The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) takes up where The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) left off, with a similar group of characters (differently named) and many of the same actors. It's another Wes Anderson story about a lovably depressive and dysfunctional family. The father died in an accident a year before the story begins. The mother has retreated to a monastery on a mountain top in India. Three brothers—Francis, Peter, and Jack Whitman—haven't spoken since the funeral. They unite for a "spiritual journey" that will eventually take them to their mother. They leave a moody sister back home. Angelica Huston, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and others from the Tenenbaums film make appearances here. Adrian Brody also appears as one of the brothers.

Much of the film takes place on a train making its slow and painful way across the Indian landscape. We spend a lot of time watching the brothers interact in their train compartment and outside the train as well. Francis , who organized the trip, is the controlling brother who passes out agendas for their trip. He tells his brothers where to sleep, asks to keep their passports, suggests what they may say and do. They chafe against his low-key controlling nature.

A lot of nothing happens. If you need a firmly defined plot, if you expect characters who confront specific challenges and difficulties, this film won't work for you. If you're comfortable with slowly developing scenes in which three unexpressive and off-kilter characters spend a lot of time walking around, saying a few words, smoking cigarettes or chugging cough syrup, having vague disagreements, bumping into one another, then this film will work.

The plot, such as it is, is considerably less obvious than it was in Tenenbaums or in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). For me, the lack of a plot, the formlessness, is the film's charm. It's difficult to imagine a more dysfunctional group of individuals than these three brothers. It's difficult to imagine their surviving in the real world. Yet we identify with them. Their dysfunctional natures are ones we connect with our own.

A key moment comes when the brothers see three boys on a raft use a rope to try to pull their way across a river. Their raft overturns and the boys fall in the water. The three brothers spring into action, each of them going after one of the struggling boys. Two of the boys are rescued, but one is swept away and killed. The brothers take the surviving boys and their dead brother to their home village. They take part in the funeral for the dead boy. This experience somehow becomes the basis of a transformation, though it is difficult to see exactly what the transformation is.

The brothers at last reach a kind of understanding with one another when they meet their mother at the mountain retreat. The conclusion of this film is similar to that in The Life Aquatic. You know something has happened, but you're not exactly sure what. In The Life Aquatic, Zissou has lost his son and in what amounts to a communal mourning he and his crew take their submarine deep into the ocean in search of the fabled jaguar shark. Their encounter with the shark is a kind of emotional resolution. In Darjeeling perhaps it is the young boy's death, and the brothers' participation in his funeral, that prepares them for their reunion with their mother, but the focus of the film's conclusion is vague, and you know only that the film is approaching an end because in some indefinable way it feels that way. The presence of a man-eating tiger nearby may also be involved, though we never encounter it. We only hear about it.

India provides an unconventional backdrop. The problems the brothers have with one another have little to do with the setting. But India provides an unusual kind of visual and cultural counterpoint to the self-absorbed brothers. They make little notice of the people and countryside around them. One of them has a brief encounter with a hostess in her compartment. Another has difficulties with the conductor, who finally throws the brothers off the train. He's especially upset when he discovers that one of them is carrying with him a poisonous snake—for reasons never explained. He forbids them to smoke on the train, and they keep ignoring him.

The death of the boy in the river is a tragic, disturbing moment. But the film underplays the episode in a flat, unsentimental, almost cinematically comatose way. We can tell only that the boy's father is grief-stricken. One might argue that the inexpressive reaction of the brothers constitutes in itself some kind of reaction. Or one might argue that their self-absorption is merely that—self-absorption, cultural narcissism, beyond which they cannot see.

I enjoyed this film, but Anderson has carried his lovable, dysfunctional families about as far as they can go.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) moves along with the steady pace of a metronome. You know what's coming every step of the way, no surprises, no revelations, just one stunt and effect and clue after another. This sequel features virtually all the same characters played by the same actors
as its predecessor National Treasure (2004). Both films are heavily influenced by the faux-thriller The Da Vinci Code and any number of much better films and novels of the 20^th century that use paranoid conspiracy narratives. The main character Ben Gates (Nicholas Cage) is told that his grandfather, whom he had long believed a patriot of the Civil War, was involved in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. Determined to vindicate family history, he sets out to discover the truth. He discovers a secret Confederate cabal that plotted the assassination and planned to start a second civil war funded with treasures hidden away in the deep recesses of Mt. Rushmore. Somehow the Masons are involved. The treasure consists of golden relics and Mayan temples somehow transported from Central America to South Dakota. Oh, and there's also a book of secrets, passed down from one president to the next, containing the truth about all the mysteries you ever wanted to know the truth of—flying saucers and Roswell, NM, Kennedy's assassination, etc. This film has the credibility of a third-rate comic book. The mystery behind the conspiracy unravels in a complicated and arbitrary way as Gates deciphers clues and puzzles and inscriptions—one of them on the desk of the president in the Oval Office of the White House. Gates even has to kidnap the President, briefly, who doesn't seem to mind. Everyone here seems to be going through the motions, even Ed Harris, who somehow made his way into the story as the villain. It's as if history itself isn't enough, and it's necessary to invent stories about Masonic conspiracies and hidden clues and hidden treasure. It's easy to sleep through long stretches of this film, rousing occasionally to check on the action, missing nothing.

Civilization: A New History of the Western World

Civilization: A New History of the Western World (2006) by Roger Osborne is a 500-page tour de force account of human history in the western hemisphere. Osborne regards his story not as a series of separate episodes but rather as a continuous narrative. There are obvious highpoints, here and there—the Roman Empire, for instance—but Osborne gives an impressively full account. A pervasive theme is the tendency of western nations to attempt to impose themselves—their values and cultures—on nations they conquer or influence. This tendency accounts for the success of many western states and at the same time explains such atrocities as the murder of native inhabitants of the two American continents and the extermination of Jews and others prior to and during the Second World War.

This well written book covers not merely political and military developments but cultural and artistic ones as well.

Among the more interesting arguments advanced by Osborne are his contentions that the middle ages were never really dark at all but a period of significant human activity. Only in the last half of the medieval period do we find reason for any of the notions associated with the so-called Dark Ages. He also suggests that western civilization is primarily a Germanic affair, not a Greco-Roman one. Osborne's account of the history and influence of the Christian church, and of the influence of philosophers such as Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, Kant, and others on the evolution of the Western mind, are particularly interesting.

As he moves towards the present day, Osborne's account becomes increasingly grim. With its rationalist tendency towards self-justifications, with the rise of modern capitalism and the nationalist ideologies that fueled it, the West in his eyes seems bound towards some future apocalyptic moment of self-immolation, a moment somewhere just beyond Osborne's grasp, which at last comes to rest as he approaches the present moment.

Under Osborne's gaze, under the gaze of any historian taking such a broad and comprehensive view, history seems not so much a human story as a relentless natural force in which the lives and fates of millions of individuals seem to matter not much at all. Great leaders rule for a time and then pass from the scene. Nations rise and fall. Multitudes are born and live their lives and die. Under this force, the notion that individuals can have a role in determining the course of events seems fatuous.

Mandingo

Incest, bloody fights, hangings, sex, rape, whippings, miscarriage, alcohol, prostitutes, a man boiled alive, sexual repression, adultery, slave rebellion, depravity, decadence, cruelty, racism, decaying old mansions, mint juleps.

Mandingo (1975) is the obverse of Gone with the Wind (1939). In one Southern plantation family it embeds the whole of the institution of slavery, both as it was and as people believe it was. Mandingo serves as antidote to decades of films that extol the virtues of the Old South and ignore the dark realities of slavery. Yet as a portrait of history, it is no more reliable and accurate than the views it seeks to correct. The real intent of Mandingo is not corrective. It is prurient, sensationalist, and exploitative. Within a two-hour span, it manages to include every fact and myth imaginable about slavery and the Old South. Who knows what to believe when this film is over?

Mandingo presents a world in which plantation owners regard slaves as animals without souls. They discuss slaves as they would discuss sheep or cattle. They talk about how to breed slaves—the woman are called "breeders." Slave children are "suckers." They execute slaves who run away too often and poison those too old to work. The white male owners exercise total control over the lives and bodies of slaves. They have sex with the women whenever they like, and in fact Hammond's father (played by James Mason) explains to a young slave girl that she should feel honored to have her first sexual experience with her owner's son: "It's Master's duty to pleasure the wenches first time!" Men have "bed wenches" who give them the kind of sex their white wives are supposedly too frail and innocent to offer. Yet white women are shown as sexually repressed too.

Falconhurst is the plantation where much of the film occurs. It is located in Louisiana, somewhere between Memphis and New Orleans. Compared to other plantations, it's a pretty run-down affair, and perhaps this is supposed to imply that the Maxwells are an exception to the mythic Southern rule of leisure and gentility and beauty. Mrs. Maxwell died years before, and the place has lacked a mistress as a result. The implication is that when a new young mistress comes on the scene, she will motivate Hammond and his father to fix the place up. To do that, they will need money, and to get money they will have to sell slaves, which they never hesitate to do.

Hammond Maxwell, the son at Falconhurst, the plantation in this film, has a game leg. He is portrayed as a kind exception to the norm among slave owners. He dislikes the mistreatment of slaves. He truly loves the slave girl Blanche who becomes his "bed wench" after he buys her in New Orleans. He tells her that she will always belong to him, that no one can take her away from him. He promises that when their child grows up he will set him free. He disapproves when his cousin spanks the slave girl he has been given by a host to spend the night with. He treasures and respects Mede, the husky male slave he buys in New Orleans and who proves to be a vigorous fighter. He doesn't like to see families broken up at slave auctions. Despite all these exceptions, Hammond believes in slavery, is upset when he discovers that one of the house slaves can read, happily leads slaves off to be sold in Memphis, is enraged to the point of madness when he discovers that his wife has had sex with and become pregnant by Mede (she does this to get revenge on her husband and his bed-wench), whom he does not hesitate to murder.

Not surprisingly, slaves in the film lead a double-life. They have no choice but to accept the sexual exploitation the women suffer. They are subservient in front of whites, and more assertive, more "normal" among themselves. Out of hearing of the whites, they argue with each other as to how subservient they should be. Moke in particular is accused of trying to ingratiate himself to Hammond for his willing participation in arranged fights. He is accused by another slave, the rebellious Cicero, of turning against his "black brother." On the other hand, no one blames Blanche for loving Hammond. The movie doesn't explicitly address the fact that she has no choice but to submit to him. He tells her that he will leave her alone if that is what she wants--she responds that she wants to give him pleasure. That Hammond doesn't want to force Blanche to have sex does not mitigate the fact that as her owner he can do with her as he likes—he has the power, whether or not he uses it.

Mandingo pays much attention to racial and sexual double standards among white characters. Hammond becomes upset on his wedding night when he discovers that his wife has already had sex—she is not a virgin (at the age of 13, she later tells him, she had sex with her brother). Yet Hammond himself has been having sex with black women for years. He tells his wife, before they have sex for the first time, that he does not know how to behave with a white woman—he has only been with black women. His father has warned him that white women don't like sex and won't do for their husbands what black women are willing to do. (Black women are invariably referred to as "wenches.") In the world of Mandingo, it is accepted and expected that white men will have sex with prostitutes and with black women, that black women will have sex with the white men who own them, but that white women will have sex (infrequently) only with their husbands and only after marriage. Hammond's father tells him that he will need his "bed wench" after he marries because the black woman will relieve the white wife of having to "submit." White women, of course, cannot have sex with black men.

The primary white woman in the film is Blanche, Hammond's cousin, whom his father more or less arranges for him to marry. Once he discovers she is not a virgin, he wants nothing to do with her. She grows increasingly frustrated, especially as he continues to spend time with Blanche. At one point, while Hammond is away, she whips Blanche and pushes her down the stairs, resulting in the loss of the child Blanche is carrying. Ultimately, she forces Mede to have sex with her by telling him that if he refuses she will tell Hammond that he raped her. This is her way of getting revenge on Hammond.

At the end of the film, Hammond is forced to confront the fact that whether or not he has been a less abusive and oppressive slave master than others, he is still a slave master and capable of committing all the atrocities the role implies. Just before Hammond shoots him, Mede tells him, "I thought you was better than the white man, Masta. But you is just white!"    

One problem with this film (among the many) is historical accuracy. I do not doubt that in the abstract everything this film argues about slavery is true—that it places white owners in a position of total control over the slaves they owned. Slaves had no freedom, no control over their own lives. Many were mistreated and suffered horribly. Many slave owners took advantage of their position and had sex with and children by their female slaves. There is no doubt that slavery dehumanized both the owners and the enslaved. But did all slave-owners--or even most of them--behave as the Maxwells behave in this film? Is there any evidence that slave owners openly bragged about their relationships and offspring with slave women? Would their wives have tolerated such discussion? Would gentlemanly rules of decorum have permitted such discussion? We have ample historical evidence to document that many slave owners did sleep with their slaves, including the DNA evidence that shows Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemming, whom he may or may not have loved, and who may or may not have loved him. But Jefferson left no written comments on this relationship. There is ample evidence of such relationships throughout the slave-owning South. But to what extent is Mandingo a representative portrait of the peculiar institution? And how many white women in the 1840s—the wives of plantation owners—would try to seduce male slaves? There is certainly no evidence this was a common occurrence. Once again, when a film attempts to portray history or to correct inaccurate portrayals of history, should there be an obligation to portray fact? Or should filmmakers have license to give any version of events they want, in order to serve a particular political bias or to satisfy the sensationalist desires of their audience? Any discussion of the weaknesses and flaws in this film—the excessive melodrama, the unremarkable plot, the poor acting—must include the issue of historical inauthenticity.

Mandingo is beautifully filmed. The music is written by Maurice Jarré. The music is particularly tender in the scenes between Blanche and Hammond, suggesting that what we are seeing is a romantic relationship between two lovers--an oversimplification and distortion of the true situation. Music and visual beauty simply contribute to the overall distortions that the film presents.

The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible (1995), loosely based on a novel written by John Kennedy Toole when he was 16 years old, is a stagey, doleful, impressionistic account of a young boy's life in a torn and eccentric family in the early 1940s. If Toole is in any sense identifiable with the young protagonist of the story, then perhaps we can infer that the novel and film tell us something about the nature of his life with his own mother. But that is speculation at best.

Placed in Georgia (the credits say it was filmed on location in Madison, Crawfordville, and Atlanta), the film is contrived and artificial. It lacks life, has little to say, other than implying that life in the 1940s South was repressive. We see the boy's father (played by an unrecognizable Dennis Leary) take him to a lynching. There are several scenes involving church and revival services where the emphasis falls on sin and hellfire damnation. In one voiceover that accompanies a scene of people sitting in church, the protagonist explains that in his town you had to be like everyone else or you had to leave town—there was no alternative. The film's title is perhaps suggests the repressive atmosphere of the world in which the boy grew up.

The scenes seem to shift back and forth in time, to some extent, although the overall movement of the narrative is chronologically forward. Ostensibly, the film focuses on the arrival in the family of Aunt Mae, the older sister of the boy's mother. She is played by Gene Rowlands, who is too old for the part, but who nonetheless plays it well. Mae is a singer and performer who left the stage for reasons unspecified. She spends much of the film reminiscing about her days on the stage and the men who courted her. As the boy's mother sinks deeper and deeper into mental illness, Mae is the boy's confidante and companion. Her departure towards the end of the film traps him, since his mother has to be watched on a 24-hour basis, forcing him to quit his job as a drugstore clerk.

There are some contrived set pieces in the film, one at a revival service and another at a World War II-era fundraiser where Mae sings. There are scenes in which the camera lingers for long seconds and perhaps minutes on random images—for instance, the dark, cavernous entrance to the tent where a revival is taking place. These scenes suggest the impact of the past, of the boy's memories, perhaps, but they add to the awkward, pretentious character of the film. They seem purposeless. They take up time rather than move the film forward or somehow enhance the portrayal of a character or the evocation of a mood,.

The film is slow and melodramatic. The boy's parents argue and fight. His father doesn't want Aunt Mae in the house. They have no money. We watch the mother gradually lose her mind—we see several scenes of her suffering, mainly evinced by her tendency to cry at revivals and public gatherings. Does she go mad because of a repressive family life, because of her husband's death in the war, because of competition with the more outgoing Mae? The movie doesn't suggest a reason—it simply illustrates. The boy makes tentative but unsuccessful attempts to be friends with girls. Finally, when Mae announces she is leaving to take what she hopes will be a job in Nashville, the boy is trapped. He returns home from the train station where he has told Mae goodbye to find his mother collapsed and bleeding on the upper store of their house. Instead of calling for a doctor, he drags her into the bedroom and puts her on a bed, where he lovingly embraces her while she goes about dying. Is this intentional, his failure to seek medical help? In the novel, the boy kills his mother. In the film, after the mother dies and while he is burying her, a local preacher arrives to cart his mother off to the mental asylum. The boy kills him with a shot gun.

The whole film is told retrospectively, as the boy sits in a train car riding towards an undetermined destination. He looks out an empty dark window and remembers the scenes that the film dramatizes. To my knowledge, this film was never released in wide distribution. The New York Times review describes the film's British director Terence Davies as "a gifted cinematic poet whose semi-autobiographical films 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Long Day Closes' present a child's-eye view of growing up in Liverpool in the late 1940s and 50s, Davies uses film like Proust's madeleine to recapture the past. Storytelling is wound around a montage of images and songs that have a mystical personal resonance." The same method seems evident here, but for whatever reason—the fact that Davies is not working with his own life, the tentativeness of the novel, his own unfamiliarity with the setting of the story, it doesn't work.

The Story of Temple Drake

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) takes the dark Southern Gothic of William Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary and transmutes it into a 1930s gangster story. Faulkner's novel itself is not "Southern" in a conventional sense. There is the small Southern town in which Temple Drake and other characters reside, and there is Lee Goodwin's home, the "Old Frenchman's" plantation house, which the film portrays as half-collapsed and wholly decayed. In the novel, the South provides a background against which the characters move and talk. But the novel's story of physical and moral corruption is no more dependent on the Southern setting than it would be dependent on New York if it were set there, or on Los Angeles, or Chicago. The Southern setting helps explain certain mannerisms and accents of the characters, and it provides a sordid context for the motley crew of characters who hover in and around Lee Goodwin's house. One could argue that the Old Frenchman's place is the novel's symbol of a decadent and vanished Old South. Finally, the South in the novel with its tradition of vigilante justice and of privilege for the wealthy and disadvantage for the poor helps explain the horrific conclusion of the novel.

The film gives us a few Southern accents, mixed in with Chicago and British accents. Some black servants and the house where Lee Godwin's crew lives alert us to the Southern setting. But the film is not really about the South.

In a number of ways the film replicates important aspects of the novel. Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins) remains a central point of interest, as do Lee Goodwin and his wife Ruby Lamar. The film changes Popeye's name to Trigger, and Horace Benbow becomes Stephen Benbow, a former spurned flame of Temple's. Temple's dangerous flirting personality, the way she entrances men with the offer and then the refusal of her sexuality, is largely present in the film. (Made before the advent of the Production Code, the film's frank treatment of sexuality, even if by implication and innuendo, is still surprising). We can glimpse the trappings of Faulkner's novel, even if ultimately we realize there is only slight substance behind them.

Sanctuary is about the moral and physical corruption of its characters, specifically of Horace Benbow, Temple Drake, and others. Its story is unrelentingly despairing and pessimistic, and it savagely destroys most of its characters. Horace himself is complex, self-deceived, and unlikeable. His attraction to beautiful women, his fascination with the sexuality of women, is a motivating force in his defense of Lee Goodwin (whose wife Ruby he wants, just as he wants his wife's daughter, even as he wants his sister). This is a frequently seen character type in Faulkner—the deluded male who thinks he is doing good when in fact what he is doing is trying to steal another man's wife). In the film, Benbow is a young lawyer attempting to do the right thing. He is earnest and moral and lacks any fixation on young women at all. Faulkner's novel is also about the corrupting force of female sexuality—a force that corrupts men as well as women. Temple is the prime agent of this force. She is a flirtatious flapper, a vacuous Southern belle who flaunts beauty and sex and who once she experiences sex through her brutal experience of rape cannot have enough of it. She is Faulkner's paragon example of a woman corrupted by her own sexuality. Faulkner's treatment of female sexuality is complex and multilayered. Sanctuary is one of the novels critics turn to in order to label Faulkner a misogynist.

The Story of Temple Drake is about a woman redeemed. The film seems to agree with the novel that Temple's reckless and flirtatious behavior placed her in the way of rapists like Trigger, and it suggests as well that she enjoys what happens to her. Even before the rape, she tells Stephen Benbow that there is an evil side to her—she seems to imply that she is incapable of virtue. This is the film's way of suggesting her nymphomania, her inability to be satisfied with any one man. For this reason, she suggests to Stephen, she rejects his proposal of marriage, even though she claims to like and even to love him. So Temple in the film is possessed of a moral self-awareness not allowed her character in the novel. The film provides Temple with a number of opportunities to redeem herself, each of which she seizes. The first comes when Stephen barges into the room where Trigger is staying with Temple at Miss Reba's whore house. Stephen is shocked to find her there and assumes she is a prisoner. But Temple, who knows that Trigger is ready to shoot Stephen, lies and tells him she is there willingly. Shortly after Stephen leaves, she prepares to abandon Trigger, and when he stands in her way, striking her and telling her that he is not through with her, she shoots him. This is her second opportunity for redemption. And her third is when she testifies on the witness stand in Lee Goodwin's trial that she saw Trigger kill Tommy, revealing in the process that she was raped and that she killed Trigger. This moment of personal and social disgrace is her final act of self-redemption. She saves Goodwin at the cost of her own reputation. She then collapses. As Stephen carries her out of the courtroom, he turns to her grandfather Judge Drake and tells him that "You should be proud of her. I know I am." The film ends.

This hackneyed and corny cinematic ending contrasts markedly with the triple conclusion of the novel—Lee Goodwin's lynching, Popeye's hanging, and Temple's grim appearance in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris. It's difficult to think of a grimmer, more disturbing, more apt conclusion for any American novel than this one.

The film captures the shock value of the novel but ignores or fails to understand the reasons for the shock—the moral hollowness of the characters and of their world. Sanctuary condemns its world, while The Story of Temple Drake confirms that in the world it portrays virtue always wins out.

Both Sanctuary and The Story of Temple Drake seem to be premised on the notion that small Southern towns are threatened by the invasion of big-city evils—gangsters, sex, crime, violence—though it is well worth pointing out that those menaces were really there to begin with, just hidden away, unacknowledged, called by other names.

Be Kind, Rewind

"Be Kind, Rewind" is the name of the video store in Passaic, NJ, where this eponymously named 2008 film is set. The store specializes in tapes, not DVDs, and business is not booming. When the owner goes to attend an anniversary commemoration of the death of his idol Fats Waller, he leaves his assistant Mike (Mos Def) in charge. A whacked out mechanic named Jerry (Jack Black) who lives in a trailer nearby convinces Mike to help him sabotage the local power plant. When their plot goes awry, Jerry is magnetized, and the next time he walks into the video store, his magnetism erases all the tapes. In a panic, and with customers demanding to rent tapes, Jerry and Mike decide to make and rent their own versions of the erased films. Their films, which they refer to as "sweded" versions of the originals, become a hit with the store's clientele.

This highly improbable plot is the center of the highly improbable comedy, which is made in as loose and casual and even careless way as the sweded films of Jerry and Mike. It doesn't try to be realistic or adhere to rules of logic—it simply takes the idea and runs with it. It's like an extended skit in a high school play. Everyone in the film is eccentric. The store owner, played by Danny Glover, who looks as if he is playing the same character he played in The Royal Tenenbaums, has convinced Mike (whom he apparently raised) that the store is located in the birthplace of Fats Waller. He never tells Mike the truth because he doesn't want to disappoint him. Jerry is a conspiracy-paranoiac who sleeps in an aluminum foil helmet to avoid radiation from the nearby power plant. Customers who patronize the video store haven't yet switched over to DVDs—they're clinging to the obsolescent format of the past. Developers want to raze the decrepit building where the video store is located and build condos in its place. Mia Farrow appears in the film as a woman who can't tell the difference between the real film Ghostbusters and the version that Mike and Jerry make on their own and rent to her. Everything and everyone in the film is threatened with obsolescence.

Be Kind Rewind pays homage to the American romance with films, and with the American obsession with celebrity and fame. It shows characters trying to rise above the quiet and desperate anonymity of their lives. In their final sweded film, the only one they make up on their own, Mike and Jerry produce a film biography of Fats Waller. They enlist all the customers who patronize the store as actors and crew.

In the end, Be Kind Rewind can't quite pull off the trick that it plays. But it's an entertaining and charming effort.

Sigourney Weaver appears in a bit role as a Hollywood lawyer who accuses Mike and Jerry of copyright infringement. She is, of course, one of the stars of the Ghostbusters films.

The Invasion

There have been so many remakes of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers that perhaps we should declare a new genre: body snatcher remakes. This new one, The Invasion (2007), features Nicole Kidman as Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist who becomes suspicious when patients start claiming that their husbands or wives aren't who they used to be. She enlists the aid of a friend, Ben Driscoll, played by Daniel Craige, and of some scientists who are investigating the phenomenon of people who believe their loved ones have been replaced by cold and emotionless simulacra.

Of the various remakes I've seen, this is the weakest. It borrows from the other versions, especially the 1956 and 1978 models, and these borrowings are really the only reasons why this movie works much at all. It offers nothing new, except for a different kind of conclusion, one that hardly improves on any of the predecessors.

This "invasion" is an infection by intelligent microorganisms brought back to earth by a space shuttle that disintegrates during reentry—for reasons never entirely clear we're told that those aboard intentionally caused the shuttle to crash. The scenes of the shuttle disaster are uncomfortably close to those of the 2003 Columbia tragedy. (I am not one to complain about bad taste, especially in the cause of a good film or book, but in this case I have no such defense.) The disaster leaves a 300-mile swatch of contagion across the continent, and the infection spreads.

In the earlier films, alien forces infected the bodies of humans and caused pods to begin growing that gradually came to maturity and replaced the bodies of the poor souls infected. The mechanism here isn't so clear. Infected people chase down the uninfected and vomit contagion on them. The intelligent germs take hold and begin growing. The agent takes over when the infected person goes to sleep. But whether pods or alternative bodies are involved is hard to tell. At one point Kidman's character finds some bodies growing in a closet, but whether they belong to people already infected, or whether they will replace the victims' bodies, isn't clear.

There are some astounding logical leaps in this film. Number one among them is the declaration by one of the scientists, fairly early in the film, that, based on scanty evidence, he's convinced that intelligent alien microorganisms are taking over the world. And the ease with which the scientists find a cure for the alien pestilence is equally hard to swallow. Most astounding and fortuitous of all is the source of the serum used to develop the cure.

Everything in this film is predictable. We have scenes of paranoia and of frightened people and of menace and horror. But these scenes come straight from the earlier films—they're updated here, but without any freshness. It's convenient that everyone concerned about the invasion succeeds (or nearly so) in escaping infection. By the end of the film they've discovered an antidote that not only immunizes the uninfected but reverses the infection in those who already have it. This is a feel-good body snatcher film!

In the other films, the endings were dark and pessimistic—with a few survivors lost amongst the multitudes of those whose bodies have been untimely snatched away. There was a wondrous and dismal pessimism to these endings. The best among them, the 1956 version, ends with the main character screaming hysterically about the alien takeover, but no one believes him. In this film, we have a happy ending. It made me want to vomit—no, not that way.

Becoming Jane

I watched 39 minutes of Becoming Jane (2007), until the DVD player began to skip and stutter, and the whole entertainment ground to a halt. From the first scenes, I wanted to ask: "How do we know how people lived their private lives? How do we know how they behaved, what they thought, how they passed their time?" For Jane Austen, we know little. There are her writings, some letters, some biographies based on second- and third-hand accounts. But there is little else. Her novels may have been to some extent autobiographical, though attempting to reach conclusions about a writer's life based on fictional novels is always risky if not reckless. Austen lived with her poverty-stricken family deep in the English countryside, in Steventon, Hampshire. She never married. For all we know she never had a love affair or even felt love for another soul outside her family group. The novels came from somewhere, of course. She must have been a deeply imaginative and perceptive woman.

For me, there is not a true note in this film, at least in the first 39 minutes of it. Every detail, every image, every glance, every small act or behavior, seems false and artificial. The film gives us Jane Austen's era as viewers in the first decade of the 21st century want to envision it. Jane in the film is a frustrated and ambitious writer, young and earnest, always scribbling away while her sisters worry about potential suitors and clothing and her mother toils away at housework. Jane speaks out. She is witty and ironic, she holds herself apart from the rest of her family and their crowd, she feels smothered and stultified without even knowing that she feels so.

A young man named Tom LeFroy studying for the bar in London is sentenced by his uncle for ungentlemanly behavior to live for a time in the country with his cousins. Jane catches his eye. He lectures her on the necessity of widening her experience so that she can be a better writer. He suggests she read Tom Jones, and she does with much avidity. I suppose the novel will inspire her at some point after the 39^th minute (though Fielding and Austen have virtually nothing in common). I suppose some sort of relationship with this man will provide the catalyst that makes her a great writer. If I make it to the 40^th and 41^st minute, perhaps I'll find out.

This film is earnest and high-toned. It reveals nothing about the mystery of Jane Austen's life and novels. It speculates and imagines and leaves us gaping, grasping. Anne Hathaway as Jane can be appealing and earnest, but she cannot act, and she never for a moment convinces me that she connects meaningfully with Jane Austen, and I know virtually nothing about Jane Austen.

. . .

Well, I did watch the rest of the film. It was better than I had anticipated. The film does a good job of taking elements from Austen's novels—details, character-types, events—and weaving them into the story it tells of Jane's early life—implying that she created her novels by drawing from her own life, which she undoubtedly did to an extent. I am still suspicious of the film's authenticity and of Hathaway's portrayal of Jane. The idea that Austen may have had some sort of friendship or bond with Tom LeFroy, while based on sketchy information and a comment from LeFroy himself that he had loved Austen, though in a "boyish" way, is mainly fictional speculation. In the film, LeFroy and Jane fall in love and elope. But on their way to be married Jane discovers that LeFroy (who will be disowned by his uncle for the elopement) supports his impoverished mother and sisters in Ireland with the allowance his uncle gives him. She refuses to go on with the marriage and returns to her family home. The film portrays this act of self-sacrifice as the event that made her into the writer she became (although she is already at work in the film on the book that she would later revise into Pride and Prejudice).

So the image this film puts forth for our consideration is that of a noble and suffering artist who gives up the man she loves for the welfare of his family. We all want our artists to be noble and better than we are. In this case, the story is largely invented and involves some events (the elopement, for instance) that almost certainly did not occur. Again, the film gives us the Jane Austen that our modern era wants to envision without telling us much about the historical person or about the motives that enabled her as a writer.

In the Valley of Elah

In the Old Testament, David fought and vanquished Goliath in the Valley of Elah. That valley is the metaphoric setting for In the Valley of Elah (2007; dir. Paul Haggis). In a sense this film is about the war in Iraq, though most of the action takes place in the United States. A father receives a phone call informing him that his son has gone AWOL. The father doesn't even know his son has returned from Iraq. He feels he knows his son well. He is sure the boy wouldn't go AWOL, and that there will be a good reason for this misunderstanding. He drives to the Army base where the boy is stationed, two days away, and starts looking for him. Tommy Lee Jones plays the father, Paul Deerfield, a former military detective who in retirement drives trucks and hauls loads of gravel.

In his characteristic way Tommy Lee Jones plays the father as an expressionless but likable man who takes charge. He assures his wife that he'll find their boy and that he doesn't need her help. Jones doesn't play Deerfield as a man capable of great depths of introspection. He's a man who lives on the surface. He's never had to question himself or his actions or his relationship with his sons, or with his wife for that matter. He's never questioned how he raised his sons or the pleasure he feels in their military service. He believes without question in the Bible story he reads to a young boy in the film—the story of David and Goliath.

Deerfield and his wife had two sons. Their older son was killed in a military helicopter accident 10 years before. Michael, the AWOL soldier, is the surviving child.

There are a number of different ways to look at this film. It is a detective story about the search for a missing son and about the search for the murderers when the son turns up dead. It is also about parents and their children, about the responsibility parents bear for the people their children become. And it's about parents coping with a son's death. It's true that in this film the boy doesn't die in Iraq. But he dies as a result of Iraq--that much is clear. But that much is not entirely relevant either.

Deerfield's self-confidence and certainty that he can find his boy are quickly challenged. He no longer knows anyone at the military base where he once worked. The Army believes his AWOL son is blowing off steam after his return from Iraq and that he will surface soon. The father seeks help from the local police, but they regard the missing soldier as a military problem. He tries to trace the boy's movements and is only moderately successful. Then the boy's body turns up on an isolated road outside town--chopped into pieces and burned.

Some time ago I read a comment that cited In the Valley of Elah as an example of how films about the war in Iraq are not marketable or popular. I'm not sure Iraq is the reason for this film's lack of popularity. The target audience for most popular films is the 18- to 25-year-old age bracket. This film is about a father and his search for his lost boy, about the father's search to discover who his boy really was, a boy he never really knew. The film demands that you watch it from a perspective totally foreign to the target demographic audience. You have to be a parent with adult children living independently outside the home to understand this film. What do parents really know about their adult children? Most parents love and idolize their children. They are not always prepared for those moments when they discover that their children might have become something different than what they hoped for or expected. They especially are not prepared for the discovery that they're the ones who made their children into the strange and unfamiliar beings who shock them. This is certainly the case with Hank Deerfield.

Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as Deerfield. I thought he was good in No Country for Old Men, but he is even better here. Charlize Theron is also effective in her role as a police detective who befriends Jones and assists in investigating his son's disappearance. She occupies her own Valley of Elah. She's the only woman on the police force, and the other detectives believe she slept her way into her current position. She's unwilling to say whether this is true. There is some kind of relationship she apparently had with the chief of police. She's recently divorced, and she admits that her son was not fathered by her ex-husband. Much of this seems totally irrelevant to the point of the film. It's enough to know that she's a woman, an excellent detective, and that the police force for which she works is dominated by men who take every opportunity to make fun of her.

To Hank Deerfield, the Valley of Elah is the stolid and impenetrable wall of the military, which resists his investigation into the mystery of his son's disappearance and death. It's that gap of understanding between himself and his missing son—the son he thought he knew and who he learns he didn't know well at all. It's the gap of understanding between himself and the identity of his son's killers. It's that knowledge he comes to grasp of his responsibility for the man his son became in Iraq. It's the realization he comes to about his failure, in a crucial moment, to understand certain facts his son was trying to convey to him.

When Deerfield learns who murdered his son, the discovery seems incidental. The discovery at the heart of this film brings knowledge he has to live with for the rest of his life.

Susan Sarandon is excellent as Deerfield's wife, Joan.

An awkward element is the series of video clips Deerfield finds on his son's damaged cell phone. They are jerky and corrupt and difficult to watch. At first they make no sense, but as Deerfield assembles information about his son, he begins to understand what the images convey. Their use in the film seems an unnecessary gimmick.

In the Valley of Elah is a very fine film.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

I asked my youngest son whether I should see Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008). His answer was clear: I shouldn't see the film. He said he didn't even want to think about the possibility that I might see it and didn't want to know if I did.

This is an intermittently amusing, occasionally hilarious film. In this sequel to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), our multicultural stoner heroes are recovering from an epic feast of hamburgers. They decide to take a trip to Amsterdam so that Harold can hook up with a girlfriend whose acquaintance he made at the end of the first film. Midway across the Atlantic Ocean, Kumar is spied trying to light a homemade bong by an old woman already convinced he and his friend are terrorists. Kumar and Harold are arrested and accused of bring terrorists who are trying to blow up the plane. They are sent to Guantanamo Bay, which the film depicts as one of the veritable pits of hell. The prison guards are glowering, towering buffoons who expect inmates to service them with oral sex on command. Harold and Kumar manage to escape soon after they arrive, and the remainder of the picture consists of a series of sometimes funny sketches about their efforts to get to Texas, where Kumar's former girlfriend is about to marry. He wants to prevent the wedding and at the same time prove that he and Harold are not terrorists.

One of the funniest parts of the movie involves a drive through Alabama, which neither Harold nor Kumar has ever visited. Not surprisingly, this part of the film makes comedy out of stereotypes about Southerners. First Harold and Kumar drive into the middle of a group of large hulking African American men playing basketball. When the men approach with threatening looks on their faces, Harold and Kumar assume they're going to be beaten up or worse. They jump out of their car and run away. Instead, we learn, the men were planned to ask Harold and Kumar if they could be of assistance. In another scene, they are surprised by the hospitality and friendliness of a young Southern couple that takes them in. The film seems to be suggesting that stereotypes about Southern rednecks are wrong. Yet it turns out that the couple is the incarnation of those stereotypes--they are a married brother and sister. The freakish product of their union is locked in the basement—a one-eyed monster. Later Harold and Kumar find themselves at a Ku Klux Klan meeting, listening to Klansmen trade stories about how they have mistreated minorities.

In the penultimate scene of the film, after Harold and Kumar have been recaptured by Homeland Security agents and sent on their way back to Guantanamo Bay, they overpower their guards and parachute out of the plane. They fall through the roof of a house in Plano, Texas, that happens to belong to President George W. Bush. The boys become friends with Bush--they toke up with him in his garage and trade stories about their difficult parents. Bush grants them a full pardon and also makes it possible for Kumar to get to his girlfriend's wedding in time to stop the proceedings.

The humor in this film is often gross but also broad and relatively gentle. The film exploits every opportunity it can find for comedy, but unfortunately this isn't often enough. Much of the film is just plain silly, aimed at a college-age audience that doesn't have especially high standards for humor. In particular the film doesn't exploit the potential for satire aimed at racial and ethnic stereotypes. After all, Harold is Korean and Kumar is Indian. There are only a few moments of such satire. In one, an African-American airport security guard mistakes Kumar for a potential terrorist because of his dark skin. Maybe this is supposed to be ethnic profiling in reverse.

Despite the title, there is not much political satire either. George Bush comes off as buffoonish but sympathetic. The film aims its most biting satire at the Homeland Security agents who trail Harold and Kumar. The vice-director of the Homeland Security agents is an ignorant clown who is constantly jumping to illogical conclusions even when the obvious truth stares him in the face. One example comes when Harold's parents speak to him in very clear English: he thinks he's hearing Korean. Yet the broad slapstick nature of this satire strips it of any real power or impact. The film is serious about its humor, but not so serious about any political message.

So, despite my son's warnings, I saw Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. And I think I recognized the scenes he was worried about.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008, dir. Alex Gibney) narrates the life and career of new journalist Hunter S. Thompson. The film pays appropriate homage to Thompson while at the same time maintaining a certain objectivity as well. It divides Thompson's career into halves. The first begins in the early 1960s and continues on through Thompson's early magazine journalism to his book, Hell's Angels to his fantastic and outrageous novelistic screed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971)
to his wonderful manic articles on the 1972 presidential campaign to his 1974 Rolling Stone article on a speech that Jimmy Carter gave at a Law Day convocation at the University of Georgia. The latter article helped make Jimmy Carter nationally famous and paved the way towards his successful bid for the presidency. The second half of Thompson's career begins with a trip he was assigned to take to Zaire to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, a boxing match between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman. This became one of the most famous boxing matches of the 20th century. Foreman was heavily favored. Thompson was so convinced that Mohammed Ali would lose that he didn't bother to attend the fight. The film marks this failure as the turning point in Thompson's career, the beginning of a long decline. Thompson published occasional books and articles and a series of newspaper columns in the 1980s and 90s. Two volumes of his letters were published. Occasionally and sporadically Thompson seemed to recover some of the brilliant energy that characterized his best work. The film suggests that Thompson was swallowed up by celebrity, alcohol, and drugs and by his own inability to distinguish his invented persona Dr. Gonzo from his real self, the writer Hunter S. Thompson.

The film and various commentators celebrate Thompson's propensity tall tales, exaggerations, and outright lies. These are one of the most prominent elements in his best work. One of the most notorious examples is a rumor that Thompson started during the 1972 democratic primary campaign that Maine senator Edmund Muskie was addicted to a drug called Ibogaine. Thompson readily admitted to the fabrication, which may have done real damage to Muskie's campaign. Thompson favored McGovern and fiercely opposed everyone opposing him. Fabrication is a major component of Thompson's writing. He was, as one commentator notes, able to tell a larger than life truth while distorting or inventing his own version of reality. In the end, however, do we praise him for using an invented rumor to harm a candidate's campaign?

The film uses clips from other documentaries about Thompson's life and career and features Johnny Depp reading selections from Thompson's writing. Depp played Thompson's character in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and remained friends with the writer for the rest of his life. He helped pay for the funeral at which Thompson's ashes were shot up into the sky over his ranch near Aspen, Colorado. The film includes interviews with various writers and political figures and other people who knew Thompson. They comment on his life, his reportorial abilities, his wild exaggerations, his unusual personality. They attest to the fact that he was a true individual, but they really don't move us very far towards understanding exactly why Hunter S. Thompson was like he was. (One commentator suggests that growing up in an impoverished family left him feeling excluded and mistreated). Some of my favorite commentators in the film are Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, Tom Wolfe, and Thompson's first wife, Sandy. Juan, Thompson's son, also appears. He suggests that the closest he ever got to his father was when Thompson taught him how to use guns. Thompson was obsessed with guns.

This is an entertaining and informative portrait of Hunter S. Thompson's life. It's a sad film given that the last 25 years of Thompson's life were a long period of decline. One commentator suggests that Thompson's suicide was a kind of victory, an assertion of his right to end his life on his own terms. But his first wife Sandy suggests that his suicide was a failure. She points out that, given the current state of affairs, with the war in Iraq and George Bush as president, we need a writer like Hunter S. Thompson. I couldn't agree more.

The Brave One

A moody faux noir, The Brave One (2007; dir. Neil Jordan) pays homage to revenge films of the 1970s, films with Charles Bronson and Bruce Dern and others where everyday citizens suffer horrible tragedies and take revenge on the criminals responsible. These films, along with the Dirty Harry and Billy Jack and Walking Tall series, and others, reflected a white middle-class belief in the breakdown of law and order in American society. In particular, they showed law enforcement agencies as ineffective if not corrupt, a justification for vigilante justice.

In The Brave One a couple soon to be married is attacked by thugs in a city park. The man is killed while the woman is gravely wounded. When she recovers, she finds that she is afraid in places and situations where she had never felt uncomfortable before. She buys a black-market gun for protection. One evening she walks into a grocery store and witnesses a murder. When the killer realizes she is watching, he moves to shoot her, but she kills him first. When hoodlums threaten her on the subway, she shoots them. She sees a man sitting in his car with a prostitute. He invites her to get in. The prostitute is barely conscious, heavily drugged. When the woman tries to help the prostitute out of the car, the man locks her in. She shoots him.

The woman increasingly chooses to walk isolated parts of the city at night, to expose herself to risk and to menacing people. Ultimately, she begins seeking those people out.

Her name is Erica Bain. She is a late-night radio show host who specializes in recording city background noises and on-the-air monologues about urban life. Her recovery from the tragedy she suffered is a gradual descent into murder and near madness. Jody Foster as Erica Bain is excellent. She plays the role in a flat, mute, depressed way. Terrence Howard as the police detective Sean Mercer investigating the murders plays his role in a similarly restrained and affectless manner that suggests deep emotions within.

This film's moodiness stems not only from the performances of the lead actors but also from the music and the cinematography. Most of the film takes place at night, in shadow or darkness, on streets hemmed in by towering buildings. The film is deliberately claustrophobic. The urban landscape is hostile and threatening. People avoid glancing at one another on the streets. The places Bain frequents are seedy and run down. There is little that is swank or high-toned about the New York of this film.

Unlike the vigilante films, the focus in this one is not on revenge but on the changes that occur in Bain's character and her developing friendship with detective Mercer.

Why in 2008 should a vigilante film fueled by the breakdown of law and order be relevant? Erica Bain early on asks herself why the police, who are investigating her fiancé's murder, seem like the enemy. Other than an unhelpful and impersonal desk detective, the police are sympathetic to her, although they do not manage to identify the people who attacked her. The breakdown of law and order in the United States is not a major issue these days. What is an issue is the breakdown of international law and order, the threat of terrorism in the United States, the fact that military and law enforcement agencies no longer seem able to protect individuals such as Erica Bain from threats and menaces that arise, whether this means thugs in a public park or men with bombs beneath their clothing. Erica's response to the violence in the city may be the film's way of expressing the unsettled state of world affairs in general.

The Brave One is well made, but it has its flaws. It's difficult to believe that Bain could get away with the murders she commits. She does not seek out most of her victims—but most of the time she kills, coincidentally or not, when no one is around to watch. Detective Mercer's gradual realization about who is committing the crimes is not credible. Arbitrary clues and guesses and a significant dose of intuition lead him to the discovery too soon. He himself is recovering from a difficult divorce, and his own traumatic experience allows him to sympathize to an extent with what is happening to Bain.

The Brave One ends in a resolution that betrays the basic principles of film noir. But it is the kind of ending that popular cinema must deliver. It is also, ironically, the kind of ending that confirms the underlying assumptions of 1970s vigilante films about law enforcement. Of course, numerous events in the last several decades seem to confirm those assumptions.

Harlan County USA

Harlan County USA is a 1976 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple about a 1973 strike at the Brookside Mines in Harlan County, Kentucky. There is no narration. Only a few on-screen messages provide basic information about the strike or about national developments in cold mining labor relations. Instead Kopple organizes the film so that the words and faces of the coal miners and coal mine owners and others tell the story. (Her voice is often heard in the background of the film, asking questions of the miners). This approach works extremely well. It is a small and focused story. But it becomes a microcosm for a study of labor relations in the American coal mining industry in the 20th century.

The film documents a strike against the Duke Power Company in a small Kentucky coal mining community. The people who live there are for the most part not especially educated. They live in shacks and rundown shanties. They live hard lives in general, both in and out of the mines. Harlan County has a long history of difficult coal mining labor relations going back into the 1930s. Several of the older miners and their wives reminisce about that era.

The personalities and voices of the miners and their wives make this film memorable. They speak with simple eloquence. They may not be highly educated, but there is nothing unintelligent or ignorant about them. The film is shot in color, but the black-and-white hues you would expect in a coal mining community dominate the film. For the most part the miners and their families are lower-class whites. Only a few black coal miners appear, but they seem to get along well with the other miners even though this is a 1973 rural Appalachian Kentucky community.

The film highlights the role of women as part of the Brookside Mine strike. They support their husbands and often stand on the front lines, opposing the goons and thugs hired by the coal mining company to intimidate and threaten the striking miners. When the men seem to be losing interest in the strike, the women upbraid and encourage them to press on. During a meeting that follows a particularly violent attack on the striking miners, one woman pulls a pistol from her blouse and announces that she is ready to answer violence with violence. The women are a fundamental part of the struggle against Duke Power.

Folk and mountain songs about coal mining provide background music for the film. Some of the miners are shown performing music, singing and playing banjo or guitar.

The film is about the exploitation of the coal miners. It makes clear that the exploitation is not only the fault of the local managers of the Brookside Mine and the Duke Power Company but also that of the upper administration of the UMW. The film implies, or at least the coal miners believe, that deals have been cut between the coal mining owners and the UMW bosses and that the coal miners themselves are powerless to negotiate agreements that will change their working and living conditions. When this film was being made a major transition was taking place in the UMW. New individuals were challenging the UMW leadership. In 1969 reform-minded Joseph A. Yablonski ran to unseat the long-entrenched Tony Boyle as president of the UMW. In December of that year, Yablonski and his wife and daughter were found murdered in their home. Boyle himself was convicted in 1974 of commissioning the crimes. These events are all covered in the film.

Harlan County USA is a wonderful example of how a documentary can illustrate and explain history through the voices of people who themselves are making history. This is an eloquent, extremely well made film. It's moving and sometimes emotionally draining. But it's also uplifting and inspiring. When the strike is over, the coal miners get their contract. It's not exactly what they wanted, but it's better than what they had. The national UMW succeeds in negotiating a contract for the national coal mining industry and even that is imperfect (it denies miners the right to strike on the local level). At the end of the film the miners return to the mines for the first time in thirteen months, resolved to continue with the only occupation they know, resolved to continue struggling to improve their circumstances.

Harlan County USA is widely respected as one of the best examples of documentary filmmaking in America. It deserves that reputation. It won the 1976 Academy Award for Best Documentary film.

Sarah Palin

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate is an example of pure and transparent political cynicism. You can understand why he would have leaned towards a woman or a person of color as his vice presidential choice. Such a candidate provides an ideal way of deflating the Barack Obama bandwagon. It's also an ideal way of countering the notion that a vote for Obama is a vote for making history by electing the first African-American president of the United States. Now you can vote for a Republican woman as vice president and also make history though not quite as dramatically. What's so disturbing about the choice of Sarah Palin is the fact of her profound inexperience. Yes, she combated corruption in Alaskan politics. Yes, she opposed some of the biggest and most long-established moguls in the Alaskan government. But when you look at her qualifications and when you consider her position on fundamental political issues, she's not at all impressive. In fact, she's frightening. She is right wing in the extreme in a way that contrasts markedly with John McCain's self-styled moderation. She's taken a right-wing position on practically every issue you can name, from her opposition to abortion rights to her enthusiastic endorsement of and membership in the National Rifle Association to her belief that polar bears should be removed from the endangered species list to her advocacy for drilling for oil in one of the most pristine and beautiful natural habitats in the world. She's a right-wing evangelical. She favors the teaching of creationism in public schools. There are some who say she hasn't hesitated to use her position as governor of Alaska against people she dislikes--currently she is under investigation for trying to have her sister's ex-husband removed from his position as a state patrolman. Of course, the facts are not all out on this issue, but it is certainly worth keeping in mind. Sarah Palin has a profound lack of experience not only in Alaskan politics--she has been governor for only two years--but also on the national and international stages, where she has no experience whatsoever. The notion that this wholly unproven individual could suddenly be thrust into leadership of the free world is most disturbing.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is perhaps the most disappointing choice he has made in this presidential campaign. I don't support John McCain's candidacy for President and will not vote for him. I don't agree with him on many basic issues. But he has over the years acted and spoken in a way that suggested he has his own mind and that he has a streak of independence and integrity. He has consistently attacked Barack Obama for his purported inexperience in government. Now he chooses as his vice presidential running mate a considerably less experienced person who has never served in national government and who has served only two years in state government and whose positions are so far to the extreme right that we have to believe that McCain is not only pandering for the votes of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters but that he is also pandering to the far right. Television newscasters and pundits have suggested that this appointment by McCain is a Hail Mary pass, the kind of gamble a candidate would take when he recognizes that his campaign and his prospects for the presidency are foundering. Yet McCain has been faring fairly well in the polls of late, and just before the Democratic convention he had pulled almost even with Obama. Of course Obama is now experiencing the kind of bounce in the polls that presidential candidates experience right after the conventions. But McCain is not out of the running. At least he wasn't out of the running until now. Surely Hillary Clinton supporters will not be deceived by this ploy. Surely no intelligent person who supported Hillary Clinton and all of her important positions on women's rights, on the war in Iraq, on healthcare, on the role of government in servng the welfare of American citizens would even consider for a moment voting for McCain because of the gender of the candidate he has chosen as his running mate. The choice of Sarah Palin should mark the realistic end of John McCain's hopes to be president of the United States.

Thunder and Lightning

Thunder and Lightning (1977) seems like a half-hearted Hollywood effort to jump on the 1970s-decade films-about-the-South band wagon. Produced by Roger Corman, directed by Corey Allen (mainly a director of television episodes), it tries to make David Carradine into a Southern ring-tailed roarer in the vein of Burt Reynolds' Gator McCluskey. The action is intense but without much excitement, the hijinks are forced and unsurprising, the story-line is shallow and punctuated with seemingly endless dune buggy races and car chases. There's a fight in what appears to be a hog trough. There's a protracted scene where Carradine and his girlfriend throw cartons of soft drinks from the back of a delivery truck. There's plenty of moonshine and a range of bucolic good-ol'-boy types along with a few Mafioso enforcers trying to conduct a hit on a golf course thrown in for good measure.

The basic plot concerns moonshiners in the Florida swamps. There are the "good" moonshiners who make high-quality shine and sell it to the locals, and there are "bad" moonshiners who use radiators and car batteries to make tainted shine which they force local vendors to buy. The bad moonshiners spend a lot of time colluding with the mob up North and with the local senator, and with breaking down the stills of the good moonshiners whom they try to put out of business.

Carradine plays Harley Thomas, the hero, who delivers whiskey made by the good moonshiners. His girlfriend is the smoothly coiffed Nancy Sue Hunnicutt (Kate Jackson), whose father heads up the local bad moonshine operation. Harley is the fool killer in this film. He drives fast and furiously, always outwits the bad guys, speaks with the same accent he used in the Kung Fu television series. Kate Jackson at least manages a mild accent. We see a possum in one scene and an alligator in another. In one faintly amusing scene Harley meets Nancy at a church service where the reverend delivers his sermon while wrestling an alligator. Other than them critters, there's nothing authentic or mildly stimulating in this dull and bland production.

The South in Thunder and Lightning is dirt roads, hicks, illegal whiskey, trucks, cars, dune buggies, grizzled old men, dimwits, fistfights, corrupt politicos and businessmen, swamps, and rusty radiators.

CSNY: Déjà Vu

CSNY: Déjà Vu (2008) is Neil Young's documentary about his 2006 tour with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. During that tour the band played many of the songs from Young's Living with War album—an album that is virulently opposed to the ongoing war in Iraq. Thus we have a film that is about a rock band and also about a war protest. It examines varying crowd reactions to the political agenda of the tour. It also focuses on the aging band members, all of whom are in their 60s (only Stills seems subdued by age—he speaks and sings with a slur that perhaps reflects damage from drugs and alcohol abuse). The issues here include the nation's response to the war in Iraq, the impact a rock band can have on political issues, whether the current political climate is analogous to the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Neil Young correctly observes during the film that the absence of a draft has prevented widespread protests among America's youth because they do not feel at risk. Another question the film considers is whether CSNY can still play together, whether they can play well.

Undoubtedly, CSNY: Déjà Vu seeks to portray the band in a positive light, yet there is a surprising balance here. We see the band members in all their aged glory, especially Stephen Stills. We listen to their ragged playing early in the tour. We are shown varying crowd reactions to their music: the concert in Atlanta provokes walkouts from audience members unhappy with the song "Let's Impeach the President." For the most part the walk-outs were middle-aged adults, and it's difficult to know how representative they were of the audience as a whole. An interview with libertarian radio talk-show host Neal Boortz is interesting—Boortz doesn't condemn the band's tour appearance in Atlanta or its subject matter--he sees it as a matter of free speech, though he notes that the band has to be prepared to deal with the consequences of their attitudes.

One way the film achieves whatever measure of balance it has is the use of ABC news correspondent Michael Cerre as an "embedded" participant in the tour. Cerre spent two tours of duty as an embedded reporter in the Iraq war prior to the CSNY tour, and returned to Iraq after the documentary was made. He wrote and narrates much of the film, offering his own perspectives, which are frequently distinctive from those of the band members. Young apparently asked Cerre to compile news clips and footage from the war for the film. It is Cerre who brings into the film interviews with disgruntled fans and with commentators such as Neal Boortz. He thereby helps the film avoid hagiography, though there are undeniably a few hagiographic elements.

What's most interesting about the film is how it shows the continuing commitment of the band to an anti-war point of view and to music as a form of communication after more than forty years. By the end of the tour, the band is performing better than it has performed in years. One of the band members comments that the tour has enabled the group to rediscover itself.

Neil Young directed this film under the moniker of Bernard Shakey, a name he has used in other directing efforts. The only other Neil Young film I have seen is the film version of his album Greendale (2004). Although that film had its interesting moments, it was more a series of loosely conceived rock videos, based on the album, than a coherent film. In CSNY: Déjà Vu there are moments of deeply felt emotion, of raw political anger, and of transcendence. The film never argues that the band has any effect on the opinions of its audience or on US participation in the Iraqi conflict itself. What it does argue for is the character and persistence of the band, and its commitment to peace and good music.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) portrays a small town in the rural South of the 1920s and 1930s that tolerates and supports a relationship between two women whom today we would describe as lesbians. That statement needs scrutiny: what would such a community know of a lesbian relationship, which would take place behind closed doors? Would it necessarily be seen as unusual, by prevailing standards of the day? Or would it simply be seen as a matter of two unmarried women living and working together for the sake of convenience, like a Boston marriage? Because no one names their relationship, no one has to react or pass judgment.

At any rate, the two women at the center of this film, and their family, tolerate individuality and eccentricity. They are not what the film presents as the prevailing Southern norm. The norm is Ruth Jamison's abusive husband. The norm is the Klan, which attacks the Whistle Stop Café for its too tolerant attitude towards a black employee. But mostly, it seems, the community simply ignores or doesn't think about or doesn't understand Idgie and Ruth's private life. The town simply accepts them. When Idgie is put on trial for killing Ruth's husband, Ruth is asked why she left her husband to go live with Idgie: she answers that Idgie "is the best friend I've ever had. I love her." The townspeople see the relationship as a friendship, and the film portrays it that way, although there is enough information to allow us to infer a deeper bond.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Intruder in the Dust (1949), and other films, Fried Green Tomatoes examines the South through characters and situations that are exceptional rather than representative. Yet it argues that exceptions such as Ruth and Idgie are part of the community because of a fundamental tolerance for variation and eccentricity. The South is, after all, according to a fundamental stereotype, full of eccentrics and individuals. Shouldn't it be accepting of them? As the film makes clear, such tolerance extends within but not across racial boundaries.

The film has a double-plot structure. A modern housewife named Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) is unhappy with her marriage and her life in general and is suffering a personal crisis. She meets an elderly woman living in a nursing home named Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) who tells her stories from her earlier days in a nearby town called Whistle Stop. These stories mainly concern Idgie and Ruth. They inspire Evelyn to get her life in order, to be more assertive, and to stand up to her husband. I found the Evelyn Couch scenes deadly dull and uninteresting. Kathy Bates overplays her character and is more a cartoon than a realistic figure. The Ruth and Idgie story is far more interesting. Evelyn's life provides a frame that enables Ruth and Idgie's story to be told (a frame similar to what we find in Princess Bride, 1987, and Edward Scissorhands, 1990).

This film is often grouped pejoratively with other films about Southern women such as Steel Magnolias (1989). The grouping isn't accurate—Fried Green Tomatoes is a better film primarily because of the writing, the narrative coherence, the characters, and the actors. Mary Stuart Masterson (Idgie) and Mary-Louise Parker (Julie) are excellent in their roles, though there is, admittedly, a Hallmark Hallof Fame sheen to both of them. As much as it is a kind of fairy tale about an idyllic Southern past, Fried Green Tomatoes is not (unlike Steel Magnolias) a conglomeration of stereotypes and parodies. It is a portrait of a close and deep friendship and the community around it. Interestingly, both films use the death of a main character as a dramatic focus. Julie's death seems a way by which the film evades long-term issues about her relationship with Idgie.

Fried Green Tomatoes is also, like many Southern films, a nostalgic excursion, told from a future vantage point in time, looking back towards a past that some might prefer to the present day. In the old days, the film implies, Ninny would not have been left in a nursing home. Friends and relatives would have taken Ninny in, as Evelyn seems ready to do at the end of the film. The past is clearly past—times have changed. This is an underlying premise of Ninny's stories about the old days in Whistle Stop. The café closes, and Whistle Stop withers away after the train no longer stops there. This signifies the passage of the old order.

Ironically, the train is the source of the town's economic life, yet it is also a threat from the beginning. Idgie's brother Buddy is killed in an early scene when a train kills him after his shoe becomes stuck between the tracks.

Fried Green Tomatoes depends on notions of Southern local color and quaintness for much of its secondary interest. It is about a former time and place, an enclave of isolation from modernity and all of its inhospitable elements.

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight (2008) is the best of the Batman films and maybe the best film in general based on a comic book hero. Dark, brooding, and suffused with repressed energy that breaks out at predictable and unpredictable moments, the film is exciting and disturbing. It is disturbing in its refusal to adopt pure moral positions and in its insistence on portraying a world where good and evil are confusingly and increasingly intertwined, where truth and fiction cancel one another out.

The Dark Knight is clearly a post-September 11 statement. The Joker in this film is the agent of chaos, anarchy. He repeatedly insists that he has only one purpose—to cause chaos. He does that effectively. His misdeeds increase and multiply. A corps of supporters and assistants out there in Gotham City aid him in his evil doings, and as the film progresses the crises he causes deepen and darken. There is a moment in the film when, after things at last seemed under control, all hell breaks loose, and we see for an instant a panic-stricken look on Commissioner Gordon's face. All the institutions of government are failing, breaking down. His cold rational commitment to law and order is challenged to an extreme he has never experienced. This moment reminded me, emotionally, of that day when the towers fell in New York, when as things seem to have descended to a profound nadir they kept getting even worse. These moments in the film were actually frightening.

Another post 9-11 reference comes in a surveillance system that Batman's colleague Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) develops to allow him to listen in on the words and doings of every inhabitant in Gotham. The system, which exploits cell phone networks, is so insidious that Fox vows to resign when he finishes designing it. This is, of course, an implied reference to the Homeland Security Act of the Bush administration. It is also a sign of how Batman's obsession with defeating the Joker has led him to compromise fundamental principles.

The film ends with an agreement between Commissioner Gordon and Batman that the citizens of Gotham need to be protected from the truth of what happened to the young district attorney who had vowed to purge crime from the streets of the city. The truth would be too dark, Batman insists, and the citizens need someone to believe in, as well as someone to hold up as a villain. This agreement reminded me of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Marlow protects Kurtz's Intended from the truth of how he died by telling her that his dying words were her name. (There is a Kurtz-like character in the film who is wholly corrupted by how the Joker preys on his pride and ambition). It reminded me as well of Freud's observation in Civilization and its Discontents that civilization is a network of laws and restraints that protect humanity from its essential savagery. Ironically, a certain truth is withheld from Batman at a crucial moment in the film.

Heath Ledger is excellent as the Joker. One can imagine, and be tempted to believe, that the power of the character he was playing lured him into madness and drug abuse, leading to his death from an overdose of prescription medicine. I don't believe that, but whatever demons he may have been wrestling with energize his performance. One of the most disturbing aspects of the film is how the Joker keeps insisting to Batman, to the new district attorney, and to others that they all have much in common, that they all are alike. The film insists on a fundamental moral ambiguity in all human beings, a state of perpetual compromise.

As the Joker in the 1983 film Batman Jack Nicholson improvised on the role played by Caesar Romero in the 1960s Batman television series. Nicholson was excellent, but his character was never more than a comic book parody. Ledger gives the Joker depth and three-dimensionality without ever really hinting at the events that made the Joker what he became. In his ability to prey on the deepest psychological vulnerabilities of his opponents and victims, Ledger's Joker is more the descendent of Hannibal Lecter than of any character in the comic book series.

The Dark Knight is not perfect, by any means. For me, the sudden emergence late in the film of a second arch-villain is a weakness and a flaw. Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman is effective, but he growl too often when in costume. His flickering romance with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is confusing and frustrating. It is also not a film with a happy ending—this is not a weakness.

The Dark Knight offers some wonderful visually operatic moments. Better than any of its predecessors (and some of them were successful on their own terms), it illuminates and inhabits and magnifies the mythology of the hero it brings to life. Director Christopher Nolan, both in this film and its predecessor Batman Begins (2005), brings true vision and power to his subject.

Macon County Line

Macon County Line (1974) was a primary entry in a genre of films that emphasized the South as a place of violence, vigilante justice, and hostility to people from outside the region. In such films as Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and 2001 Maniacs (2005) and in such more reputable films as Easy Rider (1969) and Deliverance (1972) down-home Southerners were portrayed as depraved and vicious.

In Macon County Line two hipsters on their way to enlist in the army pick up a Southern girl on her way to Dallas. The hipsters—college-age boys—the girl is 20—have little money. Their car breaks down in a small town that is apparently Macon, Georgia. While it is being repaired, they meet the local deputy sheriff, Reed Morgan (Max Baer), who is hostile but who after some intimidation lets them go their way. Later, their car breaks down again—ironically—just in front of Deputy Morgan's house. His wife has just been raped and murdered by two hoodlums. When Deputy Morgan discovers the crime and sees the car, he assumes the boys and their female friend committed the crime. With his ten-year-old son in tow, he chases them down. Murders ensue.

Though this is a poorly made low-grade film, Deputy Morgan is not as simple as one would think. He wears a Confederate flag shoulder patch on his uniform. He is pretty much a product of his times. He loves his wife and is kind to her. He buys an expensive gun (a 12-gauge shotgun) for his son, Luke, whom he loves. He imagines giving the shotgun to his son and then going hunting with him. When his son explains that he would rather play baseball with friends, Deputy Morgan finally agrees to delay their hunting trip until later. Morgan sees his son talking to some black kids and explains that the roles of society dictate that blacks and whites do not spend time together—they live and go to school separately.

What the film seeks to demonstrate—above and beyond the fact of the South's savage violence—is that a violent heritage breeds violence. The deputy sends his son to a military school and wants to instill in him the same racial values and love of hunting that he holds. His idea of an expression of love is a 12-gauge shotgun. At the end of the film, as he hunts the people he believes have killed his wife, his son makes good on that heritage by shooting and killing the girl and one of the boys. At the beginning of the film, an ominous message on the screen suggests that the story about to be told is based on true events. At the end, a similar message informs us that Luke at the age of 29 still resides in a mental institution, where he will remain for the rest of his life. It is as if the supposedly factual basis of the film is somehow meant to justify the exploitative nature of the violence in the film.

There is little suspense or pacing in the film, which fundamentally lacks excitement. The best scene involves a romantic tryst in a watering trough.

Despite the deputy sheriff's lecture to his son about race relations, and despite the incompetence and corruption that pervades local law enforcement, the film curiously avoids any commentary on contemporary Southern affairs—it is set back in the early 1950s--1954, to be exact. We see the deputy's wife watching the Joe McCarthy hearings shortly before she is raped and murdered. McCarthy himself was a public official who like Deputy Reed ran amuck and became besotted with power. I doubt Max Baer intended this film to be a commentary on McCarthyism.

Max Baer, of course, played Jethro Bodine for a decade on the popular 1960s The Beverly Hillbillies television series.

Once

Once (2007) is a simple, charming, enchanting film, a musical in which all the singing occurs in an entirely natural way. One of the main characters is a street singer (and a vacuum cleaner repairman) who is trying to break into the recording business. The main character, referred to in the credits merely as the "boy," is an Irishman who sings on the street for coins. He is played by Glen Hansard. One night a young woman, the "girl" (Marketa Irglova), stops and strikes up a conversation. When she learns that he repairs "Hoovers," she asks him to repair her malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, and they strike up a friendship. Early on, he suggests they spend the night together, but she refuses him. For the most part their friendship is platonic, but you sense something subterranean going on. Both of them are on the apparent down sides of relationships. The boy's girlfriend has moved to London, and he says that he will not see her again—though all the songs he writes are about her. The girl has left her husband in Czechoslovakia. She tells the boy that their relationship is over, but she never admits to not loving her husband.

In a music store, the boy discovers that the girl can play the piano and sing. They sing one of his songs together. Later he asks her to help him record some of his songs so that he can take them to London, where he has decided to go to unite with his girlfriend and to try to get a recording contract. The girl helps him negotiate a fee for use of the recording studio and helps him find other musicians to play with.

The night before he is to leave, the boy is about to say goodbye to the girl but then suggests that they spend the rest of the evening together, hanging out. She hesitates and asks him whether this might involve hanky-panky. He admits that it might. She agrees to come over to his apartment. But she never shows up. They never meet again. He does leave her a parting gift.

This is a film about what might have been. The boy and girl discover one another through their mutual love of music, through the experience of creating music together. Though many of the songs may be inspired by the boy's loss of his former girlfriend, you realize as the film progresses that the way the boy and girl perform the songs together is an expression of their developing feelings for one another. Hansard and Irglova co-wrote a number of the songs in the film. Hansard wrote several others, and Irglova's own composition "The Hill" is also featured.

This was a low-budget film with a budget of $150,000. There is nothing glitzy or slick about it. The interior shots seem to take place in real music stores and pubs and recording studios and apartments. The clothes the characters wear look like clothes they really own. The camerawork is often jittery and unbalanced. The music the boy and girl sing together sounds like what it is—improvised, poorly rehearsed but real music.

The end of Once is bittersweet, but mainly sweet. The boy and the girl proceed with their lives, without each other. This is a small film with a modest focus. It is almost like a documentary. But it is full of life and quiet passion and joy. The characters and their music make it much larger than it aspires to be. With limited resources and inexperienced actors, director John Carney has made one of the best little films I've seen in a long time.

The Astronaut Farmer

The Astronaut Farmer (2006) is one of those American fairy tales about dreams and individualism and traditional values. The basic plot: Charles Farmer, a former astronaut in training who bailed out of the program when his father committed suicide, has never abandoned his dream of travel into space. He's a farmer somewhere in the middle of nowhere Texas. He's haunted by his father's death and believes that by killing himself his father accepted failure. By repeated borrowings from the local bank and credit extensions, he's found enough money to build a rocket that he plans to ride into space. He's $600,000 in debt, the local bank is about to foreclose, his wife doesn't realize that they may lose their farm.

The film's title reflects how the film joins together the farming crisis, disappearing American individualism, and Farmer's dream of becoming an astronaut. When he tries to buy fuel for his rocket, the bank refuses to give him another credit extension and threatens foreclosure. The government sends FBI and FAA and NASA security agents of one sort or another to investigate his plans and to threaten him. His wife threatens to leave him when she discovers the full extent of his indebtedness.

Charles Farmer is crazy. Only a crazy man would try to do what he does in the film. But the film argues that there needs to be room for crazy people and their dreams in our world. It also argues in a way that is more convenient to the story than purposeful that the modern world threatens the traditional values embodied by nuclear families and farms and small towns and individual dreams. At one point Charlie talks about how he used to remember being told as a boy that he could be anything in the world that he wanted to be. He remarks that "Somewhere along the line we stopped believing we could do anything. And if we don't have our dreams, we have nothing." Sappy, yes, but true to the spirit of the film. The film does suggest that government, corporations, agencies, institutionalized groups in general conspire against individuals and individualism. At one point, Charlie launches his rocket and it malfunctions, shooting across the landscape a few feet above the ground, endangering lives and property. The film doesn't really consider whether we are supposed to be accepting of such expressions of old-time American individuality.

This film reminded me of Field of Dreams (1989) and The World's Fastest Indian (2005). In ways it seems underwritten, sketched out rather than fully developed. This is perhaps part of its fairy tale quality

Billy Bob Thornton plays astronaut farmer Charles Farmer. Billy Bob basically plays the same Billy Bob in almost every film he's appeared in (with the exception of Sling Blade, 1996). His demeanor is always calm and irritable and reserved, and only the nuances and intonations differ from role to role. This is OK with me. He's effective in most of the roles he chooses. No one else could have played Bad Santa (2003).

Although there are unexpected twists and turns here, The Astronaut Farmer basically adheres to the formula that most films follow about loners and individuals intent on realizing their dreams. It also depends on your unwillingness to pursue certain questions to their conclusions—such as how could one man with limited resources know enough to build an operating rocket from junked spare parts and $600,000. However, we are not supposed to ask such questions, and if you care too much about the answers this film is not for you.

With a supporting cast of such folks as Virginia Marsden, Bruce Dern, Tim Blake Nelson, and others, the film offers solid acting. Director Michael Polish, who also co-wrote the film, apparently believes like Charlie in making the pursuit of dreams a family effort—a number of his relatives appears in bit parts in the film.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

For any fan of the television series, The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) should be a satisfying experience. More like an extended episode from the series than a feature-length film, it builds on and embellishes the themes and character relationships of the series, specifically Fox Mulder's compulsion to believe that "something is out there" and Scully's conflicted struggle between rationality and faith. It also builds on the romantic relationship between the two that was increasingly implied in the television series and made explicit only in the final episodes. There is an allusion to the child Scully had with Fox, and which she gave up. There is an allusion to Mulder's lost sister, supposedly abducted by aliens during his childhood—the primal event of his life. The most satisfying aspect of the film is the fact that the essential characters of Fox and Scully remain intact, and that we take them up some six years after we last saw them.

Aliens have nothing to do with the plot of this film, which concerns a series of grisly killings and a psychic priest with a pedophilic past who keeps leading investigators to body parts buried in a snow-covered field. (Visually, snow is everywhere in this film). The priest's supposed psychic abilities lead the FBI to summon Mulder and Scully out of retirement. One agent, an admirer of Mulder, believes the priest is truly psychic. Other FBI agents are skeptics (the main skeptic is played by Xzibit, of Pimp My Ride fame—he is effective in his role). The film follows the efforts of the agents and of Fox and Scully to discover the killer. It also follows Scully's efforts to treat a boy suffering an apparently incurable illness, and to deal with her increasingly complicated relationship with Mulder. The film occasionally bogs down, but where it succeeds it succeeds because of its fidelity to the two main characters, Mulder and Scully.

Father Joseph Crissman, played by Billy Connolly, is in many ways the center of interest. His visions and psychic insights enable the investigators to move closer to the truth. But how does he know what he knows? Scully believes he is a fraud. The FBI agents think he is connected to the killers. Mulder, of course, wants to believe him. Does Crissman speak for God, for Satan, for the killers, for himself? This is the question the film examines. When he tells Scully "Don't give up," and when he claims he didn't know what he meant when he made the statement, she suffers a crisis concerning the sick boy she is treating, her relationship with Mulder, and with her faith. Scully for me was always the most interesting character in the series. She was seriously conflicted in her role as a medical doctor, an FBI agent, as a professional woman with a private life of her own, a medical pathologist who is also a devout Catholic. The film develops these competing aspects of her character to good effect.

Given the failure of this film at the box office, this is probably the last we will see of the X-Files. I'm sorry for that.

Mama Mia

It is OK to enjoy Mama Mia (2008).

Mindless and full of the music of ABBA, a 1980s musical sensation that never quite made sense to me, Mama Mia takes the music of this Scandinavian group that sang but could not speak English and transplants it to the isles of Greece, under the auspices of an Italian title. The result comes close to being Americanized Bollywood, and I don't mean that as criticism. Mama Mia is full of music, energy, color, song, and dance. The scenery is beautiful, and it is fun to watch Meryl Streep shamelessly dance and sing and emote.

I did not see the Broadway musical that is the film's source, but the film works well enough. Donna (Meryl Streep) plays the beleaguered American proprietor of a hotel on a remote Greek isle. Twenty years before the time of the film, she had three summer affairs, one of them with a man whom she loved, two with men she turned to when the first lover abandoned her. The result was a daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). Donna doesn't know which of the men was Sophie's father. In the film's present time, Sophie is about to be married. She has always wondered who her father was, and she learns about the three affairs while reading her mother's diary. She invites each of the three men to her wedding, thinking she will instantly know her father when she sees him. Of course, things aren't that simple. All three men come to the island, Donna is thrown into crisis and consternation when she sees them, and Sophie is confused when she can't recognize her father and when her mother is upset at the arrival of three former flames.

Such is the film's thin plot. But its thinness doesn't matter. It's a sufficient skeleton to hang the songs on. My favorite was "Dancing Queen," a wonderful and colorful number in which all the women on the island participate, reliving their past memories of lost romanticism and youth. The title song sequence "Mama Mia" is also good, as were "Does Your Mother Know" (sung by Christine Baranski) and "Take a Chance on Me" (sung by Julie Waters) and "SOS" (song by Pierce Brosnan).

The film suggests that Donna and her three lovers were children of the 60s, a decade that in fact occurred forty years earlier than the time of the film. But that discrepancy is not worth fretting over.

As Sam, the man Donna loved, Pierce Brosnan sings a number of songs. Am I mistaken about the pained look on his face? Anyway, everyone seems to be having fun.