CO-PICKS OF THE WEEK: NEW

Army of Crime (Three and a Half Stars)
France: Robert Guediguian, 2010 (Kino Lorber)

Army of Crime is one of those movies that takes history — in this case, the saga of the French Resistance in World War II — and makes it come blisteringly alive. The film also shines a light on a great contemporary French filmmaker who, apart from festivals and art-houses, has been somewhat ignored and neglected here in the U.S.: Robert Guediguian. Guediguian is the man who made the marvelous romantic comedy-drama Marius and Jeanette, and other warm, humane, funny-sad leftist ensemble films, often about the contemporary French lower middle class, often set in Guediguian’s hometown, Marseille. Here, he trains his camera, and brings part of his vibrant acting repertory company, to a story set in Paris in the WWII past, a subject relentlessly grim and full of pain and terror.

Guediguian’s mostly real-life tale follows the bloody and overmatched battle against the Nazi occupiers of a group of 22 French Resistance fighters composed mostly of immigrants and outsiders: Armenians, French and Polish Jews, Hungarians, anti-Franco Spaniards, and many others — people outside the mainstream of French society, but willing to risk death or the camps to try to save it, and each other, It was a group that was actually dubbed the Army of Crime by the Nazis.

It’s an exciting story, and a tragic one. (We know most of these Resistance fighters will be rounded up and sent to their deaths from Guediguian’s very first scene.) But it’s not dark and downbeat in the way of, say, Army of Shadows, by the Jewish ex-Resistance fighter and supreme noir filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville.

Cheerless, downbeat and full of dread, Army of Shadows presented a gallery of seemingly doomed fighters led by the dour quiet Gu (Lino Ventura), all in the grip of a nightmarish inhumanity that seemed to have swallowed up the world. Army of Crime suggests that the normal world, and normal emotions and loves, still exist both outside and inside Vichy France, but that they are under battering assault — and that though most of the Resistance men and women we see here may never know that sweet or buoyant life again, the world Guediguian paints elsewhere, some of them might.

Guediguian’s gift for creating humanity and life permeates his film, gives it a grim humor and a romantic charge. The focus of the movie’s ensemble is the Armenian Resistance leader Missak Manouchian — played by Simon Abkarian, with the uncommonly beautiful non-Guediguian regular, Virginie Ledoyen, as his wife Melinee. And we follow Missak through one violent or dangerous scene after another, though internal resistance battles with dogmatic superiors (the Resistance had a considerable Communist presence, something the leftist Guediguian doesn’t gloss over), the group‘s assaults on the Nazi soldiers and officers, and the (largely unintentional) betrayals and roundups by Vichy police such as the dogged Inspector Pujol (Jean-Pierre Darroussin).

SPOILER ALERT

Missak is backed by a colorful, diverse, mostly very young crew — including Robinson Stevenin and Leopold Szabatura as the devoted, deadly brothers, Marcel and Simon Rayman, and Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet as the equally deadly Thomas Elek –and _- and these younger actors mesh well with Darroussin, Ariane Ascaride (as Mme. Elek) Gerard Meylan (as le flic resistant) and other Guediguian regulars. (The last two are the stars of Marius and Jeanette). But throughout, Missak remains the central figure, and the movie closes with his last letter to Melinee, a heart-breaking real-life message of astounding love, humanity and lack of rancor.

END OF ALERT

As a portrait of political warfare, Army of Crime seems to me more powerful and moving than Olivier Assayas’ often excellent Carlos, and not just because the Resistance fighters were mostly good guys and Carlos a bad one. By showing men like Missak, who didn’t fight and kill out of predisposition or temperament (as Carlos seemingly did), but out of genuine idealism, the movie steeps us in the dramatic contradictions, and deep tragedy, of war. The imminence of death constantly cues the drama here, and Guediguian presents the horror of daily life under the Nazis with both sensitivity and with the appalled gaze of a man of peace and optimism gazing at a (past) world of war, blood and terror. (In French, with English subtitles.)

Extras: Interviews with Guediguian and Ledoyen.

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Nowhere Boy (Also Blu-ray) (Three Stars)
U.K.; Sam-Taylor Wood, 2010

Nowhere Boy is a good film, a moving, well-crafted film, but its resonance for anybody who was in their teens and twenties during the ‘60s heyday of The Beatles, will be much more intense. It’s the emotional, touching story of the Liverpool youth of Beatle John Lennon, and his relationship with the two women who had the most profound influence on his young character: Lennon’s aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas) and his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff.). For better and worse, these two — the mother who left him and the aunt who raised him — shaped the young man John is by the end of the film. They molded also the world-shaking artist he became afterwards, along with his great mates Paul, George and Ringo.

As we watch, John grows from a shy, fun-loving, but tragedy-stricken 15-year old, with a taste for rock n’ roll, into a confused son who finds his lost mother (Julia, of the seashell eyes and windy smile in the song from Lennon‘s poignant White Album song), and to a guy at once rebellious, arrogant, sensitive, vulnerable, bullying and disarmingly playful, who acted like a street tough in Liverpool. Finally, just about to blossom and break loose, we see the beginnings of Beatle John, a brilliant and iconoclastic musician poet — a rocker with an Elvis scream, who can make his guitar howl and move. Playing with Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster) and George Harrison (Sam Wood) — Ringo Starr has yet to join them — John is the lead singer of a group called not the Beatles, but the Quarrymen. But Hamburg, and the birth of the Beatles are both on the horizon. (For the Hamburg tale, you see Backbeat.)

There’s precious little Beatle music here, except for the opening chord from Hard Day’s Night, and, under the credits, John’s solo cry of anguish Mother. But we get a strong Beatle feel from the cast. John is played by a fine young actor named Aaron Johnson, who looks eerily like Lennon (though he’s handsomer), and who is also the husband of Nowhere Boy director Sam Taylor-Wood. (She‘s a lady and mother, despite the Sam.)

It’s a remarkable performance. Johnson makes us like John, sympathize with him, understand how torn he is that the good-time siren Julia left him (unable to care for all her children), how he’s drawn to her sensuality, her smiling pain, her frolics. And he lets us see also how John chafes under the more responsible (and dowdy) Mimi’s discipline. But he also shows us John as a bit of a bastard, a mixer, and a bully who tyrannizes his mates, bashes his best friend Pete Shotton at a party, and bashes Paul as well, then sadly, contritely apologizes to both.

This is a guy whom we know could write (and even feel) the nasty punk mood of his Ray Charles knockoff, “Run for Your Life” from Rubber Soul (“I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man…”), but who could believably later write all those tender, rapturous, heart-struck love songs to Yoko Ono.

Johnson plays his first few scenes almost wordlessly. But then he dives into John‘s verbosity and cut-and-slash wit and impudence. The way Johnson tilts his head is pure Lennon; so is the way he curls up unashamedly in his mother’s arms.

The key thing about the Beatles, besides the fact that they were the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band (Sorry, Rolling Stones), is that they were these four great friends and terrific musicians together, who together could do it all, do everything, who made each other better (with a little help from George Martin) and pulled each other up to the top, or to the topper-most of the popper-most, as John would say to them before shows. Saying that John was better than Paul, or vice versa, fanning the flames of that pointless old feud, just prolongs the tragedy of their split-up. The Hell With It. Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play…And we’re all Nowhere Men (and Women) for prolonging even after death a split that shouldn‘t have happened.
So, in a way, I’m not instantly receptive to the idea of a film about John Lennon, tormented young artist and lone rebel with an acoustic guitar. It’s the synergy of The Beatles I love, their community. (A community of…workers as Paul says pugnaciously in A Hard Day’s Night.) But if you’re going to take that approach, then Ms. Taylor-Wood and her hubby Aaron have chosen the right melody and the right key. They fill this movie with all you need, love — enough to carry into our hearts and minds. So do those two wonderful actresses, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff, as Mimi and Julia.
I haven’t said enough about Kristin and Anne-Marie, of course. But then, mothers are used to being taken for granted. And if you don’t feel a twinge at the movie’s last pre-credit title, which is about Mimi, then maybe you’re a bit of a bastard yourself. Hey, Yeah yeah yeah…I thought John (and Paul) couldn’t make me smile in a movie theatre again, like I did when I was a teenager, watching A Hard Day’s Night for the first time. I should have known better.

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC

The Naked Kiss (Three Stars)
U.S.: Samuel Fuller, 1964 (Criterion)

This Sam Fuller movie begins with one of the great shocker low-budget opening scenes: a beautiful bald prostitute (played by Constance Towers) beating the crap out of her procurer, losing her wig, pulling out the cash he owes her, and dumping the rest on his whimpering chest. Fuller, freed of any strictures of big studio propriety, shoves this scene in our faces: At one point hooker Kelly aims her purse at the camera, and batters us movie voyeurs as well as her ex-pimp.

But The Naked Kiss is also a romance (of sorts) and a woman’s picture (of a particularly dark and mordant kind). And soon we see Kelly in a typical ’50’s-early ’60s American small town or city, called Grantville, trying to escape the dark past of that first violent scene by becoming a nurse’s aid: a natural care-giver, specializing in adorable children, who sing sentimental songs. Kelly meanwhile, is crazy for Fuller’s favorite composer, Beethoven, and especially “The Moonlight Sonata.” And can she escape the past? Maybe not. The only movie playing in Grantville’s cinema is Fuller’s own previous Constance Towers picture, Shock Corridor.
Kelly’s nemesis seems to be a salty cop named Griff (played growlingly by Anthony Eisley, of TV‘s Hawaiian Eye), who beds her right off the incoming bus, pays $20, and then directs her to the nearest brothel in the next town (a bordello run by film noir regular Virginia Grey). Her salvation seems to be the strangely gentle playboy/philanthropist/Lothario (and Griff’s Korean War buddy) Grant (Michael Dante), who, like Kelly, loves Beethoven and Lord Byron. And something else.

Full of Fullerian sock and sensation, The Naked Kiss — which, like Fuller’s 1963 Shock Corridor, was cheaply but artfully art-directed by Eugene Lourie (Renoir‘s The Rules of the Game) and gorgeously shot in black and white, by Stanley Cortez (The Night of the Hunter) — is also rife with a bizarre tenderness, a tough romanticism, and something part of the way between schmaltz and weltschmerz.

Just as, according to Kelly, the naked kiss is the kiss of a pervert (and a guaranteed ‘60s marquee draw), this movie has a little bit of Baudelaire peeking up though the Fannie Hurstisms. It’s Fuller’s most Sirkian film, just as Shockproof (co-written by Sam) was Sirk’s most Fullerian.

The Naked Kiss is also a fine showcase for Constance Towers, an underrated leading lady who worked for John Ford (in The Horse Soldiers and Sergeant Rutledge) as well as Fuller, but whom Hitchcock somehow just missed. She’ll never be forgotten for that opening scene, though. Among bald prostitute movie leading ladies, Constance Towers is the queen.

Extras: New interview with Constance Towers; 1967 and 1987 French television interviews with Sam Fuller; Trailer. Booklet with Robert Polito essay, excerpt on prostitutes and The Naked Kiss’ from Fuller’s autobiography A Third Face, and illustrations by the great cartoonist and comic artist Daniel Clowes.

PICK OF THE WEEK: BLU-RAY

Secretariat (Also Blu-Ray) (Three and a Half Stars)
U. S.; Randall Wallace, 2010

Secretariat has a great story, an almost unbelievable (but mostly fact-based) tale — the incredible saga of the horse who won the 1973 Triple Crown, blew away the field, set unmatchable records, and is still regarded almost universally as the greatest race horse who ever lived and ran. (Almost?)

All the above is not spoiler-alert-worthy by the way. Anybody who doesn’t know at least part of the Secretariat legend, probably has no intention of ever seeing this movie, of ever going to a horse race, or even of finishing this review. A good part of the audience (especially the younger part) probably never heard of the horse Seabiscuit before they saw the movie, although they certainly had to know that multi-million dollar films most likely aren’t going to be made about horses that lose the big race and fade into obscurity.
But what person who ever picked up a sports page hasn’t heard at some time of Secretariat?

Director Randall Wallace’s and scenarist Mike Rich‘s movie generates suspense and narrative tension in different ways than making you wonder what will happen next. This is a movie that takes us behind the scenes of a story we may partly know — and then shows us what we don’t know about it, tells us how and why it all happened, and introduces us to the gallery of characters who were present at the creation of the legend. . All that turns out to be as engrossing as the recreated spectacle of Secretariat, dueling three times on the track with another great Horse, Sham, his insistent Triple Crown runner-up and a thoroughbred racer who would have been the record-breaker if Secretariat wasn‘t around.

The problem with making an inspirational sports movie about horse-racing is that the races themselves only last a few minutes. Seabiscuit triumphed over that by giving us the back-story. Secretariat does something similar. But the races themselves are squeezed for all the drama they can yield — with captivating long shots and close-ups, slow-motion, and telephoto wizardry, and with jockey Ron Turcotte battling his way, on the unconquerable Secretariat, up through the pack to daylight and the inevitable (almost always) finishing line.

Those scenes are exhilarating, in a way modern sports movies — taking advantage of modern technology — often can be. But the back-story, the tale behind the race, is exhilarating too.

That drama revolves around the strong, non-stereotypical woman who, in real life, owned this history-making stallion, held onto him and backed his rise to fame and glory despite heavy odds: Penny Chenery Tweedy (glowingly played by Diane Lane). The daughter of a once prominent stable owner (Scott Glenn), who dies and leaves her his seemingly failing operation, Penny shows classic inspirational sports saga gumption, keeping up the business, Virginia‘s Meadow Stables, despite strong opposition from her family, especially from her finance-minded brother (Dylan).

And she does it despite an occasionally surly, uncooperative staff (a trainer she has to fire) — and despite the fact that she lives in faraway Denver in the middle of the country, and so has to commute to the East Coast to keep the whole thing afloat. Among those left behind, are Penny’s husband Jack Tweedy (Dylan Walsh), who sides with her brother, and her teen daughter Kate (AJ Michalka), who, in typical early ’70s Vietnam era fashion, wants to get out of Vietnam. (Those protest scenes, are a major phony note.)
What saves Penny and Meadow Stables is Secretariat. He’s an amazing horse from the moments of his birth, when he stands up in the stall almost instantly, after emerging from Royal’s womb. His heart is more than twice as large and strong as the average horse‘s. He seems twice as smart too. He is beautiful and ungodly fast and perfectly muscled and he loves to run. He even seems somewhat cocky. In races, Secretariat likes to start by laying back near the tail-end of the field, as if teasing everybody on the track and in the stands, then put on a sudden, unbeatable burst of speed, blow past every other horse anywhere near him, and win going away. His nickname is Big Red. His groom, Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis), swears he can understand the humans around him and what they‘re thinking, though they (we) can only marvel at him.

Penny assembles a crack team behind Secretariat, that includes Eddie, the maternal go-to gal Miss Ham (played by Margo Martindale, in what should probably be described as a quintessential Margo Martindale role), his plucky jockey Turcotte (played spot-on by real-life jockey Otto Thorwarth), and, most importantly, her gaudily-dressed, acid-tongued new trainer Lucien Laurin (played, with his usually screen-grabbing relish, by John Malkovich), an eccentric and acid-tongued French-Canadian whose sartorial tastes are as whimsical as his strategies are rock-solid.

Obviously, there’s a feminist theme here. But the movie doesn’t hammer at it, doesn’t pile on too many scenes where Penny — played with her usual quiet natural radiance by Diane Lane — bests some chauvinistic or testosterone-heavy foe, gracefully ball-busting him.

If Lane, daughter of the late acting teacher/director and Cassavetes crony Burt Lane, makes us fix on her on screen without any strain, than Malkovich retains his title as one of the top modern scene-heist artists in movies. Garbed in flamboyant pinks and outlandish haberdashery, his voice and manner tart as a grand aunt (as Norman Mailer once said of Truman Capote), Malkovich plays the kind of believably weirdo character that would never have been imagined by a yarn-spinner for a movie like this, who could only spring somehow, however fictionalized, from life itself.

Wallace wrote the screenplay for Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Scots heroic saga Braveheart, and he directed Gibson’s somewhat pretentious kick-ass Vietnam War movie, We Were Soldiers. Rich is an inspirational sports-movie specialist; he wrote The Rookie (2002) and Miracle. This movie’s advisor, Bill Nack, also wrote the book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, on which the film is based, and he’s an expert on the subject, bringing scads of the little, lesser-known facts and rich details that make this movie seem so real, so knowing. The houses look impeccable but lived-in. The talk seems right; the characters converse with that easy, courtly, cocky-casual semi-arrogance the American upper and upper-middle classes often affect.

But we can also see how a phenomenon like Secretariat breaks up classes, vanquishes snobbery, reduces a whole crowd of breathless spectators into a mass of gaping, amazed kids-at-heart. That’s what happened on the race tracks, as never before, and never since, with Secretariat. That’s why we don’t need conventional suspense and surprise. Watching this careful, loving, often exciting recreation of this amazing horse’s astonishing career is like seeing a grand dramatic recreation of the Ali-Foreman fight, the Boston-Phoenix finals classic. We know how it ends. We know what it means. (Or part of what it means; we‘ll know more about Secretariat after watching the film.) We just want to watch it happen. We want to see that horse, on that track, at that time, in those moments, win those unprecedented, unrepeatable, jaw-dropping races. In the best of Secretariat, we do.

OTHER CURRENT AND RECENT DVD RELEASES

Red (Two and a Half Stars)
U. S.: Robert Schwentke, 2010 (Summit Entertainment)

The name Red stands for Retired: Extremely Dangerous, which is the legend stamped on the files of Bruce Willis, as 50something Black Op specialist Frank Moses — and also on the files of his longtime colleague/buddies, played by primo actors Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman. In addition, it’s the title of a long comic book, a.k.a. graphic novel series, by Warren Ellis and Cully Hammer, all about old retired C. I. A. pals uncovering plots and going on rampages, and of the cleaned-up, fairly entertaining and likable, but basically kind of silly action thriller that director Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife) and writers Jon and Erick Hoeber have made from it.

I like all these actors — and many of the others in Red. They should always be working, and in roles worthy of them (or at least in roles that pay well, like these). But Red‘s script is the same old stuff, the same old malarkey, only with an older, better, brainier cast. Any movie that casts all the above players — and others here like Brian Cox, Richard Dreyfuss, James Remar, and for the love of God, 93-year-old Ernie Borgnine as Henry, the C. I. A. records keeper — maybe deserves a medal. But it also lays itself open for ageist cracks and youth-crazed dopey biases, which are far too rabid in movies and TV these days anyway.

Red tries to attack those biases, make fun of them. But there’s a problem. Like many modern movies with older actors, this picture has them playing too constantly young and spunky (Morgan Freeman as the more vulnerable 80-year-old Tom Matheson honorably excepted), when they’d be more effective playing older, more vulnerable but smarter (like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Arthur Hunnicutt in El Dorado). The idea seems to be that Frank should show us he’s as good as he ever was, better than the young punks in his face, and the older creeps behind them. And he is, but maybe his superiority would be better shown in different ways than this show seems to value: killing a bunch of bad guys who have superior firepower and government backing, and screwing young women. Especially when Helen Mirren is around.

The plot has Frank falling for young Sarah Ross (Mary Louise Parker) a chatty phone operator at his C.I.A. pension number — and then nearly getting rubbed out at his home by a hit squad that seems to be under the command of fashionable C.I.A. stud William Cooper (Karl Urban). So Frank grabs Sarah, and takes off on a transcontinental, multi-location jaunt/chase to find and warn and recruit his old pals and colleagues: Freeman as the wry-smiling Matheson (who’s actually in an old folks’ home), Mirren as two-gun Victoria (who can practically juggle automatics, and recovers almost instantly from bloody torso shots), and Malkovich as Marvin Boggs, the recluse/weirdo of the bunch. (It’s another of Malkovich‘s Don’t-rile-him-He’s-crazy roles.)

Along for support is the gang’s old friendly antagonist, and Victoria’s From Russia with Love ex, Ivan Simonov (Brian Cox). And lurking in the background are Robert Stanton (Julian McMahon), a hypocritical Vice President, and far-right Presidential candidate, who apparently hasn’t yet gotten his automatic candidate/host slot on Fox News. Also lurking and smirking is evil arrogant rich bastard Alexander Dunning — played by Richard Dreyfuss, whom Dick Cheney might accuse of Sarah Palinizing him. Jesse Eisenberg seems a natural for the missing part of the young C.I.A. trainee or Internet expose reporter, who defects to Frank’s gang, but maybe they figured they didn’t need him, with Parker around.

The movie is fast and pretty funny and it gets around. It’s not too good, thanks to the script, but I liked the company, and you probably will too.

Extras: Commentary with C.I.A. man Robert Baer; Featurette; Deleted and extended scenes; Featurette; Interactive feature.

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Inspector Bellamy (Three Stars)
France: Claude Chabrol, 2008)

Inspector Bellamy, an odd but richly drawn, sardonic and compelling detective story starring Gerard Depardieu, was the last feature directed (and co-written) by France’s Claude Chabrol, a filmmaker whose excellent movies, mostly about crimes and the French bourgeoisie, have charmed, disturbed and held me spellbound for almost half a century. A jolly man in real life, directing movie after movie almost to the end, Chabrol released Bellamy in 2008 — and then went on to make two more TV episodes (both mystery stories) before dying at 80 in September.

Long before the end, Chabrol turned out to the most prolific and productive of all his old Cahiers du Cinema critic-turned filmmaker buddies, the remarkable quintet who launched the Nouvelle Vague together: the so-called Holy Family of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette — and Chabrol.

Now, only Godard and Rivette are left.

It’s a sad occasion but a good film. Depardieu plays Bellamy as a solid, bourgeois, randy but dutiful husband and keen-eyed cop, a kind of homey Inspector Maigret with a soft spot for murderers, who runs into two problems on his summer vacation with Mme. Bellamy (Marie Bunel): the arrival of his drunken ex-con step-brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), and his strange encounter with a natty insurance agent named Emile Leullet (Jacques Gamblin), who may have faked his own death in order to start a new life with his sexy mistress Nadia (played by the very sexy Vahina Giocante).

Bellamy‘s cat-and-mouse relations with the fugitive are mysterious, but almost comical, as if Leullet were a Raskolnikov seeking out his own Inspector Porfiry. And the French Inspector’s savage links with frere Jacques, in the other part of the movie, are dark, deep, profoundly twisted. Inspector Bellamy grips and surprises you, but easily, surely, without any fuss.

Depardieu, who works even more constantly than Chabrol did, rivets you with his casual expertise, but he also almost shocks you with his late-Brandoesque bulk. He‘s immense, beyond Raimu. This fiery, consummate actor who, it seemed, could either go savagely modern, or play all the great French classical stage and literary roles, from Cyrano on, now seems in shape only for a classical turn as Gargantua, in a film based on Rabelais.

It doesn’t affect his performance which is, as always, effortless, magnetic and inwardly exuberant. The other actors are fine as well, and the movie, shot by Eduardo Serra, has a relaxed roll and rhythm, as if it were a snap to make. Chabrol, who once said that a film without a murder didn’t interest him, has often been called the French Hitchcock. Here he sometimes seems like a Lang, a Preminger, or a Renoir as well. Despite his age, he’d often been at his best in recent years, from 1995’s La Ceremonie on, and Inspector Bellamy, while not a masterwork, is certainly a master’s work. (In French, with subtitles.)

Extras: Featurette; Trailer.

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Riot (Two Stars)
U.S.: Buzz Kulik, 1969 (Olive)
Jim Brown, Gene Hackman and Ben Carruthers (the star of Cassavetes’ Shadows) are three convicts who are part of a riot and takeover (and secret breakout tunnel plot) at the real-life Arizona State Prison — whose warden and many actual prisoners appear as supporting players or extras. It always seems as if should be better than it is — the writer is James Poe of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? — but the movie stays grim and relentless and second-rate to the end. Brown holds his own acting with Hackman, which is saying something.