In the same vein as the political spitfire of this year's Why We Fight, but far more passionate and personal (that film was a lesson, this one a memoir), When the Levees Broke carries the same objectivist sobriety of 25th Hour, Lee's 9/11 allegory (I stand by it). Told over four hours, Levees sprawls very thoroughly through what happened, how it was bungled as it occured, how it was bungled after it occurred and the heartbreakingly cruel aftermath of displacement and abandon. Clearly the film elicits a naked response, one nearly impossible to separate from its aesthetics: Carved of Lee's commanding montage skills and heaping spatter of his own voice, it pulls no punches and left me drained and weeping both nights I watched it.

Wading through a heroic collection of green screen madness, we patiently await the penultimate drowning of a main character. If Poseidon were a soft drink, it would be Diet Rite: There's not a calorie - or an original visual concept - to be found.

Unusually rousing, particularly for this take-two-sequels-and-call-me-in-the-morning team, but rousing nonetheless - and so surprisingly literate, despite being damned to hell forever by its writer of origin (who, truly, can't be that unnerved when a film like The League of Extraordianry Gentleman is still available to the film viewing public). Perpetually clandestine, Hugo Weaving's V runs a particularly predictable course (especially while rolling in the haunted, knot-in-the-machine backstory of prison experiments) and Portman is a wee bit too cute for this gimmee of a role. The age evoked is both familiar and alien, terrifying and giddily sci-fi. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sliding on the line of being too silly to be allegorical, V for Vendetta will still make time, occasionally, to remember - visually and gorily - that, despite it's (very warranted) heavy-handed finger pointing is based upon a graphic novel.

I was watching with this internal loyalty-to-Ellroy vs. loyalty-to-De Palma struggle which wasn't too terrible, as the film is pretty much halved (the first section falling to Ellroy's book, the second to De Palma's filmmaking, for the most part). Both Eckhart and Swank surprised me, given that nothing in their careers led me to believe they were capable of playing either of those characters in a film that held a simulcrum of respect for the book (oops! Ellroy bias slipping in...) The big twisty okay-we're-done-following-the-book moment was so classically De Palma, I gasped. The close-up of heads splattering was a nice touch (De Palma preference rising...) Mia Kirshner is particularly creepy in unearthed reels of Elizabeth Short flirting with the casting director and, later, doing much more. Obviously, there was no way a collaboration this ideal was going to satisfy one's craving for either. Quite frustrating, that.

Boy do I wish Nick Cave had directed this. His music sneaks across much of it and his script is pulpy, but simple, like one of this songs - - but there's nothing of his vision and the film winds up feeling, ultimately, minimalized. While Pearce and Huston can't seem to erect a proper tone to the strange positions they now find themselves in (Huston, in particular, seems to float back and forth between wanting to be the Col. Kurtz character and wanting to be a flat-out psychopath), Ray Winstone - as the morally blurry sheriff of a dusty, outlying town in the outback - is impeccably on-key, continues a string of terrific turns within the confines of a very gray morality (he reminds us very much of his level-headed crook in Sexy Beast). Cinematography is easily some of the best I've seen in a film this year.

Seems to really sink its teeth into the concept of a maintenance drug, but veers from the constant question of How Can He Be a Crack Addict and a Teacher? to follow the travails of his charge and their brazenly inappropriate realtionship. She sees him smoke crack, he starts being really chummy with her, as if he has to make up for - or at least justify - trouncing her innocence. Gosling owns this role, one of those turns plied of pure, unadulterated absorption: Every tick and tock of his being is invested in trying to pull off both of these lives and it becomes truly horrifying to watch them bleed into each other. Part of this is how sympathetic the film is towards him. It roots for him. It cheers him on. And it feels all too inspirational, all too familiar to watch the thing continue to flirt with all the usual suspects (his fling with the female teacher, his cat, his stark, TV-deliberate rolemodeling). I'd be surprised if he escapes an Oscar nod, and its well deserved, but the subtlety of this film could easily have thrived sans the father-daughter jauns.

The downward spiral into mental chaos reminded me a bit of  (the far better) Tarnation, as we grasp people dipping in and out of lucidity, staring into a camera helplessly, as if they can acknowledge what is happening to them, but they cannot stop it.Daniel's is a fascinating life to study, and his current state (esp. when playing live) is ultimately pitiable from a proven talent vs. modern coasting standpoint (nowhere more prevalent than in the sequence where he is visited/blown off by Matt Groening), but the contrast never feels like the focus. In point of fact, the film never openly acknowledges a pretty universal fact among sonic junkies: Johnston's music sounds almost exponentially better in the vocal chords and worn speakers of musicians; The movie makes a great case for the impossibility of treating Daniel as a mere songwriter when, ostensibly, he lusted for the fame of a rock star.

[ I am very much considering re-renting The Devil and Daniel Johnston to hear the elusive Dean Wareham cover of Johnston's "Some Things Last a Long Time". It's haunting me. ]

The conversational mastery sucks you in like the TV show it was influenced by (ER), and the film dabbles in a palpable sense of really terrific slash really inappropriate gallows humor but, for all its corner-and-confront gusto, it begins to feel repetitious to nary an end. Lazarescu's humanity and the desire by all involved for us to collectively "Aww" seems in opposition to its oversold execution; By the time we get the idea, the film is still piling it on. That the exaggeration seems to be welcomed by the film as a "Surprise - it's shockingly all true!" revelation, I can only conclude, after all, that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is like Mr. Fantastic trying to describe the size of a recently caught fish: His arms never stop expanding.

I feel almost ridiculous adding my brand to the already heaping pile of "entertaining" accolades, but the film really does rise and fall like an entry in the filmography of Scorseses' past: Sprawling, unapologetic, violent, lightning quick on its feet and high on the Rolling Stones. That's not to say that Scorsese is back to making masterpiece after masterpiece - but I don't suspect he ever will be. At least not like before. He's streamlined his process almost to fluidity, with consistently great construction choices, and black comedy. The new Scorsese is silkier and less risky, but allows the flicks to unfold, rather than hurling them at the audience. It's as if he's settled into making prestige pictures, but hasn't changed his taste for off color, uncannily violent pulp. Case in point: The breezy, "silly" Infernal Affairs couldn't have been a film more ripe for remake, yet it could have easily become an overhaul of sleazy excess weighting a premise of genuine merit (dueling cop and crook moles are tasked by their superiors to root out themselves, unbeknownest to each other). Monahan's script not only make sense of the whole strand, it seems to reinvent the very idea of sense, proving things movie style with a single shot or a single line of dialogue. The Departed veers beautifully from its source in so many ways. And Nicholson: Becoming a thinner, more down to earth, far more alive Brando. (Imagine Marlon's character in The Score, unpredictably scattering pearls of wisdom and worldview.)

It's about three different films in one, but most of all it's a wild exercise in shifting loyalties and unjustified imperfection. I was so entranced by the film's age-mismatched love story and subsequently so flabbergasted by its sudden uproot in narrative tectonics and, by the way, so knocked out by the performances that I barely noticed Down in the Valley, curiouser and curiouser, as it sputtered out of gas just before closing its curtain. Worldview matched by a carefully chosen, scraped-out vision of The Valley, here a dually important stomping ground for Harlan, a(n unstated) schizophrenic whose childlike vulnerability is matched only by his unwavering dedication to delusion (so jarringly revealed in a scene where he suddenly and briefly steps out of character). Edward Norton's charming slash unnerving slash devastating spin at this character I sorta wish wasn't so easily construed as Travis Bickle's Southwestern cousin zings and smarts, but equally fierce is David Morse's morally gray, good hearted father. I think I like Evan Rachel Wood even more here than in Pretty Persuasion. It's the rare film that keeps us with it even as it repeatedly turns on our comfortable grooves.

No brain commitment, pretty colors. Watch me! Watch me!

Works reasonably well in a very polished, very overwrought version of Altman's style, best when its profiling the backstage antics, letting the characters simply blather on in character, sing duets and muse, inimitably, about the end of A Praire Home Companion, the live radio show famous towards the end of its run as an NPR staple. The major flaw is less the stating and restating of the end of the show (with little variation or genuine emotional heft), and more the fanatically bad choice to frame it around their head of security's bizarre dealings with a nostalgic angel that only he and Garrison Keillor can see and interact with. It becomes more than a left field attempt to contrast the jubilance of PHC itself with situations the film readily interprets as "tragic" (Tommy Lee Jones' greedily indifferent axeman, little more than a cameo to provide face to what seems like a reasonably realistic and appropriate end to a show with too few listeners to float it); I'm all for documenting and grieving something you love as it fades into the night, but for the love of cinema, make a documentary if you must: Don't sabotage your own process with silly, narrative stuff-ins.

[ Be warned, grade reflects the mean of an A-, C+ and a C ]

The first segment (1969) packs a genuine, classical romantic exhiliration, blending a fluidity, an optimistic side stare at the free floating body language of flirtation and, dare I say, a palpable poetry. That it's closest counterpart (2005) contains none of this is Hou's point, one that is - unfortunately - more conceptual than aesthetic: If you're willing to coldly turn out two and a quarter hours to learn that at one time people communicated with the electricity of the mind's wonder and that now we communicate with the electricity of our evil cell phones and computers, then have at it. Joined by a bridge (1911) high on the fumes of Wharton (but, sadly, sans a pulse), the film as a whole seems so anti-omnibus (which I'd usually be backing), so poised to drive you bonkers rather than not - - I can't help highly advising that you watch forty-five minutes and snap it shut.

Holy bleak. A film that seems to hold with the worldview that ambition in art is foolhardy and those who truck with ambition will almost certainly do something as evil as passing off another's paintings as their own. In the film's only real moment of conviction, it stands by, smirking as we watch the punishment (mistaken identity gone awry! and unchallenged!) fit the crime. The rest is tired clichedom at best, lazy retread at worst, with Max Minghella seemingly adrift in a sea of knocks at a crowd that's far too easy and far too limited among the general viewership to warrant mention. How could a duo that created a film like Ghost World possibly have veered so far from the graceful social critique, warm embrace of obsessive niche and emotional investment that made that film so damn special?

Messagewise, Edmond couldn't be more relevant - or chilling. Separating from a very Ammerican quintessence, William H. Macy allows his ultimate fate - homosexuality in the slammer - to find him (versus the reversal, where he sought out (as Mamet vaguely infers) the faceless career, a decayed marriage and a life of order). The arc seems predicated, too often, on a need to consumate his new journey, leading to far too many encounters with failed sexual release (and, subsequently, listening to Denise Richards, Mena Suvari and Bai Ling attempt (and fail) to tongue fondle that which has become known as Mametspeak). When he finally hits the one that works, and topples the primal encounter with an even more innate human primal urge, Mamet's dissection of our suppressed humanity - however vicious - feels alarmingly truue.

The atmosphere doesn't have the sincerety of Hess's Napoleon Dynamite (more of a bitter tasting manufactured colloquialism), but as a Jack Black vehicle - it could have been much worse. I don't care for wrestling (really, at all, in the slightest), but the wacky interaction between Black's goofball priest-turned-ring-strongman and Héctor Jiménez's Esqueleto (Black's bum-turned-sidekick) is off-the-wall enough to plug this puppy to a solid ninety minute distraction.

The Road to Guantanamo is disturbing to no end, but fraught with a storytelling frame that sells it very short. The real life guys are reflecting on re-enactments, taking a film that, while lived-in, seems always to be looming with an out when the savagery of U.S. torture gets too graphic or horrific. The out (that the presence of real and unreal underlines the actuality of the unreal) saps the film's strength, too often; The ending, too, where all of the characters have learned to be better Muslims seems like an almost inappropriate point to make (remember, filmmakers can make choices), as if Winterbottom and Whitecross are buying into the idea that US policy and its underlying fear and hatred of the Islamic faith is worth even acknowledging, let alone throwing it into the collective face of such absurdity. It feels like a cheap shot in a film that unsparingly exposes hypocrisy.

Dunst is wonderful, full of lusty asides and quick-wits, intelligent yet flawed, almost constantly sidestepping the film's two huge flaws (dialogue as noted above and the general sense that we're sympathizing with a figure who was smart enough to know better, but still spent all the country's money on clothes and cake); She's flanked by a great supporting cast, not least of which is The Great Steve Coogan (doing a turn so serious you'll blink in disbelief) and Danny Huston as Marie's brother, whose elephant-in-the-background sexual advice to Schwartzmann (whom I liked in the film very much) nets the film's biggest laugh. Dialogue - while thankfully sparse - runs the gamut from Jarmuschian ("So, I hear you make keys for a hobby?"/"Yes"/"...and do you enjoy making keys?"/"Obviously") to sour noted ("Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness") to almost absurdly Hollywood  ("This is ridiculous"/"This, madam, is Versailles"). (Yes, luckily all the lines I wanted to use as examples were on the imdb. I scoff at those of you who are suspicious that it was the other way around.) Soundtrack is a key player, with great 80s synth: Gang of Four over the opening credits, Radio Dpt.'s lush feedbacks, The Cure's "All Cats are Grey" over the close (so hungover blah, how utterly perfect as a coda). But all of the obvious notes that everyone's picked on - it was filmed at Versailles, it was based on an alternate text, "it's like watching paint dry" (P.Greg) - all seem to fade out of memory as you watch what is, essentially, a sprawling art film, cut beautifully to zip through time and photographed with a lush, soft-day blur and attention to nature. In short - It's a gorgeous piece of eye candy with a great soundtrack. It has none of the supposed cerebral doin's or mainstream appeal of Coppola's 'Lost in Translation' and mirrors her best film, 'The Virgin Suicides', only in its relentless quest to duplicate hazy, youthful pleasure.
 

None of it seemed all that shocking, with the Merchants of Death sequences being the most TV-soft, dated bites and low-level comedy. I found myself really sorry for Eckhart and his having to wrap his tongue around some of this really bad dialogue. The Hollywood knocks might have seemed obsolete almost ten years ago. His interaction with his son nearly saves the film; I wish more films showed parents having actual conversations with their children. Fuckin' ironic to see something like that in a film this incredibly played.

There is an outlet for Gretchen Mol! Less of a performance than a transposed clunker, she manages to capture the "gee-golly, mister" star eyes of Bettie Page with what appears to be little effort. Never expected to find myself unconscionably smitten and truly moved by Bettie herself; The proceedings are pretty wan, unceremonious tours through her abused early years that lead to posing which leads to posing nude which leads to posing for bondage photos, all the while the very picture of the most naive and impressionable gal ever thrust into this world. Ends accurately, but you'll roll your eyes.