RECOMMENDED

Koji Masutani’s “Virtual JFK (Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived)” is an intriguing array of counterfactual arguments, taking up in documentary form the argument that Kennedy’s prior decisions indicated that his course in the Vietnam War would have been as disastrous as anyone else’s. Drawing on Harvard historian Niall Ferguson’s notion of “virtual history,” Masutani examines six episodes when Kennedy’s decision-making process was demonstrated and essentially ventures the question, “Does it matter who the president is when it comes to war?” With John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara and co-producer-historian James G. Blight. The memorable takeaway? Footage of Kennedy engaging in pitched battle at news conferences and remaining cool and cogent. 82m. BetaSP. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Like an altogether different movie also opening this week, “Virtual JFK (Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived),” Nacho Villagondo’s “Timecrimes” (Los Cronocrímenes, 2007) toys with the notions of “what if only…” With almost as much invention as the underrated “Primer” but with slightly less force than “Groundhog Day,” the tricksy-turvy narrative definitely takes a jaundiced view toward the notion of free will. Are there choices we didn’t make? Would things have been different? Héctor (Karra Elejalde) and his wife Clara (Candela Fernández) have moved into the countryside in the north of Spain; surveying his new domain with binoculars, Héctor quickly becomes interested in the sight he catches of a woman in her twenties (Bárbara Goenaga) taking off her clothes. Once Clara’s out of sight, Héctor heads into the forest… Complications and fearsome scissors ensue. Let’s just say he gets several chances to wholeheartedly fuck things up. It’s a worthy follow-up to his 2003 Oscar-nominated short, “7:35 in the Morning,” which you can find online. From Magnolia Pictures, which also released “Let the Right One In.” 88m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

The dour yet sentimental romantic comedy “Moscow, Belgium” (Aanrijding in Moscou, 2008), directed by Christophe Van Rompaey, parlays the outline of a working-class triangle in a suburb of Ghent where Cossacks once lived into something odd and oddly warm in its best moments. The familial and affectional affinities and clashes are at once familiar and eccentric. It may well be the best Flemish May-December romance of 2009. With Barbara Sarafian, Jurgen Delnaet, Johan Heldenbergh, Anemone Valcke, Sofia Ferri, Julian Borsani, Bob de Moor and Jits van Belle. 102m. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

Angel-feather tats twine a stripper’s back; twinned, a wrestler’s is lined with scar, knotted by scarification.

“The Wrestler” sears because of its two central roles, Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a beat-down wrestler in his early 50s, and Marisa Tomei as “Cassidy” (nee Pam), a stripper he feels close to as the walls of his life close in around him. Brave and sometimes literally naked: they make a tremendous match as performers. And that dovetailing seems a suitable fit for the films Darren Aronofsky’s made so far: Try as the mind might, thought cannot save the flesh.

The Ram, Aronofsky says, “loves what he does and he’s got that going for him. What’s the theme—how do you make a movie about wrestling? Everyone says, ‘Oh, wrestling’s fake, why do you want to make that?’ But that becomes the theme, what is real and what is fake? That became the big challenge of the Ram character in the movie. Where is his real world and where is his fantasy world, and has he confused them? And that carried us over to the stripper story and her really clear lines between what is real and what is fake.”

From the start, Tomei’s substantial qualities as an actor forestall the fear of stripper clichés. And once the two of them are circling each other, you realize that at that point in their lives, they’re mirrors: Merchants of flesh, exploiters of their own bodies, just past their prime.

“Yeahhh…” Aronofsky says, pausing. “When you do an independent film, with a stripper, all the red flags go up, ’cause you’re like, ‘Oh shit! Why am I doing this?’ I remember fighting with myself and with the writer, what else can she be, what else can we make her? But the attraction of how similar they actually are: They both have stage names. They both dress up. They both create a fantasy for the audience. They both use their bodies for their commerce and age is their enemy. Those connections between the two of them were just too delicious to want to live without.”

The movie was under most filmgoer’s radar before its Venice première, where it won the Golden Lion. “Yeah, it was instant acclamation, to be honest,” he says. “We finished the film two days before Venice. We were mixing. We finished the mix like a week and a half before, and then there’s a lot of tech things that have to go right, the sound and image have to get married, you have to check prints to make sure the color’s right. It was very last minute, then we had to get it over to Rome to get it subtitled. That last week was quite a rush job to get it done. Only a few people had seen it at that point. Of course, the Venice festival had seen it and invited us to attend. But we didn’t have any sense of what the audience reaction would be. We landed in Venice and then a day later we did the press conference, and the press gave us a standing ovation, which I guess they don’t do. It just took off from there. It was a rocket ship. I don’t think anyone was ready, me, Mickey, anybody. We all had high hopes.” Or else you wouldn’t have struggled so hard to make the thing, and to make it with the almost-impossible-to-finance Rourke. Aronofsky thinks. “For me it was always a portrait film, a character study. It’s not filled with politics; it’s not filled with the obvious heartstrings. It was a real chance for me to work with who I thought is one of the great actors of our times. It was a unique world. I think what I learned, my lesson, was that all you need is an honest performance and a lens to make a good movie.”

The film’s use of austere locations, including perhaps the last pay phone in New Jersey and a deserted boardwalk, seem to gain from budgetary restriction. But in fact it’s almost as if what could be just a painful necessity becomes part of the palette of the film. “Definitely, that’s always been my school of filmmaking, you turn your limits into your strengths. You really identify what you can do and you push it as hard as you can and then within that kind of circle, you create as well as you can what you can do.”

“The Wrestler” is now playing.

RECOMMENDED

Fans of Richard Yates’ elegant, cold-hearted, bitter, angry, unforgettable novel have begun pouring out reminiscences of discovering its brutal charms while summering at writers’ colonies and inveighing against its screen adaptation (written by Justin Haythe, directed by Sam Mendes). “Revolutionary Road” is a great novel, but so acid that to fully reflect Yates’ brimstone would be near unendurable. While the death of dreams is one of Yates’ subjects, Mendes’ version more reflects the death of a marriage in suburban 1955. Leonardo DiCaprio captures a certain amount of doubt in his playing of Frank Wheeler, but it’s Kate Winslet who embodies fearfulness and a bite of madness with essential gestures. It’s a tremendous performance, capturing timorousness but also a streak of desperation borne of inchoate miseries (whether of will or failure of will or incipient madness). Michael Shannon plays a neighbor’s son, briefly brought out of the madhouse to speak unspoken tensions, a crackling performance: “You want to play house, you’ve got to have a job; you want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you’ve got to have a job you don’t like. Anyone comes along and says ‘What do you do it for?,’ he’s probably on a four-hour pass from the state funny farm. Agreed?” Zoe Kazan’s quiet sleepwalker of an office co-worker who cheats with Frank is more graceful and equally compelling. Some of the most combative scenes draw almost exclusively from Yates’ written dialogue, with word changes for economy more than “updating.” I’m fond of Thomas Newman’s scores, but this is one is far more foreboding than, say, for “Wall-E” or “American Beauty.” As shot by Roger Deakins, Mendes’ camera style is simplified, often choosing a more theatrical, tableau-style presentation than working with editing or extended camera moves, a choice that highlights performances down to the cold, cold final shot drawn directly from the novel. With Kathy Bates. 119m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Juan Mora Catlett’s 2007 “Eréndira Ikikunari,” shot entirely in the indigenous language of Purépecha is another of what seems a burgeoning genre of lovingly picture cultural epics from around the world that offer counter a tendency by some filmmakers toward ethnographic tourism. Eréndira was a young woman who railed against the invading Spanish conquistadors as well as her culture’s innate sexism, showing bravery far beyond learning to ride a horse. Catlett’s style sups at theatricality. 114m. 35mm.  (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Of Federico Fellini’s memory films, “I Vitelloni” (1955), with its splendidly evoked hope of escape from a small town, is the one I hold fondest, but there are bursts of mad, boisterous wit and energy in the poetic, affectionate “Amarcord” (I remember, 1973) to treasure. Set in the seaside town of Rimini in the 1930s, Fellini combines nostalgia with glee, making his adolescence something fanciful but also grounded in human urges. The delights range from the vision of a peacock competing with fresh, faux snowfall to the grandfather who gaily farts before breakfast by manhandling a chair; a horny teen boy’s near-suffocation by an older woman’s voluminous bosom; to and the simple uncle who climbs up into a tree, baying, “I want a woman!” and can only be saved by a dwarf nun finagling a ladder. Nino Rota’s score can keep you awake at night if it sticks in your memory. 127m. Restored 35mm print. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Michel Ocelot’s 2006 digitally animated French-Belgian-Italian-Spanish “Azur and Asmar” has some of the same charm of his earlier hand-drawn “Kirikou and the Sorceress” in its telling of two boys raised as brothers, one dark skinned, one pale, from the same mother’s breast in a vaguely French land. Politically aware drama after the style of “Arabian Nights” ensues. It’s a boisterous amalgam of kid stuff and idealism. The score by Gabriel Yared is stirring. 99m. (Ray Pride) 

By Ray Pride

It get don’t I.

A case of too much of a so-so thing, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a fatal mismatch of sensibilities, orchestrated by a master of complete control, David Fincher, with a poet of the passive, screenwriter Eric Roth, whose work includes “The Good Shepherd” (spy as watcher) and “Forrest Gump” (simpleton as empty vessel).

Drawing on a slim conceit from a wafer of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald—man bites dog! I mean, “man born old grows young”—“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is less picaresque or lifelong wanderjahr than a hybrid “Forrest Button.” Things happen. A character gawps. The mind wanders. And it makes one muse over passivity in Fincher’s films: in “Fight Club,” doesn’t The Narrator lie back and let rampaging id Tyler do all the work? And “Zodiac” is a masterpiece about a gaze that misunderstands, about asking the wrong questions rather than not ever finding a sought answer.

Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born old and grows to be an ancient newborn. Ever-fresh Daisy, the girl he loves, dances from a redhead of 10 to a dancer of whatever, embodied in some parts by Cate Blanchett, and in the distancing present-tense portions, set during the winds and lashing rains of Hurricane Katrina, by a bid for a Best MakeUp Oscar. In the middle, there’s stuff about shipping out to sea and committing adultery with Tilda Swinton in a Russian hotel and getting sunk at sea and eventually Brad Pitt digitized to a younger, ever more angelic version of himself on the back of a fine shiny motorcycle. For me, the feeling was less one of coolness and distance and apartness from the material that some have identified than simply, what is going on here? It feels as impersonal as a yellowed telegram ordering clock parts. Pitt is a lovely mirror, but what’s reflected back? Are you the hero of your own life if your fate is to repeatedly open the closet in the hall and life avalanches on your head like a succession of empty boxes?

Born in New Orleans on the day World War II ends, Benjamin is a foundling, thought a monster for his newborn decrepitude, but once left on the doorstep of an infertile young woman (Taraji P. Henson), a miracle. Fireworks play across the French Quarter night, like the similar digital sky that opens “Zodiac,” with fireworks exploding above the bridges of the Bay. But the episodic tale that follows pales in comparison to “Zelig” or to “Forrest Gump,” less a chronicle of experiential amplitude than one of fussy gee-whillikers cod-drollery.

Images of intimate beauty twinkle through the tobacco’ed skies of this would-be epic, but the voluminous narration reminds again and again of only one indelible figure from the pantheon of cinema: Joey Nickels. Joey Nickels? Joey Nickels from “Annie Hall”! Joey Five Cents? (What! an asshole!) The stories being funneled through the walls of the theater invariably sound like oft-repeated balderdash from someone who’s grown used to no one listening, not even himself. (”Button”’s best recurring joke involves lightning strikes, and is self-criticism of high comic attainment.)

Still, in terms of inedible imagery, Jean-Pierre Fincher still trumps Jeunet, to whose work “Button” has been compared. In faux battlefield footage, doughboys stride backward as if emerging from the bullets that had in fact just pierced their chests. Florets of fireworks reflected incidentally in a Model T’s tilted-just-so windscreen. Night-set scenes that work on the verge of pitch, the blackness and guttering sepia of de la Tour candlelight. A perspective of bridges overhead melting with fog. Daisy in a flat beret. An early 1960s rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. Scars on a woman’s legs, fingered deftly.

Any element beyond the simplest elements of timepieces, beyond basic movement, consists of constructions that are crested with a lovely term of art: complications. (Thus, great and treasured watches are built from complications of complications.) But in plotting, as in childbirth, complications can be the death of a thing, the death of narrative grace and ease. There are heartening, hushed instances when you can feel Benjamin and Daisy meeting in the middle, the conceit of the moments of the two lovers are slowly hurtling in opposite directions, and you can furnish the particulars of your own life and loves to capture the sense of the fleeting correspondence of contact, or parallel human treks. But that’s the function of canvas, not of a painting. And at these instances when the characters meet at nearly the same age that imply the sorrows of fleeting flesh and ever-limber love…yet the moment you’re touched Roth reaches out and slaps you with a nice wet bromide. Something like “You’re odd. You’re diff’r'nt from anybody I ever met,” or “You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. You can make the best or the worst of it.” Box of chocolates for $160 million, Alex? I can’t see the trees for the Forrest, but sweep Oscar smell I.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is birthed Christmas day.

RECOMMENDED

“The world doesn’t give a shit about me. I’m here. I’m really here.” I don’t know all the implications that can be wrought from this great line in “The Wrestler,” an original script by Robert D. Siegel, a former editor of The Onion. But self-pity is never part of it. Mickey Rourke, a thousand punches, blows and self-lacerations since his pretty-boy days of “Diner” and “Rumble Fish,” is the fleshy center of Darren Aronofsky’s movie, passion played again and again. Simple and unadorned, it’s both tragic and touching. Rourke plays “Randy the Ram” Robinson, a professional wrestler in his early 50s, living day-by-day, match-by-match, pill-by-pill. He’s a lonely man. Rourke plays him without vanity, unless you consider the vanity of stripping to muscle as if muscle were bone. One of Randy’s great hopes is getting closer to “Cassidy” (Marisa Tomei), a stripper he frequents. Tomei’s quietly fierce performance keeps stripper clichés at bay. There are jokey references to “The Last Temptation of Christ” as they banter in the club’s space to the side. The rending of flesh is made particular. It both diminishes and embellishes Randy’s ground-level transfiguration. And quickly, quietly, it sneaks in—you realize that “The Ram” and “Cassidy” are mirrored: merchants of flesh, exploiters of their own bodies, right past their prime. It’s a powerful duality, especially within the actors’ mutual lacks of vanity. Later, there’s a gag with a small kid who’s bored by the Nintendo game that featured Randy: pixels past prime. Steeped in sorrow, mingling overstatement and understatement, “The Wrestler” is smart, goofy, heartening entertainment. With Evan Rachel Wood, Todd Barry, Mark Margolis. 109m. Widescreen. An interview with Aronofsky will appear next week. (Ray Pride)