Disturbia

This fairly well done 2007 remake of the 1950 Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window has all the basic elements of the original: a protagonist temporarily trapped in his house, a mad murderer of women, voyeurism, temperate eroticism, detective work, suspense. The main difference between this remake and the original (aside from the 57 years that have passed, the contemporary suburban world of the remake vs. the same world circa 1950 of the original) is that the remake is of and for teenagers. Shia LeBoeuf plays a disaffected young man named Kale Brecht who feels responsible for his father's death in an auto accident. After he slugs his mathematics teacher, he is sentenced to three months house arrest and is saddled with an ankle bracelet that notifies the police if he strays more than 100 feet from his house. Add to that the fact that the policeman assigned to his neighborhood is the cousin of the teacher he slugged. Add to that the beautiful teenage girl, Ashley (Sarah Roemer) who has just moved in next door. Add to that Shia'a sometimes inattentive and imperceptive mother (Carrie Ann Moss). Add to that Shia's best friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), an Asian teenager with a love of jokes, pranks, and cameras. Add to that the predominantly night-time scenes and the murky subterranean pool beneath the basement of the next door neighbor's house. All of these play into the relatively predictable plot. What really made the 1950 film Rear Window was the interplay between Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart. Kelly infused the film with an incredible eroticism solely by inference, by subtle suggestion. Although there is no sex per se in the remake, there much thinking about it by the two teenage boys, who spend much time staring at Ashley sunbathing in her bikini or her cut-off shorts or undressing in her bedroom, as well as at the ominous movements of the neighbor on the other side of the house. Whereas in Rear Window Stewart's character is watching his neighbors in a desultory way, to pass the time, in Disturbia (be sure to get the interplay with "Surburbia"—hardly the sort of playful, subtle linguistic bawdry possibly implied by the title of the 1950 film) the teenage boys are deeply engaged in voyeuristic fascination with the girl. Their interest in the man who lives on the other side of the house, and who might be a notorious serial killer of women, is at first incidental. Only gradually does it become more central. This is an entertaining film, but the fact that it is presented as a teenage film, with all the usual trappings of teenage films intended to lure and hold a teenage audience (our hero has to rescue his girl, rescue his mother, rescue his best friend, and then he has to kiss kiss kiss his girl), and with no real attempt to transcend those limitations, prevents it from rising very far above the mundane average. A friend of mine observed that what most irritated him about this film was that he had to watch the young hero and his girlfriend kissing: "I'm too old to enjoy that." Well, perhaps, in the spirit of the voyeurism of both the original and the remake, I won't go that far. But kissing was not the focus of the original, and the fact that, in the remake, it is the focus pretty much explains the difference between the two.

The Night of the Hunter

Towards the top of my list of favorite films about the American South is the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, based on the Davis Grubbs novel of the same name. This is the only film ever directed by stage and screen actor Charles Laughton, and its commercial and critical failure following its release convinced Laughton and his producers that he should not direct again. When the film was released, critical reaction was mixed and reflected confusion on the part of reviewers and probably also on the part of audiences. The film was an unusual combination of crime drama, film noir, children's fantasy, and stylized, expressionist motifs. It combined scenes of comedy and tragedy, of violence and religion. Parts of the film were conventional; parts seemed almost amateurish. It is not surprising given the kinds of films being made in the 1950s that The Night of the Hunter sank from view soon after its release. It ran counter to established trends. It took 20 years for critics and viewers to recover this film and to begin to recognize its considerable merits.

Admittedly, the inclusion of The Night of the Hunter in a course about Southern films may seem problematic for some. In fact, the more I researched the background of this film, the more problematic its inclusion became. It is first of all not set in the South, or at least not in the deep South. It apparently takes place on or near the banks of the Ohio River, probably where it borders West Virginia. The film certainly looks and feels Southern, set in a rural region during the time of the Depression. A number of scenes show rolling farmland landscapes, with barns such as one would expect to find in the tobacco lands of Tennessee and Kentucky. A number of characters have Southern accents. It has many of the elements we expect to find in Southern literature—for examples, concern with religion and a gothic interest in violence and murder. It also expresses an agrarian skepticism towards cities, progress, technology, and the modern world and the general decay of values in the modern world. So for these reasons I've felt justified including The Night of the Hunter on my list.

But there are further complications. The traditional conception of Southern literature is that it is written by people who have spent all or most of their lives in the American South and that it expresses attitudes and deals with subjects generally associated with the South. We know that this view is being supplanted with other views, and that Southern literature is more diverse than traditional definitions would allow, but I will let tradition suffice for the purpose of this paper. I must further add that I tend to view films in the same way I view literature, that is, as texts suitable for interpretation. I am not a film scholar. My training has been that of a literary critic and teacher. Film has all the basic elements of fiction—narrative, plot, characters, themes, images, setting, and so on. So I treat it as literature. But in thinking about certain films as Southern films, there is a major difference between literature and film. Literature is usually the product of single authors. Film is collaborative. The director is often credited as the auteur, but others, such as screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, and actors, also have a major role in the final product. There is also not a major film industry in the American South. Films are made here, of course, but the people who make them are not typically Southern. Thus in a simplistic way it may be possible to argue that while Southern literature in its traditional definition is by Southerners and about the South, and reflective of attitudes one might associate with the South, Southern films are largely made by non-Southerners who use the South as a landscape on which to explore attitudes that may be Southern or that may not be.

This is certainly the case with The Night of the Hunter. It was filmed on a Hollywood set. Most of the principal actors were not Southerners. Laughton was British. Laughton convinced James Agee, the Tennessee writer who had written the screenplay for John Huston's The African Queen, to write the screenplay for this new film, but the evidence seems to suggest that Laughton did not like Agee's screenplay and partially or largely rewrote it. It is possible that Laughton saw Davis Grubbs' novel The Night of the Hunter as a "Southern" work and that in hiring a Southern writer such as James Agee to write the screenplay he was reflecting this fact. There is conflicting evidence as to how much of the Agee screenplay was actually used in the film. The best discussion of this question that I have read, based on close study of extant drafts of the screenplay, is by Jeffrey J. Folks, "James Agee's Filmscript for The Night of the Hunter," in The Southern Quarterly (1995). Folks suggests, contrary to what others have said, that much of Agee's screenplay appears in the film. Whatever the case might be, the film does reflect his influence.

A number of reasons explain Laughton's desire to make a film of Davis Grubb's novel. He first of all liked the novel, which he read before it was published. He set out to make a faithful adaptation and worked closely with Grubbs in developing the film. The themes that he emphasized in the film were religious extremism, the dire economic conditions of the Depression and the suffering of the rural poor as a result, the victimization of women and of children, and the loss of values in the modern world. His emphasis on the rural landscapes, on the religious extremism and misogyny of his main character Harry Powell, and on the clash of modern values and the modern world against more traditional values—these are emphases he accepted from the novel—are ones that are characteristic of much modern Southern writing. They make it convenient as well as logical to view this film as a Southern work, and at the least as a work which in tone and content is consanguine with other Southern literature.

For those of you unfamiliar with this film, here is a barebones summary. A man named Ben Harper robs a bank and kills two men in the process. He gives the money he has stolen to his son John and directs him to hide and protect the money at all costs. Harper is captured by police, sent to prison, and executed, but before his death he tells his cellmate, an itinerant preacher named Harry Powell, about the hidden money—but does not say where the money is. Powell, who is in prison for stealing a car but who in fact has been traveling through the countryside romancing and marrying vulnerable widows, killing them, and taking their money, decides to find the widow of his executed cellmate and marry her. Soon after this, Powell finds and marries the widow, he realizes that she does not know where the money is and that the children do, so he kills her and begins pressuring John and his sister Pearl to give up the money. They refuse and flee, escaping down the river in a small boat. They are taken in by an elderly woman, played by Lillian Gish, who befriends orphans. She is a pious, virtuous woman who protects parentless children from the evil of modern times, and from people like Harry Powell, whom she wounds with her rifle when he tries to break into her house, and who at the end of the film has been captured and is headed for trial and execution.

Three characteristics make this film remarkable. One is the character of Harry Powell as portrayed by Robert Mitcham. He is an evil and psychopathic serial killer who believes that he is carrying out God's word. His hatred of women, his animalistic greed, and his willingness to kill the children in order to get what he wants make him one a truly chilling character. Mitcham never surpassed or equaled this performance during the remainder of his career. You can't put out of your mind his singing of "leaning on the everlasting arms"—it's not comforting. The second memorable element involves the visual qualities of the film. In cinematography the film ranges from ultra realism to stylized expressionism to fanciful lyricism. One thinks of this film in terms of the visual images that characterize it: the hands of Harry Powell tattooed with the words Love and Hate, the church-like bedroom where Harry kills his wife; the gruesome image of a dead woman sitting in an old jalopy on the bottom of the river, her throat cut; the lyrical images of the children fleeing downriver from their pursuer, and so on. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez deserves much of the credit for this aspect of the film. The third characteristic involves the film's narratives, which fuse the plights of children and widows in the Depression and a young boy's determination to carry out his promise to his father with an elemental battle between virtue and evil.

This is not a perfect film, and from the technical standards of 2007 it may seem dated in ways, especially in several scenes involving special effects. Parts of it are contrived or overstated. My students were particularly put off by a series of scenes in the film's central section where the fleeing children are juxtaposed with images of wild animals that are supposed to suggest that the children live in a world where the strong victimize the weak, where there are predators and their victims. The Night of the Hunter is clearly a "made" film that seeks to create its own world with its own set of standards, not one that seems to emulate the world we inhabit. I like to think of it as a nightmarish fairy tale, the kind that keeps you awake at night. Yet the imperfections, the utter distinctiveness of this film as compared to most American films of the 1950s, or of any other decade for that matter, make this film what it is.

Dragon Wars: D-Wars

I am writing about Dragon Wars: D-Wars (2007) only because I set a goal to write on this blog about every film I see. TV ads for this film, which showed battling dragons in an urban landscape, with one dragon coiled about a towering skyscraper, convinced me that this was the sort of film with brassy digital effects and loud explosions that my son and I might enjoy as a mindless entertainment. So we went to see it. I paid $8.00 each for tickets.

This was the worst film I've written about so far. It is apparently a Korean-made film repackaged for American audiences. To say it is a Korean film in no way is meant to say that it is necessarily a bad film, only that it is not what the television advertisements make it out to be. This film possesses, with one exception, every aspect of badness one can imagine: acting, story, screenplay, editing, continuity, you name it. I knew within five minutes—as scene after scene of subtitled flashbacks and exposition began to unfold—that this film was a mistake. The one minor exception to the wide and impressive array of execrably bad aspects was the digital monsters. The first few times they appeared they seemed impressive. But soon they become increasingly like monsters from a third-rate comic book and they pale in comparison to some of the beasts we encounter in such films as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There we had a good story. Here we have an intricately murky mythology about dragons that come back to life once every five hundred years. There is always a girl who must be sacrificed so that the good dragon can triumph. If the bad dragon wins, then the human race ends. There is a five-hundred year old man who runs a curio shop. There is another man who can walk through walls and leads a troop of soldiers dressed in impenetrable armor. They ride dinosaur-like beasts. Their swords shoot fire. Flying lizards spit balls of fire. There are plot holes (even given the utter ridiculousness of the story) large enough to drive battle cruisers through.

I wondered briefly if my negative reaction was the result of my unfamiliarity with Asian mythology and dragon myths. But surely such unfamiliarity could not lead one to misjudge a good film as bad. Although D-Wars features the only cinematic appearance of an Asian dragon I have seen, Asian dragons do not redeem this film from the dragon excrement that suffuses it from beginning to end.

New York Times reviewer Andy Webster wrote that D-Wars "is such a breathless, delirious stew, it's impossible not to be entertained, provided — this is crucial — you have a sense of humor." I have a sense of humor and laughed often during the film, but virtually none of the humor in D-Wars is intentional (with a few exceptions) , and after a while one tires of laughing at scenes and dialogue and plot turns for their clumsy ineptitude.

Driving Miss Daisy

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) records a very narrow slice of Southern life between the late 1940s and early 1970s. The setting is Atlanta. The principal characters are an aging black man in need of employment and an old Jewish woman no longer able to drive, or at least whose son does not want her to drive. She is feisty, stubborn, and independent, and when her son brings to her house the man he has hired to chauffeur her around, she makes clear her lack of interest. Gradually, over the course of twenty-five years, a friendship develops between the two. Although Daisy thinks of herself as a progressive woman who has never been prejudiced, she clearly is. She never recognizes the links between herself and Hoke. When the Atlanta Jewish Temple is bombed, Hoke remarks to her that the same men who committed that crime are also the men who commit acts of hatred against blacks. She fails to see the connection. Later she fails to understand why Hoke might want to attend a dinner where Martin Luther King is speaking—she had an extra ticket she could have given him—he drives her to the dinner but does not attend, waiting for her outside in the car while King gives his talk. Despite all of this, their friendship develops in spite of limitations of prejudice and racial divisions.

As the chauffeur Hoke Coburn, Morgan Freeman plays a role that earned him both praise and criticism. He is ingratiating, and there are stereotypical elements in his performance. But he brings Hoke to life not as a general type but as an individual human being. He plays a kind of black man who today would seem a throwback, an anachronism, by 2007 standards. Such men did once exist. To play such a character must have taken courage on Freeman's part, and might well have involved humiliation as well. Jessica Tandy is equally good as Daisy. Criticisms leveled against the film found fault with its portrayal of a friendship between the elderly white woman and her black employee. Such friendships did not exist, so the criticism argues, and the film perpetuates a damaging falsehood as a result. Such friendships may have been rare, but undoubtedly they did occur. Clearly there were black people who worked for white families who felt a sense of kinship with their employers, who may have identified with them to varying extents. Clearly also there were many black people who worked for white families who felt no such kinship at all. Does the film argue that we ought to return to former times, when divisions between the races were more clearly marked, when whites occupied rigidly defined social position over that of blacks? No, I don't think so.

In a sense, the film is about change, progress—both in a good and bad sense.

One can see how the film might be seen to suggest that social progress and modernization have come at a cost. In particular, Daisy's son Boolie and his wife Florine adapt a lifestyle that is decidedly untraditional, at least in the sense of Jewish traditions. They celebrate Christmas and put up seasonal decorations. Boolie may in fact affect Christian customs for the sake of his business, which relies on many non-Jewish customers. He also declines to attend the Martin Luther King tribute dinner because he fears that doing so may cost him the business of white patrons who dislike King. Boolie makes many decisions on the basis of what is good for his business. One might argue that this film portrays a kind of friendship that would have become much more unlikely in post-civil rights days. Thus from this point of view the film may bemoan the loss of such friendships. But what the film doesn't do is argue for a return to the past. It illustrates and marks time's movement forward and the changes it brings. The film effectively illustrates how people grow old, lose their friends, lose their bearings, become more and more alien and alone in a world that is moving forwards and changing without them.

An interesting aspect of this film based on the play of the same name by Alfred Uhry (who also wrote the screenplay) is its low-key portrayal of Jewish Southern life in Atlanta during the mid-twentieth century. In many ways Daisy and Boolie's lives are indistinguishable from the lives of many non-Jewish people around them. Daisy attends synagogue regularly and has her circle of Jewish friends—they play canasta together on a regular basis. They may be outsiders in a predominantly Christian city., but they are also citizens of that city (as Daisy makes clear when she attends the MLK dinner). Some minor conflicts in the film arise from the collision of Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. But Daisy's religion is an incidental context. It's important but not the center of the film. Her identity as a white Southern woman struggling against advancing age and her own prejudices is more important in the film than her religion.

Again we confront in this film the issue of representation. The film portrays an individualized situation—an individual white woman developing a friendship with an individual black man. The film makes no claims that these two are representative of a larger class of people, or that their friendship in some way is representative of a larger phenomenon between white employers and their black employees prior to the Civil Rights movement. But film is a representative medium—it portrays individuals who are also, inescapably, seen as representative types. Audiences are naturally prone to see individual characters in a film as representative of a larger, wider reality. When we watch films (or read books) we often identify with the individual characters—we see them as representative of a larger aspect of experience than their individual situations can imply. It is easy to understand why some viewers of this film may object to the portrayal of a friendship that they do not believe accurately represents white and black relations in mid-20^th century Atlanta. But this whole issue is fraught with complications. Often when we talk about the past, attempt to understand it, to portray it, we skew and distort our visions to encompass a past we want to believe in. How can we know what the facts of the past are to begin with, unless we actually lived through it? Even then our own prejudices and perceptions and memories distort our sense of our own experience.

3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma (2007) is a study in angles and close-ups. The film is composed almost entirely of close-up shots of its characters, sometimes one character, sometimes several at a time. Often we view the action at eye-level from just behind the shoulders of a character. The result is a sense of deep involvement with the characters and their conflicts, and also of constraint, claustrophobia. Some scenes are filmed with handheld cameras, which produce a shaky, jerky shot that both disorients you and draws you deeply into the action.

A remake of a 1950s film of the same title, 3:10 to Yuma takes a number of old movie western conventions and reinvigorates them through a fresh script, excellent acting by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, innovative cinematography, constant tension and movement. The hackneyed convention made fresh is that of a Civil War veteran, Dan Evans (Christian Bale), down on his luck. He has lost the respect of his wife and his two sons, especially his oldest son, a fourteen year old, who thinks his father inept and a coward. A drought has caused crop failures that have left Evans nearly penniless and in debt. He has to regain his bearings or perish. When he and his sons witness a stage coach robbery by a gang of outlaws led by the notorious Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), Evans takes a wounded survivor of the robbery to the town doctor and in the process gets involved in the arrest of Wade, who carelessly goes into town after the robbery and stays long enough to be arrested and captured (this is a plot flaw, as Wade is not portrayed as a careless or unintelligent man). Evans agrees for two hundred dollars to escort Wade to the local penitentiary. Obviously he sees this as an opportunity to get out of debt and redeem himself in his sons' eyes. It's a risky and foolhardy job—Wade's murderous gangs of thugs and psychopaths are ready and waiting to rescue him.

Much that may seem conventional and predictable about the film is kept interesting by the acting of Crowe and Bale.

Bales is excellent as a slow-witted but resolute father who endures the contempt of his older son and risks his life to save his farm and family. Crowe plays a murderous outlaw, an amateur artist who is utterly without scruples, but who turns out in the end to have a small redemptive core. Crowe keeps his character interesting and alive even at moments when he seems on the verge of sinking into cliché. Wade is clearly a legend, everyone recognizes his name, people tell stories about the crimes he has committed and people he has killed. Some stories are only legend, but others are true. Wade has surrounded himself with a gang of utter lowlifes, vicious desperate men who follow his bidding without thought, including one younger man, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), who kills with the indifferent fury of a robot. Yet Wade also has his sensitive side: we see him at several moments in the film sketching—a hawk, a woman he has just slept with, even Dan Evans. One character reports that Wade sketches only those things that he loves. But his interest in drawing suggests that beyond his two-dimensional murderousness is a more complicated man that we might expect.

John Ford westerns pitted his characters against each other as well as against the western landscape, against Nature. His camera rarely came in as close to his characters as they do in this film. While in the best Ford movies the struggle is against the environment as well as other humans, in this film characters struggle against one another. Environment is incidental--except for that environment created by the jealousies and ambitions of men.

There is at least one truly heroic moment in this film when, after other characters have been killed off or have withdrawn in the face of almost certain death, Dan Evans says he will escort Wade from the hotel where they have holed up to the train station. Wade's gang and others wait outside the hotel ready to shoot anyone who tries to take Wade to the train station. Evans' fate seems almost certain. Although he does make arrangements with a train agent to provide for his family should he not survive, his determination to get Wade to the station is a matter of principle—of setting an example for his son, of standing up for law and order, of doing the right thing.

For a time in the film the struggle seems to be between the law and respectability as exemplified by Bale and the utter anarchistic, rapacious fury of Crowe and his men. In the end the struggle boils down to the gradual efforts of two very different men to come to terms with each other and with themselves.

As predictable as the end of the film may be, it is truly moving.

Colonel Effingham’s Raid

Colonel Effingham's Raid (1946) dramatizes the conflict of modern commerce and traditional values, at least as they are construed in this film based on the 1943 Berry Fleming novel of the same title. In a sense the film is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the elderly. Col. Effingham comes home to Fredericksville at the age of 65 after a lifetime career in the army. His great achievement has been assisting with the building of the Panama Canal. He returns home in 1940 eager to be of use. Col. Effingham in the film is a man of high ideals and principles. He regards himself as a patriot. Although he is overbearing and full of bombast, he is also sincere. He volunteers to write a column on the military for the local newspaper. The newspaper is ambitious to compete successfully with a larger newspaper in town and is not inclined to seek conflict with the political power structure of Fredericksville, a group of older men who have been running the town out of pocket for years, who make deals and agreements under the table, and who have contempt for the townspeople and for the principles of democracy. When they decide to name the town's Confederate Square for a long deceased businessman whom many locals consider a carpetbagger, and when they decide to demolish the historic courthouse and replace it with a new structure to be built by the mayor's brother, Col. Effingham takes aim in his column, calling the citizens to arms and lambasting these threats to the town community and tradition.

The lines of battle are drawn between business , progress, and traditional values. This film about a small Southern town is also set just before the beginning of the Second World War. Therefore at the same time the colonel is battling attacks on tradition and hometown values, the nation is preparing for war. The film (and presumably the novel) explicitly links these two dimensions—Effingham is leading a battle to defend tradition and place and the nation's military is calling up forces to do the same on a wider scale. Oddly, then, this places the nation's enemies—the Nazis and others--in the same category as the men whom the colonel regards as the enemies of the town-- the corrupt political and commercial machine that have always gotten their ways. Not surprisingly, these forces on various scales continue to do battle today in numerous small and large towns and cities around the nation.

One odd characteristic of this film is that while it makes no hesitation to identify itself with a small Southern town there is virtually nothing about the film that is regionally marked. Virtually no citizen has a Southern accent. Col. Effingham himself, played by Charles Coburn (a Savannah, GA, native) has a British accent and swaggers and wears a monocle. I don't really think this is a matter of the film trying to avoid acknowledging its settings (there are a number of black characters playing servants); it may be more a matter of the film's simply trying to avoid the difficulty and expense of teaching actors accents and dressing them up in regional attire. The film may be navigating the demands of authenticity by ignoring them—we have generic Southerners as a result, Southerners who readily acknowledge their region but who aren't much like people who live there. Once you adjust to the peculiarity the rest of the film works well enough.

Effingham's energetic efforts to defeat the town power structure, save the courthouse, and keep the original name for Confederate Square initially seem to fail when every businessman in town refuses to support his efforts—they have too much money at stake, they don't want to anger the city fathers and endanger their own economic welfare. Even the colonel's cousin, a young man named Albert, who also works for the newspaper, is embarrassed by his elder cousin's stand. Only when his uncle suffers a heart attack and lapses into weakness and despair at the defeat he has suffered does Albert begin to feel regret and a sense of duty both to his cousin and the town. Matters take their formulaic course at a rally in the town square held to send the Georgia National Guard off to war.

The South defined in this film is probably based on Berry Flemings own definition in his novel. The South is portrayed as a place of traditions and values threatened by commerce and corruption that have come in from the outside. The lure of money is too much for many of the town's leaders, men who grew up in Fredericksville. It takes the older men like Effingham as well as the women to stand up for traditional and virtue. The newspaper for which Effingham writes his column is portrayed as a paper more interested in its own financial status than in representing the interests of the community.

An exception to the generic South of this film is the black characters, all of whom appear as servants. They play the typical stereotypical roles, rolling their eyes, acting clownish on occasion. My attempts to identify the black actors in the film were made difficult by the fact that the credits don't seem to list them. It's ironic that the one Southern characteristic the film doesn't ignore is the presence of black servants.

Ratatouille

There came a moment in Ratatouille when the audience audibly gasped at the image of rats busily engaged in preparing food in the kitchen of a Parisian restaurant. This moment signifies the success of the film—it compels you to believe in the rats. Ratatouille has much in common with other animated films from Pixar and Disney--talking animals, caricaturish humans, computer animation. What makes this film work so well, what pushes it well above the level of most other animated films, is how well all the basic elements interact and cohere. The film has an interesting and engaging story, a varied and distinctive array of characters who seem real and about whom we care (including the chef rat Remy), beautiful animation that does not call too much attention to itself, and a fine soundtrack. It combines a romance between two cooks in the restaurant kitchen with the story of the rat Remy's ambition to become a great chef. A key element is the fact that Remy is the most intelligent and engaging character in the film. The great antagonist of the story is the head cook Skinner, an undersized but tyrannical taskmaster who runs the kitchen like a boot camp, who is incompetent and also responsible for the once-great restaurant's decline. My favorite character was the restaurant critic Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O'Toole. The film boasts a multiplicity of plots: Remy's desire to cook, the romance between Linguini and Colette, Skinner's jealousy of Linguini's inexplicable ability to cook wonderful dishes (Remy does the cooking for him), the ghost of the deceased master chef Auguste Gusteau, and so on. This is a delightful and charming film.

Stranded

Stranded is a 1987 film featuring Maureen O'Sullivan and Ione Skye (the singer Donovan's daughter) about a family of aliens who suddenly appear in a house outside a small Southern town. The aliens are fleeing an assassin on a remote world. Why they are the object of assassination is never explained. The aliens are vintage Lost in Space aliens, with bad hair and cheesy costumes and make-up. Based on their coiffures, the aliens owned blow dryers. One of them, an apparent robot, is dressed as a Ninja. We know this film is set in the South because all the human characters speak with Southern drawls. Some carry shotguns, drive pickups, hate black people and other strange people including aliens. The local sheriff is a black man, and at least one of his deputies, not to mention other numerous locals, hate him because of his race. Despite the fact that they kill several people who are, admittedly, trying to kill them, these aliens turns out to be kind and civilized. A teenage alien boy and the character played by Ione Skye seem to fall in love. The grandmother played by Maureen O'Sullivan becomes friends with an alien grandmother. This silly film lacks humor, intelligence, insight, and skill. Despite the fact that in the course of the film most of them are killed, the surviving aliens leave the earth at the end of the film with smiles on their faces. Galactic understanding and good will for all.

I had not heard of this film when I saw it listed on the schedule of a cable movie channel. Stranded construes the South as shotguns, baseball caps, pickup trucks, dimwitted racists, and a few good souls thrown in for good measure.

Snakes on a Plane

There was no way Snakes on a Plane (2006) could have lived up to the furor surrounding it for months prior to its release. And it doesn't. The film is on the same general level as Anaconda, whose huge digital snake terrorized passengers on a boat on the Amazon. Some of the snakes on the plane in this film are actual snakes while others are digital, and it's often easy to tell the difference.

Snakes on a Plane exploits primal fears of slithering reptiles and the claustrophobic entrapment some people feel within the fuselage of a jetliner. Halfway through the film some sixty people on the jetliner are dead, bitten by poisonous snakes placed on the airliner to prevent a government witness from testifying against a Hawaiian gangster. The snakes make their appearance while the plane is still two hours from Los Angeles. Soon one pilot is dead, and after a valiant effort to keep the plane in flight the other pilot dies too. The only person left capable of flying the plane is a rap artist's bodyguard played by Keenan Thompson. Keenan has over 2000 hours of pilot experience flying video game airplanes, and on the basis of that he has to bring the plane in for a landing at LAX.

The plane is full of distinctive passengers who remind you of the passengers in such films as The High and the Mighty, Airport, and other such films. The drama of those other films came out of the private lives of the passengers, all of whom are brought together in a moment of crisis on an airplane high in the sky. The interest of those films, where there is interest, grows from the way we care about those passengers. (The High and the Mighty is the classic film in this genre). In Snakes on a Plane most of the passengers are developed only far enough for you to take note when they are bitten by a snake. They're not human beings with interesting back stories—they're victims. A pair of newlyweds meets their snake in the bathroom, where they are trying to enter the mile-high club. A snoring overweight Hispanic woman meets her fate when a snake slithers up her dress. A stewardess on her last flight is bitten when she attempts to keep a cobra from biting a five-year old. An obnoxious Frenchman is crushed to death by a giant anaconda and then swallowed head-first after he throws another passenger's Chihuahua into its jaws. And so it goes.

Most of the major characters in the film survive. The baby and two small boys survive. If the film has any real guts, the anaconda would have swallowed the baby and one of the boys wouldn't have survived the flight. The only real star in the film is Samuel L. Jackson, who seems to appear in every film these days, and who waits until nearly the end of the story to utter the famous line that will give this film its own immortality. Jackson seems bored with his role, but even so he performs well. The only other actor of any note is Juliana Margulies of ER fame, and this film won't do anything to restore her sagging career.

Films such as Alien and Halloween and even Nightmare on Elm Street rely to varying extents on tension and suspense to hold the viewer's interest. There is little tension or suspense in this film. You know that at some point the snakes are going to appear, and you can guess pretty much how things are going to go when they do. Rather than stirring up suspense, this film relishes in showing you how various passengers come to their deaths when snakes bite them. There's too much attention on the gore and the effects of the poison and the faces grimacing in pain. In one scene we are shown how a man foams at the mouth in his last seconds. One woman is bitten in the eye. A male passenger is bitten while relieving himself in the bathroom—you can guess where he is bitten. Other passengers are subjected to multiple bites all at once. Some die quickly. Others die slowly and horribly. The film makes a point of displaying their swollen, discolored bodies. At one point, one of the pilots, before he is killed, radios LAX air control that 60 passengers are dead. This is a horrific fact, yet it seems merely incidental here. The point of this film is to show death, but death doesn't seem to matter.

When the plane finally does land in Los Angeles and the surviving passengers emerge, it is a kind of victory. Everyone is happy and joking. Samuel Jackson and Juliana Margulies embrace and make a date. When a last snake manages to bite the star witness in the chest, Jackson shoots the snake with two gunshots that go through the snake right into the witness' chest. Well, not really. The witness is wearing a bullet proof vest, so he is unaffected by the bullets or the snake. Everyone laughs. No one seems to remember that sixty or more dead passengers lie in the plane. They don't matter. The survivors have survived. Margulies and Jackson will have their date. Jackson and his witness are shown surfing together in the film's last scene. The studio has its money. Case closed.

A subplot in the film involving a herpetologist trying to help the police locate anti-venom seems almost comically superfluous. No one cares.

Let's be clear: this film was made by the pre-release hype. Everyone went to see it with high expectations. And perhaps those expectations lured them into liking the film. But Snakes on a Plane has all the lineaments of a low-budget C-grade movie—no artistry, no interest, a cynical, perverse, obsequious pandering for the viewer's money.

Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu (2006) is a predictable but entertaining time-travel drama. Set in New Orleans, the actual plot of the film has little to do with the city, other than the fact that various scenes are set in such areas as the French Quarter and that in the closing credits a message dedicates the film to the Hurricane Katrina survivors. The connection, perhaps, lies in the explosion at the start of the film that kills more than 300 people on a ferry—the ferry disaster is connected to the Katrina disaster, though to me it is cheesy and insincere of the film to suggest the link.

In Déjà Vu Denzel Washington plays an agent of the division of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms who investigates the explosion. He becomes interested in the body of a woman that has washed up on the shore of the Mississippi, a body that appears to be that of a disaster victim, even though it washes up two hours before the explosion occurs. Washington is recruited by a secret government agency that has developed a time machine that allows anyone using it to gaze back three days into the past. The agents using the machine hope to track events and find out who is responsible for blowing up the ferry. Washington senses a link between the body washed up on the shore and the disaster. In the process of using the time machine to track the dead woman's movements, Washington finds himself increasingly interested in her, and subsequent events unravel exactly as one would predict—he uses the machine to travel back in time to try to save her and prevent the disaster.

Although the film doesn't dwell much on the supposed science behind the time machine, and although it does seem aware of some of the theoretical implications of time travel, when it tries to explain how the machine works, anyone with the faintest knowledge of physics will recognize the hoopla. Fortunately, the film doesn't emphasize the science behind the machine, and even the implausible machine itself is underplayed.

The connections of the New Orleans setting to the concerns of this film are minimal. The film contrasts the rationality of the scientists who develop and use the machine with the humanistic and spiritual implications of its existence. (The actual inventor of the machine admits near the end of the film that he believes in God). As a center of African-American culture, New Orleans provides a background where the film's interest in issues of the spirit—one scene takes place near a church--can be tentatively and haphazardly explored. The woman whose body washes up on shore appears to be African American, and the father who mourns her death appears to be white, so New Orleans as a place where inter-racial relationships and marriages are common provides a social context that explains these different racial characteristics, though the film does nothing to expand this dimension.

One scene shows the destruction left by Hurricane Katrina, but it lacks organic connection with the remainder of the film.

As bad as it was, The Skeleton Key made better use of New Orleans as a setting, linking the New Orleans culture of voodoo and superstition directly to the plot of the film. Déjà Vu is certainly a better film, though only in relative terms.

Porgy and Bess

Porgy and Bess (1959) is unavailable on tape or DVD and has been shown only a few times since its initial commercial release in 1959. The Gershwin family apparently felt that the commercialism of the film ruined the opera, and they have refused to allow its release as a result. Concerns about the portrayal of African Americans in the film perhaps also discouraged its release. With high production values and an outstanding cast of African American actors, this film based on the most famous American opera, with music by Gershwin and the book by Dubose Heyward, is a significant landmark work. Featuring Sidney Poitier as Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, along with Pearl Bailey, Sammy Davis Jr, Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll, and others, it is difficult to think of a film with as impressive an African American cast. One may argue that films featuring African American actors in the 1950s and 1960s played a significant role in heightening the public consciousness about civil rights, just as did, in other contexts, African American figures in sports and music. If so, Porgy and Bess was one of the most accomplished of those films.

Mainly filmed on a set, most of the film takes place in Catfish Row, the fictional section of Charleston, South Carolina, where its characters live.

Porgy and Bess is a folk opera that seeks to portray the lives of African Americans in Charleston in what appears to be the early part of the 20^th century. It presents the love affair of Porgy, a crippled man, and Bess, who enters the film in a relationship with a man named Crown (Brock Peters). Crown gets into a fight during a gambling match and kills a man. He flees to the swamps to hide, leaving Bess behind. When some of the people of Catfish Row blame her for the murder because of her relationship with Crown, Porgy takes her in and offers her protection. They fall in love. Later in the film, when Porgy is taken into custody as a witness to a murder, her attention wanders and she is seduced by the character Sportin' Life (Sammy Davis Jr.).

The music and singing in the film are outstanding, though the singing voices of several major actors—Poitier, Dandridge, Carroll—are dubbed. Poitier's deep bass singing voice seems totally unlike his speaking voice. Sammy Davis Jr. and Pearl Bailey, not surprisingly, do their own singing. They have the standout roles of the film. Davis' rendition of "It Ain't Necessarily So" is one of the best of a many great numbers. I never realized that the song is Sportin' Life's attempt to cast doubt on the religious beliefs of other characters. He is the great seducer in the film, and he offers cocaine to Bess and ultimately lures her away from Porgy.

Does this film show stereotyped portrayals of African American characters? From a modern point of view the answer may be that it does, in a certain way. The characters are full of life and joy; they dance and sing, love and gamble and fight. Although they are shown expressing deep emotions, deep thoughts are not so common. Bess in particular is fickle, moving with some ease from one lover to another. For the most part Porgy and Bess shows these characters interacting with one another within their own community. But the film clearly means to show these characters in a positive and sympathetic light. Undoubtedly many of the activities we see them engaged in were realistic portrayals, given the place and time of the film. The film emphasizes how they are at the mercy of the white law and the sheriff, who can enter Catfish Row whenever he pleases, accusing residents of crimes they didn't commit, hauling them off to jail for whatever reason. There is nobility in the best of these characters, especially in Porgy and in Pearl Bailey's character Maria.

One could argue that Porgy and Bess shows the African Americans of Catfish Row as shallow and as preoccupied with the simple pleasures. Yet it also shows them doing their best to respond to the difficult circumstances within which they live.

Although the film seems to end early, with Porgy on his way to try to win back Bess, it is still a powerful work. The picnic and hurricane scenes are especially effective. It memorializes the passions and the nobility of the people of Catfish Row. Even if it does invoke some stereotypes, it doesn't patronize or condescend and it avoids resorting to shuck and jive comedy stereotypes . Its fully rounded characters support and depend on one another and attempt to live their lives in the best ways they know.

Flannery O’Connor: A Life, by Jean Cash

Jean Cash's biography Flannery O'Connor: A Life is a disappointing hagiographic litany of facts and quotations. Cash does not know how to edit and consolidate information. Every fact and every statement she got from interviewees seem to appear in the book, even when they are redundant and repetitious. Thus we learn a great deal about O'Connor's love of chickens and other birds, her iconoclastic ways as a child, her unsociability. Cash includes contrasting opinions and accounts of O'Connor alongside one another without attempting to sort them out or resolve the conflict.

Cash goes to some pains to show that Flannery O'Connor was not a lesbian, that she was (or was not—there is some vacillation) a racist (Cash concludes that O'Connor has progressive racial views for a person living in Milledgeville in the 1950s and 60s, but she kept most of those views to herself to avoid offending the people she lived with). Cash believes O'Connor loved to goad some of her more liberal friends by pretending to be more racist that she really was. Cash argues that O'Connor was a brilliant intellectual in the hinterlands of middle Georgia, crippled by disease and place and circumstance.

The book is useful for the basic outline it provides of O'Connor's life. It is also useful for the many quotations from O'Connor's essays and letters it provides—drawing these together in one place it effectively builds the case for her intellect. They do allow us to develop a sense of a person and writer. But most of this work we have to carry out on our own—Cash the biographer doesn't carry it out for us.

The book is a disappointment for its failure to connect O'Connor's life with the fiction she created. We hear a lot about where O'Connor was when she was working on Wise Blood, and we hear a little about her writing of the stories that found their way into A Good Man is Hard to Find, her first story collection. There are some efforts to connect events and people in O'Connor's life—especially her mother Regina—with events and characters in the fiction, but sometimes Cash doesn't go far enough with these connections, and sometimes she goes too far. In general, she seems to regard the fiction as incidental to her claim that O'Connor was a great genius and intellect

This is an account of a writer's life. It is not a literary biography. It doesn't describe and explain the writer. It merely tells what she was doing on a particular day in a particular year. We don't learn much about how she wrote, why she wrote, what she was thinking as she conceived of a particular character or a particular plot. Maybe there isn't enough documentary evidence to provide such information. But some discussion of the novels and the short fiction would have provided the literary context that would make clear why this woman merits a biography. We receive discussions of what people thought of O'Connor when they met her at a particular meeting or reading. Chapters are devoted to O'Connor's book reviews in The Georgia Bulletin, a Catholic newspaper, and to readings and to friends, but no chapters discuss her writing of Wise Blood or the short stories or The Violent Bear it Away. No chapters offer analyses of these works.

The book is poorly written, with prose you would find in a small-town newspaper. There is too much repetition. This overly short biography or a woman whose complicated life was itself too short is too long and prosaic. It raises more questions than it answers. It portrays O'Connor and her work pretty much as O'Connor would have wanted, not from the imaginative, objective, analytical standpoint that a genuine biography should take, not from a standpoint that would expand and deepen the way we regard this writer. O'Connor deserves better.

Band of Angels

Band of Angels (1957) is based on the 1955 Robert Penn Warren novel of the same title. In the novel, young Amantha Starr, the daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner, returns to her father's funeral and discovers that she is the daughter of her father and a slave. He spent all his money on gambling and a fancy woman, his plantation is in debt, and Amantha is seized by a slave auctioneer, to be sold with all the other slaves on the plantation. The film devotes itself to how Amantha reacts and adjusts to her new station in life.

Band of Angels as a novel is so densely philosophical, so infiltrated with Warren's sometimes murky musings about slavery and identity and guilt and consequence, that the story itself seems secondary. Amantha is purchased by a former slave runner named Hamish Bond and at the end of the novel ends up married to Ethan Sears, whom she knew as an aspiring minister who visited her in finishing school. Although he was an ardent abolitionist as a young man, when he discovers that Amantha is part black, he is repelled, though he doesn't leave her. Warren loved this kind of irony and hypocrisy, loved to be able to show that even the most idealistic people often cannot live up to their ideals.

The film based on the novel strips away much of the philosophizing and moralistic musings and instead focuses on slavery and race. It foregrounds the relationship of Amantha and Hamish. Although well intentioned, and progressive for its time, as a film Band of Angels is confused. Most of the characters from the novel remain in the film, though some are relegated to minor status (such as Ethan Sears). The point of the film is to show the wrongness of slavery and racism. It does this in ways that are both overt and subtle. The home of Hamish Bond allows for subtlety. He owns slaves whom he treats as employees and near equals. The mistress of the house, Michelle, is a slave whom he has obviously had a relationship with, and she shows minor signs of jealousy when Hamish brings Amantha into the house. Perhaps as a result, she helps Amantha in an attempt to escape upriver to Ohio, where she attends school, though the attempt fails. Amantha, who has never been a slave until her father's death, never knew that she was part black or that her mother was a slave, regards the bars on her second-floor bedroom as a sign of her enslavement, while Michelle tells her that the bars are Hamish's way of trying to keep out the external world. There is ambiguity and uncertainty attached to the boundaries of Hamish Bond's house and yard. Within those boundaries the house servants (slaves) are allowed to come and go as free members of the household. Those who cross the boundaries and go out into the outer world do so either by permission or as a matter of trust with Hamish. The film implies that if they wished to leave Hamish would not prevent them, and that they do not leave because of how well he treats them. Yet there is one moment when Amantha, assisted by Michelle, tried to leave and turns back when confronted by Rau Rau. Would he have prevented her? The most important slave characters in the film are Rau Rau and Michelle. They are apparently allowed to do as they wish, but in return for the way Hamish treats them they remain to do his bidding. It seems likely that Michelle loves and respects Hamish, while Rau Rau, whom Bond has educated and reared as his own son and to whom he has given much responsibility, hates him—hates him because he is, after all, the Master. Despite everything Hamish has done for Rau Rau, the fact that he remains a slave provokes his hatred. These slaves—educated, respected by their owner, dressed in fine clothes, entrusted with important and serious tasks—are hardly representative of the typical slave in the American South and their relationship with their owner is hardly typical of the average owner-slave relationship. Of course, in New Orleans, where slavery took on new and complicated dimensions compared to the rest of the South, these issues become even more complicated. The film examines these issues through Amantha, who is a special case, and through Rau Rau.

In the film, Hamish Bond tries to atone for his terrible sins as a slave runner by treating his own slaves with respect and by purchasing Amantha, thereby protecting her from being sold as another man's mistress or into a brothel. In his house, she may become his mistress, and the implication is that he may have purchased her for that ultimate purpose. However, he makes no moves towards her, waiting for a moment to develop that will bring them together. This happens during a thunderstorm (recall the Kate Chopin story "The Storm"). After they have slept together for the first time, Hamish later seems remorseful and tells her that she is free to go, that he will help her travel upriver to Ohio and provide support for her to live there. Instead, as they arrive at his plantation, she declares her intention to remain with him. Is this a declaration of love on her part, where she chooses love over freedom, or is it a matter of the slave choosing to stick with the comfortable life afforded by the Master? The movie seems to hold both possibilities up for consideration. This is both a slave choosing to stay with the Master who owns her legally and sexually, but also the woman who has been placed in bondage by a man and who chooses to stay with her out of love. It reminds me of that scene in the William Gilmore Simms novel The Yemassee, where a slave owner tries to emancipate a loyal slave who then begs not to be released because of his love for and allegiance to his master. Undoubtedly such scenes may have occurred in reality, in isolated episodes, but Simms uses the scene to exemplify his contention that slavery was a beneficent institution that served the welfare of the slaves. How Band of Angels means us to see it is another matter, perhaps. It also reminds me of the rape scene that Scarlett O'Hara so clearly relishes in Gone with the Wind. These aspects of Band of Angels are clearly dated. Rather than focusing on the fact that Amantha, Michelle, and Rau Rau are slaves, the film focuses on Hamish's kind treatment of them, as if that mitigates his role as the enslaver or their roles as slaves.

As Hamish Bond Clark Gable plays a part curiously similar to his role as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. At least it is difficult to tell the difference. Yvonne DeCarlo, who went on to fame as Mrs. Herman Muenster, actually handles her role well. In 1957 Sidney Poitier was always the actor of choice for African American roles—he is, as ever, refined and articulate, too much so for a character such as Rau Rau who is supposed to be burly and muscular as well as educated. In Warren's novel Rau Rau is somewhat less elegant but perhaps more convincing, given his background.

A major difference between the film and its source is that Amantha and Hamish reconcile after a separation. Hamish has a duel with a rival plantation owner, a reconciliation of sorts with Rau Rau, and finally escapes the Northern military officers who are trying to capture him on a fishing boat. As weak as the ending of Warren's novel may be, the end of the film rivals it in credulity.

Transformers

There's not a lot of back story to Transformers (2007), or at least I didn't pick up on much of one. This film is fun to watch, more so in the first half than the second, but it's important not to think about it much. Just watch it. The first half is more interesting because it dramatizes a teenage boy's discovery that his run-down Camero is actually an alien robot that has come to earth along with a group of similar friends in search of an alien power source. Once the film finishes introducing the good transformers, such as Optimus Prime, it bogs down a bit in increasingly complicated exposition. It turns out that the government has known about the transformers for fifty years, that the leader of the evil transformers was discovered frozen in the Arctic by the boy's grandfather, and that eyeglasses belonging to boy's grandfather provide missing evidence that brings the transformers to earth in search of the power source.

My sons who were young in the 1980s played with transformer toys. That is how I became familiar with them. There is not much of a mythic framework behind or beneath the transformers. There are simply some good ones that want to help and defend the human race and some bad ones that want to destroy it. The same is pretty much true in this film. Good vs. evil on the shallowest levels.

Politically, the film is deluded and reactionary. The American military shoots at the evil robots with weapons that have pinpoint accuracy. Hasn't our experience in the Iraqi wars of 1990 and 2002 more or less proved that such weapons don't exist?

Commercially, the film is about product placement, as others have noted. The transformers apparently made a deal with General Motors—the robots agreed to transform into GM cars. No foreign models, especially no Japanese models, which is ironic given the origins of the transformer cartoon series and of the transformer toys themselves. Also, it turns out, if the power source is activated, certain mechanical devices (such as Nokia cell phones) will transform into evil robots. Foreign devices in this case are allowed.

Two sources of action in the film: when the transformers transform, and when they fly and rumble around shooting at each other. That's how this film solves problems—alien robots shoot at one another and whatever buildings happen to be nearby. It is on that level that you must watch the film. On that level, and not any other, it is actually entertaining.

Despite the digital and other types of moviemaking technology brought to bear on the film, there are a number of moments in the latter half, when the good and the evil transformers are battling each other, that you know you are looking at men in rubber suits.

Heart of Dixie

Heart of Dixie (1989) uses a Southern sorority in 1957 to examine race relations and a college student's awakening into the meaning of racial equality and human justice. This is a commercial film drawn with broad strokes. It is told from a white girl's point of view. There is only one black character in a minor role of any consequence. Still, it has merits and effectively dramatizes the power of social pressures and of race itself at the time of the story.

The college where the story takes place is a thinly camouflaged version of Auburn University. The novel Heartbreak Hotel (1976) by Anne Rivers Siddons on which the film is based was an autobiographical account of the author's experience during the 1950s at Auburn University, where she caused controversy for writing editorials sympathetic to integration. She was fired from the student newspaper after publishing the second editorial. Her membership in Tri Delta sorority obviously influenced the novel and the film as well.

The sorority to which Maggie belongs is portrayed as a backwater in the modern world. All of its members want to be pinned and to get married as soon as they graduate. Maggie DeLoach, played by Ally Sheedy, at first is like everyone else in the sorority. She's never been exposed to beliefs different than the ones she grew up with. Two elements gradually wake her up: one is Hoyt Cunningham, a young photographer she meets at a bar. He is played by Treat Williams. Williams reads a newspaper editorial Maggie wrote about Autherine Lucy, the first African American to enroll at the University of Alabama, and although he is impressed that she wrote it he finds it timid. When he expresses support for the notion of integration, Maggie's friend asks him whether he is a communist. The other is her mildly bohemian friend Aiken Reed, played by Phoebe Cates, who apparently does not belong to a sorority.

When Maggie attends an Elvis concert with the photographer, she witnesses a young black man beaten up by a white concertgoer and then by a policeman who stops the fight. She is upset and angered. A talk with the black friend who works at the sorority leads her to write an editorial for the newspaper. The dean threatens her and the editor with expulsion if it is published. They publish it anyway. Her sorority sisters, including her best friend, shun her, she breaks up with her boyfriend, and she is expelled from school for refusing to apologize for the editorial.

Two key scenes: one at the Elvis Presley concert where she witnesses the beating; another where the first black student walks through a hostile mob to enroll at the university.

The sorority is a symbol of the pre-civil rights south: the sisters want to live like they are characters in Gone with the Wind. One sister is overheard saying she wants to marry Rhett Butler while her friend wants to marry Ashley Wilkes. When Maggie questions the automatic assumption that after graduation she will marry, have children, and live a life of leisure, her friend Maggie is astonished. Several scenes involve sisters talking about the desire to marry, resisting sex with their boyfriends, and so on. When Aiken announces she is pregnant at the end of the film, Maggie is astonished at her plans not to marry, to drop out of college, and to go live in Greenwich Village.

Maggie's gradual realization that she believes in racial equality, her decision to reject what she has believed for all her life, is the main focus of the film. It happens as a result of her exposure to various expressions of racism (such as her boyfriend's father the judge who explodes in anger at the notion of civil rights) and the bearing at the Elvis concert, and her exposure to ideas contrary to the ones she grew up with. The film shows the development of Maggie's racial consciousness and along with that her independence and integrity.

The scene in which the first black student enrolls at the university is moving, even though Maggie is only a witness to it, though she picks up and returns a handkerchief and returns it to the student. The fear on the student's face raises the scene above the ordinary. The scene seems to have been influenced by films of the integration of the University of Alabama in June, 1963, with Governor George Wallace first barring the door and then stepping aside to allow the first black students to enter.

Heart of Dixie is a film similar to Intruder in the Dust and To Kill a Mockingbird in the way it dramatizes a young character's awakening to the meaning of social injustice and racial prejudice. It is not as good a film, however, and it lacks their depth and richness. Heart of Dixie is self-consciously a film about race and racism. It wears its heart on its sleeve, which is not to say that it doesn't lack in subtlety. It does have its virtues. And its portrayal of racism and the social pressures it could bring to bear on people in the 1950s is accurate. The hothouse atmosphere of a college sorority may not provide the best means of exploring the themes it undertakes to explore. The South was hardly as homogeneous as the film would have it, and the sorority, and Greek life in general, don't offer a way of showing anything other than homogeneity.

To its credit, Heart of Dixie doesn't suggest in any way that Maggie's awakening has much of an impact on the civil rights struggle or the welfare of blacks in Alabama. Instead the changes that matter in the film are the ones that occur within Maggie. This is the story of the development and awakening of her character. By extension, they were changes that would occur in the hearts and minds of individuals all over the American South, and throughout the United States as a whole, in the years and decades that followed the year which the film concerns.

Madea’s Family Reunion

Madea's Family Reunion (2006) delivers a good message through a faulty medium. The film begins as if it is a Woody Allen movie for African Americans. The first scene involves a posh apartment and three well dressed young women. In later scenes we encounter characters from differing social classes—a bus driver, two elderly retired people, a young woman trying to succeed in her own business. Despite this, the film offers an idealized, smooth, sometimes saccharine portrait of its characters and their lives. The wedding scene at the end of the film is difficult to swallow.

Set in Atlanta, Madea's Family Reunion focuses on a mother, Victoria, and her two daughters Lisa and Vanessa. Victoria is a haughty and scheming woman who uses her daughters to get what she wants. Lisa is about to marry a wealthy businessman who beats her and generally abuses her. When she confides in her mother about the abuse, the woman tells her she must put up with it. She believes that woman must accept their lot, and what comes with it, if they want to be comfortable and cared for. Vanessa is generally ignored by the mother—later in the film Vanessa reveals the abuse she suffered from one of her mother's several husbands, abuse the mother not only countenanced but arranged for.

Madea is the aunt of the mother. She is a loud, brash, domineering woman who takes foster children into her home and disciplines and loves them rigorously. She and her husband Uncle Joe are comical characters in a serious soap opera. Madea is full of energy and is the heart of the film. She is played in drag by the director Ryan Perry, who also plays Uncle Joe. Their comic shenanigans often seem out of place given the serious problems of the other characters, but without them the film would be much less entertaining than it is. Madea and Uncle Joe are both stereotypical characters—Madea is similar to Big Momma in the two Martin Lawrence films of that name, while in Barbershop (2002) portrayed several characters like Uncle Joe. White filmmakers have used black stereotypes for years, and it is interesting to see them in films by black directors. Barbershop was criticized by Jessie Jackson for its use of stereotypes he regarded as damaging. What ultimately prevents Madea's character from being overwhelmed by the stereotype she portrays is her strong positive character and the support she provides to Lisa and Vanessa.

Social responsibility and family unity are the message of this film. It suggests that a black matriarchy seeks to uphold positive social and moral standards and to defend women and children from the onslaughts of destructive irresponsible males. The matriarchy also resists the decline of values evident in contemporary society. In general, the women characters have been victimized by men in one way or another, while the men are either weak and foolish or brutal victimizers. Madea is the strong and positive woman in the film, while her husband Joe is a flatulent fool. Lisa's fiancé is rich and ruthless—he sees Lisa as just another possession. The one positive male character is the bus driver Brian, who falls in love with Vanessa. Because of her painful experiences in earlier relationships, she resists him. Lisa wants to abandon her fiancé but he threatens her, even threatens to kill her, and her mother insists that she stick with the engagement—her financial welfare depends on the marriage, for reasons the film details.

Events work themselves out as they usually do in this sort of film.

The heart of the film is a family reunion where the 90 year-old-matriarch of the family is upset when she sees her descendants gambling and dancing licentiously in skimpy clothes. Cicely Tison and Maya Angelou give moving speeches about family and social responsibility, upbraiding the family members for their errant ways. As Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal Constitution pointed out in her review. "Perry shares an agenda with Bill Cosby and Spike Lee: He wants young African-Americans to take responsibility for themselves. He has no patience for drugs, careless sex, guns, fists, sexually provocative behavior, or blaming everyone else for what you're doing to yourself." This is one of the film's central messages, but the speech that Tyson delivers, and Angelou's comments, and the family reunion itself, seem awkwardly placed in the film focused on the serious problems of Lisa and Vanessa. The film is episodic and consists of a number of loosely linked set pieces, the reunion is the prime example, but a farting episode involving Uncle Joe is another. The different parts of the film don't really fit together, it's schizophrenic in a sense, and although the film is entertaining to watch and, in the end, moving, especially Tison's speech, it is not successful. It is a loosely assembled. It as if Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy collaborated on a film and could never agree on what they wanted to do, so that each directed his own individual scenes.

Madea's Family Reunion is a sequel to Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2002). Both were directed and acted in by Ryan Perry, whose plays of the same titles served as the source for the films.

Black Snake Moan

"Black Snake Moan" is the title of an old blues song about a man's grief over losing his wife. The song plays an important role in the film of the same title, directed by Craig Brewer, previously known for Hustle & Flow. The principal actors in this film are Samuel Jackson and Christina Ricci. Jackson (who appears in more films than anyone I can think of) plays an aging blues singer named Lazarus whose wife leaves him early in the film. His head is half-shaved in the film, evidently to suggest a radically receded hair line, but it looks fake. Christina Ricci's character is Rae, who is half-naked throughout much of the film.

Black Snake Moan (2006) begins with film clips from an interview with the bluesman Son House, who explains the blues as a musical form about relationships of men and women. The film then alternates between scenes involving Rae and her boyfriend Ronnie (played well by Justin Timberlake) and scenes involving Jackson. Lazarus meets his wife in a cafe hoping to repair their faltering marriage, but instead she tells him that she doesn't love him anymore and is leaving. In a later scene Lazarus' younger brother tries to talk to him in a bar—he is the person whom Lazarus' wife is leaving him for. Lazarus comes close to slitting his brother's throat with a broken beer bottle, so he is a man capable of violence, and his former life as a bluesman suggests that he is a man of talent as well as complications—now he is a farmer who takes his produce to town and sells it. He is so angry over his wife's departure that he plows under her rose garden and breaks apart furniture in their house.

Rae, on the other hand, is upset because Ronnie is leaving to join the army. They are not breaking up, but she seems pathologically upset about his departure and says she will not survive without him. Ronnie and Rae are codependent. Ronnie suffers anxiety attacks that only Rae can soothe. Rae is well known in the town for her sexual voraciousness. Everyone knows about her and the various diseases she has caught and passed on to others. In the early scenes of the film she is constantly coughing, as if she has a chronic illness such as TB, though later in the film she coughs not at all. Rae is what used to be called a nymphomaniac, and only Ronnie can satisfy her. We later learn that her problem stems from sexual abuse she suffered from her father. When Ronnie leaves, she runs amuck, taking drugs, getting drunk, playing football with most of her clothes missing, and having sex with a random man in the dirt. Ronnie's best friend offers to drive her home after a drunken evening and ends up trying to have sex with her—she rebuffs him and he beats her viciously, pushing her out of his pickup truck on to a dirt road, leaving her there in the middle of the night. Lazarus finds her the next morning and carries her into his house, where he undertakes to nurse her back to health—physically as well as spiritually.

At times Black Snake Moan wavers among being several different types of films—a film about the blues, about redemption, about the need for mutual dependence between the races, about social problems such as sexual abuse of children and its consequences. The notion of Rae's nymphomania seems not only a sexist cliché but also a hackneyed Freudian gimmick, not to mention a sensationalist ploy. Christina Ricci is a beautiful woman with an attractive body. For the first half of the film she appears frequently in various stages of undress. She compels one to view jean shorts in a new light. But the film's fascination with Ricci's body becomes fetichisist, voyeuristic—there is too much of it.

Why does Lazarus pick Rae up, take her back to his house, and try to "fix" her?—he's interested in doing this in a spiritual sense. Our first glimpses of him show him to be a man of potentially violent passions—he's angry and bitter and does not seem particularly pious. But as soon as he finds Rae on the road, he's interested in her soul. It's clear that at moments he's attracted to her in a different way, in a sexual way, but he always resists that attraction, even when she throws herself at him.

Black Snake Moan wants us to see Rae and Lazarus as kindred souls. It does not matter that he is black and she white, that she is young and beautiful and he is not, that she has a notorious reputation and he is respected. It matters that both have broken hearts, she from the departure of her boyfriend and from sexual abuse in her childhood, he because of the betrayal by his wife and brother.

Jackson is great in his part. But he's not wholly believable. His desire to redeem Rae isn't quite logical. Why does he want to help her? What specifically qualifies him to redeem her? How are we to view the fact that her presence in his house reawakens his interest in playing the blues—he takes her to a club where he plays publically for the first time in twenty years, and he plays well? Redemption works both ways.

Some reviewers criticize this film for using the stereotype of the wise old virtuous black man who helps save the needy white girl. The stereotype is there, but if the human realities of the film are vital enough, if the power of the script and the performances by the two actors are distinctive enough, the stereotype fades. Rae is a stereotype too, the nymphomaniacal white trash girl who sleeps with every man in town.

Black Snake Moan is about wounded people, wounded black and white people who need each other, sometimes, to recover from their lacerated emotional traumas. It is also, incidentally, about music, the blues. The film has a great soundtrack, and Samuel Jackson is very good in his role as a bluesmen. The film clips at the beginning and near the end that show Son Housie talking about the blues and their concern with relationships between men and women lead us to conclude that, in the context of this film, broken hearts, guilt and grief over the loss of love, are what white people and black people have in common and therefore are the reason why the blues serve as an effective metaphor and binding force for racial interdependence.

When Ronnie returns to town after being discharged from the army—his anxiety attacks prevented him from firing a rifle with accuracy—he finds Rae with Lazarus and threatens Lazarus with a pistol. Lazarus talks Ronnie out of shooting, him, essentially by provoking anxiety in him. Then he calls a preacher friend and arranges for Ronnie and Rae to marry. At the end of the film, when Ronnie has an anxiety attack driving with Rae down the road, sandwiched in between two large trucks, it is clear that life is going to be hard for both of them. Marriage is not going to solve their problems, but at least it provides a basis for struggling in the right direction.

The notion that the film presents African Americans as redemptive and soulful people capable of providing the spiritual support and guidance that white people need is clearly apparent in the final scenes. A black minister officiates; a young black teenager whom Rae seduced earlier in the film serves as best man; Lazarus and a woman from town in whom he has a romantic interest are present as witnesses. The only white people present are Rae and Ronnie.

In most small Southern towns that I know of, people like Rae and Ronnie wouldn't spend much time with black people. Racists don't typically associate with the race they hate. Rae sports a Confederate flag t-shirt early in the film; Ronnie calls Lazarus a "nigger." The film argues that the need for redemption drives Rae and Ronnie to seek the support that Lazarus and his preacher friend can provide. In Hustle & Flow Craig Brewer seemed to suggest as well that white and black people need each other, that they have more in common than they have differences. This may be one of his main themes, but it works better and makes more sense in Hustle & Flow (where economic survival is a motivating force) than it does in Black Snake Moan. The latter film does not offer convincing logical justification for Lazarus and his character and his desire to help Rae.

This is not to say that Black Snake Moan doesn't work as a film, only to argue that it does not consistently stand up to close scrutiny. Aspects of the film simply don't make sense. As a whole the different parts of the film don't cohere. One major plot strand seems unresolved—Ronnie's best friend tells him that he slept with Rae, and that Rae slept with others in town. For this betrayal, Ronnie simply tells his friend to leave. Although Ronnie confronts Lazarus with a gun—Lazarus the black man whom he believes has been sleeping with Rae—he does nothing to his best friend who betrayed him, just as Lazarus did not ultimately use the broken beer bottle on his brother.

The end of the film, with the reconciliation between Rae and Ronnie, the wedding, the helpful presence of the various African Americans who have brought about their redemption, seems contrived and sentimental. The fact that Rae and Ronnie face an uncertain future, and that Lazarus has a new love interest, doesn't make the ending more believable.

Black Snake Moan is powerful, moving, provocative, and disturbing. It's entertaining and emotionally fulfilling, but it's best not to think about it too carefully.

Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella

A novel about male wish fulfillment, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982) is a kind of adult fairy tale about a man who obeys the injunction of a voice what whispers various messages. The most famous message is "If you build it, they will come." Ray Kinsella is the novel's main character. He has a wife named Annie and a young daughter named Karin and both are perfect. Despite the fact that he is on the verge of bankruptcy throughout the novel, when Ray tells Annie that he wants to use valuable acreage to build a baseball field, she agrees. Later when he tells her that he wants to take a tour of various famous baseball fields in the Midwest and east, she agrees again. She never doubts his most foolish plans, and he is full of them. But the nature of the novel is that foolish plans are often the right plans.

Kinsella clearly loves baseball and sees it as a metaphor for the American Dream. If you don't see the aptness of the analogy, then the novel will not work for you. If you don't believe that J. D. Salinger, the reclusive novelist, would allow himself to be talked into leaving his home with Kinsella in order to see a baseball field where the famous members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox come back to life to play baseball again, then the novel is not for you. Shoeless Joe requires one to suspend disbelief on all sorts of levels. If you can do that, the experience is entertaining and sometimes moving. I'm a sucker for any novel that depicts the reunion of a son with his long-dead father.

The makers of the film Field of Dreams (1989) significantly simplified the narrative of the novel. Several characters are dropped (Ray's twin brother and the oldest living Chicago Cub, Eddie Scissors, who rents the farm to Ray). This was probably a good decision as it allowed the filmmakers to focus on the story of the baseball stadium in the cornfield, of Ray's devotion to baseball. In the film, J. D. Salinger has a different name, and his character is played by James Earl Jones. This was probably mandated by the threat of lawsuits from Salinger, who doesn't like any kind of intrusion into his privacy.

Both novel and film suggest that modern America and baseball have been corrupted by commercialism and big business. The farm where Ray builds his baseball field, surrounded by the fields of corn, contrasts with the concrete and the hustle and bustle of the cities where major league baseball is played. In this sense, Shoeless Joe is a latter day agrarian novel that longs for the good old days when men aspired to play baseball for the pleasure and the glory of the game, not for a high salary. It hearkens back to an earlier, better time. It also suggests, improbably, that bankruptcy can be staved off just by wishful thinking.

I was moved by this novel, and angered by it as well. Its insistence on being naïve and sentimental, its willed romanticism, its fatuous notion that the past was somehow better than the present, doesn't work for me. Kinsella argues that dreams are more important than realities, but without realities, dreams can never come true. Americans place much stock in dreams. Perhaps this is one of the points of the novel. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Americans sometimes can't see themselves for who they are, and why the United States too often gets into trouble. It can't see its own dark side.

2001 Maniacs

2001 Maniacs (2005) is a remake of the 1964 film 2000 Maniacs, once a cult classic because of violence and gore but now largely and fortunately forgotten. Why the remake? I don't have an answer. Neither the original nor the remake has any value, but they are still accessible for public viewing. Both are available on video, and the remake recently played on a cable channel. It follows the same basic plot as the original, and uses low-budget but more up-to-date technology to depict various acts of torture and violence and various body parts. The Plot: College students from the North who are headed to the beaches of Florida become lost in rural Georgia and accidentally wander into the lost village of Pleasant Valley, where a celebration is in progress which the students are invited to join. Citizens of the town systematically frighten, torture, maim, and kill the students, with cannibalism as the ultimate goal.

The film does place more emphasis on the revenge that the ghoulish citizens of Pleasant Valley are seeking against Yankee college students for atrocities allegedly committed against the town by rogue Union forces near the end of the Civil War. The town comes back to life once every year on the anniversary of the massacre. The desire of the townspeople for revenge will drive them, we're told, to torture, maim, and kill Yankee tourists until they have matched the death toll of the original massacre. Confederate flags are evident everywhere. Townspeople openly discuss their desire for revenge against the Yankees. The mayor wears an eye-patch with a Confederate flag on it. In one scene, as the townspeople prepare to slaughter and consume the last two surviving Yankee students, they stand around their intended victims and chant "The South will rise! The South will rise!"

A key early scene informs us of what this film is really up to: one of the college students plays his guitar and tries to keep up with the banjo-picking of a demented looking Pleasant Valley citizen. The scene recalls the famous dueling banjo sequence from Deliverance (1971). It enforces the notion that the South is full of genetic throwbacks and demented low-lifes, something the movie proceeds to confirm in numerous ways. The women are quick to doff their clothes and engage in sex that usually end in genital mutilation or acid drinking or other horrific events for the male participants. In another scene (taken from the original film) a young woman's arms and legs are tied to mules that her tormentor then swats with a branch, so that her limbs are torn from her body.

The South in 2001 Maniacs is a place of Gothic horror, supernatural terrors, demented goons, perverted and violent sex, and general ":Never Fergit" dimwittedness. The filmmakers count on the audience regarding this film as a joke, and that it is—but a sick joke. Even though only someone as limited in intelligence as the citizens of Pleasant Valley would take the film's depiction of the South seriously, it is easy enough for viewers willing to sit through the film to suspend disbelief and temporarily accept this depiction of an alien Other—a place that encourage the viewer's own sense of his or her civilized and refined superiority because it is not the viewer's place. It is the South, which by definition (at least this film's definition) accommodates the horrors of Pleasant Valley.

Why anyone would want to watch this film is beyond me. I fast-forwarded through most of it.

Idlewild

Idlewild (2006) focuses on two childhood friends, Rooster and Percival, and their diverging though related paths in life. One stays close to home and works in his father's funeral parlor, though he also nurses his musical talent and works on the side in a speakeasy. The other ends up running the speakeasy. These roles are played by the two main members of Outkast, Andre Benjamin and Big Boi. Both are great in their roles, especially Benjamin as Percival, the son of the undertaker.

Idlewild is distinguished by visual flair—flashy, frenetic dance numbers; an effective fusion of cinematography and music, an impressive use of digital effects that speed or slow the action, place emphasis on different characters, or lend tension to a scene. The music throughout is a major strength. In many ways the best music and dance sequence in the film comes during the closing credits, although there is a stunning sequence early in the film.

The film is set in a small Georgia town named Idlewild. It is just the opposite of the town associated with the New York airport formerly of the same name, though the club that is the center of the town—at least for the characters in the film—offers as much action as one could find anywhere in New York.

Idlewild did not receive particularly strong reviews. One reason may be that it seems something like a folktale or fairy story. It gives the effect of realism without being realistic—how could a nightclub like the one in this film exist in the remote hinterlands of rural Georgia in the early decades of the 20^th century? The film reminded me in ways of the folk ballad "Frankie and Johnny" and even of Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, which is like a folk or blues song set in high literary form. Idlewild brims with magical realism. One example is the flask of liquor that Rooster (Big Boi) carries with him throughout the film. It is emblazoned with the image of a rooster that talks to the owner of the flask throughout the film. Another example: when Percival looks at the pages of music he has composed, the notes become stick figures that walk and dance across the page. Several characters seem drawn deliberately larger than life: Terrence Howard as Trumpy is an especially vicious gangster who uses threats, violence, and murder to get what he wants. The musical styles of Outkast are laid on top of, combined with, musical styles of the time period of the film. The same is true of dance. In this sense the film suggests Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (2001), which combines dance and music styles from different time periods. There are scenes every bit as phantasmagorical in Idlewild as those in Moulin Rouge.

Another reason for the lack of critical acclaim may be that Idlewild might seem a film more of music, visual imagery, and style than of substance. Other recent African American films such as ATL and Stomp the Yard explored a number of contemporary issues important to African Americans: questions of class and economic tension, of assimilation, of personal responsibility. One can find those issues, by looking carefully, in Idlewild—one example is Percival's struggle to break out of his staid rut to assert himself as a musician and composer--but they are largely overwhelmed by the spectacle of the film. Spectacle, however, is no mean thing.

Idlewild begins with images of sepia-toned photographs of African American culture from early in the 20^th century. One of the points in these photographs is to make clear that the story about to be told is from the past, part of history, and as such is a part of African American tradition. I noticed a Eudora Welty photgraph in the sequence. In ways Rooster and Percival represent different aspects of the African American struggle for success and respectability in a predominantly white world (though there is virtually no evidence of that world in the film). Rooster at first chooses the life of a gangster, running whiskey and working in a speakeasy. Percival is attracted to the wild life, but sticks close to home, working for his father and playing piano in the speakeasy on the side. He represents loyalty to place and to family, to tradition, but only by breaking with these virtues in the end is he able to give full expression to his talent.

This may be the first major production directed by Bryan Barber. He apparently had his start as a director of Outkast music videos. He has much promise. Idlewild comes across as the work of an experienced and confident director. Cinematography is one of the film's strongest elements. It's immensely entertaining.

Idlewild is the best musical I've seen since Moulin Rouge.

Seraphim Falls

Seraphim Falls (2006) plies the tired notion that hostilities between North and South did not wane following the end of the Civil War. It does so by focusing on the efforts of Colonel Carver (Liam Neeson) to track and kill Captain Gideon (Pierce Brosnan). The film begins in medias res, as it were, with Gabriel high in the mountains of Colorado. A rifle shot wings him in the shoulder, and he runs down the mountain, apparently aware that he is being tracked. My son and I wagered over how long it would take for this film to offer a flashback that would begin to provide background information about why Carver is tracking Gabriel). My son bet 20 minutes; I bet 10. The first flashback came in 14 minutes, though it offered only brief images, and it is not until late in the film that a substantial flashback provides this information. That mystery is about the only genuine source of tension in the story, other than the question of whether Gabriel will escape or Carver will catch up with him.

The first half or more of the film is fairly naturalistic, following the efforts of Gabriel to escape and Carver to capture him. The narrative is episodic: at one time or the other Carver and Gideon meet a band of thieves, stop at the cabin of settlers, encounter, religious zealots in a wagon train, stop at a camp building a rail line, meet an Indian by a small pool of water, and finally, in the middle of what appears to be Death Valley, meet a woman selling miracle tonic (Angelica Huston). When first Gabriel and then Carver encounter the Indian, the film takes a somewhat surreal turn, and it occasionally seems to recall the films of Sergio Leone, and some of the earlier Eastwood films, by suggesting that these encounters may be allegorical and that it is the struggle of Carver and Gabriel to come to terms with the tragedies of their own lives that is the real focus of this cat and mouse game they are playing. (Gabriel lost his two sons on the same day during the Battle of Antietam; Carver's wife and children were killed in a fire accidentally set by Union soldiers). But the allegory is not very coherent and the film is largely turgid and without suspense. The film does not really draw distinctions between the characters of Carver and Gabriel. Carver is overwhelmed by the fate of his family. Gabriel is haunted by his past and presumably the deaths of his sons. But they could easily change places. The point of their conflict is not in their regional loyalties but rather in the intersection of private and random events that overcame them, events that they personalize and blame on each other.

Brosnan is good at huffing and groaning. Neeson hides his accent. Angelica Huston is effective but out of place.

The film ends in Death Valley—is there an echo here of the ending of McTeague, by Frank Norris?