The King's Speech (2010)

A surprising film. More fun and more absorbing and more moving than I might have expected. I expected to be good in a "what's on PBS this Sunday night" kind of way but found this film to have an emotional immediacy that proved to be totally surprising. Generally i don't have an emotional reaction to a film in its first moments but here I was actually and honestly moved -- to the edge of tears -- in the opening scene. That scene -- in which the Duke of York struggles to deliver an address to a crowd of people in a stadium and listening throughout the empire via wireless -- to convey the shame at root of what is the king-to-be's struggle throughout the film. His struggle, his shame, his terror -- all were utterly palpable in a way that, while not subtle, made the predicament become immediately real to me. Thus, I responded with forceful empathy from the outset of the film. Colin Firth does the work of the role with charismatic humanity -- developing the king's nasal reedy vocality while also conveying a forcefully genteel masculinity. He's a strong man hobbled by circumstance and this comes through powerfully in this opening scene. (Gratefully, the film chooses to begin with the Bertie, the Firth character, rahter than with Lionel, the Geoffrey Rush character. Both the scripting and the performance of the Lionel character proved a bit harder sell for me, so I am glad that the film anchored itself so deftly within the character and struggle of Firth's Bertie.) I didn't realize until I was doodling the notes on the above film doodle that the film is constructed as perhaps the first Merchant-Ivory/BBC entrant into one of the most successful recent genres of American film: the bromantic comedy. Indeed, this film is most essentially a love story -- of the unlikely, transformative and redemptive friendship of between the man who would be king and a brewer's son from the Australian outback. The narrative is simply how a man could barely speak became the orator whose words guided the British people through the darkest hours of war. That narrative hook ups the stakes for the story -- it MATTERS that Bertie learns to speak with/through his stammer. But the heart of the move comes from the struggle of these two men becoming friends. In true RomCom tradition, the film even gives us the post-breakup montage sequence in which each is depicted as being miserable without the other after some ridiculous fight. And it is the film's adherence to romantic comedy genre formulations that delivers the least effective and most manipulative sequence (the one in which Lionel's lack of credentials is revealed as a betrayal of trust). It's an unnecessary wrinkle, one seemingly utilized by the film to ratchet up additional emotional tension just as the historical details threaten to overtake the film. But it's a brilliant move by the filmmakers, really, to make this not as a buddy movie (those typically need a common obstacle -- like "the man" -- to work) but to imagine it as a bromantic comedy. And I do think that genre choice makes it a crowd pleaser as well as crack for anglophiles.

But what I think hooked me emotionally was not the friendship story but this as a narrative about fear. Bertie's stammer literalizes the way that unconfronted fear can paralyze even the most formidable of creatures. The film does edge a teensy bit toward psychobabble but the film also develops the peculiar lives of the royals as something to empathize with. (Usually only romance does this in the movies, the queen can't marry the one she loves blah blah.) Here, though, the royal must develop emotional insight. ANd this is where the character of Bertie really sang to me -- his stammer literalizes his experience of fear and connects it to his anxieties about not performing to expectations. Thus, for all his strength of intellect and principle and character, Bertie is ever certain that he's doing it wrong and is confident in his fundamental inadequacy. It's a powerful character arc, one that spoke immediately to me in that opening scene, and which then had purchase upon my emotions throughout.
In terms of performances, Colin Firth delivers an expertly charismatic performance -- compelling, focused, amplifying the core integrity necessary to the role. What I so admired about this performance (something missing from Firth's exceptional work under Tom Ford last year) is that this performance harnessed Firth's gift for witty self-deprecation, which he deploys here to convey both Bertie's humility and his arrogance. It's what elevates Firth's work here and, in some ways, showcases all of his strengths as an actor in a way that A SINGLE MAN did not. Geoffrey Rush (who I never can quite get myself to like that much) is fine in the role. I was struck that the character of Lionel really does well utilizing Rush's sloppy and vaguely reprobate presence in service of the character. The problem I had here, as I often do with Rush's work, is that everything was spot on yet I somehow missed the sense of personhood in the role. All the details were right, and he seemed to be inhabiting the character, but Lionel seemed always a character and never a person. Helena Bonham Carter gave a delightful return to old kind of performance. In the first decade of her film career, HBC seemed most adept at amplifying the contemporary registers within her corseted characters, retrieving them from the Royal Shakespeare embalming school and delivering them with a new wave-ish verve to contemporary audiences. And that's what she does here with the Queen Mum -- an acerbic, sharp, loving and present wife to a husband who rightly adores her. It's fun to see HBC back in these wigs, after so much Tim Burton and Harry Potter inspired ravings/rovings and HBC does deliver a vivid and clarifying performance. The film is really, pretty much, only about the three of them. But Guy Pearce does a nice job as Edward/David and Derek Jacobi is perfectly obsequious as the archbishop. Jennifer Ehle is great as Lionel's wife and a raft of capable and charismatic younger actors do well as the kids in each of the respective houses. Claire Bloom is brilliant as Queen Mary (her reaction when Pearce collapses with grief in her arms is stunningly funny). Only Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill is off-pitch, but that might be because I just never like watching him.
I should also note that the sound design in this film is really deft. I don't know much about such things but it worked in ways I found exhilarating. Also, the wall in Lionel's shabby studio -- a ruined wall, bearing the bruises of too many wallpapers -- is probably the coolest looking wall I've ever seen and one I want for my dream house. So there. That's it. I liked THE KING'S SPEECH -- much much more than I expected.

Mi Vida Loca (1994) +

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.23.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

A startling, direct portrait of life for young women in Chicano Echo Park during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I remember not loving the film as much as I wanted to when I first saw it during its theatrical release. I recall craving the film to address lesbian possibility for the gang women featured. I also remember thrilling to the scenes when the women gathered for the council. In that scene the principals and recurring/supporting characters appear alongside women who are clearly non-actors and the scene carries a curious authenticity as a result. A few thoughts on the film. FIRST: It's a brilliant screenplay, I think. The diction and syntax are really quite extraordinary. The actors have screen presence but they aren't always the most dynamic performers, which doesn't make the screenplay necessarily come to life. But listening to the screenplay this time through I was very impressed. NEXT: I didn't remember Jacob Vargas from this, nor did I notice Salma Hayek, though she does pop from the screen here. NEXT: The film walks a really fine line between placing the women at center while also marking the ways that relationships with men configure their sense of self and sense of possibility. I really admire the feminist filmmaking I see here. The way Anders maintains the centrality of female experience even in contexts where the guy stuff is much more spectacular. The way the men are filmed, too, suggest a really compelling feminist filmmaking sensibility at work. It's quite extraordinary, I think. And one more thing on this -- I like how men are dogs, good guys, and doofuses but no one is necessarily demonize, not even Ernesto. NEXT: I love the way this film caused me to think about the funeral as a device in films featuring female ensembles. How the funeral is a narrative device particularly suited to feminist/female-centric projects...not exclusively of course...but a remarkably efficient scenario within which female-centric relationship networks and community can be mapped. Makes me want to build a list of funeral women. But I'm not good at lists. FINALLY: I'm still perplexed by my earlier ambivalence about this film. It's an encounter with my more selfish filmgoer self, where I think I wanted the film to give me particular pleasures and I was predisposed to resenting it if it didn't go far enough in the ways I wanted to. Seeing this film tonight, though, i was impressed by just how extraordinary a film it is. Have we seen such a film since? In which women's community is the focus, rather than a dyadic love story? I'm now a fan of the film, in ways I don't think I expected. I see the seams in the film, but I don't care because for some reason now I can see what the film is actually trying to accomplish (where before I think I wanted to be delighted by the chola camp of it all). A worthwhile film of distinguished accomplishment; one of the rare early 90s indies that comes off even better now than it did then.

The Strange One (1957) +

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.23.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

A controversial hazing incident instigates this fraught exploration of power, privilege and masculinity a Southern military college in the 1950s. With Ben Gazzara in the central role, the dialogue-driven film (adapted from a play END AS A MAN) is redolent with the neo-Freudian erotic subtext that so delighted denizens of the Actor's Studio. The film, most simply, offers a portrait of a dormitory bully with the unlikely name of Jocko De Paris.

Gazzara's Jocko is the bully who rules the school right under the noses of the actual military folk running the place (which is clearly modeled on The Citadel). He's basically Mary Tilford in college ROTC garb. The machinations of the plot are fairly simple. In the earliest scenes, Jocko stages an elaborate scene -- involving alcohol, gambling, and a fight -- all to implicate two vulnerable first year cadets in his actual vengeance scheme of getting the Major's son expelled from the academy. It's a complicated ruse, and the first third of the piece is devoted to unraveling Jocko's actual intentions (and also revealing how he staged the ruse to incriminate everyone but himself). The remainder of the piece follows one of the recruits as he struggles to reconcile what he's done with what he incrementally understands about Jocko, which all leads toward the requisite humiliation scene, wherein Jocko's own scheming machine mobilizes against him and ousts him from the academy. The piece is interesting to me for a three main reasons. First, the reason I got the dvd in the first place, is that Jocko De Paris and the boys-school hazing scenario is fraught with not especially oblique late1950s homoeroticism. Second, the film offers a really interesting pivot in the popular understanding of youth criminality/misbehavior, especially vis a vis the Red Scare. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the film really displays what was compelling about the American method, via Ben Gazzara's extraordinary performance as Jocko. They all blend together in some ways but I'll try to take them in turn.

First, the homoeroticism is WILD. There's an incredible secondary character Perrin "Cockroach" McKee, played here by Paul A Richman. Richman's Cockroach is a simpering sissy -- a self-proclaimed "creative writer" who worships Gazzara's Jocko and professes to using Jocko as the model for the hero of his own novel "Nightboy."

Jocko and Cockroach sustain a fraught flirtation, with Gazzara's Jocko realizing that Cockroach can bring him down. (Cockroach follows him and knows everything Jocko's done. Moreover, Cockroach has little allegiance to the institution that berates and belittles and excludes him at every turn.) Gazzara's Jocko strings Cockroach along, in part to cover his bases but also, it seems clear, because he actually enjoys being worshiped even/especially by someone he holds in contempt. It's a fascinating dynamic, nearly apologetic in its twisted sadomasochistic dimensions.

Richman's Cockroach is, quite simply, played as a simpering fag but -- strangely -- he's also depicted as somewhat strong, clear and confident in his identification as an outsider. He craves an intimate relationship with Jocko ("All I want is to have your confidence and your friendship") but he's also queerly confident as an outsider. Richman's performance is at times cringe-inducing, but there's an authenticity within the character and characterization that I found surprising.

THE STRANGE ONE's Cockroach is not that different than GLEE's Kurt Hummel or WEST SIDE STORY's Anybodys. The role is punctuated by humiliations but there's a resilience and an autonomy that I found curiously compelling in the character, which I did not suspect. I also did not expect the play to be so much like all the other "teen fabulist" stories I talked about in my Modern Drama article. I am relieved that this piece is set in a college setting, else I might have been anxious that i did not know to include it in the essay, but thankfully these guys are college age and therefore outside the perameters I set for my teen fabulists. But the story operates on many of the same levels, so typical of homsex stories in the McCarthy era, in that it pursues the knowability of truth and the ease with which malevolent figures can twist the truth of even the most transparently noble and worthy characters. The whole dramatic scenario is impelled by someone being cruelly punished for doing the right thing. What becomes interesting, though, is how this piece ends up moving toward a grassroots/vigilante reprisal against Jocko and how the narrative endorses the overthrow of Jocko as tyrant (notably by revealing Jocko's cowardice in a faux-lynching scene). The piece is really interested in conspiracy and that fascination shifts the register both of what Jocko's abuse means and what his extralegal expulsion from the community accomplishes. It's a really wacked out meditation on the operation of social power. Finally, Ben Gazzara. He is such an emblematic example of the possibilities and the limits of the American method. Gazzara's performance as Jocko is indelible and charsimatic, utterly believable and utterly captivating. Yet its also a cipher. Basically, what I learned about the method from Gazzara's performance is that it's not actually about revealing the character's motives at all. Rather those motives become the wave upon which the character -- as a compelling presence BEING in the moment -- rides through the script. I have no idea WHO Gazzara's Jocko is but I get an absolutely clear sense THAT Jocko is WHAT he is. Basically, the technique that Gazzara and Brando distilled in ways better than anyone invites us to be fascinated with these extraordinary creatures. Not characters we are to understand, but creatures we are to experience. And Gazzara is brilliant at that here, even though his work tells me little about Jocko's motives. I don't understand Jocko much at all but I do get an extraordinary experience OF Jocko from Gazzara's experience. I wish I could explain this more precisely but that's what I've got. Gazzara's utterly fascinating here, but I still don't think he's an especially interesting actor.

And that's the limit of the Method -- it's often fascinating but often less than satisfying, from an audience's point of view. (A quick aside: one of the devices the film uses to amplify Jocko's difference is to remind us that he's Italian which as it goes and goes serves to remind us that he's not normatively masculine, that his masculinity is not the sort of masculinity celebrated in the military traditions guiding this academy. This racialization of Gazzara's character is amplified by the piece's ending wherein, after leading him to believe that he's being "lynched" in a way, the vigilantes deposit him in the "colored" car of a passing train so that he might leave the community. Thoughout the film, there are incongruous moments when the absurdities of the military man-boys behavior is observed bemusedly by black women and children. And the film punctuates the fact of Jocko's expulsion from the fraternity of the school by having him "come to" in front of an older black woman who looks at him with a banal blank expression. This moment seems to underscore his expulsion from white normative masculine privilege in a particularly unsubtle way. All told, THE STRANGE ONE is indeed a strange one, but one that remains utterly fascinating as a document of all kinds of cultural and aesthetic trends on stage and screen in the 1950s. I sorta already love it and am so glad (after holding a netflix copy of it hostage for more than a year) that I finally forced myself to watch it.

Jack Smith & The Destruction of Atlantis (2006) +

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.22.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

An enthralling homage to one of the most notorious and legendary experimental filmmakers cum performance artists of the twentieth century. Mary Jordan's film is presented as a documentary portrait and it's an apt tagline. This film's primary project, it seems, is to introduce the extraordinary Jack Smith as a person and as an artist to a whole bunch of people (not unlike myself) who mostly know him (if they know him at all) because he made a film called "Flaming Creatures." The film neither defends nor critiques Jack Smith but, instead, through a captivating meld of experimental montage and deftly integrated talking heads develops a thorough and at time discomfiting portrait of Jack Smith's extraordinariness. Indeed, the main "takeaway" from this film is a clear appreciation of just how influential Smith was on more known figures and movements (most notably Warhol, Cindy Sherman, John Waters, etcetera). Smith did it all and, in most cases, did it first. Yet the film does a nice job of attending to Jack Smith as "self-absorbed ass" as well. I came away with nothing but admiration and affection for Smith, and feel I have a much deeper appreciation of the genealogy of some of my most treasured late 20th century innovators (Waters and Charles Ludlam among them) but I'm also clear that, at some point, Jack Smith took that fateful left turn to Crackpotville. (At some points, I was a bit overwhelmed by just how much he reminded me of one of my dearest friends who, like Smith, is living in squalor in great mistrust of the way that the art world works.) But this film offers glimpses to rarely seen bits of the Jack Smith archive and gathers an exciting assemblage of his surviving collaborators. Several key themes: I love hearing Smith talk about the "baroque" -- which, to my ears, sounds like a mix of postmodern bricolage cut with DIY punk aesthetic, all avant la lettre; it's a great reminder of the art aspiration of the repurposing aesthetic. I'm also struck by Jack Smith the performance artist--living life as performance but also as emphasizing the creation of the work as the source of its meaning, in an almost Pollockian way. The tragedy, of course, comes in Smith's concomitant hostility to consumer capitalism and thus his refusal to "finish" any work, as an activist/artistic refusal of permitting himself and his work to become products. One talking head considers this as a signal of Smith's artistic purity. I don't know that I'd take it there, but it does signal some of the core precepts of what becomes "performance" in performance studies and I can see just how significant Jack Smith was and is as a (tacit) influence on subsequent generations. For example, I will now never think of Divine being raped by the lobster without contemplating the lobster as a symbol of captialism in a Jack Smith sense. As a film, Mary Jordan's work amplifies the formal and cultural work done by Smith's stuff in a way that seems to be both very respectful and deeply honest. This is a "warts and all" portrait and it's power -- both as a story and as a cinematic experience -- derives from that. An utterly captivating portrait of an artist who's influence we feel nearly every day but who's name goes largely unmentioned.

Training Rules (2008) +

A compelling and poignant account of the decades of homophobic discrimination within the Penn State Women’s Basketball program during the years in which the team and the were program led revered coach, Rene Portland (who insisted “No Drinking! No Drugs! No Lesbians!”). Professionally filmed and edited. Generally well executed. Utterly conventional in style and structure. Stylistically, the film feels more like a television documentary (or an extended series on something like HBO Real Sports) than a more cinematic one. The six athletes profiled offer a productively diverse glimpse into the impact of the discrimination (the activist, the one whose life was nearly ruined, the former closet case, the straight one) but the film suffers for its singular focus/emphasis on the program at Penn State. Some might fault the film for not giving voice to “the other side” of this conflict, but what bothers me more is lack of a more meaningful national context for Penn State. The story feels at times like a (well-earned) hatchet job on Rene Portland, while only glancing toward the other sports or other programs and they way lesbians have been discriminated there as well. My favorite moments in the film reached toward some compelling, unexplored aspects of homophobic discrimination in women's sport (1: the discussion of "ponytails" and the shifting gender styles of women's athletics; 2: the reference to men coaching women's teams as a way of guarding against lesbians in the game). I love documentaries about lesbians in sport; I just wish they didn't all have to be so darn conventional. An important story/history competently conveyed, but lacking both the depth and breadth to really make it great.

88 Minutes (2007/8) -

A stunning wrongheaded concoction posing as an "adult" thriller. Al Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist whose carefully crafted professional persona casts a long shadow. He's a famous provider of "expert testimony" who regularly makes the rounds of the television talkshow circuit. He also teaches an elite seminar at an apparently major university. And, as the film begins, he's the subject of a gaslighting by an anonymous stalker who keeps promising that he'll die in eighty-eight minutes. (The basic shtick is that one of Gramm's most high-profile convictions -- a serial rapist/murderer whose conviction rested almost exclusively upon evidence provided by Gramm -- is coming up for execution, occasioning a new round of scrutiny for this controversial conviction.) So, the story basically goes: a new batch of murder's matching the profile of the incarcerated killer begin popping up around town. The kicker is that all the victims happen to be young women in Jack Gramm's life. At the same time, the convicted killer is hollering once again about his innocence. Together, these three circumstances begin to cast suspicion on Jack just as his day starts becoming really complicated when he begins receiving cell phone calls from a mysterious voiced man who claims that Gramm will be dead in eighty-eight minutes. So, the narrative must maneuver all of these plot points -- exonerate Jack, reveal the perpetrator of the hoax, kill a couple more women along the way to keep things "interesting", blahblahblah. At center is Al Pacino in a giant wig, huffing and puffing his way through various close calls. The cast around him (Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Benjamin McKenzie) all are foils, alternately doubting Gramm's innocence even as their own guilt at the possible gaslighter opens and closes at arbitrary intervals. I found that I felt mostly sorry for this talented youngish cast, who (inevitably) hopped on board this ridonkulous project for the chance to work with Pacino. But a lot of good it does them. Some try their best to do good work (Witt, Brenneman, Forsythe) and come out relatively unscathed, while others provide proof of just how much they can (and cannot) do. (Truth be told, Sobieski does give Pacino a run for the "worst" acting in this movie, though the disaster of her performance is less tragic than that represented by his.) The real problem is that the film has no idea what it wants to be. It's really the kind of movie Michael Douglas might have starred in back in 1996 but, with Pacino in the lead role, there seems to be a greater sense of reach in the film but little intelligence, insight or irony to back it up. (A cynical "twist" toward the end -- in which Gramm's ethical vagaries are confirmed -- does little to amplify the emotional or moral significance of this utterly derivative conceit.) And every time we get Neil McDonagh on screen, it's a confirmation of how (a) utterly conventional this story is and (b) nobody but McDonagh knows how to play this kind of tripe. When he's on, it's fun. When he's gone, it's deadly dull -- by turns sluggish and silly. It's a genre piece done arty. Kitsch without enough cleverness/artistry to take it into the realm of camp/cheese. But with enough lurid, default misogyny to make the whole enterprise feel gross. Like Pacino's tanning booth face and Elizabeth Taylor wig.

For The Bible Tells Me So (2007) +

An entirely lucid and utterly careful examination of the biblical basis of anti-gay rhetoric, sentiment and activism -- offered from the perspective of a group of families whose own views and activism within the church has shifted (albeit to varying degrees) as a direct result of loving a gay child. The film is not so much an expose of the radically arbitrary ways the bible is used to support and foment anti-gay sentiment (though, with the support of a diverse array of biblical experts, it does that too) but mostly an account of the various ways evangelical protestant families have made it "through" the challenges of loving a gay child. The families are a diverse lot -- a religious mom who shuns her lesbian daughter until that daughter's suicide transforms the surviving mother into a PFLAG activist; Senator Dick Gephart's maneuvering of the private/public challenge when his adult daughter comes out; two parents uncertain about their own feelings and beliefs when their attractive teen son comes out in high school; a mother and father's decision to love their daughter while disapproving of her life; the experiences of parents who are in their 70s and 80s when their son becomes the first avowedly gay Episcopalian bishop -- and this works to the films advantage, as the stories in concert demonstrate the particularities of each persons struggle reconciling homosexuality and faith. The film also feels very much like the kind of story one could show one's family with relatively little concern. An admirable piece of documentary filmmaking built around the project of awareness.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) +

A sweet, simple teen romantic comedy with a distinctively contemporary verve. Michael Cera and Kat Dennings play the title characters. Cera's Nick is a painfully romantic kid, who's stuck in a swoonpit for his ex-girlfriend Tris (Alex Dziena giving an empathetic performance in the bitch role) even as she's moved on. Dennings's Norah is a "not high school pretty" and painfully intelligent girl who's burdened with big boobs and a famous/powerful father. This combination of features has cultivated an unhelpful cynicism in Norah, who regards any boy's interest with a weary wariness. Nora's ex-boyfriend -- a delightfully smarmy Jay Baruchel as the lead singer in an Israeli rock band -- embodies the worst of both of the mercenary attractions to Norah, and it's compelling to watch Dennings's Nora inhabit the unpleasantness of his attention. (What I like about the framing of this romance is that we see both Nick and Norah's humiliations in not letting go of these awful exes not as simply pathetic, but as a gesture of how hard it can be to let go of what you know. For both characters, the ex relationships are mostly verification that it is possible for someone to love them a little and it's really terrifying to let that go.) But I also like the framing of the story for the way these characters inhabit a complex social universe that's both plausible and delightfully fantastic. I love the simple high school conceit with music as the currency of self (Nick's been making Tris excellent mix cds, which Norah's been rescuing from the trash at school -- so Norah's sorta fallen in swoon with Nick long before she ever met him). I also like how Nick and Norah both have unlikely friends. Nick's the straight-boy mascot of a batch of cute, wackogay rock boys. Norah's best friend is the proto-alcoholic basket case Caroline (played brilliantly by the hilarious Ari Graynor, who inhabits a humiliation narrative with a just light enough touch to keep it from getting entirely sad). There're great comic set pieces, a "fantastic" (both in the most excellent and utter fantasy sense) culmination of Nick and Norah's romance, some genuinely funny/strange moments, and a sense of giddy adventure that comes from the "crazy NY night" conceit. In many ways, it's a perfect teen romantic comedy -- loaded with attractive kids giving sweetly silly performances while also being allowed to be smart at the same time. I guess I liked it for being everything I like/d about Juno (without the supposedly elevating gravitas) and also being everything I like/d about Can't Hardly Wait (without cloying Hollywood veneer). A genuinely sweet and genuinely funny and basically smart teen romantic comedy. They really should make more of them.

Coraline (2009) -

A visually compelling parable about the temptations of ingratitude -- the perilous pleasures derived when you're certain that your life sucks. The film focuses on a little girl named Coraline, whose life is characterized by a constant barrage of mundane humiliations (beginning, of course, with the fact that no one seems capable of calling her by her correct name, insisting to address her as "Caroline"). When she and her work-obsessed parents move into a ratty apartment building in the middle of nowhere, Coraline is certain its all part of a scheme to make her miserable and sets out plotting her escape from the dreary new place she now calls home. A mysterious neighbor boy -- who Coraline treats miserably upon their first encounter -- delivers a gift, in the form of a doll that looks remarkably like Coraline. The doll is enchanted, and soon Coraline becomes absorbed in a series of delightful adventures in an alternate universe: one where her parents dote on her, delicious food is plentiful, and both the upstairs and downstairs neighbors present marvelous entertainments solely for Coraline's diversion and amusement. At first it seems like the alternate world is solely of her own dreaming but, as Coraline becomes incrementally more miserable in her daily life, the line separating the two worlds becomes ever less distinct. Of course, there's something ominous about the alternate world -- where everyone has buttons for eyes (kuh-reepy!) -- and soon it becomes clear that something malevolent is afoot on the other side of that little door. (A miniature door is the portal between these parallel dimensions.) As the narrative proceeds, Coraline must accomplish all sorts of formidable tasks in order to rescue several spirits trapped on the other side. The narrative is a moral parable addressed to children, melding the macabre whimsy of Edward Gorey and the magical sermonizing of Shel Silverstein, Carole Kind and/or Maurice Sendak. The one thing missing is the gleeful sense of whimsical possibility that Roald Dahl was so good at, wherein the scary comingled with the silly to make for truly gratifying journey toward moral resolution. The story here -- taken from Neil Gaiman -- seems always to be an adult speaking to a kid, and though Coraline is at the center of the story, she's as annoying and unappealing as "I Don't Care" Pierre or any of the unfortunate Golden Ticket holders. Which proves a problem. I don't know why I'm to care about Coraline, or Coraline's adventures. Indeed, I really am not encouraged to have even as much empathy as I do for Edmund in the first Narnia tale. Coraline's impossible, yet she's the hero. It's a curious narrative dilemma. Visually, however, this film is a feast. Incredible visual spectacles unfold at nearly every turn, all using a delightful "repurposing" sensibility (wherein everyday objects are transformed into thrilling discoveries). Unfortunately, the visual delight -- the film looks just amazing -- doesn't do much to clarify the cynical narrative. So the whole film's a little too scary, a little too arch, and way too emotionally obtuse. I wanted to like it at every turn, but never found my way in. The vocal performances are flat (Teri Hatcher's and Dakota Fanning's especially) and the lesson of this moral parable never truly coalesce. I love genuinely scary, animated ghost stories with kid protagonists -- Monster House, as one example -- but this one seems pitched a little strangely. While there was much to admire about this film, there was little in it love.

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th (2009) +

A simple, entertaining, fan-centered documentary about the phenomenon of the Friday the 13th franchise. Directors, writers, and performers all talk about their participation in the developing franchise. Their varied points of view are effectively woven together to compose an interesting synthesis of the narrative constructed by the many many episodes in the franchise. Some great details emerge -- like the sound concept behind Jason's signature stalking motif -- and some amusing descriptions of how various scenes were accomplished. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film involve everyone's theorization of "who is Jason" (given that the character has been reanimated using so many different conceits) which opens surprisingly interesting questions about the meaning of the narrative diachronically or synthetically. Mostly, however, the film works as a promotional teaser making even someone like me want to revisit all the films. Like I said, it's a fan-centered homage -- the filmmakers and stars being presented as participants in the same circuits of fan-culture as the presumed viewer of the film. But, really, quite engaging and interesting -- for a glorified DVD Special Feature. But there's a lot of material and, even for someone who fell off the Friday the 13th wagon after PartII, I found this homage to the series and its enduring pleasures to be utterly captivating.

Doubt (2008) +

Upon second viewing, Doubt impresses mostly for its hermetic efficiency. Shanley has crafted a diverting bauble, a compelling hypothetical that permits its well-intentioned audience much room to rehearse its pre-existing ideas. Nothing in this film -- or I suspect the play from which it is adapted -- requires that the audience confront their prejudices and predispositions. Rather, the film instigates a gratifying kind of self-reflexivity -- a lovingly filmed scenario that permits the audience to spend time mulling over their own thoughts and convictions. This, it seems to me, is what is most surprising about the piece: it doesn't provoke, really, at all. It invites thoughtfulness, but nothing so strenuous that it might cause someone to change their minds. And most insidiously perhaps, the film actually encourages the audience toward a kind of certitude: they film/play may not say but I know for sure. Which is sorta weird, actually, to stage a piece ostensibly about doubt and yet privilege the notion that people will believe what they are inclined to believe anyway. But what the film/play/narrative truly provides is the ring, the mat, the field of battle. As I was reflecting on the film, for the purposes of Viola Davis's Supporting Actress profile, that the film's many head-to-head confrontations are like a series of arm-wrestling matches, some of which end in victory for one or the other, but all of which are incredibly captivating. It's a hoot to watch these performers play through these roles, even if the roles make little sense beyond embodying key variables in Shanley's little game of morality algebra. Notably, Streep's performance was palpably richer on second viewing. Adams's work, too, signaled easily overlooked depths in nearly every scene. Davis's work was even more impressive, for its precision and its clarity, especially -- although I found it less emotionally compelling the second time through. And while Hoffman felt less mannered this time through, I found that I was more convinced of the performance's limits this time through. What I really admired this time through though (other than the surprising vulnerability with which Streep layers each of her dragonswipes) was Shanley's homage to working class NYC culture. It's a suspect romanticization, to be sure, as it's basically what was great about NYC before white flight, but it's stylishly done here. An interesting revisit... one that I found more gratifying than I anticipated.

He's Just Not That Into You (2009) -

An astonishingly tedious rumination on the contemporary courtship rituals of the privileged and attractive and heterosexual. The elaborate yet simple-minded plot is exhausting for its dependence on familiar formulas/cliches of the romantic comedy genre. Basically, this is what happens when you try to use Sex and the City's signature episode formula -- a soupy base of recognizable romantic difficulty, a heaping dollop of lifestyle porn, a dash of cute boy/man, and a garnish of flashy/pithy cameos -- and expect it to stand alone. The problem? The heart of SATC -- like Designing Women, Living Single, or The Golden Grils -- is the sustaining friendship shared among quite disparate women. Contemporary American filmmakers, however, find it really difficult to trust female friendship. So these women aren't really friends, just chattery co-workers inclined to shooting glib opinions and half-baked sympathies from their well-clad hips...or they're the other woman. Oddly, the guys in this film are pictured as having much more emotionally anchored relationships, although even those scenes are mostly scaffolding for early exposition with the relationships themselves fading as the film lumbers along. The cast is uniformly appealing. The three chattery coworkers -- 2 Jennifers and a Ginnifer -- are the most tediously scripted, and Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly do well reaching beyond the material to craft adequately appealing portraits of basically unappealing characters. Ginnifer Goodwin, in what is arguably the film's lead role, is way cute -- too cute actually -- for the role Drew Barrymore might have played a few years back. Unfortunately, Goodwin's performance is more annoying than endearing, largely because she's stuck playing such an emotionally monochromatic character. And I guess its the casting of this film that I find most annoying. Everyone's playing their type -- to a one this film is "perfectly" cast. You can almost imagine the screenwriters saying "we want a Jennifer Aniston type for the role of Beth" and then what happens when they get Jennifer Aniston for the role of Beth? It becomes fundamentally uninteresting because there's little discovery left to do. There's one scene in particular -- when Goodwin's Gigi has realized that Justin Long's Alex actually likes her and tell's Connelly's Janine about it -- Janine, who is supposed to be experience the incremental collapse of her marriage, immediately jumps into planning Gigi and Alex's "destination wedding." Both actresses do what they can with this scene -- Connelly playing the move as an desperate expression of Janine's deep denial, Goodwin registering the shock at her friends grasping romantic delusions. Yet the scene trucks on, the actress's "playing against the grain" doing little to actually complicate the sturdy artifice of the scene itself. And this is basically the way the whole film works. The actors's best efforts are for naught, and the film basically depends on how much you crush on the lifestyles depicted. The set decoration is glorious...straight out of dwell. Jobs are glamorous...with little work involved. And the relationships resolve as you expect them to upon first glance. Tedious, disappointing, obvious. I knew I was in trouble in the first scene when a galling "cute" joke about women's refusal to see the romantic truth literally "went to Africa" depicting tribeswomen gossiping. Dumb, racist, not funny. Then in the first real scene between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston -- the couple who's choosing not to marry NOT because of something like a political commitment to marriage equality but because a vaguely anti-establishment mistrust of marriage as an institution -- when their first real fight over the idea of marriage is staged in front of some "edgy" painting with the word "should" written on it about twenty times -- when I saw that I sorta knew that this film's notion of sophisticated/subtle was pretty dumb and that I was in trouble. Sure enough. Dumb dumb dumb. And the film uses gay men and black people as obvious props while leaving lesbians completely out of the picture. (A smarter movie -- or at least Dan in Real Life smart -- would have had one of Aniston's sisters be a happily married lesbian, her partner sitting watching sports with the other brothers-in-law or something.) But then this movie appears to have had no interest in being smart. As MrStinky noted, it's enough to make you worry about the future of the "romantic comedy"...

The Last of Sheila (1973) +

An utter lark of a murder mystery, cleverly crafted by the (perhaps) unlikely screenwriting partners of actor Anthony Perkins and composer Stephen Sondheim and filmed by longtime Sondheim pal, Herbert Ross. (In short, the project is about as A-gay as any Hollywood project could get, circa 1973.) The set-up is delightfully baroque: a set-up that camps on the early 1970s fascination with all-star Agatha Christie parlor plays restaged in exotic locales; a delightedly sour tone that layers a scathing critique of Hollywood's most mercenary shallowness; and an intricate and captivating central mystery that keeps the twists coming until the final moments of the narrative. Featuring a delicious/weird cast (James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, Ian McShane, Richard Benjamin, and James Coburn), the film surprises for the array of pleasures it assembles. You can enjoy the mystery while also delighting at the silliness of the spectacle. James Coburn is clearly having a blast, as are Cannon and Benjamin. McShane is a treat to look at. Hackett's acting her balls off, while Mason outacts everyone while barely breaking a sweat. And then there's Raquel. It will likely remain a mystery whether or not the whole character of Alice was intended as a spoof of Raquel Welch's signature style -- what I have called her "strangely passionate alacrity" -- or not. The filmmakers give poor Raquel the lamest lines, and she delivers them with a crazy sincerity that just makes me wonder if Tony, Steve and Herb weren't just pissing themselves with giggles in the editing room. It's not that they're mocking her, exactly, because there is no hint of cruelty in the film's presentation of her. Rather, it seems that they are just spooling the rope to see how far she will take it... Indeed, I wonder if this performance will emerge as one of my favorite Raquel turns in her superstar period. I'm not sure why the film remained off my radar until very recently. It's smart, weird, hilarious. Some of the casting choices are strange, and possibly attributable to the likelihood that they wanted to make this movie with their friends. (For example, Dyan Cannon is nothing in the excellent role of Christine, the ambitious Hollywood agent; she's also about years too young for the role, a hard-bitten Hollywood dame who was a secretary in the HUAC era. It's not impossible that Cannon, who would have been in her mid-teens during the McCarthy moment, might have worked in the secretarial pool at 16 but Cannon always acts like she's sixteen so we don't really get it that she and Coburn and Mason are industry peers who understand each other. I would have loved to see someone like Bacall or Stapleton in this role; would have read entirely differently.) The whole treatment of male homosexuality, too, is a fascinating glimpse into the lives folks like Ross and Perkins must have led. And while I was able to "call" most of the later twists -- the final use of the puppets; the red herrings in the first interpretation of the crime; etcetera -- the film remained a complete hoot, of the sort that I wish they made more of... I don't like reading mysteries but I sure do enjoy watching attractive, ostensibly glamorous people play at murder. And the spectacle of James Coburn in drag while wearing a monk's robes? Cuckoo crazy in only the best of ways. A lark.

Play Time (1967) +

A visually stunning comic opus. Jacques Tati constructs a visual landscape -- a high modern urban maze in which his character Monsieur Hulot gets variously lost. At the same time, Tati stages the parallel story of a warm American tourist who seems as at ease within this urbanized modernity as Hulot seems flummoxed. The film is meditative in tone, even as it executes some of the most intricate and subtle comic set pieces ever stage in cinema. The palette is all steel grey, with slight variations toward the green, blue and gold, so that the occasional splash of color (the blue of the elusive businessman's blazer, the american tourists's hats, the blue of a workman's uniform) becomes almost radiant. The fabricated landscape is loaded with giant sheets of glass -- doors, walls, windows -- which simultaneously force a curious lack of privacy even as they install a new kind of estrangement. The opening sequences in the modern office building and department store are enthralling but it's not until the extended sequence in the new restaurant that the film really becomes satisfying. There's a concentrated chaos in the restaurant, which permits a kind of gratification as we follow the vast array of running gags through the skein of confusion and chaos. I've never seen a film like Tatis's Play Time. It's poignant. It's literate. It's a visual feast. It's a tough go. Yet, for the most part, it's gratifying. I think what becomes most impressive about the film, at this historical moment, is that its an utter fabrication. Most of these sets -- interior and exterior -- were built on a soundstage, to Tati's precise specification. So, as such, none of them are "real" yet neither are they CGI. There's an old school artistry to the physical comedy, I guess, when we acknowledge that this is a built environment constructed solely for the purpose of making this elaborate series of refined visual jokes. As such, I guess, I'm fundamentally impressed by this as a triumph high-modern (and also post-modern) bit of physical comedy, of prop comedy, and of comedic commentary on contemporary society. I don't have much original insight on the film really. Most of my thoughts run the conventional routes -- this bit worked better for me than that; I'd love to see it in its intended 70mm; talk about redefining what masterpiece means -- but I am really glad to have seen the film, and I suspect the bits will haunt me for some time. (And I can't believe Professor Weinstein didn't show this in City and the Arts; must not have been available or something.) But an amazing piece of cinema, the kind that broadens your vision of what cinema is capable of, even/especially without the ornamental geegaws provided by cgi (though his use of 70mm does anchor this in the history of "new" cinematic technology in important ways). Anyway. Wow.

Arab-American Comedy Tour (2006) +/-

A fairly low-rent collection of concert footage of the three leading Arab-American comedians working today: Ahmed Ahmed, Dean Obeidallah, and Maysoon Zayid. The audiences for these sets are largely community audiences at Arab-American cultural events in such locales as Deer Park, Michigan, or Seattle. As such, some of the material collected here addresses its audience of "Middle Eastern heritage" more explicitly than any other Arab comic dvd I've seen. This video is marred by the erratic sound quality and occasionally amateurish camera work. The sound/camera work is of especially poor quality during Ahmed Ahmed's set (unfortunately during some of the only material with which I was unfamiliar). Obeidallah's set is mostly the standard stuff, with some interesting "new to me" bits about his Sicilian mother. Maysoon Zayid's set is good. Her presence as "a Palestinian virgin with cerebral policy who lives in New Jersey" adds what I think to be a necessary complexity -- especially regarding the racially marked body -- that is clarifying. If the production quality was a little better this would likely be the best Arab comedy dvd to own; as it is, the sound quality mars the product so that the dvd becomes mostly useful as a reference point for other video captures of these performers' work.

The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (2006) +/-

An effective introduction to the core themes/figures in the new "Arab" comedy moment/movement. Ahmed Ahmed and Dean Obeidallah appear doing their core material, along with Maz Jobrani (who's very good) and Aron Kader (who's fine). There's not much really to say about this except that it's a Comedy Central special and the four comedians each do a representative set before a largely Middle Eastern concert audience. The material is solid and the framing conceit (each comic passing through an airport security check) is not distracting. I feel like I've heard the entirety of Obeidallah's and Ahmed's set, but this is a feature I think of this concert/show being targeting a more mainstream audience who might not yet know these two comedians. Unremarkable but effective introduction to these key figures within this particular moment in American stand-up comedy.

Heckler (2008) -

An odd, dispiriting exploration of the critical impulse and the damage it can do (and does do) to the creative spirit. Comedian/actor/filmmaker Jamie Kennedy's style is comparatively direct: by collecting observations and insights from a broad array of comedians, as well as a smattering of other performers (athletes, singers, directors, actors, authors, etc) and a handful of hecklers (comedy club hecklers, print critics/reviewers, bloggers/web-critics), Kennedy examines the ways in which criticism is a burden and nuisance for the real work of art-making. The basic argument of the film informs the film's structure. Kennedy is suggesting that all critics are basically "hecklers" -- the arrogant, no-talent, attention-craving yahoos who ruin the show for everyone else because they're so sure they know the artist's not doing his job right. This core premise informs the structure of the film, as Kennedy's many very smart and very funny talking heads craft an analysis of the heckler's action. (In this collective theorization, the heckler wants to both snag a part of the glow of attention while also asserting their own importance within the performance event. In this conceptualization, men do this because they're losers who can't get laid; women do this because they're drunk and possibly horny.) Building from the location of the comedy club, and the core dynamic of the various strategies a comedian might use in dealing with a heckling member of the audience, the film next moves outward, first to print/broadcast critics and then to internet critics (bloggers and web-writers mostly). The film becomes progressively less interesting as it moves away from the comedy club heckler, and Kennedy's frustration with the idea of criticism of any kind becomes increasingly annoyed and defensive as his focus moves away from the concentrated dynamic of the heckler-comic. One of the most entertaining and interesting aspects of the film is its portrait of the various ways professional comedians have for "winning" battles with hecklers. And Kennedy himself seems often quite adept in doing just that -- shutting down the heckler in a comedy club. And, as the film moves away from the dynamic liveness of the comic-heckler dyad, it seems Kennedy is also exploring how various folks "shut down" such hecklers when they're not in the same room, but writing in a magazine or snarking on a teevee show or blathering on a blog. The film begins powerfully -- smart, funny, intense -- but by the end (when Kennedy is basically picking fights with white guys who gave his 2003 movie Malibu's Most Wanted really mean reviews in regional weekly papers or glossy snark rags) the enterprise of the documentary just feels petty and defensive. All the familiar screeds against criticism ("who are these people and are they any good at doing this thing they're criticizing me for?") are mixed in with easy internet cliches ("probably a [insert disparaging reference to age, body type or sexual inexperience] loser writing in his mother's basement") so that Kennedy, however consciously or inadvertently, replicates the action he most judges the critic for: tearing people down just because he can, just because he has the access and technology to do so. (You can sorta tell the moment when the film starts losing the clarity of its intelligence when we stop hearing much about female hecklers and, by extension, female critics.) What's unfortunate in this is that the exchange between audience and performer -- the very dynamic that the heckler so poisonously exploits -- is lost as Kennedy's film moves along, and as Kennedy's conception of criticism and commentary becomes increasingly about defending his own rights not to be criticized. Which just stops making sense after a while. Several interesting routes of inquiry -- the rise of snark, the proliferation of opinion, the spectacle of artist abuse -- are left unexplored, while Uwe Boll's notorious beatdown of several "critics" is depicted in detail. It's too bad that Kennedy's genuinely interesting premise -- use of heckling as a model for explaining the complicated ways in which criticism and creativity are often uncomfortably conjoined -- devolves so into a confusing/confused defensive rant.

Revolutionary Road (2008) -

A pretty pretty postcard of marital misery. The film tells the story of "The Wheelers" -- a "special" couple living in suburban New York. Rick (Leonardo DiCaprio in a sincere performance that once again demonstrates his limits in playing period style) is an in-house copywriter for a nondescript firm. April (Kate Winslet, luminous as always in a performance that demonstrates none of the actress's capacity to subtly plumb unforeseen depths) is a stay-at-home mom who studied acting back in the day. As the film begins, Rick's on the precipice of his 30th birthday as April's reeling from the humiliation of being reduced to performing in an especially bad community theatre production. The coincidence of these challenges to their respective self-esteem occasions a crisis of faith for each partner's confidence in themselves and in their shared marriage. Rick reacts by instigating a predatory affair with a girl in the typing pool (Zoe Kazan, captivating in a throwaway part); April reacts by concocting a scheme to sell everything and move to Paris, where she can work and he can begin to find himself. Both Rick and April get completely hopped up on this fantasy and their love seems to be reanimated. As they spin this new fantasy future, those around them react variously. The dissipated, sissy-ish man who shares Rick's cubicle (Dylan Baker, in a quite thrilling performance -- I wanted to follow him into his own movie) observes with bemused cynicism. The Wheelers's neighbor pals The Campbells react with shock, with Milly (Kathryn Hahn, vivid and utterly human) reacting in frightened terror and Shep (David Harbour, in perhaps the film's most dimensional performance, responding with a melancholy fury). Of course, Rick and April's grand plans are patently unrealistic and they are humbled soon, in the most gendered of terms. Rick is offered a promotion at work and April discovers that she's pregnant. The threat to their shared plans (and private fantasies) posed by this pair of realizations causes their relationship to spiral deeper into the despair from which their Paris fantasy had briefly lifted it. Then it all really goes to hell. Rick takes up again with the girl from the typing pool; April has a cruel fling with Shep. A disastrous dinner with a mentally unbalanced guest compels a new kind of clarity for both Rick and April and, the next day, Rick starts his new job and April attempts to induce her own miscarriage (with devastating results). The problem with the film is one of tone. Director Sam Mendes plays the sincerity of the scenario, which only amplifies the shrillness of each character's shallow self-obsessiveness, without a clarifying frame. (I liked it better when Winslet played this same character arc in Little Children two cycles ago.) Winslet and DiCaprio spend a good deal of the film shrieking at each other, in ways that were likely quite challenging (and gratifying) as actors but do little to illuminate the characters of Rick and April. Michael Shannon does is feral force of nature thing as the mentally unstable son of The Wheelers's realtor (Kathy Bates, in an almost really good performance). As an intellectual currently undergoing electro-shock therapy at a nearyby loony bin, Shannon's character is poised to be the "speaker of truth" -- the one citizen capable of calling out that the emperor has no clothes. He seems at first to understand Rick and April's impulse to flee their perfect life; then, he calls each out for their cruel hypocrisies in not following through. He's patently a device -- like Mrs. Miller in Doubt -- who arrives to throw a monkey-wrench into things and thus amplify the tension for the last act. Shannon is good, but obvious, in the role. Ultimately - SPOILER ALERT - the film concludes with April dying as a result of her self-induced miscarriage/abortion; Rick leaving the community; and the neighbors left to sift through their own ambivalences about the "special" Wheelers. The narrative scenario is deeply cynical, ostensibly a satire on the conventions of self compromise that characterized post-WWII American middle-class privilege. The tragedy of Rick and April is borne of the fact that neither believes in anything, only their shared "idea" that they were "special" -- that Rick was "above" his job and that April was so much more than "just a housewife." I knew I was doomed when Rick and April shared the moments they knew they were alive: Rick's being the moment he marched to battle in France and April's the first time she had sex with Rick. This hollow fantasy of Rick as superman is the shared illusion that collapses on top of both characters, and it's at the root of the film's/narrative's most compelling critique: choosing to believe in the fantasy (of a future in Paris; of happiness in the suburbs; of how "special" The Wheelers are; of the importance of maintaining polite appearances) will be the source of one's devastation, if not one's doom. I actually quite like that premise. However, this film -- for whatever reason -- elides that tension in a curiously self-gratified indulgence in the intensity of each moment as it comes. Instead of this being a devastating satire of middle-class self-deception, the film becomes a meticulous dissection of the petty cruelties animating an unhappy marriage. Neither as intricately crafted as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf nor as emotionally stark as Scenes from a Marriage, this film feels stunty and intellectually lazy. Really good actors get lost in their roles (Winslet, DiCaprio, Bates) while smaller roles shine (Shannon, Baker, Kazan) because of their relative clarity. Only David Harbour seems able to maneuver the three tracks necessary -- tracks that are (aptly enough perhaps) easiest described in the most simplistic psychoanalytic terms (id, superego, ego). Harbour (and to a lesser extent Bates) provide a really palpable sense of the pressure of the "rules" of proper behavior (superego), and Harbour also really taps into this guy's competing/conflicting desires (id). As a result, Harbour really is able to play -- in every scene -- the real conflict Shep feels as he tries to negotiate between his desires and his sense of obligation/duty. It's a dynamic, surprising, humane, and complex performance. I wish Harbour's subtle complexity had been matched by the other principal players. Alas. Everyone else gets too lost in id or too gummed up in superego and it's just tiresome. But the part that really pissed me off? How this film's depiction of a historical subculture (white suburbia at midcentury) characterized by rank, chauvinistic misogyny ended up as a replication of that misogyny rather than a lucid critique of it. The film's concluding moments are especially outrageous. As folks deal with the aftershocks of April's suicide-by-self-induced-abortion, the "blame the woman" aspects of this story really fly. In each of the concluding scenes (Rick on a playground, Shep meeting the couple who have just moved into the Wheelers old house, Mr. Givings as he turns down the volume of his hearing aid as his wife natters on), our sympathy is ostensibly invested with the men. And the only woman who isn't the "cause" of the man's discomfort? Milly -- the perfect housewife who does and says exactly as her husband asks and who believes in the principles of middle-class suburbia as social gospel. It's an appalling moment really: as we're asked to absorb the tragedy of April's death the reason for these men and their current unhappiness. Indeed, I left the film thinking less of Kate Winslet for having bought into this tacit misogyny -- I was so infuriated by the film and its bizarre resolution. We are offered these scenes as simple depictions of the characters's realities and it all points back to April: if she hadn't been so selfish, so unrealistic, so grandiose, none of his would have had to happen. It's a despicable conclusion, one that reveals not the satire, not the historical commentary, not the idea that things were so bad then...just that women are to blame for men's unhappiness and discontent. If only they could all be like Milly... Ack. Feh. Gah. Whatever.