crowe's next? Or that Sofia Coppola cast her in her upcoming biopic (or whatever) of Marie Antoniette? Man, this girl's going to go places. And she's just 22.!!!

In the utterly preposterous thriller The Forgotten, Julianne Moore (yes, the great Julianne Moore herself) plays a grieving mother who discovers that her child had never existed - or rather, that everyone else has forgotten he existed. Of course, she rebels and unearths a conspiracy of mind-boggling proportions with a fellow-sufferer called Ash (played by Dominic West). It is not an understatement to say that the movie is bad - it just plain sucks. And I'm not really talking about the leap of faith that the plot requires us to make. That, in itself, wouldn't matter. What thriller doesn't require you to make a leap of faith? What thriller doesn't have a token romantic storyline and campy dialogue?. But The Forgotten is just bad. It is as if the movie was made on auto-pilot. No one seems serious about it - not the director, not the screenwriter and definitely not the stars.

The movie has a lot of running around. But these scenes are desultory and the background score is uninspiring. There is no palpable sense of fear and the scenes of grief are contrived. Moore and West are supposed to have some kind of chemistry between them. The fact is: none exists. And the campy dialogue doesn't help either. This is a sloppily made, tired movie - a movie which could have been much better only if a little more thought had been spent on it. Worse still, the plot is non-existent. I mean, the most important question, why!!, is never answered except for some mumbo-jumbo about discovering the psychic, almost fleshy link between a mother and a child. Please. And why would someone want to know that? The denouement is so silly that its absurd. Moore's character calls the villain (who's supposed to be an alien or something) a son-of-a-bitch and - bam! - he vanishes because - and this is a scream - he needs more time apparently. More time for what? Will he be back? And who was he anyway and why was he doing all that? Sometimes, in the movies, some questions are better left unanswered but in the Forgotten, it seems as if the screenwriters forgot the plot as they were writing the chase scenes.

I wonder how Moore got hooked into this disaster. But perhaps that's easily explained. Moore's most famous roles have always been about suffering (safe, Far from Heaven, The End of the Affair, The Hours, even Boogie Nights, perhaps) that she inevitably jumps at the chance to expand her repertoire. Hence Evolution, The Big Lebowski, and Laws of Attraction. That's also probably why she agreed to star in Hannibal - a film I enjoyed very much - and managed to convey convincingly an older, more bitter Clarice Starling. Maybe someone came up to Moore and said - "Hey, I've got this great idea of a thriller of a mother who blah blah blah". Lets face it, the plot synopsis sounds good. The only thing is - the screenwriters lost interest while writing the screen-play, the director lost interest while shooting the horrible screen-play and the editor lost it because of the sheer yuck nature of the material he had. Moore probably lost her interest during the production itself. To her credit though, she manages to be impressively manic in two or three scenes (maybe less than that) but how can any actor, even one as great as Moore, overcome the flat tired material?

I know I am being unfair to Moore here and I love her work. She is not only an impressive actress but also an articulate one. The Hours DVD has commentary by Streep, Moore and Kidman on their respective scenes. Kidman, whose performance in the movie is its highlight, drove me nuts - as she went on and on about how great it was to work with a director like Stephen Daldry, how Virginia Woolf was an inspiration to her et al. I mean: Please!! Streep was hard too - not because she blathered on and on but because her commentary seemed vaguely contemptuous and condescending. Moore however was sublime, she was articulate in explaining her acting choices and it's obvious how much thought goes into her acting. Interestingly Moore described Streep as "formidable", a word I thought I understood particularly since I was also listening to Streep's commentary. By now, I have heard Moore's commentary on the End of the Affair DVD and her take on Safe and I am desperate to hear her on Far from Heaven too.

There are two faces in the utterly fascinating documentary Control Room that linger long after it is over. One is of Samir Khader, a producer for Al-Jazeera, a man who seems constantly to be smoking and who has the particularly pungent manner of a scheming Machiavelli. The other is of Lt Josh Rushing, a painfully earnest (and endearing) young American, who, by the end of the movie, promises that he will do more work in the future so that "the American public learns more about Palestine". In a way these two men, I think represent the two extremes.Rushing seems somehow to be trying to make sense of the world. Khader is frankly cynical, even manipulative, knows exactly what he thinks and why he thinks so but his cynicism also masks a certain kind of idealism - he wants his kids to study in the US and live there.

The film-makers try hard to be objective though its always very clear whose side they are on. But in a way, there are no sides in Control Room, just fundamentally irreconciliable points of view. Lt Rushing, in the most touching moment of the film, admits to the fact that he was disturbed by the gruesome footage showing dead American soldiers but not so much by the footage of dead Iraqis. He wonders why this was so - the slightly bewildered look on his face is something that I will not forget, more so, since questions like these confront most of us today. The other big moment in the film comes when Khader candidly admits that he would gladly exchange the "Arab nightmare for the American dream". Its a funny moment but theres never a doubt that the man means it. Theres another such "aha" moment when Hassan Ibrahim, a journalist, tells Rushing that Arabs connect every image of a foreign army in their capitals with the Isareli-Palestine conflict - something that Rushing (and me too) had never thought before. To me, nothing could be more distant than the war in Iraq and West Asia conflict.

I have stopped regular television consumption a long while ago (My TV viewing since 1996 has been fairly erratic) but Control Room reminded me more than anything else how television coverage had the immediacy that newspapers lack. War coverage, especially through newspapers, turns into statistics of casualties and wounded. Television makes the casualties real though I guess, they could never be as real to a viewer sitting and watching in the comfort of his living room as they are to people in them.

Sometimes the arguments in Control Room become farcical even as they are striking. Lt Rushing, in an argument with the journalist Hassan Ibrahim, says that the US spent more money on the precision bombs when hell, they might as well have bombed Iraq with the kind of bombing that happened to Germany and Japan in the twilight of WWII. And I thought: Does he think Iraqis appreciate that? But in a way, Lt Rushing has a point. Television coverage, has certainly helped make war more humane (or at least the appearance of being more humane). But the movie's strength is that it never lets you forget that war is a messy business.

I was not really convinced that the US actually bombed Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad - it seems like a really dumb and obvious thing to do, even if they needed Baghdad to be cleared of all journalists to stage-manage (??) the toppling of Saddam's statue. But the movie did make me appreciate Al Jazeera a little bit more (I've never watched the channel, actually but I didn't really think much of it before). To be an independent news channel in the Arab world - where democracy as such doesn't exist - and to cover the momentous events now unfolding there, is one hell of a task.

Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes’ masterful tribute to Douglas Sirk could well have been called The Fall of Cathy Whittaker. When we first see Cathy, she is the perfect housewife, the perfect suburban mother, devoted to her children (though Haynes has some fun with Cathy and Frank’s attitude to their children), more than attentive to her husband, and planning her annual party with her friend Eleanor (played by Patricia Clarkson in a pitch-perfect performance). At the end of the movie, as she stands looking forlornly at a departing train, she has no husband, no money and most importantly, no standing in the frosty narrow society that she lives in. As Cathy’s life unravels, Haynes, while maintaining the same visual style as that of a Sirkian melodrama, manages to bring to the surface all the subtext in Sirk’s films. It is the perfect deconstruction, cerebral, yet at the same time, heartbreakingly visceral.

The power of Far From Heaven lies in the fact that it works equally well, even when the viewer has no idea of who Sirk is. (me, for example). The characters talk in stilted, frustrating euphemisms, never once spelling out what’s on their mind, yet Elmer Bernstein’s matchless score, which runs beneath nearly every scene is more than equal to the task of supplying the emotions that are running amok. Moore, who is in almost every scene, is brilliant. She works within the conventions of the tear-jerker but what she does with her role goes beyond melodrama. True to the times that the movie takes place in, Haynes doesn’t waste much sympathy on Quaid’s character, a closeted homosexual. Yet Frank’s agony and rage come through, especially in the scene where he breaks down and admits to his wife that he has fallen in love with another man. The movie’s most tenderly realized relationship is the one between Cathy and her black gardener (played by Dennis Haysbert). It is here that Moore’s finely realized performance is at its devastating best.

(How does Moore do it? She has now played three different variations of a suburban housewife; earlier in Haynes' Safe and the more recent The Hours, yet she manages to be different every time. Plus she's played a porn star in Boogie Nights, the devious Mrs. Cheveley in An Ideal Husband, a woman struggling with her faith and love in The End of the Affair and Yelena in Vanya on 42nd Street! And each one of them is amazingly done!)

Here is an interview that Moore and Haynes did with the Guardian. Also A.O. Scott's superb review of Far from Heaven in the New York times (my favorite Scott review!!) and Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian

When he finished Rushmore, director Wes Anderson decided to show his movie to the redoubtable Pauline Kael, whom he apparently admired. When things didn't quite turn out as expected, (Kael had Parkinsons and was rather luke-warm about his film), Anderson wrote an article in the New York Times titled "My Private Screening with Pauline Kael". The text is not freely available on the Times' website but here is David Edelstein's rather sharp rejoinder to Anderson. (Incidentally, the article can be found as an introduction to the published version of the Rushmore screenplay.)

In his article, Anderson says that Kael told him that she "genuinely did not know what to make of the movie". Anderson, narcissist that he is, probably takes this to mean that there are people who just dont "get it". I agree with Kael though. I have no idea what to make of Rushmore. Or what Wes Anderson wants us to make of Rushmore. Yes, so he can create obnoxious - and I mean, really offensive - characters like Max Fisher. And yes, maybe Bill Murray can appear in a movie without appearing superior to it. But so what?

I could hardly stay awake through Rushmore, and most of the people I saw it with, couldn't either. After seeing the movie (or rather staying awake through it), I cannot believe that Bill Murray was even considered for an Oscar nomination for this performance. That this silly, pretentious, self-conscious, and smug movie is even considered to be a little gem.

Here is an interview with Wes Anderson published in Salon magazine.

Also a tribute to Pauline Kael that appeared in Salon.

I just got back from the execrable "The Village" just now and I can safely say that M. Night Shyamalan has probably created his silliest plot twist ever. Which, I guess, was bound to happen some day or the other. How can a man create an entire story around a plot twist? Yet that is exactly what Shyamalan does. It helps, of course, that he is the master of the medium. There are a few scary sequences in "The Village" that are, well, exquisite. Its just that Shyamalan is never content to make just a good old-fashioned scare picture. He needs to put something else in there as well and as far as it goes, his pseudo-philosophy is just not as interesting as his direction. Take Signs, for instance. What could have been a standard alien-scare picture (and boy, was it scary!!) is instead some kind of fable for proving that God exists and whats more, that miracles are possible. To say that this is hokum isn't quite right but as David Edelstein has pointed out, a director utterly in control of his story and his characters is almost God.

In "The Village", Shyamalan tries to spin up a political allegory. It is never very clear when exactly the movie takes place but we do hear something at the end about combat casualties. The idea seems to be that creating a money-less insular society away from all "evil" might be the best way for us, considering the decadence we've fallen into. But Shyamalan, not surprisingly, (his movies are inevitably about ghosts and gods) injects religious overtones into the movie - the idea peddled is that the village is a holy place, full of love and innocence, a veritable paradise, in fact. Michael Agger has noted in Slate that Signs became a hit only when it was adopted by Christians as a movie about the power of faith. The same could work for The Village, despite that fact that God, in all of Shyamalan's movies, is a non-denominational entity.

There is nothing wrong with a film-maker working with different themes in a thriller. Hitchcock, on whom Shyamalan clearly models himself (the point-of-view shots, the total control over the camera and the music, even the cameo appearance), clearly grappled with love, obsession and desire, even though, on the surface his films are all routine thrillers. But Shyamalan's thinking is sloppy and his pseudo-religosity borders on the exploitative. Can an insular world - a closed ecosystem - really be that "holy"? This is an idea that seems to possess everyone - from woolly-headed Gandhians to even more woolly-headed globalization-protestors. Hell, before the British came to India and started their whole-scale exploitation, villages in India were mostly self-sufficient, closed-off ecosystems. But were they really such "ideal" societies? We see reports of atrocities and hate-crimes everyday and most of these take place in small towns and villages. An insular system is a sure recipe for stagnation - human progress comes from an inter-play of ideas and resources. But Shyamalan, of course, will have none of that. Instead, he combines his ideas with his religious fervor so well that such logical objections must necessarily be cast aside. It helps of course, that he does not have the mentality of a raving street-prophet, that his movies combine nerve-jangling sequences with a stately, glacial pace, qualities that could be easily mistaken for profundity.

Shyamalan's great talent is directing young actors with spooky looks in their eyes. Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense, Rory Culkin in Signs, and now Bryce Howard in The Village. I was impressed with Howard who makes her debut here. I loved Joaquin Phoenix's acting in Quills and although, his performance here is sub-par, the man still manages to be interesting. As for The Village, go see it for the scares - but please, Mr Shyamalan, lets stop all this pseudo-profundity.

Make no mistake about it, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart is an angry polemic. There is little poetry in it, or beauty or any of the things that we so admire in art these days. The play is an angry howl of rage, the rage of a man who fought the system and encountered systematic indifference, apathy, even outright hostility. Kramer's greatest achievement in the play is that he manages to walk the thin line that separates righteousness from self-righteousness.

Ned Weeks (who, I suppose, stands for Kramer himself) is an angry young man. He is strident, shrill, disagreeable and very very annoying. Kramer himself spent months creating a group that would help raising AIDS awareness. He was also fired from the same group he helped create before he wrote Normal Heart. The play is a damning indictment of everyone in power when the AIDS epidemic began. Like his earlier novel Faggots (which I haven't read yet) , it is also an indictment also of the gay subculture that has separated sexuality from the mind so completely that it was the easiest target for the HIV virus.

The Normal Heart recently had a revival in Chicago where it received a luke-warm reception. The NYT even carried a touching letter in response to their article on the play's closing.

I am having a hard time wrestling with my demons after seeing the Irish film "Cowboys and Angels" recently. It's not just the fact that people I watched it with found it "sweet" or "cute", who told me with frank bewilderment in their voice, "How could you *not* find it cute?". Was the movie an unabashed piece of populist film-making? Yes, most definitely. Is that bad? Again, definitely not. I've never been a big fan of far-left criticism (read The Village Voice) that casually dismisses movies that it considers even remotely populist.

But its more than that. Consider "Cowboys and Angels". It traffics in cliches. Like a sort of Irish version of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", it has a queer guy and a straight one. Both room-mates. Of course. Of course, the straight guy gets a make-over courtesy the queer guy. There's the inevitable fag-hag who the straight guy has a crush on. There are a couple of gangsters who complicate matters. There's drugs and a little (just a little) bit of sex. And of course, there's the customary happy ending with the even more customary rites-of-passage. All of this, handled rightly, could definitely have made for a "cute" movie.

But Cowboy's problem is not the the cliches it peddles. It is the movie's fucking tepidness (or is it tepidity?). Its utter lack of dramatic intensity. The way it meanders in different directions but never - never - ever backs up its cuteness with emotions. Midway through the film, our hero reveals that he lost his father in an accident and had to give up his dreams of college. The scene is played with the customary weepy background score - but it amounts to nothing more than words. The actual import of what has happened is never conveyed - neither by the cute actor Michael Legge nor by the film-maker himself. The deep bond that develops between the room-mates by the end of the movie remains a screen-writer's device. It is not even remotely in evidence on the screen. And the movie's set-piece - a scene where the gay guy tries straight sex and a homo-thug goes down on the straight guy - is so contrived that I actually burst into laughter.

For a movie that calls itself gay - and markets itself as a plea for tolerance (blah!!) - there's a curious double standard on display here. Like NBC's Will & Grace, homosexuals are fine - hell, they 're even amusing - as long as they don't have sex. The movie's one moment when the gay guy is actually shown having sex - if it can be called sex, that is - is also it's biggest cheat, proving that in movies, characters are functions of plots.

Fernando Meirelle's City of God (or rather, Cidade de Dues, as my friend calls it - its so much more glamorous!) is filled with astonishing visual tricks.  The narrative is full of little digressions and detours yet the weave is astonishing.  The movie made the adrenaline literally sing in my veins, I got up around the room, I paced, I paused the movie when I wanted to savor a moment. It's like a well made MTV-video - the shot-composition is brilliant, the cuts and the fades are just right and the music - the music! - is one throbbing rave.  The movie pulses like a heart - a live heart. 

Yet for all its virtuoso techniques - and it is brilliant film, really! - the movie left me uneasy.  Now a film, that, for most parts is full of gun-toting kids, some of whom are barely five or six, would make anyone uneasy.  But its a little more complicated than that.  The movie made me uneasy because it wasn't uneasy enough about what was going on.  It's all there - the City of God was created to keep the poor away from the posh confines of Rio, the law is absent, only the fittest survive and children get inducted rather early into the cult of violence - but the movie uses all these elements as the raw materials in it's jazzy syntax to craft, what is ultimately, an action film.   There is no moral center in the city of God. 

Our protogonist is a photographer, a little like the director of the film himself.  Yet, his photography, and his camera, to him, are little more than instruments of escape - of escape from the City of God itself.  He - and consequently, the movie and the viewer - learn nothing from what is happening around them.  The startling thing about the movie is that the rites-of-passage it promises at the beginning never really happens, instead our hero remains stuck in his limbo - he may appear to have climbed out of it but he's stuck nevertheless. 

I hate to sound like a puritan nag here.  I've never felt that movies needed a moral to be good - particularly if the moral was one of those old out-dated cringe-worth cliches that we often pass off as morals.  The exhilirating movies of Quentin Tarrantino, for example rarely offer any morals, as such.  Critics of Tarrantino have criticized the nihilism of Kill Bill, with it's fetishistic violence.  (Interestingly the same critics would never say the same of the sadomasochistic violence in The Passion of the Christ).  But Tarrantino's movies take place in their own parallel world and in that specific world - he imbues his films with feeling and even, may I say it, with honor.  City of God, on the other hand, uses it's realism in a way that borders on the exploitative - it's been adapted from a book which took the author 8 years to write and which is based on his own experiences in the City of God. 

It's a great movie - just not that great!

The gay romantic comedy is a strange hybrid. Dennis Lim , writing in the Village Voice, says that Bumping Heads, a short in the Boys Life 4 anotholgy is "stupendously inept", a "blabbering concussed cringefest of unrequited lust". Lim, like his colleague Michael Atkinson, is guilty of overkill. Dave Kehr, writing in the New York Times, says that gay indies havce become "much less overtly political" and "tend towards naturalistic comedy and drama, trading slogans for complex emotions.".

I have nothing against Bumping Heads which I found slight and pleasing. It belongs to that genre of indie romantic comedies, which adopt multiple-points-of-view narrative, overlapping voiceovers and intersecting flashbacks to jazz up a light romantic story-line. What I object to is that this short is placed in a gay shorts anthology even though, it has really nothing to do with the experience of being gay.

The same goes for "This Car Up", an annoyingly pretentious story that claims to be about serendipity and fate when it is really nothing much more than a series of meet-cutes lifted straight from the movies. Again this one is buoyed up by its fancy syntax: four split screens, two to map out its protagonists and two that act as their thought-bubbles.

The other two shorts can at least claim to be "gay". O Beautiful which is again filmed mostly in split-screens (suprisingly well, I must say) is about the aftermath of a hate crime. The premise and the movie's ambition and it's fearlessness to venture into melodrama are it's strengths. Its actors' tics and mannerisms are it's liabilities, as well as its inability to make the melodrama really affecting.

The worst film in the anthology is LTR, a preening, elbow-digging pseudo-documentary. I suppose Philip Bartell thinks that filming a mock documentary on two twinks who rhapsodize about love committment rings is insightful. Well, it's not. This is the kind of movie that tries to make itself good by making its viewers feel superior to the protagonists. Forget about insight, it's not even remotely funny, except when the documentary-maker ends up having a fling with one of the guys he's filming.

Is it a sign of progress and amalgamation that indie gay cinema is leaning more towards light romance rather than "serious" examination of gay issues? Not really. It'd be a sign of acceptance if gay romantic comedies found a place in romantic comedy anothologies, rather than gay anthologies. This is clearly not the case. Gay romantic comedies are clearly marketed towards gay audiences. The need of the hour is to take the gay out of the romance.

The star of Quills far from being Geoffrey Rush is Joaquin Phoenix. As the Abbe Coulmier, he is the anachronistic good-hearted liberal, a man of faith who tries to solve all his problems by compassion. He is deceived repeatedly, by the Marquis, and even by the inmates of the lunatic asylum he runs, but he retains his kindness. Being kind is probably the only way he has of retaining his sanity, but the film implies that this probably might also have been the reason for his undoing.

consider this scene where the the Abbe realizes that the Marquis has been publishing his pornographic books behind his back. He storms into the Marquis's cell with a copy of Justine, but is sidetracked when the Marquis asks him if he has read the book. Phoenix's voice almost breaks with indignation. "Its not even a proper novel. ....Frankly it even fails as an excercise in craft. The characters are wooden. The dialogue is inane. And not to mention the endless repetition of words like ...(pause) nipple and pikestaff". I found Phoenix's performance breathtaking; the battle between lust, love, duty and innate kindness plays out on his face on a near operatic-scale. I'd never have thought that the lugubrious Phoenix and the winsome Kate Winslet would make a heart-breaking couple but they do. Winslet is amazing (as always). So is Rush.

It is the character of the villain, played by Michael Caine, that ultimately trips Quills up. The man is a monster, with no redeeming qualities about him. He sodomizes his wife, a child of sixteen, presumably because that way, she retains her virginity. He practises torture ruthlessly, and for all practical purposes derives a kind of sexual pleasure from it. He condones murder, kills people, drives them insane. He is probably the embodiment of the AntiChrist (and I use that word only because the film uses it once) that probably the Marquis thought he himself was. But the man is frankly, not believable. And in directing all the source of evil to this one person (what about the Marquis himself? He wasn't a saint now, was he?), the movie reduces its own complexity.

But beyond a doubt, the film is a masterful piece of work. It is sumptuous in its look and feel even when its second half is filled with blood, death and torture. It even tries, by its own standards, to show the other side. The conservative argument against pornography is that it gives people "ideas". A key plot development in Quills rests on an inmate, who wants to try out the things he hears in the Marquis's work. The puritan right can no doubt use this plot-point in the movie to justify it's stand on pornography or any "deviant" sexual act. But the Marquis was not a man who only dealt in normal kinky sex between consensual adults. As so many commentators on this film have pointed out, he was an aristocrat who believed that his position gave him (and others like him) a license to kill (and torture, and mutilate) for pleasure and sexual gratification. What should our reaction be to his work now? The cannibal case in Germany has shown that kinky sexual acts must be constrained; S&M torture has to be within boundaries, if it involves taking human lives, however consensual. The question: Can the Marquis de Saade be our hero in opposing the puritan right? The movie's answer is an emphatic yes; but since it softens the Marquis considerably, by turning him into nothing more than a witty kinky indomitably scoundrel, I don't quite agree.

John Sayle's Lone Star is a quiet contemplative well-crafted film, but what distinguishes it from it's competitors is it's texture. In a space of two odd hours, Sayles manages to create a series of rich sketches involving more than 10 characters. On the surface, of course, it seems like a crime-thriller when the discovery of an old skeleton prompts the local sheriff (Chris Cooper, brilliant!!!) to launch an investigation. The investigation is more of an excuse for Sayles to examine a small Texas town in all its contradictions. I have never seen a movie with so many characters, each of whom is so strongly written. The movie does however have a final "twist", but its not the one I'd been expecting. The delicate, yet stunning end, is the movie's tour de force. A great movie!!!

Is a satire successful if it never reveals its true nature? Or a colossal failure?

Robrt L Pela, in his review of What the #$*! do we know?, compares it to the faux documentaries of Christopher Guest. This is cavalier treatment of Guest, all of whose movies from Waiting for Guffman and the more recent, A Mighty Wind, are extremely funny and a treat to watch. Aside from the Polish Wedding sequence, What the #$*! is greyly unfunny, endlessly repetitive and in the final analysis, tedious. In his review, Pela mentions "those humorless movies that soft-pedal science to those of us who wouldn't know the nucleus of an atom if it entered us from behind". This one however makes no attempt to even soft-pedal science. Sure, we get a lot of talk about quantum mechanics, but there is never an attempt to explain it, howsoever rudimentarily. No Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, no dual nature of matter. Maybe, it is "too wacko to be what it claims to be: a semi-serious documentary", but it is never really wacky either.

Despite what Pela says, I don't think that movie is intended as a spoof. The behavior of its talking heads - who perhaps think that the best way to hammer a concept into our heads is by sheer mind-numbing repetition - indicates otherwise. But on its own terms - that is, as a semi-serious docudrama - it is even worse. It starts off with a gratuitous extrapolation of quantum mechanics, which is applied in a seemingly arbitrary manner to all manner of things from the nature of reality to the presence of free-will. The metaphysical mumbo-jumbo used borders on cant. Then, we veer off into neuro-chemistry - emotions are compared to addictions – and then suddenly, the talk turns to the nature of God. But it's only in its tedious final quarter that the movie reveals its true colors. All of the talk - quantum theory, neuro-chemistry, and even the dubious meta-physics - is in support of that standard staple of self-help hacks - - "I am what I think I am".

Concurrent to all this is the fictional narrative of a young deaf-mute recently-divorced woman whose conception of reality changes. A smirking young boy asks her "How far down the rabbit-hole do you want to go?” And later on she stumbles on to a woman who talks about how the power of words changed the shape of water molecules. The movie asks us to imagine what we could do to ourselves if we only thought right. At the end, our protagonist has dutifully started loving herself and becomes a more satisfied person (or so the movie would like us to believe). This straight-for-TV story is interesting only because of some delightfully funny animated sequences - sequences, I must say, that are strangely incongruent with the rest of the movie.

Is Pela spoofing himself when he recommends the movie as “fine family entertainment”? I have never been less entertained in my life. The movie peddles bad science – and what’s more, its bad film-making too. This is a self-help book/movie masquerading as a scientific documentary-parable. Instead of wacko insights, we get repetition. Instead of soft-pedaling science, we get pseudo-scientific rubbish.

I just wish that the film-makers had made an all-out faux documentary instead. Their animated sequences cackle with energy and a few times, even had me convulsed with laughter. But finally, I hope to God that the movie was intended as a spoof, even if an unsuccessful one. Because otherwise, it becomes not just a bad film, but instead criminally bad film-making that ultimately endorses bad science.

West Side Story would probably have been a much much better movie had it been a dance-musical without dialogue. Alas, the movie does have have characters that talk and one cringes to hear them sometimes. When Natalie Wood makes her climatic speech over her dead lover's body "All this happened because of HATE", the more cynical among film viewers might burst into laughter, while the more restrained ones (I count myself among them) would merely squirm in their seats and wait for the scene to end. It is said that the redoubtable Pauline Kael called Wood "machine-tooled" and her character "so banal that she destroyed all thoughts of love." Typical Kael! Maybe its just the way the character is written. What, for example, can one say about Wood's character Maria, who at one point (when her lover has killed her brother), tells her lover, "Hold me! Tighter!!", and goes limp in his arms? Wimpy, I thought, as I watched the movie. Get a hold on yourself, girl.

Without those jarring dialgues though, the movie is marvellously choreographed by Jerome Robbins and has a fine score by Leonard Bernstein. The first set-piece begins with a stationary frame, continues into gorgeous overhead shots of Manhattan and then zooms right into a basketball court to introduce us to the Jets and the Sharks. The greatest compliment comes from Roger Ebert who says that if street gangs could dance, they'd have danced like the Jets and the Sharks. And they would, really. Robbins manages, by the sheer force of his dancers' moves, to bring out the arrogance, the power, and even the fights. (I've never seen anything like the Rumble which is a dance-fight scene.) The movie comes alive during the dances, in a way, that makes it seem even more dissapointing when it's characters start talking. The foot-tapping number America is easily the finest in the film and the dancing in Cool is simply breathtaking.

There is a performance in the movie that is brilliant, moving even, but it belongs to Rita Moreno, who plays Bernardo's girlfriend Anita. The scene were she almost gets raped by the Jets is the most harrowing scene in the film. (Even this has been choreographed as a dance.) Her dancing, her dialogue, even her singing carry the kind of conviction that no other actor is able to match, except while dancing.