Holding On

Apologies for the delay on my Casino Royale series. Real-world items have intruded the last couple weeks, and not in an unpleasant way, but enough to divert my energies from obsessively cataloging the vast array of Casino-isms. Will return to the fun soon.

For now, a palette-cleanser on a pair of highly praised recent films I've finally caught up with. First, The Counterfeiters (2007), the true-story Best Foreign Film from last year's Academy Awards may, at a glance, fulfill Spike Lee's famous axiom (I'm paraphrasing): "About the Holocaust -- win the Oscar." It's a different spin on the topic though, a cross between The Lives of Others and Schindler's List starring Karl Markovics (who resembles Lives's Uhrich Muhe in both physicality and temperament) as Salomon Sorowitsch, an expert forger of passports and currency in 1930s Germany who is arrested by an unusually avuncular SS officer by the name of Herzog (Devid Striesow, doing a nifty Claude Rains) and tossed in the concentration camps. Sally -- as Sorowitsch prefers to go by -- is a career white-collar criminal with palpable contempt for his Jewish heritage. ("You know why Jews are hated?" he asks early on. "Because they refuse to adapt; it's not that hard.") Cunningly he rises through the camps by playing the sycophant, painting florid portraits of his commandants until he is recruited by Herzog to lead a massive counterfeiting operation on behalf of the Nazi war effort.

This is a great story for a movie, and The Counterfeiters is terrific for about three-quarters of the way. The relationship between Sally and Herzog has more than a few echoes of Rick and Renault in Casablanca, a pair of cynical crooks who eschew violence and ideology for self-preservation. Cinematically, I've complained about hand-held cameras in the recent past, but here we have a director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, who knows how to use them, with unobtrusive Altmanesque zooms and creating an overall atmosphere of immediacy.

Ruzowitzky also understands when to keep the camera still, and some of the best scenes in The Counterfeiters show Sally and his team sitting quietly in the sunshine, enjoying privileges that their brethren lack. The filmmakers skillfully imply that another kind of Holocaust film -- the kind we're more accustomed to -- is happening right behind the walls and across the fences of the concentration camp, and as the Nazi regime crumbles the stakes get raised as to whether the best chance for survival is by helping or hindering Herzog's scheme. Another major character, a stubborn Marxist ideologue named Burger (August Diehl), spends the last act sabotaging efforts to produce a successful counterfeit dollar, and the movie bogs down a bit with Sally's contrived conversion to Burger's perspective. (Not akin to Liam Neeson's "I could have done more" eye-roller at the end of Schindler's List, but jarring all the same.) Diehl gives Burger validity and dignity; but what sticks with me about The Counterfeiters are the moments that ring both odd and true, as when Herzog attempts to inspire motivation by giving his prisoners a ping-pong table. I'm sympathetic to Stuart Klawans' suggestion of a moratorium on Holocaust cinema, but scenes like this one show that there's still life in a subject so filled with death.


Subtitlitis notwithstanding, American audiences would probably find The Counterfeiters infinitely more accessible than the acclaimed American indie Old Joy (2006), which I checked out partly because of an interest in the director Kelly Reichardt's newest film, the Michelle Williams/labrador retriever saga Wendy and Lucy. James Wolcott has also lavished praise on Old Joy as "a marvel of Hemingway/Carver iceberg-tip unspoken implication where the emotion seeps through the minimalism and produces an epiphany muffled in enigma." Heady stuff for a camping trip that climaxes with a back rub.

Confession: while I'm not averse to minimalist moviemaking with obscure intentions, I do find I need a degree of accessibility to fully engage with a narrative -- The Station Agent comes to mind. On the surface, Old Joy carries a whiff of familiarity: a pair of buddies (Daniel London and Will Oldham) mull over their estranged friendship on a weekend hike through the woods. It's the kind of movie that draws praise for Leaving Things Unsaid, but for me Reichardt shows a knack for opening up the wrong spaces, removing us from the central relationship while overstating the sociopolitical environment with "Air America" radio broadcasts (somewhat reminiscent of the narration in Y Tu Mama Tambien, only without the deadpan satirical edge). Old Joy isn't pretentious; it's best moments are sharply observed vignettes between two men on diverging paths -- as when the bearded Oldham, playing an aging hippie vagabond, notes how there are trees in the city and trash in the woods. He has a nice rapport with the soft-spoken London, who conveys his character's grounded decency along with a lingering sense that he feels like a sell-out.

Overall though, Old Joy is maddeningly remote, not least of which the aforementioned massage with all its cosmic implications, which I think add up to less than what has been speculated. I know I'm supposed to marvel at the exquisitely timed moment when Reichardt cuts away from the tension to scenic images of lush foliage and a flowing river; but all I could see was a director tripping over her own symbolism, and found myself half-expecting/half-hoping for a shot of a train barreling through a tunnel a la The Lady Eve.

Shaken and Stirred: A Closer Look at Casino Royale (Opening Credits and Theme)

Welcome to Part II of our series. Originally I'd intended to analyze the opening credits and Act I together, but I'm putting off the latter for next time. That leaves us with, um, the credits....an entire post, really? Absolutely, when the sequence is as justifiably famous as the Bond series' has always been, and when it conveys information as skillfully as the one in Casino Royale.

Perhaps a reader with a better sense of Bond lore can either confirm or correct me, but I believe the first true credit sequence in the franchise began with Goldfinger. At the least, that's the one everybody remembers. The splashy 60s animation, the dancing girls, the pop hit -- Goldfinger had all the elements that have been staples ever since. Most of them blur together or else have been forgettable, the exceptions being "You Only Live Twice" and "For Your Eyes Only," songs more memorable that the movies they precede.

You Know My Name
For all the many theme songs in Bond history, nearly all of them revolve around a basic motif -- living, or dying, or living and dying, or living let dying, or dying let living. Casino Royale's theme, sung by Chris Cornell and appropriately titled "You Know My Name," is a pretty good one, not quite great (it loses me during the bridge) but better than the Alicia Keys atrocity that kicks off Quantum of Solace. The lyrics by Cornell and composer David Arnold are no great shakes (though I do like the verse "I've seen this diamond cut through harder men"), but the melody has a drive and focus to match Daniel Craig's James Bond, to whom we've recently been introduced in the startling prologue. And the song is enhanced considerably by the visuals of this sequence, which do more than tell us the names of the people who made the picture; they also tell a story.


Recurring ingeniously throughout Casino Royale is a mix of the old and the new. In the prologue, Campbell subverted our expectations by delaying the reveal of that iconic gun barrel, so that when it finally came -- within the narrative rather than disjointedly at the start of it -- the image was exhilarating. This blending and subverting continues through the opening credits, which features the expected animation but no dancing girls. Instead, we get a pair of simple visual motifs -- playing cards and crosshairs -- that are repeated with increasingly invention and complexity. These are, of course, the two sides of James Bond: the sophisticate and the killer, both of which will be on display in Casino Royale, both of which Bond will need to survive. Yet it's the violence that's emphasized here, as the cards are used as weapons, like Chinese throwing stars, at one point lodging into the torsos of animated bad guys as cartoon blood oozes out of the wounds.

There are too many striking visuals in this three-minute sequence to mention. My favorite -- blink and you'll miss it -- occurs when a pair of crosshairs casually glides over the Queen of Spades to almost subliminally reveal the face of Eva Green (who will become known to us later in the film as Vesper Lynd -- or, as Roger Ebert would call her, "The Bad Good Girl"). But narratively the most important moment occurs when a pair of bullet holes hit a 7-card that morphs into a computer screen informing us: "007 status confirmed," thereby saving us an entire scene of exposition.

And what about Daniel Craig? He's omnipresent in this sequence too -- or rather more "omni" than "present." Campbell introduces this Bond while resisting telling us everything about him right away. By ending the sequence with Craig's blond visage fading in and out of a dark silhouette (the final image has the top and bottom of Bond's face wittily darkened to resemble a ninja), the filmmakers are underlining the song's meaning more than the lyrics: We know his name, but this Bond still has to earn our respect. He's going to discover who he is, as will we.

(Coming Soon: Act I....)

Shaken and Stirred: A Closer Look at Casino Royale (Prologue)

There is often much hullaballoo over whether a good movie is actually bad or a bad movie is actually good. Less discussed is whether an almost universally praised movie is even better than its admirers originally believed. When I first saw Casino Royale two years ago, I was so stunned I could barely formulate a response. Here was the latest entry in an increasingly passe franchise, helmed by a competent director-for-hire who had never made anything special, starring a character actor untested in a major role -- and it was amazing. While I was tongue-tied, and my colleagues were busy yammering over whether or not the torture sequence should have earned the film an an "R" rating (oh, please), there was one critic, Owen Gleiberman, who had the balls (if you'll pardon the expression) to rank Casino Royale as the best movie of the year.

Only two years later, I'd say he more than got it right. Casino Royale is holding up as one of the defining films of the decade; every time, I see it, I see something new. And rarely can I watch it from start to finish. I have to break down the experience into segments, such as I'm about to do here.

Prologue
One of the great pleasures of the Bond series has been its opening prologues. Usually they have little or nothing to do with the main feature, but are instead stand-alone short films depicting the end of a previous adventure. Spielberg and Lucas would later using this template in the Indiana Jones series, employing the climax-as-introduction in order to give the audience a boost going into the movie.

The director of Casino Royale -- Martin Campbell -- and his screenwriters -- Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Paul Haggis -- knew going into this picture that they were in desperate need for a fresh start. Bond had gone stale, through no real fault of the last actor to portray him (Pierce Brosnan), but rather by clinging to an archaic formula: the suave, misogynistic, tuxedoed spy who kills and sleeps his way through each movie while barely breaking a sweat. Yet that formula was a large part of the franchise's appeal. If they veered too far away from the template, would the essence of Bond be lost?

Campbell puts his cards on the table right away in the beginning sequence, as audacious an opener as I can remember. We fade in to an exterior shot of a building in Prague, photographed in lustrous black-and-white by Campbell's usual cinematographer, Phil Meheux (who really outdoes himself here). In a sequence reminiscent of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a trenchcoated man rides an elevator up the tower to his office, only to find Bond (Daniel Craig) waiting for him.

Unlike most Bond prologues, this one is quiet, economical, and dialogue driven. (It also doesn't start with the famous gun barrel POV, which, as David Edelstein noted, is "cunningly delayed.") The older spy in the trenchcoat, whose name is Dryden and is evidently a traitor, sits down and covertly opens a desk drawer, where we see a gun.

Dryden: Benefits of being section chief. I'd know if anyone had been promoted to double-oh status, wouldn't I? Your file shows no kills, and it takes...
James Bond: Two.


Astonishingly, Campbell then cuts to a flashback sequence, in even starker black-and-white footage, featuring Bond in a brutal struggle with Dryden's contact in a restroom. This is, we quickly understand, Bond's first kill, and it is fitting that Campbell and Meheux choose to overexpose the film, as if all the blood has been drained out of it.

After Dryden attempts to shoot Bond and discovers that the latter had already emptied the clip, their conversation reaches a climax.

Dryden: How did he die?
James Bond: Your contact? Not well.
[cut to Bond drowning the contact in the restroom sink]
Dryden: Made you feel it, did he? Well, you needn't worry. The second is...
[Bond shoots Dryden]
James Bond: Yes... considerably.


What a textbook way to write a scene; it's so much more effective with the right words left out (e.g., "The second kill is easier....") than leaving all of them in. But Campbell isn't through with us, yet. He cuts back one more time to the restroom, where Bond scoops up a gun off the floor. Suddenly the contact rises, and is then that Bond aims into the famous gun barrel. In seeing Bond's second kill first and his first kill second, it becomes clear that perhaps Quentin Tarantino, who made a highly publicized attempt to direct Casino Royale, had an impact on the movie after all. Cunningly delayed, indeed.

(Coming Soon: Opening Credits Sequence and Act I....)

Eyes on the Prize

"Do I want to win an Oscar? You bet your fucking ass I do!"
-- Kate Winslet, in a recent interview with Vanity Fair

We know, Kate. That's been painfully obvious for a long time now. And if you play your cards right -- as I think you have -- this just might be your year.

But is winning really what it's all about? Kate, you just turned 33, the same age Jesus won his first Oscar, and already you've established a remarkable career which, if it continues along its current trajectory, might rank among the all-time greats. It's incongruous that an actress who conveys such confidence and little neediness on-screen should exhibit the insecurity and resentment that you do so baldly at every awards season. Perhaps some perspective is in order.


I first noticed you in Sense and Sensibility (1995), of which my natural aversion to Jane Austen was overruled by my admiration for the films of Ang Lee. The movie was tolerable, anchored by Emma Thompson's sensitive lead performance and her intelligently structured script. And you were a firecracker, playing Thompson's love-lorn younger sister, Marianne Dashwood. Actually, you were uncharacteristically needy in this picture, Kate, both in terms of character and in a few overly actorly sequences -- such as Marianne's feverish pit of despair after being dumped by one of Austen's archetypal rich cads -- where it was clear you were clamoring for attention. You've become more subtle since then. But it was clear you had presence and charisma and talent to burn, and you got a Best Supporting Actress nomination for your trouble.

It was soon after that I caught up on video with your performance that garnered critical attention only the year before, playing one-half of the homicidal pair of young female lovers in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994). That was a great performance, Kate, a showcase for your fearless eroticism. I hope that just because the Academy didn't bestow any laurels you don't now deem it unworthy.

You followed this and S&S with solid work in Michael Winterbottom's Jude and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (both 1996). The former was a well-made downer of which not even your considerable efforts could energize. In the latter film, amid several embarrassingly miscast performers chewing on their every line, you played Ophelia with natural conviction.


Next came Titanic (1997). We all know what happened there, Kate. Yet what seems to be forgotten is how good you are in a part that must have been hell to play, with James Cameron's screaming fits and mocking your weight between takes. As Rose, the pawn in an arranged soon-to-be-marriage to the most ludicrous villain since the silent era, you made every single eye-rollingly terrible line of dialogue bearable. You were the hero of the movie, Kate, not young Leonardo DiCaprio. You were the conduit for zillions of teenage girls, never more so than in the scene where Jack paints you nude and you unashamedly hold his gaze. You deserved that first Best Actress nomination, Kate; not even the atrocious Gloria Stewart, playing your character at a later age, could snuff your lingering radiance.

You got a lot of attention for Titanic, Kate, perhaps too much. It's understandable why both you and Leo retreated, choosing parts as far away from magazine covers as possible. Like nearly everyone else, I never saw Hideous Kinky (1998), though you again received good notices. I did catch Holy Smoke (1999), another of Jane Campion's lunatic neofeminist ventures, where you play a woman brainwashed by a religious cult in India who then seduces and mind-fucks Harvey Keitel's deprogrammer. Perhaps your most impressive turn came next, in one of your worst movies, Philip Kaufman's Quills (2000). In this film, a wretched tale of the Marquis de Sade as allegory for the Lewinsky affair, you were smacked between the ham sandwich of Geoffrey Rush and Joaquin Phoenix. Yet you pulled off the daunting feat of keeping your dignity and staying real.


Another Supporting Actress nomination came for Iris (2001), then Best Actress again for the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Whereas your role in Iris as the younger version of Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench played the older Alzheimer's version) was typical Oscar bait, Eternal Sunshine was an unconventional surprise. Starring opposite Jim Carrey as the love he is desperate to forget, your Clementine is a character written as rather two-dimensional but who instead, fused by your personality, is a grounded eccentric, right down the changes of color in her hair. Your most recent nomination came as the female lead in Little Children (2007). That film, a mannered and artificically tragic satire of the suburbs, doesn't work, but your character certainly does: an unhappy housewife desperate to feel passion.

In one film after another, you have proven yourself as one of the finest actors on the planet. You convey intelligence, wit, vulnerability and warmth. Regardless of how many obscure art films to your credits, your predilection for copious nudity has earned you legions of fans from adolescence onward. Yet behind all of this has been a palpable and growing vanity -- your publicized on-again off-again weight loss and apparent plastic surgery (your face looks different now, more "perfect" yet less beautiful) the most transparent examples. You're still young, Kate. In the prime of your life. No need for Barbara Hershey-esque desperation just yet.

Even more disconcerting has been your conduct during the Academy Awards. Indeed, one of the highlights (or lowlights) of every Oscar telecast where you've been a nominee has been watching your face scrunch with rage when the winner's name is called. I can understand that five nominations without a win must be frustrating, especially when you keep losing to inferior American lightweights like Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite), Helen Hunt (As Good as it Gets), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), and Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby). To make matters worse, you turned down the plum role of Viola in Shakespeare in Love that then went to the Best Actress of that year, the insipid Brit-wannabe Gwyneth Paltrow (who's been on even more magazine covers than you have, always to remind us of how much she shuns celebrity). But your reaction when Helen Mirren took the stage for The Queen made you look petty, Kate. You really didn't expect to beat a sure thing, did you? Look how many years Paul Newman went without a gold statue, and you never saw him gnashing his teeth on live TV. Make some salad dressing. Show more class.

In recent years you've been upping the ante, gunning for the big prize, and with that there have been some miscalculations. Finding Neverland (2004) didn't fly. The Life of David Gale (2003), which on paper must have seemed like standard liberal Hollywood political sop to both you and Kevin Spacey -- the death penalty, huzzah! -- made several year-end worst lists instead. Even the lefties winced.


You've covered your bases this year, Kate, perhaps too well. You're playing a Holocaust-related character in The Reader and are re-teamed with DiCaprio in a feature directed by your already-Oscared husband Sam Mendes, Revolutionary Road. There is a worry you might cancel yourself out. Yet with The Reader generating little buzz, my money's on Revolutionary Road. You play another housewife in this one, Kate; but the pedigree of the film, a period piece based on a beloved novel, may just push you over the top.

Your ambitions, of course, would not be complete without an archnemesis to potentially impede them. Your principal competition over the next few years -- the only actress with a near-equal claim to the big prize -- is none other than the "Cate" with a C, Ms. Blanchett. Sure, she's already won playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (opposite, ironically, your Leo), but that was a supporting turn, and you know as well as I do that Hollywood would love nothing more than to give her more recognition. Plus, unlike yourself, the lady exudes class and self-deprecating wit: remember last year's Oscars, after her clip for the misbegotten Elizabeth sequel, when Blanchett turned to the camera with a sheepish, apologetic half-grin, half-grimace? Great stuff. Onscreen Blanchett has a regal air, yet in real life she's married to an average shlub, as far away from the A-list as you probably can't even fathom. She doesn't seem to need anything, and consequently she seems to get everything. I imagine you with a dart board in your basement, aiming at her ethereal visage. Don't let your baser impulses get the better of you, Kate. Remember Tonya Harding.

With Blanchett's upcoming Benjamin Button unlikely to tap the Zeitgeist, I don't think you have much to fear this year. (The same can't be said for DiCaprio, alas, who will likely fall short, in a Tropic Thunder-like scenario, to either Clint Eastwood's racist codger or Sean Penn's gay-rights advocate.) And if your name is called, I can't imagine you "sputtering like a teapot," to paraphrase Jim Wolcott's memorable description of American actresses feigning surprise. I suspect you'll give a semi-eloquent speech without any pretense of humility. You're English, Kate; you'll sound good even if you're bad.

And maybe, after you've won, you can finally relax. Choose more comedic roles, only better than that Jack Black flick you were in recently. Take the stage, where I think you'd be a natural. Or retreat into motherhood. You can afford to take your time. Your eventual divorce from Mendes is at least a couple years away. Like Julie Christie, you're a survivor, and even if you drop off radar you'll return. But you could use a dash of Christie's unadorned self-possession: she's never given a fig about awards; she knows who she is. Keep that in mind if you emerge victorious. And remember, should you lose again, the difference between being a winner and acting like one.

Bollywood Ending: Tragedy, Art and Slumdog Millionaire

I have a confession to make. When I heard the news about the massacre in Mumbai, I felt sick to my stomach. I felt sorrow for the victims, and not just any Americans targeted in the attacks. I felt anger toward the perpetrators responsible for the death of innocents. And, of course, I felt a twinge of anxiety at the possibility that it could happen here. But if I'm being honest, I have to admit that none of these was my first reaction. When I heard the news, my first reaction was: "What's going to happen to Slumdog Millionaire"?

In what has been a dud year for movies, Slumdog Millionaire is the one -- The One -- that I have been looking forward to seeing the most. It's always hard to say what's going to capture my fancy, but it's usually an amalgam of elements. In this case, it was initially the title, both playful and oxymoronish. Then came word of the director attached to the project, the Brit Danny Boyle, a visually hyperactive yet emotionally engaged filmmaker who has made his share of interesting features and colossal embarrassments but seemed karmically poised for a huge success. This was followed by my methodical perusing of the early reviews, which combined knee-jerk raves from the likes of Roger Ebert to huzzahs from typically stingier folks like Scott Foundas, whose appealing description of the film -- "ridiculously ebullient" -- transcended the usual marquee blurbage. Finally, I was intrigued by the locale of Mumbai, India, an overflowing metropolis in a country once described by a globetrotting colleague as his favorite point of destination. "It's beautiful and frustrating and wonderful," he said of India, with a tantalizing suggestion that it's never quite clear where one quality ends and another begins.

I still plan to see Slumdog Millionaire when it opens in mid-December in my neck of the woods, but the pall of reality has made me admittedly less eager. A sucker for box-office (as well as Oscar) sleepers, I'm also worried about its chances to connect with the public: will audiences enjoy the film -- also described, in more predictable blurbese, as a crowd-pleaser, the feel-good movie of the year -- or will the horrible bloodshed on the streets where it was filmed be their (our) only thought?


Sometimes the impact of tragedy on art is mere coincidence. When Hot Fuzz -- a sharp, funny spoof of cop movies, deliberately over-the-top with its violence -- was released a few days after the Virginia Tech shootings, a friend grimly quipped that the film just won the "Bad Timing Award." Indeed, box office was relatively tepid to what it might have been under ordinary circumstances; and while I enjoyed the picture and understood what Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and their accomplices were trying to do behind their barrage of gunplay, several of the laughs lodged uncomfortably in my throat.

In other instances, the consequences are more direct. Some years earlier, following the shocking murder of Phil Hartman, another friend and I were driving down the interstate when suddenly he exclaimed, "What's going to happen to The Simpsons"? He immediately expressed remorse for saying that, but he had a point: although Hartman was a semi-regular, his voicework -- spread across several characters, and which also could be called ridiculously ebullient -- was instrumental to the show's success.

It's easier for me now to laugh at Hot Fuzz than it is at The Simpsons. Freed of its untimely associations, Hot Fuzz holds up as a terrific comedy. The Simpsons, while still fitfully funny, hasn't aged well. This is because of several reasons that have nothing to do with Phil Hartman, but it still seems no coincidence that the series has never reached the same heights of creativity since.


Maybe, when it comes to art, I get angrier when it's comedy -- something that's supposed to make you laugh, forget your troubles, bond with your mates -- that suffers. I made the mistake of recommending sight-unseen what I'd thought would be lighthearted fare, Jonathan Demme's wedding-party crucible Rachel Getting Married, to a co-worker whose accompanying friend had previously lost a child -- not in the melodramatic manner of Anne Hathaway's Kym, but a terrible loss nonetheless. They ended up liking the movie more than I did, but my colleague admitted that afterward there had been a strain for conversation.

Escapism can be affected too, albeit less so when it's not entirely pure. On Thanksgiving Day, my parents and I went to see Quantum of Solace, the continuation of the Daniel-Craig-as-James-Bond saga following the astonishing Casino Royale. I haven't much to add to the negative reception of the latest Bond: the film is grinding and joyless, with set-pieces like an opera shootout that could have been classics in the hands of a great director (or even a good one like Casino's Martin Campbell) but with which Mark Forster reduces to hash. While watching the movie my thoughts drifted to Mumbai, and each time there was a change in locale (drab, uninspired vistas in Italy, Haiti, Bolivia) I kept hoping that India wouldn't be one of them. Turns out it wouldn't have mattered much. Quantum of Solace feints toward relevance, with a enviro-phony villain involved in something fittingly to do with oil and water: nothing meshes in this movie, an incomprehensible mess.


"Don't be so gloomy," Harry Lime, Orson Welles' blithe villain from The Third Man, advises Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins but could just as easily have said to James Bond, to Mumbai, to me. "Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love -- they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Certainly one could cite contemporary India -- no stranger to violence and upheaval, yet a leader in international cinema -- as further evidence of this.

Yet a provocative counterargument came last year courtesy of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, whose brilliant three-part South Park episode "Imaginationland" was re-aired by Comedy Central (coincidentally or not) the day after the Mumbai attacks. In "Imaginationland," the U.S. Government discovers to its horror that Islamic terrorists have "hijacked our imagination," presented as an actual parallel universe where all the lovable fictional characters ever created (including Dorothy of Oz, Charlie Brown, Santa Claus, and, um, Jesus) find their Utopian tranquility threatened by suicide bombers. For all of its hilarious bits (my favorite being when a military commander explains to M. Night Shyamalan the difference between an idea and a twist), "Imaginationland" casts vivid light on our current reality, where regular Americans wake up wondering if today will be the day al-Qaeda strikes all fifty state capitals in unison. While something, in some form, may or may not be coming, the question posited by South Park is the crux of the matter: Should we let our fears consume our lives?


Although Parker and Stone argue persuasively that good art is a byproduct of a healthy society, there remains the fact that a comedy golden age occurred during the Great Depression, that film noir surfaced from the shadowy depths of the Cold War, that the last great era of American movies came in the time of Vietnam and Watergate. Although Slumdog Millionaire was made before our current economic tailspin, the plot of the film, as I understand it, clearly has the potential to transcend cultural barriers and connect with American audiences. But will we go for it now as enthusiastically as we may have before the images of the Taj Hotel in flames?

I will file another report after seeing the movie, but already I am fascinated by -- and half-dreading -- this unexpected collision between fantasy and reality. "Boyle and his team....clearly believe that a city like Mumbai, with its shifting skyline and a population of more than fifteen million, is as ripe for storytelling as Dickens’s London, and they may be right; hence the need to get their lenses dirty on its clogged streets," writes Anthony Lane. "At the same time, the story they chose is sheer fantasy, not in its glancing details but in its emotional momentum." As reportedly Slumdog Millionaire closes with a splashy production number, I am inclined to envision this momentum as less dramatic than musical. And this just might be what saves the movie.


A former history professor, whom I will call "Dr. Z," once told me that his threadbare video collection contained no comedies, because once you know a joke is coming you're less likely to laugh at it, and definitely no dramas, but only musicals. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Dr. Z said, he and wife were depressed beyond repair until they decided to put on their copy of Oklahoma! and were cheered by the lyrics to the opening song: "O-k-l-a-h-o-m-a...." I find this oddly inspiring, even if it leaves me uncertain, like the "It Don't Worry Me" ditty that climaxes the assassination at the end of Robert Altman's Nashville, as to whether it's a means of ignoring tragedy or facing it head-on.

What I do know is that familiar axioms -- life is precious, time is short -- reveal their truth in difficult times. Filled with foreboding about Wall Street's impact on our culture, James Wolcott wisely notes that a "hunkered-down, bunkered-in period of cautious retrenchment smothers creative energies, and art is in what infuses life with meaning and pleasure, takes our minds off of death and paperwork." The events in Mumbai this week have brought death to the forefront again; some may argue that that is where it will always remain. So why is it that I see something hopeful in realms both fact and fiction -- from the startling image of birds in flight over the fiery Taj to my stubborn anticipation of a Bollywood ending?

Frienemies

I had high hopes for Baby Mama that it might be an unsung sleeper during its opening thirty minutes, which sets up the premise of Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey), a professionally successful, personally empty 37-year-old woman so in the throes of baby fever that she hires the lower-class Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler) to have a child for her. The set-up is brisk and amusing, with unusually careful attention paid to distributing laughs among the game supporting cast: Steve Martin as Kate's wealthy aging hippie boss; Sigourney Weaver as the improbably still-conceiving head of the surrogate agency; Maura Tierney as Kate's grounded older sister; Romany Malco as the doorman to her apartment complex; Dax Shepard seemingly doing a riff on Jeremy Sisto's tiresome white-trash hubbie from Waitress. Granted, Greg Kinnear shows up as the obligatory love interest, but you can't have everything.

It's not Kinnear's fault (though his flaccid presence doesn't help) that all the threads in Baby Mama unspool precisely at the moment they should tighten -- when Angie and Kate become roommates. From their early Saturday Night Live days to the classic sketch during our recent presidential campaign featuring Poehler as a deadpan, eye-blinking Katie Couric and Fey as John McCain's low-key, media-shy running mate, the pair have always had great chemistry. But writer-director Michael McCullers makes the same mistake as countless other contemporary filmmakers by substituting the farce with sappiness. The leads can't get a rhythm going, the primed ensemble is left stranded rather than brought into the plot, and the air goes out of the movie. It's easy to forgive amateurish direction and staging if a comedy will just be funny.



Thank goodness Fey's 30 Rock seems to be righting itelf. In my pan of the season premiere, I voiced concern that the show's edge had been dulled. Two episodes later and I'm somewhat more relieved. Last week's made more clever use of Oprah Winfrey than I would have imagined possible. This week's was a more scattershot affair, featuring Jennifer Aniston as Liz's visiting sex-crazed pal. (How or why they would be buddies in the first place is left unsaid.) There was the occasional episode of Friends that hinted Aniston's knack for screwball comedy -- donning a cheerleader outfit in one episode (long story), making a giddily drunken phone call in another. About all Aniston brings to the table these days is tabloid baggage: I haven't seen her in anything in years, yet I'm tired of looking at her. She's energetic doing what looks like a roundabout send-up of Angelina Jolie's craziness, but her spirit is heavy. (Not to rub salt in the wound, but Jolie also happens to be a good actress; Aniston is not.)

Nevertheless, I laughed a lot, thanks mainly to the "B" plot involving the efforts of Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) to reunite the cast of Night Court for the finale wedding that never was. As a kid I was a big fan of Night Court, one of those shows that didn't have a lot of depth or meaning (when it tried, it fell flat) but was nearly always pretty funny. Despite the unexplained absence of John Larroquette, Marsha Warfield and Richard Moll, it was fun to see Harry Anderson, Markie Post and Charles Robinson and all the meta references to the series, particularly when an exasperated Anderson says, "Markie, will you do me the honor of being my fake wife so we can get our money and get the hell out of here?" She gushes, "I've waited fifteen years to hear you say those words!" That's the kind of sentiment good comedy needs.

Brawl in the Family

Is Armond White going soft? Years of fulmigating about liberal "hipsters," and now he's giving them the kid-gloves treatment: effusive praise for Oliver Stone's W., (a movie I may have overrated a tad myself); hosannas for Mike Leigh's socialist rib-tickler Happy-Go-Lucky; a generous toast to Jonathan Demme's multicultural Obama-fest Rachel Getting Married. Then again, Armond has always had a soft-spot for familial love, even when the family is as unconvincing as the one in Rachel.

Advertised as a cheery comedy, Rachel Getting Married is actually a dour hodgepodge of the worst tendencies of "independent filmmaking" that White's always railing on about. The screenplay by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney) is her first, and it's filled with rookie mistakes: the enunciating of every emotion; the random acquaintance that the main character just happens to bump into who inadvertently spills the beans in front of the others; and, of course, The Tragedy From The Past that casts a pall over the proceedings. All shot by Demme with hand-held camerawork so jittery you half-expect Jason Bourne to crash the party. In the immeasurably lighter and more unassuming Four Weddings and a Funeral, Mike Newell was able to make the audience feel like a guest at the titular events without relying on cheap devices. It's time to give this visual style a rest.

Give Demme points, though, for earnestness, however brainless it may be at times. He depicts an integrated marriage between a Caucasian bride and an African-American groom without a lot of preachiness (though the white family is given all the dysfunctional character traits, while the black characters are reduced to the usual insulting role of dispensing virtuous pearls of wisdom). And Lumet has a nugget of a clever idea by making her protagonist, Kym (Anne Hathaway), an antihero who leaves drug rehab to wreak havoc on the two families who have congregated at her father's Connecticut estate for her sister's nuptials. There's something potentially invigorating in throwing a look-at-me narcissist into an event that is always the ultimate display of narcissism, and an early scene where Kym emotionally blackmails big sis Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) into letting her be maid-of-honor (her best friend had originally been offered the part) is effective enough that I wish Demme and Lumet had taken this conceit even further to explore just how far Kym will go to get what she wants.

But, alas, The Tragedy From The Past haunts her still, so that instead of exploiting the perpetual worrying of her father (Bill Irwin) to her advantage, Kym expresses annoyance that his doting is suffocating her. Nowhere to go dramatically there. Ditto her toast at the rehearsal dinner, which could have been wonderfully savage, degenerates into embarrassing psychobabble. Even the only purely entertaining scene, a contest involving a dishwasher, is given the killjoy treatment when The Tragedy rears its ugly head again, as if Demme decided to punish us for laughing.

Several critics infatuated with Rachel Getting Married have nitpicked the last act, when the musicians who have been teetering along the margins of the movie take center stage, but I enjoyed the respite from all the overheated melodrama. My misgivings take nothing away from the actors. DeWitt (whom I didn't recognize as Midge the beatnik from Mad Men) does her part to forge an exasperated yet loving sibling rivalry. Irwin conveys a sweet melancholy. As Kym's estranged mother, Debra Winger cuts through the bull with a mighty fist. And Hathaway gives it her all. It's a career-changing performance, perhaps akin to Jodie Foster's turn as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. That film was preposterous too, but Demme had Anthony Hopkins -- his ace in the hole -- to challenge Clarice, toy with her, and finally grant her absolution. If the lambs won't stop screaming for Kym, it's because Demme and Lumet surround her with enablers (Winger's character excluded) rather than somebody who might force the girl to raise her game. What would Hannibal Lecter have made of her?