By Ray Pride

January and August of most years are the dodgiest months of all as studio-film releases go, when long-delayed, long-tampered-with and long-painful dogs are let out of their cages. The big studios (and Lionsgate) have in the past year or so done the service to the working reviewer of failing to preview these lost puppies for reviewers. (Although there is a Texas-based reviewer for Variety who notes he’s assigned each Christmas morning to see the most violent release of the season that seeps up under the seasonal tree or bush.)

Folks who see a lot of movies professionally may be even more sensitive than the average movie-lover. Where the guy down the street can say of an enterprise like “The Rocker,” “Nuh-uh. The idea of Rainn Wilson as an aging musical wanna-be who seems to be sporting a diaper turns my stomach. Want to get pizza?” and no one’s the poorer. Steve Coogan playing a one-note, stuck-in-one-gear Steve Coogan-ish asshole in “Tropic Thunder” or “Hamlet 2″? How about sushi? Several writers in the 1980s made the suggestion that Steve Guttenberg was a star because he was an only-slightly-handsomer version of mid-level casting executives. More recently, the rapid-fire output of Judd Apatow-produced comedies about slightly shrubby losers getting the girl have led to similar musings about wish-fulfillment. (Although I’d say the confidence the somewhat slimmed-down Seth Rogen shows in “Pineapple Express” is a nice boost up from, say, Jonah Hill’s apoplectically red-faced spleen and panic in “Superbad.”)

Among this week’s movies that were available for preview is Idit Cebula’s larky French comedy, “Two Lives Plus One,” the story of a Parisian wife pushed and pulled on all sides by her controlling family and whose life changes when she buys a laptop and starts keeping—and publishing—journals. She’s played by Emmanuelle Devos, an actress whose charm goes beyond beauty and sensuality: she’s simply someone you cannot but stare at. She’s the same way in movies like Arnaud Desplechin’s “Kings and Queen”: wide almond eyes with a steady gaze, a slight overbite, assured, reserved—you remember that movies were once more than the sum of spare parts from the house of cards that is stock plot-development. Pictures of people talking, and more importantly, listening, can be more than illustrated radio. The French still make movies like that.

Although Devos has become a substantial star on her home turf, she displays the kind of expressiveness seen more often in American movies in the faces and behaviors of character actors, rather than the well-heeled lead players. Her characters aren’t asked to experience some kind of spiritual transformation or to lead soldiers into battle—the “journey” doesn’t involve an identikit destination, a predetermined, predestined, pre-masticated ending, but the particulars along the way.

But most importantly, she simply has “it”: an actor who, as the saying goes, the camera loves, something beyond physical beauty. Mere charisma? Original Zen: someone you would gratefully watch on any journey. A few names off the top of the head: Luis Guzman. Marisa Tomei. Laurence Fishburne. Shu Qi. Jean-Pierre Leaud. Bruno Ganz. Richard E. Grant. Danny McBride. Tom Wilkinson. Elias Koteas. Warren Oates. Bruce Greenwood. Like termites, they bite through the fabric of the rote story unfolding. (Thelma Ritter in Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street”: she sells multitudes.)

I’ll confess to a couple of other actors that when I see their name on posters, I get the willies. But, just as I’m seldom disproved in my sneaking suspicions that Ben Stiller will play a character that seems ready to scratch his skin off from nerves and physical discomfort, there are actors I’d watch in just about anything. Say, Chow Yun-Fat in “The Children of Huang Shi.” The director Roger Spottiswoode told me he had to be careful in that recent film about just how far back in the frame Chow was in some scenes: he could be fifty feet away, lighting up a cigarette, and your eye is immediately drawn, fixedly, toward his gestures. Godard said something once about the movies having, in the time since Griffith, forgotten about the wind in the trees. It’s good to remember wind in the hair, too, and the transport that can play across a face in that simple instant of communing with nature.

“Two Lives Plus One” opens Friday at Siskel. Some bad movies, too. 

By Ray Pride

On Tuesday, the L.A. Times started the tom-toms going, gauging if “The Dark Knight” is on the mark to become the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. of all time, rising beneath “Titanic”’s substantial and seemingly unstoppable total that surpasses $600 million. Then again, Christopher Nolan’s dark, conflicted tale has gone above $314 million in a mere ten days, and most of the devoted moviegoers I know who have been dying to see it have faced nothing but sell-outs. (They’re still adamant, and most of them about the IMAX version.)

There are critiques as riotously conflicted as the movie’s politics—which presents, but does not necessarily endorse, the “dark knight”’s apparent turn to the “dark side” in the choices he makes throughout the movie. This is a good thing, I think: ambivalence and ambiguity just shy of notional incoherence make for the kind of movies that make it possible just to watch the zeitgeist burn. (See under: Robert Zemeckis in mid-career movies like “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump.”) If the world’s all hopped-up over the relative virtues or failings of “The Dark Knight,” they cannot help but engage with its suggestive political text, can they?

I’m most surprised by the fistful of reviews I’ve read where the portrayal of the city—the City—Gotham—Chicago—never enters into the appreciation. Even without knowing the corners being turned, the buildings just-glimpsed then cut away from, “The Dark Knight” is a city symphony of the hardly planned architectural heap that encircles Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for this patch of prairie, this City Beautiful.

The best movie you can readily see this week traffics in the same approach to drama, in a calmer, steadier fashion, and the likenesses were even more apparent last week when I watched Christian Petzold’s glassy dream-thriller “Yella” for the third time. Petzold’s earlier pictures, like “The State I’m In” (2000) and “Something to Remind Me” (2001), have had little play here, confined to a couple of screenings at Siskel. Yet this 47-year-old German director shares the amplitude of ideas about image and sound being as important as text with the Englishman who turned 38 on Wednesday. (Happy Birthday! Here’s $10 million!)

“Yella,” like most movies, unfolds like truth, like a moment, but it is also a dream, or perhaps less a dream than a portrait of a dreamer who cannot wake. Like his earlier movies, the ninth feature from Petzold haunts for what is shown but also for what is merely implied. Petzold works in apparent realism, concrete in his depiction of space and color, yet things remain disquietingly abstract—haunted. (“Ghosts,” the name of his 2005 feature, could title any of his work.)

“Yella” keeps the viewer off-kilter with strange happenings, beginning as Yella (Nina Hoss), a woman in East Germany, is stalked by a man who turns out to be her ex-husband. An accident happens. No one could survive. They both do. (Petzold admits reworking Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” for this story.) She improbably boards a train, drying her blood-colored blouse—Little Red Yuppie Hood?—and heads to the urban west, proves to be proficient in business, the equal of the venture capitalist who employs her. While her ex continues to stalk her, the dance of attraction between Yella and her boss resembles her earlier romance, as if her boss were a hale, hearty version of the earlier man, as if memory could only become moored by repetition. Hoss has the intense features of an older Mena Suvari, with a dash of Greta Scacchi’s coolness, along with an unnervingly steady gaze. Yella is central to nearly every scene, in almost every shot. She wears a blooded-red blouse that suggests vigor within, a burst of liveliness in the VC realm. Petzold’s images are hushed, interiors and compositions in painterly geometry that holds beauty that gratifies the eyes but becomes disturbingly clinical in accumulation. The real becomes spectral before these backdrops and in these spaces.

Working with his usual cinematographer, Hans Fromm, Petzold places his characters in patterns of urban isolation; the effect is studied, but never becomes forbiddingly icy. It’s tempting to explore comparisons to other filmmakers, such as Antonioni, or to the use of space in theatrical work, in which Petzold spent much of the 1980s. Like the late Italian master or Godard in their moment, European directors continue the struggle to capture the modern world as it enfolds us. His cool complexity suggests a familiar world with ease as simple as breath. Like Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”) or Joachim Trier (“Reprise”), Petzold is an anatomist of the unsettling, the unbearable, the heartbeat that remains beneath the money-counting tick-tock of contemporary commerce.

But I’d still belabor the comparison of Nolan and Petzold: among other things, they’re landscape artists, photographers of precision. (The surfaces submerged by the plotting that only seem to be the primary cinematic element.) Big doings are conveyed in simple gestures and images (with elusive yet evocative potential means that surpass mere framings and focal lengths). In “Yella,” sound matters, too: alarms drill, clocks tick, birds call, bells ring. A sonic boom? Seismic. A crow’s caw, the wind in the trees, the thrumming of a small river: a woman always living, mentally, at water’s edge. 

RECOMMENDED

(Le Mépris, 1963) “Contempt,” a couple years on from its theatrical revival, is a revelation, an overlooked, shockingly accessible masterpiece amid Godard’s oft-challenging canon. Michel Piccoli plays Paul Javal, a playwright who needs money, and producer Prokosch is embodied by Jack Palance, that heavy among heavies, waving a packet of cash in Paul’s direction to doctor a script of “The Odyssey” that is being directed by Fritz Lang. “I like gods,” Palance purrs, “I like them very much.” Paul has a beautiful young wife, Camille, played with momentous petulance by Brigitte Bardot. Paul asks whether he should write the script. Camille tells him it’s fine. Later she feels he hasn’t shown enough concern when Prokosch has been forward with her. No matter what Paul does, it will not be enough. Camille seizes on excuses, any excuses, to dismiss Paul’s adoration. She remembers the love she once thought they had: “Everything used to happen instinctively, in complicitous ecstasy.” For a good third of the movie, the couple bicker, contradict, cut at each other in their brightly colored, unfinished apartment. The world is reduced to Paul and Camille. Man and Woman. The furniture is as bold, as blunt as sculpture. A cerulean chair, a sunflower-colored throw, a red couch. Statues. Bardot. Her body rebukes the viewer, Paul. “Do you love my breasts, my eyes, my knees?” she asks, as the camera, transfixed, goes beyond objectification into blunt fetish. “I love you totally, terribly, tragically,” is all Paul, smitten, ever-equivocating, can tell her. At the end, the camera looks out onto the ocean, the horizon. Limitless possibility or infinite distance? The space between you and I, the space between a man, a woman. The sparkling azure of the sea is the crashing gulf between them. It is unfathomably huge. 102m. Widescreen. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

(Ne touchez pas la hache, or Don’t Touch the Ax) “The Duchess of Langeais,” made in 2007, is the twentieth or so feature by literature- and serendipity-loving Jacques Rivette. Eighty and still standing, he’s one of a quartet of surviving Nouvelle Vague-ers: while Rohmer has said he’s done at the age of 88, and the still-active Godard (77) and Resnais (86 last week). North America saw rare showings of Rivette’s 1971 “Out One,” which, even though made in 1971 and running about twelve-and-a-half hours, is about as modern a movie gets. My heart usually falls when I hear that a European or Asian director I admire is making a period piece. I want to see modern life, the modern world through their eyes. Yet there are films that feel like they’re in the present moment even with the trappings of costume drama. I wouldn’t make a direct comparison, but I’d say that the feeling of “now” in Rivette’s film is parallel to what I liked about Assayas’ “Les destinees” or Catherine Breillat’s upcoming “The Last Mistress,” where the filmmaking has a grammar, tactility and an unbridled character that feels present tense. Rivette is deep into the paranoia drawn from his beloved Balzac once more, repeating some of the lore of “The Thirteen,” the shadowy, society-controlling cadre that figures into “Out One” as well. But, as Breillat reminded me in a recent conversation about her film, “All films are period pieces.” Minimal yet provocative, Rivette’s setting of Balzac’s Napoleon-era story of romantic excesses fits neatly into his body of work, with bone-dry wit throughout. Love can so readily turn to cruelty: Rivette again charts the violent transgressions of desire in beautiful measure. With Jeanne Balibar, Guillaume Depardieu, Bull Ogier, Michel Piccoli and Barbet Schroeder. Rivettte’s customary cinematographer William Lubtchansky was behind the camera. 137m. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

Goodwill may be the rarest commodity in movies today.

Not buzz from ill- or half-informed rumormongers, not good word-of-mouth after a film opens, when the text “S GOOD!!” rains from the skies. Simple goodwill. Journalists around the world fell upon themselves to repeat a New York Times article that repeated a downbeat report about “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” that had been posted to a spoiler site, written by someone in the industry who claimed to had attended a legally mandated exhibitor’s screening. In other words, a pseudonymous dis by someone who was violating a key tenet of his job had pissed on a product he would be distributing to the public. Or, as the case could be—no one but the Times reporter and his editors know for sure—it might be a repeat of ruckus from last summer involving a projectionist of twenty or so who saw nothing wrong with reviewing movies he was paid to show. (God and Homer did not invent “Doh!” for nothing.)

But “Indy”: all I’d heard for weeks from kids from 15 to 50 was a big, tall case of the warm-’n'-fuzzies. The movie premiered at Cannes, and its North American press screenings were a few hours later, midday Sunday. Insta-reviews cascaded in. New York freelancer Eric Kohn text-messaged dribbles from Cannes, a stunt for which, a commenter at David Poland’s Hot Blog aptly suggested, “The guy should have been dragged out of the theatre and treated like a gambler caught cheating in old Vegas.” Who’s on first? Who fucking cares?

There are good things and indifferent things throughout this enterprise by the two richest directors who ever lived [pictured]—are they really worth several billion dollars each?—but most of the best (and worst) moments work from surprise, which reviews have already splashed across the media consciousness. If you want to be surprised, be warned that the rest of this piece has spoilers.

While a Lucasfilm production, “Indiana Jones and the Title by George Lucas” opens with a slap at DreamWorks’ partner, Paramount, whose mountain logo melts into what resembles a molehill, from which a prairie dog makes the first of many appearances. (The later swarms of flying monkeys bring far more cheer than the lame chimp in “Speed Racer.”) The original “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was supposed to be based on breakneck, nonsensical no-budget serials that Lucas supped upon as a youth, yet in the fourth iteration (with a fifth put forward by Spielberg at a Cannes press conference), the movie seems consumed by self-nostalgia, with wacky setpieces coming in an undifferentiated rush, an expensive crap rapture. (Lucas’ original title was reportedly “Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars,” and Harrison Ford actually speaks that line.)

An opening that establishes the 1957 setting has Lucas-style road racers drawing us into a military zone (quietly marked “Hangar 51″) and a confrontation with Russian spies, led by Cate Blanchett as the most boldly sexual drawing of Natasha Fatale ever (although Boris Badonov’s consort did not have those astonishing blue eyes). Holding her features in repose, Spielberg elevates her above the “Ilsa: She-Wolf Of The SKG” Blanchett resembled in promotional stills.

The dialogue throughout is painfully expository and mostly lame in a self-aware, declarative fashion, a geezer chic to match leading man Harrison Ford’s 65 years. The stunt men are obvious and his asides are murmured, almost whispered, almost as he didn’t care to be bothered once the fedora was popped on his head. French filmmakers like Truffaut and Godard always made the point of Alfred Hitchcock that his movies were as much about images as about editing and the psychology of point-of-view—not framing or geometry or composition, the basic elements of mise-en-scene, but a bit of action weighted with emotional or cultural undertow. (A man in a business suit chased by a crop-duster across a vast empty field in broad daylight; an extreme close-up of a key; a dying woman’s eye superimposed on the drain where her blood corkscrews away.)

The lack of iconic images was one of the letdowns of “Crystal Skull,” which doesn’t resonate as a Macguffin, either. The action in the last third, filled with CGI, is often as incoherent as a “Mummy” sequel. The most piercing sequence comes early, when Jones blunders into a nuclear test. A perfect, depopulated 1950s suburban tract is peopled by mannequins. The lightly satiric décor takes on a comic yet fearful air in the framing of the figures, like George Segal sculptures, and then in their fiery detonation worthy of the great maker of sardonic sculptural tableaux, Ed Kienholz. Spielberg caps the passage with a low shot from behind Jones, where the “hero” angle from beneath is not granted to our dwarfed protagonist, but by the horror-blooming, dark, rude, dust-filled mushroom, the annihilating terror of the twentieth century dwarfing the man with the hat and the whip.

“Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is now playing.

Jean-Luc Godard and the Maysles Brothers each put their personal touches on the Rolling Stones in their films “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968) and “Gimme Shelter” (1970), respectively. But Scorsese’s new concert doc is mostly Mick’s show, not Marty’s film. In a verite backstage intro, the yappy, manic Scorsese comes off as self-parodying. Executive producers Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood jack him around. Seems they are hiding the set list from their hyper-as-a-hummingbird director until the last minute. Scorsese enjoyed more access to The Band when he filmed their last concert. The Stones, though, are taking no last bow. The sixtysomething rockers roll through eighteen numbers that were filmed on two nights at the Beacon Theater in NYC. Scrawny, sweaty Jagger parades on stage—hideously lit, as if an autopsy table—as if he’s riding a gay pride float. His knack for dance pastiche is well framed by director of photography Robert Richardson, whose A-list lensers include John Toll, Stuart Dryburgh, Robert Elswit, Emmanuel Lubezki and Ellen Kuras. With onstage assists by Christina Aguilera, Buddy Guy and Jack White III. 122m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED
Jean-Luc Godard doesn’t actively participate in the DVD production of his back catalog, but the still-active 75-year-old director can’t be less than pleased about the 35mm restorations and re-subtitling of his work for English-speaking audiences. “La chinoise” (1967) is a lavish, boldly colored pop-art canvas composed a few months after his black-and-white “Masculin-Feminin.” It’s spectacular: the politics maddening, the faces hauntingly young, the era alive, the digressions astute (and not). With the incredibly beautiful Jean-Pierre Léaud, in his most Léaud-esque era, the lavishly lovely Anne Wiazemsky and Juliet Berto and the taciturn visage of Mao Tse-tung. (The trailer gives you a taste of its vertiginous array: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI4WxJb-uRU) 96m. (Ray Pride)