a_film_you_should_see_take_3 rt a_film_you_should_see a_film_you_should_see_take_2 Old Joy this is kelly reichardt's first film. she is the director of wendy and lucy. lucy was also the dog in old joy... A rainy afternoon in a fern-carpeted Cascade forest. A black slug slides across a boulder cusioned with brilliant green moss. Why do I think I'll remember that moment from Kelly Reichart's "Old Joy" for a long, long time? It doesn't have anything to do with furthering the story, about two old friends who haven't seen each other for a while and take an overnight trip to a hot springs in the mountains near Portland, Oregon. It's just... right. The right image in the right place at the right time. Necessary. Essential. Like a great jazz musician, Reichart understands that striking a single, well-placed note can resonate more profoundly than playing a splashy cascade of noise just because you can. "Old Joy" resounds with sustained images and sounds that are given the time and space to reverberate -- fitting for a movie that begins with the chirp of a bird perched on a gutter and the chime of a meditation gong. It's based on a short story (and feels very much like that atmospheric, economical form of storytelling) that comes down to this: The two friends, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), drive up into the mountains and get lost trying to find the hot springs. They pitch camp at a spot littered with abandoned furniture and spend the evening drinking beer around a fire and shooting at the cans with a pellet gun. The next day, they find the springs. After soaking in them for a while, they drive back to Portland. The End. Of course, that is no more an accurate description of "Old Joy" than saying James Joyce's The Dead is about some Irish people who go to a party and then go home; meanwhile, it snows. It's not only that innumerable incidents are left out of this outline, but that what happens in the story isn't defined by incident. In that sense, I couldn't synopsize what happens in "Old Joy" any more than I could tell you what happens in "The Dead," or Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring, or Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way." Everything happens. But, as they say about jazz, it's as much about the notes you don't play (but hear nevertheless) as the ones you do. And sometimes the greatest drama can take place between the lines, or outside the province of the frame, and all we notice is a pause or a glance. Or a shot of a slug moving across some moss. Some may think of it as "leisurely" or "slow-paced," but those but those qualities contribute to the almost unbearable suspensefulness of "Old Joy." There are unarticulated tensions, feelings of sorrow, unease and even dread that course through the movie like a hidden creek. And when Mark and Kurt finally locate the turn-off to the springs, we see the sky reflected in their windshield and the whole world turns on this moment. What is about to happen? Will we recognize it when it does? Or did it already happen? What did it mean? "Old Joy" is not going to offer up its secrets -- mysteries of the human heart and mind -- in a glib or facile manner. All you have to do is watch, and feel, and think. Kurt obviously yearns to reconnect with Mark, and with the past, in some way, and he's saddened and frustrated that he can't. Mark, who drives around listening to Air America as if it were the one thin remaining tether to a larger dynamic world of politics and idealism that he used to believe in, seems perpetually numb. Part of it's political -- living in a blue state (in every sense), depressed into a condition of learned helplessness by elections and events, while the impotent callers on the radio drone about the possibility of a third party and bemoan the nonexistence of a second party. But perhaps the third party weighing most heavily on Mark's mind is the one in the belly of his wife, Tanya. He's about to become a father. Kurt (and it's OK to make the connection to another young blond man named Kurt from the Pacific Northwest) thinks of himself as a spiritual seeker, but that may be because he still smokes way more dope than any of his old friends, most of whom he's lost contact with. In one of the movie's best sly jokes -- and most telling bits of characterization -- he slips on a pair of plum-colored shorts, and his purplish wardrobe looks like cast-offs from the early-1980s Oregon ashram of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, followers of whom, Pacific Northwesterners recall, always dressed in those colors favored by their guru, who was deported from the United States for immigration fraud. The way Kurt spins his stories, he's always going off on wilderness enlightenment retreats, and has just returned from Ashland, which he says was "amazing. Tranformative. I'm at a whole new place now, really." Both Kurt and Mark behave as if they'd had this same conversation a million times before. Kurt is a flake -- the kind of guy who sleeps on friends' couches well into his 30s or 40s -- but he's also troubled by his inability to adapt to adulthood. What does Kurt want from Mark? Is it lost brotherhood, agape; or is there a sexual component, or does he just wish Mark could give him back the old days, and old joys, of their younger selves? Those questions, which linger long after the movie is over, make "Old Joy" unshakable. from roger ebert 090618 ... rt up there were moments as i was watching this that i totally forgot who i was somehow. the imagery is so textured that you just want to squeeze the characters and expect them to squish in your fingers. plus the adult theme trickled down to a child's understanding is genius. it is perhaps a new kind of entertainment or an old one evolved to a level of contemporary accessibility like never seen before. i completely enjoyed it. and having seen the late show after a ten hour work day i only almost fell asleep once. 090707 ... rt open hearts/ny times review before the review starts allow me to preface this as my sincere reaction to this gem of a film: it will haunt you for days... The differences between a soap opera and a serious drama are starkly illustrated by Susanne Bier's emotionally devastating ''Open Hearts.'' Until the end, when it begins to go soft, the movie takes two strands of soap opera convention -- a life-changing accident and an adulterous affair -- and spins their suds into gold. One notion that haunts this Danish film, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is how in the blink of an eye a personal heaven can turn into a hell whose agonies reverberate traumatically through other lives. The fateful blink occurs near the beginning with the opening of a car door. Until then, the movie has pretended to be a romantic idyll. In its blissful opening scene, two young lovers, Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Cecilie (Sonja Richter), who live together in Copenhagen, decide to marry. Disaster falls when Cecilie drops Joachim off to make a connection for a weekend rock-climbing expedition, and he is struck head-on by a speeding vehicle as he gets out of the car. The guilt-stricken driver, Marie (Paprika Steen), accompanied by her sullen teenage daughter, Stine (Stine Bjerregaard), frantically tries to help and telephones her husband, Niels (Mads Mikkelsen), a doctor who works at the hospital where Joachim is taken. Joachim survives, but his spine is crushed, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the neck down. The bad news is delivered curtly, and as it sinks in, Joachim seems to wither before your eyes. Because ''Open Hearts'' follows the austere rules of the Danish filmmaking collective Dogma 95, it purveys a documentary-style realism that dilutes any lingering soap opera gloss. The rough-hewn visual style matches the bite of Anders Thomas Jensen's screenplay, which pounces on all the painful issues of affliction, sex and death that you half wish the movie would sidestep. Joachim does not accept his fate stoically. Recognizing that his athletic days are over and that his sex life is finished, he furiously lashes out at the world. To Cecilie he paints a verbally graphic scenario of the withering of his limbs and sex organs. Her tearful assertions of loyalty are taken as humiliating affronts, and he repeatedly rebuffs her overtures until she retreats. Mr. Kaas is so intimately attuned to his character's inner life that you can see the light leave Joachim's eyes and his face metamorphose from scrubby, teddy-bear handsome into an ugly mask of resentment and despair. As his fury mounts, he becomes both monstrous and painfully sympathetic, and the movie puts you in the uncomfortable shoes of someone who empathizes with his rage (who wouldn't have the same initial reaction in Joachim's position?) but is powerless to help. The film deliberately allows his bitter tirades to run on long enough to test your patience and make you want to turn away and flee. Once Cecilie has withdrawn, Joachim focuses his rage on a nurse who administers physical therapy and whom he taunts with merciless insults. But she can give as good as she gets, and it becomes clear that absorbing the brunt of his fury without cracking is part of her demanding job. ''Open Hearts'' has a second drama up its sleeve. When Cecilie, rejected and at a loss over what to do, reaches out to Niels for comfort, the young doctor obliges with the blessing of his guilt-stricken wife. Cecilie is younger and prettier than Marie, and her need for comfort unexpectedly kindles Niels's desire. Suddenly a stable, monogamous marriage, which has produced three children, begins to unravel. Stine, who was recently dumped by her boyfriend and who also blames herself for the accident, intuits the affair the moment it ignites. Marie also senses a change, but she loves Niels so much that she is willing to swallow his lies. As Marie's suspicions deepen, she regards her husband with a fierce, animal vigilance. Ms. Steen lends a desperate pathos to the role of a woman fighting to preserve her family. It hurts to realize that her formidable defenses may be no match against the full flame of Niels's passion. In apportioning blame among its four main characters, ''Open Hearts'' is scrupulously even-handed. Mr. Mikkelsen's cheating husband is no sleazy lothario but a man struck by lightning, dazedly riding an emotional seesaw, teetering wildly between terror and desire. If two hard-bitten dramas seem like one load too many for a serious movie to shoulder, ''Open Hearts'' makes the point that an accident like Joachim's has an inevitable ripple effect, as crosscurrents of guilt, sympathy and the urge to fix what's broken collide. Ultimately, the film pulls back from the abyss and makes an effort to resolve its conflicts. But once it has come in from the cold, it begins to lose its bite. OPEN HEARTS Directed by Susanne Bier; written (in Danish, with English subtitles) by Anders Thomas Jensen, based on an idea by Ms. Bier; director of photography, Morten Soborg; edited by Pernille Bech Christensen and Thomas Krag; music by Jesper Winge Leisner; produced by Vibeke Windelov; released by Newmarket Films. Running time: 114 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Sonja Richter (Cecilie), Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Joachim), Mads Mikkelsen (Niels), Paprika Steen (Marie), Stine Bjerregaard (Stine), Birthe Neumann (Hanne), Niels Olsen (Finn) and Ulf Pilgaard (Thomsen). 090822 ... rt hbo's grey gardens Genteel folly has many faces — Miss Havisham and Blanche DuBois are two of them — yet until 30-some years ago, there wasn’t a handy shorthand for both faded grandeur and alarming decay. “Grey Gardens,” a legendary 1975 documentary about the Beales of East Hampton, N.Y., filled the gap between Norma Desmond and the Collyer brothers. The mere spectacle of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie, an aunt and a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, eating out of tin cans and sharing their dilapidated mansion with dozens of cats, raccoons and fleas was shocking. But that freak show alone would not have been enough to keep “Grey Gardens,” so vivid in the public imagination — and cultural lexicon — for so long. “Grey Gardens” lives on — in gay culture and beyond — because the filmmakers David and Albert Maysles studied two lonely, marginal and desperately sad lives and culled the nutty resilience that can come with delusion, seclusion and upper-class breeding. The Beales’ downward spiral was like a cinéma-vérité version of the novel “The Easter Parade,” but unlike Richard Yates’s dispossessed and depressed sisters, the two Edies aren’t miserable, self-aware or self-pitying. “Grey Gardens” is an oddly bracing portrait, and also a funny one, thanks to the spirit and quaint, patrician locutions of its two heroines, who both are, in Bealespeak, undeniably “staunch.” (The documentary also lives on as a homeowners’ version of “Reefer Madness”: this is what happens when you don’t fix the ceiling leak and let the windowsills peel.) The Maysleses’ film was turned into a hit musical in 2006; now it’s an HBO movie starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, to be shown on Saturday. This “Grey Gardens” is not an adaptation of the Broadway show; it’s a retelling of the Beales’ tale that blends material from the documentary — dialogue, songs and entire scenes — with flashbacks to the two Edies in their glory days, when both well-born women hankered, in turn, to be in show business. The early years are, of course, important: the Beales in decline swaddled themselves in old newspapers, scrapbooks and sifted memories, or as Little Edie dreamily tells David (Justin Louis) and Albert (Arye Gross), “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, awfully difficult.” But both fictional Edies are so entrancing as the oldest versions of themselves that the movie’s slow, lengthy detours to the 1930s and 1950s are almost a distraction. Even the brief flashback to the early ’70s, when Mrs. Onassis (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is driven by the tabloid exposés of her relatives’ living conditions to visit them at Grey Gardens and finance repair work, is a little long. The acting is compelling, and the costumes are sumptuous, but the staging is static, too “Masterpiece Theater” for the story at hand. The Beales are far more fascinating for what they became than what they once fleetingly were; Ms. Lange and Ms. Barrymore easily play eccentric beauties, but they are even better in the more complicated roles of crazy cat ladies. Any reinterpretation of a cult film that has almost as many memorable, and often re-enacted, lines as “Casablanca” is hard, and the mimicry has to be impeccable and subtle. Ms. Barrymore is tested first, since the HBO movie opens with a scene, shot in grainy stock that evokes the documentary’s 16-millimeter footage, showing Little Edie, in her mid-50s, dancing in white Minnie Mouse shoes and a long scarf hiding her bald head, twirling a small American flag to the Virginia Military Institute marching song. Edie, who as a debutante modeled, sang and wrote poetry until she was brought to heel by her family and her own fragility, held on to her performing fantasies well into old age. All it takes is one shot of Ms. Lange, lying in bed wearing L.B.J.-vintage eyeglasses, her hair white and scraggly and her face and neck wreathed in wrinkles, to know that Big Edie is well and unflinchingly represented. By the time Big Edie warbles to a recording of her own voice and reminisces about her days as a society matron (“I had a terribly successful marriage,” Big Edie says. “I never threw anything at Mr. Beale, never. I never had words with Mr. Beale at all.”), it becomes very difficult to keep the line between the documentary and the movie, awfully difficult. The Beale voices are hard to get right, because both Edies had their own way of talking that was at once refined and strident. Big Edie spoke with long A’s and a semi-British lilt, whereas Little Edie had a voice like an irregular heartbeat, which echoed her irregular personality. Even Christine Ebersole, who won a Tony playing both roles in the musical, had trouble holding on to little Edie’s timbre. (In the YouTube video of Ms. Ebersole singing the showstopper “The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” she sounds less like a graduate of Miss Porter’s than like Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls.” ) Ms. Barrymore, dressed in that “revolutionary” costume — dark skirt pinned together over shorts and pantyhose— re-enacts the scene from the documentary almost word for word (“Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono, so we had quite a fight”) not just well, but affectingly. The documentary exposed a power struggle between two women — the controlling, needy mother and the needy, easily controlled daughter — that was part Greek tragedy, part French farce. The Maysleses’ film, however, was really Little Edie’s vindication, a light shined on a blinkered life lived in the shadows of a more willful personality. The movie also champions Little Edie, but Ms. Lange is so seductive as Big Edie that she keeps tugging the spotlight in the mother’s direction. Both actresses artfully trace the arc of their characters’ unfulfillment. Ms. Lange weaves some of Big Edie’s youthful charm into the gnarled narcissism of old age; even as a young and stunning debutante, Ms. Barrymore’s Little Edie is flecked with a hint of the jangly unsteadiness of her later life. Some of the best lines from the documentary are left unsaid. (Little Edie scoffingly refers to East Hampton as a “mean, nasty, Republican town,” but doesn’t recite the documentary’s most famous phrase, “They can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday.” ) The HBO ending is far more cinematic and cathartic than the documentary’s elliptical closing shot. But there is enough of the real Beales in this movie to please even avid fans. And there is enough of a movie to entertain viewers who have never once described a friend, a place or a mood as Grey Gardens. ny times review 090831 ... cr0wl district 9 aliens as minorities with a gripping twist cringing fun! 090917 ... cr0wl tragic story about a young honduran girl that gets involved with a mexican gang member as she flees north for a better life. 090918 ... cr0wl goodbye solo unlikely friendship stutters between a senegalese taxi driver and an old man planning on committing suicide. 091010 ... rt Insights Arrive at the End of a Life Doris Dörrie’s “Cherry Blossoms” is both a tender tale of cultural crossings and a double portrait of grief. At its center is a long-married provincial German couple, each member of which must confront the other’s death, one in prospect, the other in fact. The conceit that makes this reciprocity possible — one of those symptom-free incurable diseases that so frequently befall movie characters — may be hard to swallow, but once you accept it you can be charmed and touched by the way it plays out. Rudi (Elmar Wepper) and Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) live in a picturesque Bavarian town. Two of their children live in Berlin, and another — Trudi’s favorite, a son named Klaus — in Tokyo, where his mother has always dreamed of going. Instead, she and Rudi make a dutiful trip to visit their son Karl (Maximilian Brückner), who lives in bourgeois comfort with his wife and two children, and daughter, Karolin (Birgit Minichmayr), who lives in a more bohemian milieu with her lesbian lover, Franzi (Nadja Uhl). I don’t want to be coy, but I also don’t want to give away the narrative surprises threaded through this gentle, sentimental tale. It will spoil nothing, however, to say that by the end of the film both parents have died, and that each has contemplated the mixture of fulfillment and regret that has defined their relationship. The matter of mourning is handled with more delicacy than the intergenerational dimensions of the story, which are clumsy and overstated, especially when Klaus and Rudi, during the father’s awkward visit to Japan, must make up for years of silence and misunderstanding. The most affecting insights offered by “Cherry Blossoms” are also, in a way, the most banal. Travel to a foreign land can give you a fresh perspective on your life. Old habits die hard. A new friend can soothe your pain. In Rudi’s case, friendship arrives in the person of Yu (Aya Irizuki), a waifish young Japanese woman who practices Butoh, the form of dance that Trudi also loves. It sometimes seems as if Ms. Dörrie’s intention was not just to direct a movie partly set in Japan, but to make a Japanese movie. Her attempts to balance emotional circumspection with an openness to feeling, and to infuse her images with a simple, unaffected beauty, evoke a Japanese tradition going back to Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu and flourishing in the work of Hirokazu Kore-eda. “Still Walking,” Mr. Kore-eda’s most recent film, shown last year in Toronto, shares with “Cherry Blossoms” an interest in how people grow old in a marriage and cope with loss. But while Ms. Dörrie’s film is exquisitely shot, its themes and metaphors are obvious rather than subtle, and its emotional rhythms — rueful laughter punctuating the pathos — would not be out of place in a television drama. Too much is explained: we can appreciate the transitory beauty of cherry blossoms without being told that they are “a symbol of impermanence,” and the flies that serve a similar symbolic function don’t need to buzz around quite so insistently. Still, there is something quiet and real in the way that this film contemplates the curious interplay of happiness and sorrow. (ny times review) 091014 ... rt Where the Wild Things Are Most of the snuffling, growling beasts that roam and often stomp through “Where the Wild Things Are,” Spike Jonze’s alternately perfect and imperfect if always beautiful adaptation of the Maurice Sendak children’s book, come covered in fur. Some have horns; most have twitchy tails and vicious-looking teeth. The beasts snarl and howl and sometimes sniffle. One has a runny nose. Yet another has pale, smooth skin and the kind of large, wondering eyes that usually grow smaller and less curious with age. This beast is Max, the boy in the wolf costume who one night slips into the kind of dream the movies were made for. Max, played by the newcomer Max Records, is the pivotal character in this intensely original and haunting movie, though by far the most important figure here proves to be Mr. Jonze. After years in the news, the project and its improbability — a live-action movie based on a slender, illustrated children’s book that runs fewer than 40 pages, some without any words at all — are no longer a surprise. Even so, it startles and charms and delights largely because Mr. Jonze’s filmmaking exceeds anything he’s done in either of his inventive previous features, “Being John Malkovich” (1999) and “Adaptation” (2002). With “Where the Wild Things Are” he has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it. First published in 1963, the book follows the adventures of Max, who looks to be about 6 (he’s closer to 9 in the movie) and enters making mischief “of one kind and another” while dressed in a wolf suit with a long, bushy tail and a hood with ears and whiskers. After his unseen mother calls him “wild thing!” and he threatens to eat her up, he is sent to his room without dinner. But his room magically transforms into a forest and, finding a boat, he sails to a place populated by giant, hairy, scary beasts that make him their king. Eventually the tug of home pulls him back to his room, where supper (“still hot”) sits waiting. There are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination. Happily, Mr. Jonze, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Eggers, has not attempted to enlarge or improve the story by interpreting it. Rather, he has expanded it, very gently. The movie is still a story about a boy, his mother, his room, his loneliness and various wild things of his creation. But now there are new details and shadings to complement the book’s material, like Max’s older sister, Claire (Pepita Emmerichs), whose lank hair and adolescent gloom are touchingly mirrored by a wild thing named K W (voiced by Lauren Ambrose). Like Mr. Sendak’s unruly boy, the movie’s Max is a storm without warning, throwing himself into the story while noisily chasing the family dog down some stairs. Shot with a handheld camera that can barely contain the boy’s image inside the frame, these clattering, jangling introductory moments are disruptive, disorienting — it’s hard to see exactly where Max and the dog are as you all tumble down — and purely exhilarating. Yet after jolting the story to excited life, Mr. Jonze quiets the movie down for a series of flawlessly calibrated scenes of Max alone and with his sister and mother (Catherine Keener), an interlude that tells you everything you need to know about the boy and that announces all that will happen next. These scenes, lasting 20 minutes or so, are achingly intimate and tender. Mr. Jonze, working with his regular cinematographer, Lance Acord, brings you close into Max’s world as he builds an igloo in the street, starts a snowball fight with Claire’s friends and is left to weep alone after the igloo is destroyed. (When Max slides into the igloo, the camera is right there, which means that you’re there too when disaster strikes.) The world is cruel, children too, lessons that Max absorbs through a smear of tears and hurt. The wound doesn’t heal. Max clomps and then stomps and then erupts: he roars at his mother. She roars back. And, then, like his storybook counterpart — like everyone else — he sails into the world, adrift and alone. This is the existential given at the heart of both Mr. Sendak’s book and Mr. Jonze’s movie, which might come as a surprise to anyone who misremembers the original, with its dark, crosshatched lines; spiky emotions; Max’s many frowns; and the “terrible teeth” and “terrible claws” of the creatures. Though their conceptual bite remains sharply intact, Mr. Jonze’s wild things are softer, cuddlier-looking than the drawn ones because they have partly been brought to waddling life by performers in outsize costumes. (The fluid tremors of emotion enlivening the fuzzy faces were primarily created through computer-generated animation.) The vexed, whining, caressing voices — James Gandolfini as Carol, Catherine O’Hara as Judith, Forest Whitaker as Ira, Paul Dano as Alexander and Chris Cooper as Douglas — do the expressive rest. Max discovers the wild things on an island, destroying their homes in fury and for kicks. Introductions are made, wary sniffs exchanged. But these are his kind of beasts, after all, and so, amid the rough splendor of a primeval forest where the air swirls with pink petals and snowflakes, he becomes their king. “Let the wild rumpus start!” he yells, as all the creatures, Max now included, rampage. It’s all very new (and scary) but also vaguely familiar, because we’ve seen it before. The tantrums, tears and angry words from the film’s first 20 minutes all start to resurface during this idyll, much as our waking hours invade our dreams: the snowball fight is recast as a dirt-clod battle. Max plays the angry child and then the reproving parent. Much is left unexplained in Mr. Jonze’s adaptation, including Max’s melancholia, which hangs over him, his family and his wild things like a gathering storm. But childhood has its secrets, mysteries, small and large terrors. When a hilariously bungling teacher explains, rather too casually, that the sun is going to die, the flash of horror on Max’s face indicates that he understands that the sun won’t be the only one to go. There are other reasons, perhaps, an absent father, a distracted mother. (And when a frightened Max listens to an argument between Carol and K W, you hear the echoes of parental discord.) But such analysis is for therapy, not art, and one of the film’s pleasures is its refusal of banal explanation. On occasion, Mr. Jonze lingers too long on his lovely pictures, particularly on the island, where the film’s energy starts to wane, despite the glorious whoops in Carter Burwell and Karen O’s score. Mr. Jonze loves Max’s wild things, but you don’t need to hang around long to adore them as well. Yet these are minor complaints about a film that often dazzles during its quietest moments, as when Max sets sail, and you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as we do inside our heads. But when the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that the boat is simply a speck amid an overwhelming vastness. This is the human condition, in two eloquent images. (nytimes) 091017 ... rt Patti Smith: Dream of Life (2008) NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times. August 6, 2008 Godmother of Punk, Celebrator of Life By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: August 6, 2008 You may not learn everything you want to know in “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” an impressionistic portrait of that punk godhead, but you learn just about everything you need. Created over a heroic 11 years, it was directed and mostly shot by Steven Sebring, a high-end commercial photographer whose perseverance and conspicuous unfamiliarity with, or disregard for, the conventions of nonfiction cinema (not to mention the apparently deep-enough pockets that freed him to follow his own muse) have inspired a lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion. For old punks and new, such devotion is easy. Ms. Smith was born (in 1946), wrote poetry, made rock ’n’ roll history, changed the world, part of it anyway. “Dream of Life” tells some of that story, intimately and yet at arm’s length. If you want to know about punk, what it was like to play CBGB when it mattered (or on its final night, as Ms. Smith did in 2006), look elsewhere. The same goes if you want to know what it was like to be on top of the world and on top of the charts, to watch Robert Mapplethorpe get his nipple pierced, sit at the feet of William S. Burroughs and shack up with Sam Shepard at the Chelsea Hotel. All of those things happened sometime after 1967, the year Ms. Smith left South New Jersey for New York. She shares tantalizingly little about her unformed and formative years in the film, which opens with the image of galloping horses, horses, horses, horses and her speaking in present-day voice-over, narrating in that inimitable flat accent (“leanin’ on the paakin’ meter,” as she sings in “Gloria”), swiftly tallying the ups and dreadful downs, the births and deaths that had helped shape her until now. The film has barely begun before she’s offered forth a life’s worth of headline news, a strategy that allows Mr. Sebring and Ms. Smith, who is as much a collaborator as a subject, to fill the next 100 or so minutes with fragmented beauty and song. For the most part, it is a song of life — by turns joyous and elegiac, warm and vibrantly present, a mosaic of moods and moments from one woman’s richly lived time on earth. Against the odds and punk’s dumber tendencies, Ms. Smith didn’t die young or succumb to the usual rock clichés. She did fade away, though intentionally: in 1979 she dissolved her band, the Patti Smith Group, leaving New York and her escalating fame behind for an apparently contented life as a suburban Detroit housewife, tucking into domesticity with her husband, the guitarist Fred Smith, and their children, Jackson (a son) and Jesse (a daughter). Then, in 1994, Mr. Smith died of heart failure. The next month, her only brother, Todd, died too. Ms. Smith re-emerged and joined Bob Dylan (a fugitive backstage presence here) on tour in late 1995. Mr. Sebring, who had met her that same year during a magazine photo shoot, started to tag along. He continued to do so over the next decade, shooting her performing on and off the stage (she never seems to turn off, though she does put her hand over the camera lens) in color and high-, sometimes low-contrast black-and-white 16-millimeter film. He followed her home and abroad, watched as she did a rubbing of Gregory Corso’s gravestone in Italy, visited Rimbaud’s birthplace in France with a tattered copy of “A Season in Hell” and strolled through Jerusalem. A patient observer, Mr. Sebring kept shooting as she kept roaming, memorializing and living. For the most part it’s a fairly relaxed trip. Ms. Smith’s pretty-boy looks have mellowed into a kind of weathered handsomeness — when her long, lean face is framed by two braids, you can imagine her leading a wagon train west or standing solitary guard on the prairie — and her vibe is similarly tempered and temperate. Yet while she seems very much at peace with herself and with her ghosts, she still burns white hot onstage, thrashing and raging (against George W. Bush, against the Iraq war) with the same propulsive energy and purpose that first drove this one-time poet to turn up the volume alongside the guitarist Lenny Kaye. (He’s still around too.) For her rock ’n’ roll feels like a mission and the fountain of life. Working with the editors Angelo Corrao and Lin Polito, Mr. Sebring creates a structure for the film in which past and present seem to flow effortlessly and ceaselessly into each other. The little girl hovering next to Ms. Smith backstage becomes the young woman visiting John Lennon’s Central Park memorial with her mother. And so it goes, elegantly. The film’s central image, one Mr. Sebring returns to again and again, is of Ms. Smith in a softly lighted room filled with photos, mementos and miscellaneous bits and pieces, a room that’s as much a manifestation of memory as a physical space. Here in this refuge Patti Smith coos to her cat and flirts with Mr. Shepard, who drops by for a duet and briefly stops time. 091023 ... cr0wl antichrist i once had a father who suffered from depression. it eventually took his life, even though we enjoyed several amazing years together working side by side and establishing a friendship that was the stuff of e.b white style american fiction. and so, here in lars von trier's controversial, cannes film festival favorite, much-hyped, film-to-walk-out-of, depression is defined throught the loss of a child, as result of neglect, caused by the little one falling to his death as his parents were having sex...and so come on in to the director's head as he himself shows us what depression is to him. or is it something different? see it and decide. sure, there are some disturbing images. a man that sat a few rows behind me was moaning and groaning, but honestly, living with animals at robin_hill i have seen much worse. there's a deer giving birth in total fear, a fox with half of its body gone, genital mutilation, and a millstone drilled into a leg, yet the stuff i've seen on my farm are much worse. still, go see it. your deprseeion wil pale in comparison. 100124 ... . sorry about the spelling fuck-ups. 100124 ... rt the imaginarium of dr. parnassus terry gilliam's new masterpiece. monty python lives! stunning graphics. heath ledger's swansong. hurdy-gurdy. tom waits is the devil. fiction=truth=beauty=choice=consequence 100131 ... cr0wl hunger acclaimed visual artist steve mcqueen directs his first feature film depicting the events surrounding ira volunteer-poet, bobby sands. brutal, yet poignant. inspired me to re-examine my passions. the scene when the priest tries to stop him is a one take mastery. the story bobby tells him about drowning the foal will fucking blow you away. 100225 ... cr0wl (this was written in response to a delicate scene from jane campion's beautiful film about the love affair between poet john keats and fanny brawne.) ...he had stood on one side of the wall in a white room void of all things but the anticipation of recognition and then tapped twice. he leaned forward, pressing his ear against the smooth, painted wood, waiting, straining to hear, as if this was all there was, this waiting until she would answer. moments passed like an eternity impossible to limit to time, while she on the other side heard the sound and turned. she rushed to the noise and lifted her hand. the weight was like a thousand pounds. forming a fragile fist so that knuckles became holy affection, she answered with an echoing repeat. first one, then another. 100306 ... oh the film is bright star. 100306 ... cr0wl tim burton's alice in wonderland 3D the choice of alice, the girl who was the best thing about the first season of hbo's in treatment, mia wasikowska, was a very good call. she adds a no nonsense realism butt up against johnny depp's madness and the rest of the zaniness. i couldn't imagine anyone else battling the jabberwocky like she did. i loved the parallel world juxtaposing, considering how much cgi there is. also, much of lewis carroll's words appear which is always nice. on the way to nyc saturday, kathy read me portions of the book and it made the car trip seem like a magic carpet ride. see it by all means and though this is a spoiler alert of sorts, have fun with the butterfly at the end! we all did. 100315 ... rt the boys are back not a perfect film because it takes too much for granted, this is a great character driven work by scott hicks, who directed "shine", "no reservations," "snow falling on cedars," and the amazing bio doc on phillip glass. clive owen steps out of his usual typecast and we see as a father who fails. the 5 year-old boy he tries to raise after his wife loses a battle with cancer is precocious but animated with a feverish spunk that is totally enjoyable to behold. but his greatest trouble comes after his tennage son from another marriage comes from england to live in australia with his new family. features several sigur ros songs on the soundtrack and life down under is beautifully filmed and artfully lived. 100323 ... rt Exit through the gift shop Documentary. Directed by Banksy. What is "Exit Through the Gift Shop," other than the obvious - a fascinating and entertaining glimpse into the world of high-level and socially conscious graffiti artists? There is no directorial credit on the film, but it has since come out that it was made by Banksy, a British graffiti artist who is internationally famous but has never been seen publicly, his real name unknown. The film starts out as a documentary about internationally renowned graffiti artists, including Shepard Fairey in the United States (his Barack Obama portrait became an iconic image of the president's campaign), Invader in France, and Banksy, whose illegal art has turned heads from the Palestinian segregation wall on the Left Bank to Disneyland. The footage was apparently gathered by a Los Angeles-based French videographer (and cousin of Invader) named Thierry Guetta, who spent a decade documenting the street-artist movement. But then the documentary changes. Banksy encourages Guetta to become an artist himself, and so he does - becoming a monstrous creation known as Mr. Brainwash, introduced by a big-budget, splashy L.A. exhibition on a scale that would take most artists years to achieve. And yet, many believe that Mr. Brainwash is himself an invention and that Guetta is really Banksy. If so, the joke's on us. Mr. Brainwash's work is certainly not at the level of Banksy - but if Mr. Brainwash is Banksy, then it could be Banksy's comment on the modern art scene and its gullible patrons. If it is all a put-on, count me tagged. I had too much fun to care. "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is not only fabulously made, it will probably spark a discussion about what art is, and its role in society. 100415 ... no reason well i'm not sure if this is obvious or if it's appeared in any of the other a_film_you_should_see pages, but scott pilgrim vs. the world if you haven't seen it, you should probably go do so right now. it will probably alter your reality at least a little. (also, it's set mostly in my neighbourhood, which admittedly is pretty neat.) 111120 ... PeeT la strada 111121 ... PeeT bellflower 111121 ... raze "days of heaven" terrence malick's poem of a film, with every scene a painting in motion. almost no artificial light was used. most of the film was shot during "magic hour" — "a euphemism," cinematographer nestor almendros explained, "because it's not an hour but around twenty five minutes at the most. it is the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets and before it is night. the sky has light, but there is no actual sun. the light is very soft, and there is something magic about it. it limited us to around twenty minutes a day, but it did pay on the screen. it gave some kind of magic look...a beauty and romanticism." making almendros' academy award-winning cinematography even more astonishing is the fact that he was going blind at the time and had to rely on polaroid pictures taken of his camera set-ups, viewed through strong glasses, to ensure they looked the way he wanted them to. there were actually two cinematographers, the second of whom didn't receive much credit for his work. the entire production was fraught with difficulty. malick took two years to edit the film while searching for its soul, completely reshaping it in the process. he was so burnt out by the experience, he wouldn't make another movie for twenty years. has richard gere ever been in anything else even approaching this level of artistry? has there ever been a more remarkable use of narration in a non-documentary film? would david gordon green exist without "days of heaven" and "badlands"? i suspect the answer is "nay" on all counts. 130922 ... raze "only god forgives" this is either a_film_you_should_see, or a_film_you_should_not_see. it's hard to say which. i guess it depends on how you respond to it. it's probably the most dreamlike movie i've ever seen. it's like one of those deeply unsettling borderline nightmares that has enough beautiful visuals and interesting moments to keep you from abandoning it. but in those dreams, you tend to have some understanding of what's going on, intuiting things without being told. whereas the first time i watched this film, i had no idea what the hell was happening half the time, or why. it makes a lot more sense the second time through. once you understand certain fundamental things (one character is meant to be god, and the seemingly emotionless haze another walks around in is really thinly disguised fear), it becomes an entirely different viewing experience. i can see why this has been such a polarizing film. some people think it's a masterpiece. some people think it's a pretty-looking piece of shit. i'm still not sure which side i come down on, but the soundtrack is fantastic, immersive, moody stuff. and there can't be many movies out there in which god sings karaoke as a cleansing experience after mutilating sinners with his katana. so it's got that going for it. 140304 ... raze "lost bohemia" josef astor's documentary about a group of artists living in studio spaces built on top of carnegie hall. ultimately heartbreaking, but well worth watching. if you get tvo, it's coming on again in a little over two hours. better yet, you can see it here anytime regardless of tv subscription / scheduling issues: http://tvo.org/video/194764/lost-bohemia 140705 ... nr me and earl and the dying girl 150612 what's it to you? who go blather from