Vincere (Four Stars)
Italy; Marco Bellocchio, 2009

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (Victory) is grandly ambitious and often stunningly beautiful: a lush, brilliantly stylish operatic bio-drama about an edgy, difficult subject, the unlikely tragedy of Benito Mussolini‘s spurned lover/maybe wife Ida Dalzer, his rejected son, Benito Albino Mussolini and the brutal Il Duce‘s barbarous neglect and mistreatment of them both.
It’s an often extraordinary film. Bellocchio, now 71 — who has been making his best films in this latest part of his career in the 2000’s — has been writing and directing movies, since his notable debut at 27 with his 1966 radical political shocker Fist in His Pocket. But this may be the best picture of his entire career, a visual aural and dramatic knockout from a creator not afraid to assume his audience‘s maturity, intelligence, breadth of interests and adventurous spirit — as well as our love of film as a great, mixed art form, where someone like Bellocchio, just like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane,  can use and embrace many other art forms as well, from theater and literature, to opera, painting, music, the architecture of history, and the poetry of psychology.

The story, new to me, comes from the book The Secret Son of Il Duce: The Story of Albino Mussolini and his Mother, Ida Dalzer. Mussolini — the fascist dictator to be, who starts in the pre-World War I era as a radical fiercely telling a crowd that he’d like to use the “guts of the last pope“ to “strangle the last king,” meets Ida in 1907, becomes her lover and uses her ample family money to finance his radical anti-clerical paper “Avanti,” besides impregnating her.

Ida falls madly in love, surrenders her sumptuous body in scenes both lyrical and chilling. But when testosterone-heavy Benito returns from the war, wounded, Ida discovers in the hospital that he has another very contentious wife, and other children. When she violently objects, he has her forcibly removed, the beginning of a savage campaign of exclusion in which he keeps screening her and their son away, and where finally Ida’s sad, determined attempts to reestablish what she thought was her family, ends with  exiled mother and son dying in mental hospitals, Ida at 57 and Albino at 26. Il Duce, of course, would die violently, hung upside down with his mistress, at the hands of Italian partisans, as the Nazi Army fled, and as the allied armies overran Italy.
It’s an often extraordinary film. Bellocchio, now 71 — who has been making his best films in this latest part of his career in the 2000’s — has been writing and directing movies, since his notable debut at 27 with his 1966 radical political shocker Fist in His Pocket. But this may be the best picture of his entire career, a visual aural and dramatic knockout from a creator not afraid to assume his audience‘s maturity, intelligence, breadth of interests and adventurous spirit — as well as our love of film as a great, mixed art form, where someone like Bellocchio, just like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane,  can use and embrace many other art forms as well, from theater and literature, to opera, painting, music, the architecture of history, and the poetry of psychology.

The story, new to me, comes from the book The Secret Son of Il Duce: The Story of Albino Mussolini and his Mother, Ida Dalzer. Mussolini — the fascist dictator to be, who starts in the pre-World War I era as a radical fiercely telling a crowd that he’d like to use the “guts of the last pope“ to “strangle the last king,” meets Ida in 1907, becomes her lover and uses her ample family money to finance his radical anti-clerical paper “Avanti,” besides impregnating her.

Ida falls madly in love, surrenders her sumptuous body in scenes both lyrical and chilling. But when testosterone-heavy Benito returns from the war, wounded, Ida discovers in the hospital that he has another very contentious wife, and other children. When she violently objects, he has her forcibly removed, the beginning of a savage campaign of exclusion in which he keeps screening her and their son away, and where finally Ida’s sad, determined attempts to reestablish what she thought was her family, ends with  exiled mother and son dying in mental hospitals, Ida at 57 and Albino at 26. Il Duce, of course, would die violently, hung upside down with his mistress, at the hands of Italian partisans, as the Nazi Army fled, and as the allied armies overran Italy.

It’s a curious tale, and one in which our sympathies are divided. However sorry we may feel for Ida, her persecutors have a point: there is something insane about her persistence, though nothing that justifies her abuse at their hands. And worse, what Ida wants, and what Albino apparently wants too, is to be re-accepted as the wife and son of a vicious fascist tyrant, a bully and killer who treats his subjects with the same callousness and manipulative egotism  with which he dismisses her.

The daughter of a rich family, and a beautiful woman with other suitors, Ida could obviously forget Il Duce and lead a comfortable life with her son. Instead she keeps assaulting the seats of power, trying to win reconciliation or justice, insisting that Mussolini is the only man she can ever love, trying to reestablish in the real world the central lie of Mussolini’s life, the family that he rejects. In the last part of the story, as Ida meets rebuff after rebuff, rejection after rejection, as she lies imprisoned in a huge, vault like asylum that looks like a castle of the damned in a classy horror movie, her face takes on a heartbreaking mix of determination and resignation. She keeps trying; she will not stop. And even as she fights on, escapes, climbs the gates, and screams out her pain, her eyes tell us she knows deep inside that her dream can never be realized, that her lover has truly abandoned her, that he is a monster who has no heart. That is what she cannot accept. That is her tragedy.

Ida is superbly played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, the beautiful star of Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Nostalghia. And both Benito Mussolini and his son Albino, are played, in a major tour-de-force, by Filippo Timi.Timi’s Mussolini is a believable early version of the scowling, screaming real-life dictator we see in the film’s plentiful newsreel footage. And Timi’s Albino is a much different, but recognizably related figure. When the son rants and howls in imitation of his fathers harangues and speeches, he looks and sounds like a spoiled boy actor imitating a pater familias who is also a mad, angry ape.

Mezzogiorno meanwhile, takes Ida from erotomania to obsession to misery and anguish to that horrible weary resignation we see at the end. A romantic spurned, she becomes not a madwoman, but a tragically sane observer in a world increasingly going mad before her eyes. It’s a sort of  triumph, in a way, that Mussolini does reject her for the plain, unpleasant women whom she marries; otherwise she too might have been strung up by the partisans. But she doesn’t know this. In the world that casts her off and imprisons her,  she is  woman who feels thrown out of heaven, when she is really exiled from hell.

The style of the film is both florid and brilliant. Bellocchio (the name means Beautiful Eye, as his admirer, Pauline Kael, once noted) contrasts the newsreels of Mussolini and the fascist or gullible throngs with silent movies (Eisenstein and others) shown in recurring movie theater scenes or simply cut into the flow of images. The real scenes are richly colored, composed like romantic or surrealist paintings, and shot like ballets or operas. The score, by Carlo Crivelli, is hypnotic, suggesting Herrmann over Morricone over Verdi. Each scene, almost every frame, delivers something stunning, entrancing, or horrifying. One of the finest films of the year, winner of four prizes at the Chicago Film Festival, “Vincere shows us, indelibly, that grand ambitions, however much they might have destroyed Mussolini and blighted the lives of his first wife and son, still have their place in the cinema. In Italian and German, with English subtitles.

Extra: Trailer.

CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: CLASSICS

The Red Shoes (Two Discs) (Four Stars)
U.K.; Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948 (Criterion)

The best loved film of The Archers — the British director-writer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who also made the eccentric but beautiful ‘40s classics A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp — The Red Shoes is also the ballet film that probably inspired more youngsters who watched it, to a life in the dance, than any other, repeatedly cited, for example, as a main career inspiration by the characters in Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line.

It‘s the magical tale of a fatal triangle among young prima ballerina Vicky Page (played by Moira Shearer, who was second to the young Margot Fonteyn in Britain’s Royal Ballet), her discoverer and Diaghilev-like impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook, in one of the greatest performances of the British cinema), and the fiery young composer who becomes Vicky’s lover, Julian Craster (Marius Goring). All three become principal creators of The Red Shoes, a ballet conceived by Lermontov, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s poignant fairytale of the young dancer, who puts on a pair of magical red shoes given her by a demonic shoemaker (the great dancer Leonide Massine), and proceeds to dance without ceasing, dance her through a world and life that too swiftly races past her, dance her past happiness and love, dance her finally to death.

In the movie, the ballet is tragically echoed in real life, leading to conflict and destruction. And The Red Shoes (based on an idea of Alexander Korda’s on which Pressburger labored for years) became one of the screen’s greatest celebrations of dance, with the Red Shoes ballet (music by Brian Easdale and choreography by Shearer’s fellow dancers Robert Helpmann and Massine) the spectacular 20 minute long piece de resistance that inspired Gene Kelly’s American in Paris number and all the other extended movie musical showcase ballets of the ‘5os.

None of the others is as dramatically powerful as this one. As we watch Shearer’s red-headed Vicky whirling to Easdale’s wistful, exalting, chilling music, she becomes both prisoner and queen of the dance, and the movie’s dark, scary climax becomes an overwhelming final curtain. The Red Shoes, with its extravagant sets by Hein Heckroth and ravishing cinematography by the great Jack Cardiff, with its great cast (including saucy ballerina Ludmilla Tcherina, Albert Basserman and Esmond Knight) and its extraordinary teamwork by Powell, Pressburger and their whole company,  is a work of art that celebrates the whole process of  collaborative art, its joys, its terrors. As you watch this great movie, you may fall in love with the dance just like Vicky, feel your hear soar to music and tingle with the bliss of creativity, like Julian, or feel the pull of dark obsession stung by dreams of perfection just like Lermontov.

Extras: Commentary by critic Ian Christie, with Shearer, Goring, Cardiff, Easdale and Red Shoes admirer Martin Scorsese; restoration demo by Scorsese; Making of documentary; Interviews with Powell and his wife (and Scorsese’s editor) Thelma Schoonmaker; photos and memorabilia; audio recordings of Jeremy Irons reading Andersen‘s fairytale and excerpts from the Powell-Pressburger novelization of the  film; an animated film taken from Heckroth’s storyboards; trailer; booklet with essays by David Ehrenstein and Robert Gitt.

Black Narcissus (Three and a Half Stars)
U.K.; Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947 (Criterion)

The most visually beautiful and stylistically remarkable of all the Archers films: the stunning Powell-Pressburger adaptation of Rumer Godden‘s novel of temptation, love and madness in an Indian convent for British Catholic nuns, in an ex-brothel called The Palace built on a towering Himalayan mountaintop.

Deborah Kerr, a red-headed knockout at 26, is the youthful Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh. David Farrar is the impudent and sexy agent-helper Mr. Dean. Kathleen Byron is the showcase part, Sister Ruth, the nun driven mad by desire, Sabu the young Indian general who owns the convent, Jean Simmons the seductive young servant and Flora Robson the dedicated nun who succumbs to the mad winds of the mountaintop, planting flowers instead of needed vegetables.

There’s a horrifying vertiginous climactic scene in the bell-tower that probably inspired Hitchcock‘s Vertigo. The sets by Alfred Junge (the film was almost entirely studio-shot) and the incredible cinematography by Jack Cardiff both won Oscars and are landmarks in British film history. The memorable music is by Brian (“The Red Shoes”) Easdale. Author Rumer Godden, by the way, hated the film, probably for its wild melodrama; as an adaptation of her work, she much preferred Jean Renoir’s The River. Trust the tale, not the teller.

Extras: Commentary by Powell and Martin Scorsese; Introduction and video essay by Bertrand Tavernier; “Making of “ documentary; Painting with Light, a documentary on Cardiff’s photography; booklet with essay by Kent Jones.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Box-set

Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (Two Discs) (Four Stars)
U.S.; Denis Sanders (and Rick Schmidlin), 1970 & 2001 (Warner)

The best Elvis Presley movie is not Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, or Viva Las Vegas, or even his classic 1968 TV comeback concert. The best Elvis movie has always been Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, a concert film/documentary made of  his Las Vegas concert act by director Denis Sanders in 1970, and then considerably re-edited, with many out-takes and new musical numbers added, in 2001, by Rick Schmidlin. (Schmidlin is the restorer of both Touch of Evil and Greed).

Presley was at the peak of his talent when he shot the original footage, and both films (the second is superior) give you a blend of canny offstage observation and exciting onstage performance pyrotechnics: stuff that engages and enthralls you.

There’s lots of music:  gorgeous, spellbinding rock-the-house singing from the star, and also inspired stage foolery and ad-libbing that show definitively how he could take charge of his audiences and his stage (and of his musicians in the rehearsals), and just why he was called The King. Over and over again he keeps slipping in  mischievous little jokes. At one point, Elvis actually flubs a line from his cover of the Righteous Brothers’ classic “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin‘” — almost repeating the first line of the first verse, then recovering immediately and singing it so powerfully that he wipes out any memory of the miscue. Along with the penultimate “Suspicious Minds,”  it’s his top performance of the entire set.

Give The King his due. He was the greatest front man in the history of rock n‘ roll. (Michael Jackson wasn’t even close.) He was a pop singer who could grab an audience like nobody else, not even his greatest colleagues like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Ray Charles. Among rockers he was unique. His voice was as beautiful as Roy Orbison‘s, his hard-rocking intensity topped Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and his dramatic clarity and bite surpassed Mick Jagger and was the equal of Charles.

The concert was part of the beginning of the last phase of his career, and he was probably in Las Vegas because his viciously exploitive manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker (an ex-carny hustler and promoter born Andreas Corneus van Kujik in the Netherlands) had idiotically wrecked Presley’s film career, by making him turn down movies like the multi-Oscar winning West Side Story (the producers had offered Presley the role of Tony, and it would have been his greatest part), and shoving him into witless trash like Clambake, Girls! Girls! Girls! and Harum Scarum.

Parker had a good reason to hang around Vegas. He was a gambling addict who had dropped millions at the casinos. So he forced Elvis to keep going back there, and at the same time, he never let him play in the sure-thing lucrative venues overseas  — most probably because Parker/van Kujik was an illegal alien without a passport.

So Elvis became the spangled, bare-chested, white-suited King of Vegas,” and by 1977, drugs and dissolution took him to an early grave. He never played London or Paris or Tokyo, where the crowds would have gone wild and the paycheck would have been huge. By the end, The “Colonel” had him booked into some cheap venues unworthy of him, just as he’d stuck him into movies that stunk.

But in 1970, he was still in his prime. Elvis had not yet left the stadium. And when he cuts into “Blue Suede Shoes, “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel” or his great early rocker, the spine-chilling “Heartbreak Hotel” — or in newer songs like the gut-wrenching “Lovin‘ Feeling,” the pounding, pulsing “Poke Salad Annie,“ the Ray Charles classics “I Got a Woman“ and “I Can‘t Stop Loving You,” the ecstatic Simon and Garfunkel anthem “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (in the first movie), and the scorching “Suspicious Minds,“ he has the whole audience moving and swaying and rocking and crying in the palm of his hand.

I had the soundtrack album of “That’s the Way It is,“ in college in 1970, and I played it over and over  again, along with my other favorites Dylan, the Stones and the Beatles. What a shame Elvis never made “West Side Story!” (Imagine Presley — who had been called “the greatest cultural force of the twentieth century” by West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein — playing Tony, with maybe Bobby Darin as Riff. Imagine Elvis singing “Tonight“ and “Maria” and “Something‘s Coming“ and, Great God Almighty, imagine him singing “Somewhere”) What a shame he never got rid of that rotten bastard “Col.” Parker. But a least The King made Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. And they kept all the outtakes, and later made an even better one. You just can’t imagine how good it is until you’ve seen it. And cousin, you better.

Extras: The complete first 1970 version of Elvis: That‘s the Way It Is, along with the re-edited 2001 cut; Restoration featurette Patch It Up; A dozen out-take songs; out-take non-musical sequences; Biographies; Trailers.

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES
Cop Out (One and a half Stars)
U.S.; Kevin Smith, 2010

Cop Out is one movie where you can tell what went wrong just by looking at the trailer. The casting. Hiring 30 Rock’s” Tracy Morgan, to play a veteran L. A. cop who’s been partnered for nine years with Bruce Willis‘s Jimmy Monroe, a grizzled, two-fisted police-buddy now relentlessly battling the local Mexican drug gang, seems a bit like casting The Jonas Brothers as the Baldwin Brothers. Why torture a good actor like that?

Morgan is very funny, and engagingly screw-loose, on 30 Rock. But Tina Fey might have done a better job, and gotten more laughs, in this part:  the over-juicy role of Paul Hodges, hysteria-prone, jealous, weird-ass, drooling cop — who spits and blubbers and whines like a twelve-year-old throughout the most of the movie, while trying to handle dialogue so clogged with movie allusions and four-letter words,  it sounds like a twelve-year-old‘s take on Scorsese. Morgan doesn’t look or sound as if he’s been a cop for nine weeks. No, make that nine days. (How about nine minutes?)

The idea behind Cop Out, whose original title was apparently A Couple of Dicks, is dicey to begin with, about as plausible as one of those e-mails from Nigeria telling you that a mysterious stranger has just died intestate and that millions are on the way. In the movie, jammed with second-rate badinage, partner-buddies Paul and Jimmy screw up a stakeout and get a snitch killed in an operation in which Paul was dressed up as a giant cell-phone. Then they’re suspended by their chief (Sean Cullen). This puts Jimmy’s ass in a financial crack, since his daughter is getting married, and his ex-wife ‘s nasty new husband Roy (Jason Lee) wants pay for it all and make Jimmy look bad.

So, to finance the nuptials and stick it to Roy, Jimmy decides to sell his extremely rare Andy Pafko baseball card, a priceless artifact that gets unfortunately stolen by Seann William Scott as a druggie street thief, and winds up in the hands of  tantrum-throwing mucho-macho Mexican drug lord Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz), who’s maybe been watching tapes of the Al Pacino “Scarface“ (see below) and whose kidnapped hostage Gabriela (Ana de Reguera), was in a car trunk for two days (What?) and winds up in the hands of Jimmy and Paul. Despite their suspension , our dynamic duo keep running around just like legitimate buddy-cops with badges, though Paul keeps screwing up, because he’s so madly jealous of his wife, that he hides a surveillance camera in her teddy bear.

Now I understand that Jamie Foxx and Will Smith, and even Eddie Murphy, might not want to have accepted this part, and that many others might have passed too  — and they would have been dead right, even with Willis at their sides. And maybe one can‘t blame Morgan for accepting this creepy role, when they seem to handing him stardom in a bucket. But stardom isn’t everything. And this bucket is full of crap. Morgan seems licked before he starts. He no more looks or acts like a veteran cop on a toot than Cop Out looks or acts like a real movie. Instead, it’s a real stinker.

It’s not just Morgan’s fault though. Just like Paul, this show, which was directed, as if on a dare, by Kevin Smith, tends to slobber and screw up on every conceivable level. Smith, a normally funny filmmaker who specializes in buddy comedy, has here been handed such a stacked-against-him deck that he quickly achieves a career nadir, and then goes downhill. One wonders why Smith didn’t take the obvious escape and use Kevin Smithee for the directorial credit.

In any case, this movie makes The Hard Way look like Serpico, and Clerks look like Persona. We’ll remember 30 Rock and forgive Morgan. We’ll remember Chasing Amy” and forgive Smith. We’ll even remember Stifter in “American Pie” and forgive Scott — and that’s stretching forgiveness pretty far.

But how can we forgive Bruce Willis? Willis already tried this kind of action-comedy-buddy-buddy change of pace with comedian Damon Wayans in 1991‘s The Last Bov Scout, with a script by Shane “Lethal Weapon” Black, one of the many patron saints and probable evil influences on this movie. What was it that Norman Mailer liked to say, quoting Voltaire? “Once a philosopher; twice a pervert.” I would have thought that ever since then, Willis would have been muttering this mantra to himself, “Man, I don’t ever want to make another movie like The Last Boy Scout.” But he has. In fact, he’s made a movie that almost makes The Last Boy Scout look like The French Connection. Without the El scene. And with slobbering.

The Runaways (Two Stars)
U.S.; Floria Sigismondi, 2010

The Runaways struck me as a bummer, and it’s a movie I guess I should have liked.

So, why didn’t it slay me? Doesn’t Runaways have all the right, rebellious stuff? An unvarnished, unwaxed, nitty-gritty-cinny-look at a famous girl-group rock n’ roll crash-up of the ’70s? Based on the story of the real-life Runaways, whose lead singer/front girl was Cherie Currie (later Jodie Foster’s costar in Foxes) and whose guitarist/composer was none other than Joan Jett?  Done in raw, on-the-edge, balls-out Cassavetes-verite style by Floria Sigismondi, a praised and very influential artist and rock video director (for David Bowie, Christine Aguilera and Marilyn Manson, among others)?

What else does it have? Real-life sex-drugs-and-rock n’ roll fireworks. First rate actors playing potentially meaty roles (including Kristen Stewart as rocker/guitar goddess Jett, Dakota Fanning as front-girl and later movie star Cherie Currie, and Michael Shannon as macho pig manager Kim Fowley). Knowingly skuzzy-looking art direction. Lots of Jett’s and the band’s scorching music, well-sung and well-performed by a mix of the actresses and  Runaways tapes. Shouldn‘t this be a surefire winner?

Not with this script.

Sigismondi and her cast get the look and some of the (musical) sound of the period, but not the feel, not the heart. She shows the Runaways as a talented bunch thrown together as would-be jail-bait rock icons by the trash-mouthed, dictatorial Fowley (a fiercely good performance by Shannon), and then shows them falling apart, as front girl Cherie mostly ignores her dying alcoholic father (Brent Cullen) and overmatched mother (Tatum O’Neal), and takes a dive onto those omnipresent rock world demons: drugs, booze, orgies, egomania and bad management. Burnout City straight ahead. But wait, hey. I love rock n’ roll!

Sigismondi gives all the good lines to Fowley, and Shannon, who sounds as if he could be improvising some of them, takes full advantage of the largesse. He steals the movie. (And he shouldn’t). But the director  doesn’t really get under the skins of the people we’re even more interested in: Joan and Cherie and their band-mates. The movie doesn’t dig deep enough. Been there, suffered that. It’s a show that promises more than it delivers — even if you love rock n‘ roll.

The Losers (Two Stars)
U.S.; Sylvain White, 2010

Bam! Crash! Pow! Clunk!

Here we have another comic book movie, about five C.I.A. ops who get double-crossed in Bolivia by their rat of a boss, a maniac who blows up a helicopter and kills 25 cute kids before their horrified eyes. Ostracized but enraged, the Losers, now angry outcasts, chase this fiend all the way from Bolivia through Texas and L. A. to Miami — where all cliché hell breaks loose. Actually cliché hell has been breaking loose everywhere else too.

The fearsome fivesome are played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as lead honcho Clay, Idris Elba as Roque the troublemaker, Chris Evans as Jensen the jock, Columbus Short as Pooch the driver, and Oscar Jaenada as Cougar the sniper — and they’re assisted by svelte and deadly (and unblue) femme fatale Aisha (Zoe Saldana), the self-professed killer-cutie and ear collector. Aisha is some hot mama. She picks up Clay in a bar, goes back to his room and then beats the shit out of him and sets his room on fire.

Wooo! That’s a bad date. Obviously this is no woman to say “no” to. (Or “yes” either.) And pretty soon Aisha  has all the gang — including grousing malcontent Roque — on the trail of their duplicitous boss Max the asshole (Jason Patric, the best thing in the movie). Max is so crazy he kills people just for laughs, including the girl who carries his umbrella on the beach. And he‘s gotten his hands on some honest-to-God weapons of mass destruction, which makes him even more dangerous. What if Mad Max takes a dislike to some poor defenseless little city like Brussels? Or Dubuque? Or Santa Monica?

I‘m not going to tell you anything more. But don’t worry. No matter how hard you try, you can’t possibly not guess what happens. Losers is shot like a comic book and it has lots of explosions. Natch. Sylvain White directed from Peter Berg’s and James Vanderbilt’s script, and one of the producers was Joel Silver – making what seems to be a parody of a Joel Silver movie.

Greenberg (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Noah Baumbach, 2010 (Focus)

I’m torn. This is a comedy of mid-life L. A. crisis-mongering from the somewhat overrated writer-director of The Squid and the Whale, with Ben Stiller as Greenberg, an unwelcome guest, who lets his brother‘s dog Mahler get sick (before taking him to the vet), acts like a pill to his only apparent friend (Rhys Ifans, playing normal), writes carping letters to everybody under the sun, tries to date up his married ex-wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh), seduces and then insults his brother’s housekeeper (Greta Gerwig), and in general makes Paul Giamatti’s Miles from Sideways (who, I’ll bet partly inspired him, along with Larry David) look like The Good Samaritan on a bad day.

I was totally alienated by Greenberg, the main character. Frankly, I didn’t care if he ever got laid again for the rest of his life. And when he started to run away from his duties with poor sick Mahler, on an impulsive Australian trip, I wanted to kick him. (He stops in time.) He wasn‘t making me laugh either, which would have saved everything.

On the other hand, who says that I need to like main characters, or that its any good for movie comedy, or drama, if I do? So I gave it another shot, since a lot of critics seem to like this movie. (God help us if they identify with Greenberg.) And I have to admit, it’s a smart show and that Stiller gives Greenberg some humanity beneath the bile. On the other hand, I still don’t like the guy. Twice is enough.

Mother (Three and a Half Stars)
South Korea; Joon-Ho Bong, 2008

An excellent, deservedly highly praised murder mystery by Joon-Ho Bong, South Korean director of the equally excellent monster movie The Host. The superb lead performance is by Hye-Ja Kim as the mother of the title — an underprivileged, poor but indomitable woman who mounts a determined crusade to exonerate her mentally-challenged son, Yoon Do-Joon (Bin Wan), after he is accused and convicted of the murder of the city belle.  It’s another shocker, as good and gripping and sharply atmospheric as the current  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and possessed of a more deadly plausibility. You will not soon forget actress Kim as this movie’s mother. And you shouldn’t. (In Korean, with English subtitles.)

The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries (Three Discs) (Three Stars)
U.K.; Hugh David & Ronald Wilson, 1973 (Acorn Media)

Dorothy Sayers was a classic British murder mystery novelist whom tonier critics of the day preferred to Agatha Christie. Sayers’ writing style was more obviously literate (she later translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into English), her stories were more novelistic, her characters a bit deeper, her paragraphs longer, and in The Nine Tailors, she wrote a detective novel that, like E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case was a respectably serious novel that seemed to elevate the whole genre from melodrama to real drama. (I always preferred Christie, though.)

Sayers also invented a detective, Lord Peter Wimsey (marvelously played on British TV  by Ian Carmichael, the naïve protagonist of I‘m All Right, Jack), who was a fittingly named, classy comic character: an acid-tongued but compassionate detector with a taste for high literature, a gift for baroque piano playing, a genius for sleuthing, and the services of the best butler this side of Jeeves. (Wimsey was a bit of a playful snob, and his leftist acquaintances were mostly comic relief.)

These two adaptations, faithfully taken from two of Sayers’ better novels, are stylistically ordinary (like the original Upstairs, Downstairs, they look like TV shows), but well and wittily written and consummately acted by Carmichael and the supporting casts. They’re real treats for anyone who remembers Sayers, Wimsey and the classic days of the British detective novel.

Includes: Clouds of Witness (U.K.; Hugh David, 1973) Three stars. Romance, sudden death and a sensational murder trial invade the aristocratic Wimsey household at Riddelsdale Lodge, as Lord Peter’s reckless sister becomes embroiled in a nasty bit of a scandal. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (U.K.; Ronald Wilson, 1973) Three Stars. What a fabulous title! At one of those staid old London clubs, where you can’t always  tell whether a member is sleeping in his chair or has gone to a better place, one of the old fellas turns up dead indeed, amid a complex plot eventually (of course) unraveled by another endlessly inquisitive club member, Lord Peter.

Extras: interview with Carmichael; Sayers biography; production notes.

– Michael Wilmington
July 20, 2010

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