Reviews

The last time Elliott(Leo Fitzpatrick) saw Matthew(Richard Gallagher), they were both little kids at an orphanage, harboring dreams of parental love. Matthew got lucky; he went home, but for Elliott, finding a home became an ongoing search. He stayed in houses, while Matthew collected soccer trophies and majored in journalism at college. But that was then, and this is now. Dressed in a black suit and tie, Elliott is still that little boy, trying to make a good first impression, trying to be loved, when he shows up at the front door of his dying friend he hadn't seen in twenty years. Elliott is lost, looking very much like the Harry Dean Stanton character in Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas" in his formal attire, but with one crucial difference: Travis Henderson had intended on staying lost, roaming the flat prairie lands of Texas, whereas Elliott wants to be found. In the Wenders film, Walt(Dean Stockwell) has to convince his wanderlust brother to get in the car, while in "El Camino", a road movie about angsty white people that doesn't get its angst in your pants, Elliott begs Gray(Christopher Denham) and Lily(Elisabeth Moss) after the funeral to let him be the third wheel on their journey to Mexico, where Matthew's best friend and ex-girlfriend plan on scattering his ashes into the Pacific.

"I had a great life," says Matthew, whom Elliott shoots with his video camera, just as he did back at the orphanage, shortly before his old documentary subject passes away. The video camera is how Elliott participates in life, purely as an observer who points his lens at things of interest; an outsider trying to make a connection with other people, living vicariously through his recorded images. At one point during the trip, inside Gray's house, the spoiled rich kid calls him "Spielberg", an appropriate moniker, since the Elliott in "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" was looking for a friend. When Lily coaxes Elliott to surrender his camera for an interview, he becomes the subject, perhaps for the first time since Matthew interviewed him as kids. He finally becomes a thing of interest, this orphan, who the moviegoer suspects has never loved, or been loved. Since film-making is how Elliott connects with people, this burlesquing of intimacy, having Lily turning the tables and filming the filmmaker amounts to having Elliott's attempts at intimacy being reciprocated. He's being "stripped" in front of a stripper; he's naked. When Lily kisses Elliott, he doesn't know what to do, because this orphan has spent his whole life recording life instead of living it. At the final destination, a beach in Mexico, after Elliott parts ways with Gray(the angst-ridden rich kid with daddy issues), and Lily(the angst-ridden, chain-smoking exotic dancer with mommy issues), the formally-attired "boy" takes off his shirt and walks toward the ocean. Since, in all likelihood, there's nobody to watch his film, he doesn't bother recording his homecoming. (The final scene is open-ended; it might, or might not be a suicide attempt.)

Jackie Chan isn't a eunuch, but that's how American filmmakers treat the Hong Kong action star. It's especially noticeable in this year's "The Spy Next Door", where Chan, playing a retired CIA operative, dates, then marries his neighbor with supermodel looks(Amber Valetta), yet never gets to kiss her like he really means it. Hollywood decided long ago that an American audience only wants to see Chan kick ass, not tap it. If you pair him up with any pretty young thing, Claire Forlani in "The Medallion", for instance, the moviegoer can be rest assured that his coat will stay on, as well as the shirt, pants, underwear, and socks. So when Chan's character(Steelhead, a Chinese illegal in Japan) sees two hookers and suggests to his friend they have some fun, a semi-explicit love scene in which the lovely lady humps away on top of Chan, comes as a complete surprise, a shock, even, since throughout his filmography, the martial arts daredevil has never gotten to first base with a woman. In "San suk si gin", the filmmaker restores his penis, his masculinity. A eunuch persona would not suit the godfather-like character that Chan plays in this agreeable, albeit hurried crime saga(despite the two-hour-plus running time), where the asexual star of "Rush Hour" and "Shanghai Knights" is hired as a hit-man by the leader-in-waiting of the Yakuza, Eguchi(Jinglei Xu), who asks Steelhead to rub out his rivals in exchange for the promise that he'll enable the Chinese to exist as a powerful crime syndicate in Japan's exclusionary society. More odd than the sight of Chan having sex, is his atypical handling of a gun as a means of resolving conflict, rather than deploying his martial arts skills; his bare hands, and feet. Sex transforms the Chan persona. It's right after Steelhead's sexual encounter that this destitute immigrant tells Jie about his plans to "skirt the law and make money". "San suk si gin" knows that the moviegoer just wouldn't buy a celibate gangster. But Chan, the proverbial chopsocky everyman, not wanting to put his screen image at too much of a risk, is far from being Michael Corleone, or Henry Hill, since his character becomes less pro-active once his syndicate gets involved with drugs. No way is Chan going to do blow. Once Steelhead acquires his properties and Japanese citizenship, he goes legal, so the movie focuses on Steelhead's younger brother Jie(Daniel Wu), whose drug problem will remind moviegoers of "Good Fellas", in which illegal drugs becomes the bane of both crime outfits. Steelhead doesn't even know about the blow. Chan flirts with badness, but steers clear of any evil doing. When it seems like Steelhead is about to inform on Eguchi(his Japanese benefactor), "San suk si gin" never gives him the chance to double-cross his ex-girlfriend's husband, because Eguchi's Yakuza colleagues get to him before the law can. Steelhead lets the Japanese f*** Eguchi over, which mirrors the sex scene, where he allows the woman to do the work for him.

"Crazy Heart" opens with panoramic shots of a lone pickup truck traversing the barren landscape on a road to nowhere. It's driver used to be somebody, a big-time country music star, back when Nashville was full of renegades, larger-than-life men who lived hard and never gave a second thought about the consequences. But tastes change, and old school artists like Bad Blake(Jeff Bridges) watched Nashville sell-out its bluegrass roots toward a more polished sound, an amalgamation of pop and country in order to move beyond its niche market and into the mainstream. Still, the aura of celebrity hangs around Bad Blake which allows the has-been to tour the country, a circuit consisting of bowling alleys and juke joints whose clientele while long in the tooth, appreciates real country music in the Hank Williams tradition. At the peak of his career, Bad Blake embodied his adjectival moniker with pride, romancing his hard-living ways in song, his art, a justification for all the people he disappointed over the years. "Crazy Heart" is about a man who has seen his alias metamorphosize into a judgment, and is seeking deliverance from the naming he once took pride in, with the help of a young female journalist, who has the power to give Bad his name back.

Jean Craddock(Maggie Gyllenhall), a budding music journalist for a local Tucson paper, breaks the golden rule that Lester Bangs imparted to young William Miller in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous", which was, "You never make friends with the rock stars." During their first meeting in a shabby motel room, Bad asks Jean not to snap any pictures, candid pictures that would suggest his down-and-out existence of alcoholism and destitution. But he grants permission to shoot him while he's performing, which she does, at a low-angle, so that Bad Blake looms large, heroic, and nothing like the disheveled man with a gut we saw back at the motel room. And once Jean starts sleeping with Bad, her story becomes compromised. What Bad needed was an expose, not a puff-piece; an expose which detailed his long-running demons would have been the wake-up call he needed to get sober. Although Jean knows the whole story, she only writes about Bad's good points; a compromised story which compromises her heart, because she edits out his alcoholism, not only in her capacity as a journalist, but as a mother, as well, when she puts her four-year-old boy in Bad's care. In essence, she dates her puff-piece; she hurts everybody- herself, her son, and even Bad, because she didn't write the whole story. It's as if Jean needed to see the pictures that Bad asked her not to take for perspective.

As a result of her relationship with Jean, Bad writes a song called "The Weary Kind" for his protégé Tommy Steele(Colin Farrell), a successful artist in the new Nashville tradition. Since the song is a smash, an argument can be made that being bad is good for the singer/songwriter. Being bad is what informs his art, albeit at the expense of a fruitful personal life. The song was supposed to be a happy one, a song about Jean when their future looked promising. Thanks to Tommy, the song acts as a beacon in which Bad hopes Jean hears his plea of undying love and lure her back. But when Jean shows up backstage after a concert, the diamond ring on her finger instantly turns "The Weary Kind" into an elegy. All he has left is the song.

The blind man, the once-famed director of motion pictures, doesn't like to be called Mateo Blanco anymore. It's a name he associates with his seeing years, when the blind man made movies, made love to the woman he worshiped, and made enemies. Now he calls himself Harry Caine, a man who learns that his vision was taken away from him in more ways than one. More than a physical blindness, Harry was not only blind-sided by a speeding vehicle on the highway, which killed Lena, the star of "Girls and Suitcases", and left him sightless, he was also blind-sided by Judit, who afflicted her one-time lover with a professional blindness, when she butchered "Girls and Suitcases" in the editing room, out of jealousy over the filmmaker's romancing of his leading lady. Prior to his handicap, Mateo had thought he lost his creative vision. "Los abrazos rotos", in a sense, recalls Woody Allen's "Hollywood Ending", where the big joke was that filmmakers had no vision, as the filmmaker, played by Allen himself, directed a movie without the benefit of sight. In "Los abrazos rotos", Pedro Almodovar, through his evocation of screen legend Audrey Hepburn, perhaps, wants to say something about Hollywood, in which filmmakers lose their vision when the right to final cut is taken away from them. Ultimately, the melodramatic story, that of a rich tycoon who is jealous of his wife's affair with another man, frames the real subject, which is, ultimately, the relationship between art and commerce on any given film.

Throughout the interim of Mateo's sabbatical from film-making, Judit had in her possession, every inch of film that Mateo shot for "Girls and Suitcases", the cure for blindness, the restoration of his creative vision, which she withheld from him, because the healing powers of celluloid was too high a price for the production manager to give away for free. By helping Mateo regain his sight, Judit endures the bittersweet agony of mixed emotions, because her role as the "miracle worker"(after all, she helps Mateo see again) entails that her ex-lover can see how Lena was indeed, a capable comic actress, who was unfairly panned for her performance in the failed screwball comedy, due to sabotage. Since Judit might have played a role in the vehicular accident that claimed Lena's life, the production manager is also in the position of bringing her rival back to life, a correction to the professional death she engineered on the neophyte actress, the girlfriend of Ernesto Martel, while busy blinding her beloved.

At the post-production session, a belated one, to say the least, Judit cries, not only because Mateo can "see" again, but that he "sees" and she sees what a promising actress Lena actually was. Lena, newly exhumed from the professional grave that Judit dug for her, excels at comedy, delivering lines like a seasoned pro, from the final cut that Mateo was denied for so long. In a sense, the scene from "Girls and Suitcases" transforms "Los abrazos rotos" into a documentary(the making of "Girls and Suitcases"), which was what the filmmaker had in mind all along, as we watch Lena act her way past all the drama that the millionaire's son captured on his video camera.

Bill Pullman didn't die during the making of "Lost Highway", but the same can't be said for narrative coherence, however, which bites the dust hard, at the very moment when Balthazar Getty shows up, unannounced, in that prison cell, supplanting Pullman, and emerges as the regenerated protagonist. The 1995 cult classic, also starring Patricia Arquette(and her breasts), can now be seen as a precursor to "Mulholland Drive", in which David Lynch test-drove, half-successfully, his utilization of dream logic. If only Heath Ledger's sudden and improbable death was only a dream, and the consigning of his unfinished character(Tony) to Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell could be explained as a filmmaker's license to be surreal for the sake of surrealism, and not out of necessity. Not wanting to suffer the ignominy of another lost film while in production(like his unrealized epic "Don Quixote", memorably documented in "Lost in LaMancha"), the former Monty Python trouper turns to the idea of multiplicitous personas, which, not surprisingly, hardly seems out of place in such a ramshackle production such as "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus". Depp, of course, was slated to star in "Don Quixote", so his participation in this free-wheelin' movie seems like fate, a serendipity of macabre-like proportions. Taking over for Ledger, Tony #2 escorts this middle-aged socialite through a phantasmagoria of giant-sized shoes and accessories, as Depp becomes a sort of Freddy Krueger(after all, these dreamers have the potential to die, ala "A Nightmare on Elm Street", a film that, incidentally, starred a young Depp), when he tries to off the cougar by luring her to a motel where the devil(Tom Waits) can claim her soul. The plot revolves around the collection of souls, in which Dr. Parnassus(Christopher Plumber) needs five to save his daughter Valentina(Lily Cole) from the clutches of Mr. Nick. The plot, however, becomes instantly negligible once the filmmaker rolls out the Tonys, as the film, literally, turns into a memorial for Mr. Ledger, most pointedly, in a scene where Depp observes a trio of flotillas memorializing James Dean, Rudolph Valentino, and Princess Di, and by association, his good friend Heath.

Although Ledger's character turns out to have two faces(well, actually four), the star of Catherine Hardwicke's "Lords of Dogtown"(check out his spot-on send-up of Val Kilmer) apparently died before Tony reveals his dark side, which means we're spared the image of him choking a "child", a job that falls to Colin Farrell, the last Tony. The moviegoer can enjoy the late actor at his benevolent best, playing straight-man to Anton(Andrew Garfield), in a charming scene where the circus performer plays keep-away with Tony's flute. Best of all, he gets to hang out with Mini-Me, sorry, Percy(Verne Troyer), a sarcastic dwarf. Ledger gets to play the charming straggler who joins a traveling circus act(it's a shame that he doesn't get to kiss the girl), while the job of playing more the nefarious thief who hides out from his pursuers, falls on the shoulders of his collective stand-ins. Tony #3, as played by Jude Law, has a sequence in the imaginarium that recalls, in equal parts, Monty Python(the music-hall number performed by the singing policeman has a very British feel to it), and yes, Lynch, as tiny people, Tony's pursuers, who are the size of miniature toys, disappear under the hem of a peasant's dress, which is a direct steal from "Mulholland Drive".(Remember the tiny old people that the Naomi Watts character hallucinates?) Is it a coincidence that the circus performers first encounter Ledger as a hanging man, a man who could have possibly been lynched?

Not for no reason is "No puedo vivir sin ti" photographed in black and white. A life spent in abject poverty certainly can become a life without color, without beauty. Chang Yu-Tang is an unskilled laborer who dives into the ocean with faulty equipment because he has no choice. There's a young daughter to take care of, so he makes boat repairs with an old generator that could potentially, and almost does, kill him. While his uncle sleeps, the air compressor falters, but Mei, whom the father can see as a silhouette from beneath the surface, senses the imminent danger, therefore she rouses their benefactor from his nap and averts a tragedy in the making. She protects him. Tang doesn't deserve her. Mei should have decent shelter, should be in school, and in the absence of having fit parents, should at least have a fit father. Tang tries. Throughout the course of "No puedo vivir sin ti", Tang shuttles back and forth between his native Kaohsiung province and the big city in his futile attempts to enroll Mei in school. But the bureaucrats won't let him; they insist that the girl belongs to her birth mother, even though this supposed guardian hadn't seen Mei or Tang in years. The seven-year-old girl lives with her father in an abandoned warehouse by the sea. The moviegoer sympathizes with the father's frustration, as these pencil pushes can plainly see how they overmatch this borderline homeless man, disguising their contempt with the bald-faced assertion that rules and regulations need to be followed. The black and white photography gives Tang's plight a nightmare quality. Nobody listens to him, because nobody listens to a poor man. Finally, at wit's end, tired of such people pushing him around, Tang ascends to a bridge with Mei and threatens to jump. Back in the harbor, back under the water, it was only Mei who cared if her father lived or died; now he has a city and a television audience wondering about his fate. By dragging Mei into his fatalistic sphere, however, he loses the audience's sympathy.

"No puedo vivir sin ti" seems derived from the neorealist tradition with its assemblage of real locations, non-professional actors, and especially, its humanist viewpoint. The filmmaker isn't a sadist who subjects his characters with relentlessly downbeat situations. He points his camera skyward, albeit a sky without its blue rendering is like a sky without optimism, the sky remains there for looking, for hoping. He points his camera at windmills; he points his camera at pear trees. Like Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz"(the Victor Fleming film is featured briefly), Mei dreams of a better place, but not without her father. "No puedo vivir sin ti", as was the neorealist Italian films from the forties and fifties, lacks the ironic glamour you sometimes find in a studio film, where being poor sometimes seem like an adventure, and worse, fun. Being poverty-stricken may be a bleak proposition, but the filmmaker has room for some grace under the inherent desolation of indigence, as in the scene where the father and daughter eat some fruit they picked off the roadside trees. The fruit is sweet, too sweet, probably. In Vittorio DeSica's "Umberto D.", the maker of "Bicycle Thieves" reunited the old man and his dog, and yet, despite their joyful antics in the park, it was a bittersweet reunion, at best. Nothing had really changed. The old man still would be hard-pressed to look after his beloved pet. "No puedo vivir sin ti" ends similarly, but with a difference.

Although a foster home is no Oz, Mei is in school, and no doubt, enjoys better food and a real roof over her head. The action picks up two years after the incident at the bridge, and during this interim, nothing has changed for Tang, except his hair. When he locates Mei, the school authorities tell him that she's gone mute, which sets the film up for a reunion scene more befitting of a major studio movie than a low-budget one. The sentimental music betrays its previously gritty presentation with bathos. Nobody seems to remember that the father almost killed his daughter. This fact gets lost in the pretty piano balladry. The filmmaker seems more concerned with the father's needs than the daughter's needs. He manipulates the audience by rigging everything in his favor. Mei never gets to be happy. Here is a more appropriate coda: Chang sees his daughter from afar, well-adjusted and well-fed, talking with her schoolmates outside the school, then walks away, with peace of mind that his daughter is alright. That is the bittersweet ending which would ably compliment the film's formal strictures of neorealism.

Standing in the English rain, Jenny(Carey Mulligan) doesn't know the driver of the car, yet, who brakes for a woman, a mother, and no doubt, somebody's wife too, pushing the baby carriage in a crosswalk. She doesn't know that the driver, her future lover, has a wife and child of his own, and misses the telltale significance of this innocuous scene from her roadside vantage point. He stops. He takes an interest in her cello; he takes an interest in her. When the time comes for David(Peter Saarsgard) to choose between Jenny and his wife, he yields again, he stops, instead of running over his family, in order to be with this Bristol schoolgirl, an Oxford aspirant. David, as he sits in the idling car, ready to declare his intentions of marrying Jenny before her parents, realizes that his glamorous life as a thief is more like a movie than real life, so he drives away. And Jenny too, wakes up from her own dream world, and resumes her ordinary life as a schoolgirl in Bristol, who lives at home with her parents.

His car seemed safe and warm; he rescued her cello, so she accepted the stranger's offer to drive her home, and, in essence, is rescued herself from becoming the woman pushing a baby carriage. He had introduced Jenny to a faster life, a faster crowd, "enlightened people", than the one she knows, but always distanced herself from, by reading books about faraway places, and speaking French. He took her to a nightclub for "a spot of supper" with his posh friends, after spending the evening listening to chamber music. She had an advantage: the other woman in the dinner party was dumb. Around the table, everybody held cigarettes, including Jenny, and she looked like an adult, one of them, the very effect that the sixteen-year-old-girl and her schoolmates were after when they would light up after classes, trying to look older as they'd walk around town. The school uniforms defeated them, defeated Jenny. But there, in the nightclub, the cigarette, the way Jenny held it between her fingers, made her look so grown-up, the moviegoer was taken aback by her transformation. Throughout the evening, Jenny intimidated the blonde with the fur(Rosamund Pike) by demonstrating her familiarity with high culture, but as Janet fussed over David at the dinner table, she had the schoolgirl beat in an art, the womanly art of intimacy, that Jenny knew next-to-nothing about.

To the moviegoer's surprise, "An Education" has a little "Badlands" in it, the Terrence Malick film about how a young drifter(played by Martin Sheen) leads an innocent girl(played by Sissy Spacek) into a life of crime. (Because of her romantic notions, Jenny doesn't realize that David is a small town denizen like herself.) On their way back from an overnight trip to Oxford, Jenny learns that her new friends are thieves, but amazingly, she doesn't walk away; she likes the high life; she likes illicit thrills. For a little excitement, Jenny compromises her morals in order to avert the drudgery of her previously provincial life. The outlaw in her makes Jenny the slightest bit unlikable, the slightest bit snotty, especially in separate scenes where she questions the validity of higher education for women: the first time with her teacher(played by Olivia Williams), and the second time with her principal(played by Emma Thompson), role models both, whom Jenny wishes not to imitate, because sadly, the positions they hold is supposed to foretell the happy ending for Jenny if she chooses to attend Oxford. "An Education" shows how the limited the options were for women in 1961, because the filmmaker has us rooting for a future where Jenny either becomes a mother with a diploma, or a spinster with a diploma. Choose Oxford, and Jenny is staring down at future employment as a teacher or an education administrator(or as the principal suggests, a life in civil service). Choose David, and Jenny might be happy, but this isn't a genre film where crime pays with the full endorsement of the audience. The moviegoer doesn't want the girl to get ahead in such an immoral fashion. After all, this is real life, not some movie.

In Paris, the filmmaker makes this distinction, and gives their vacation a travelogue look, like a movie. Although their sojourn through France is set in the present, the relatively short montage of a couple's sightseeing tour has a curious air of nostalgia to it, like we're looking at the past, as it happens. Jenny looks so happy, so full of life, the moviegoer realizes with some sadness that she'll never be this happy again. The trip doesn't look real, because that much happiness, that much romanticism can't possibly be real. David isn't real. The real David has a wife and child; the real Jenny will get her degree in Engish and one day in the future, become that woman pushing a baby carriage in the rain.

"Aruitemo aruitemo" is about ordinary Japanese people. Comparable to the 1980 Robert Redford-directed film starring Timothy Hutton, this Far East import also deals with a mom, and how she distributes her love among the children unequally, forcing the left behind son to compete against the dead one, the favored one, the first born. Fifteen years ago, Ryo's brother died in the ocean while trying to save another boy. With a wife and child among him, Ryota(Hiroshi Abe) has returned home for a reunion(to commemorate the fifteen-year anniversary of his sibling's untimely passing), where he faces not just a frosty mother, but a father who's the antithesis to the sire played by Donald Sutherland in the Redford film. Ryota brings home damaged goods; his wife and child are widow and stepson, and they rate far below their daughter's husband and two children, in spite of the Japanese people's partiality for boys over girls. Whereas Calvin Jarrett(Sutherland) loved his son unconditionally, Kyohei(Yoshio Harada) admonishes Ryota for not following in his footsteps by becoming a doctor. Although the surviving son is in the restoration business too, artwork can't begin to compete with the prestige of fixing people, thus the wedge was set between them years ago, and festers there still, throughout the duration of what will be his final visit back home. The mother(played by Kirin Kiri), who seems to be the more congenial parent, entertains Ryo's wife with her son's childhood things, and pulls out an old school essay, in which the boy had expressed an admiration for his father and the medical profession. But that fatal accident at the beach had brought out the truth in how the family worked, so Ryo turned to art history, probably to spite his father who loved him half as much as the first born. Sympathetic portrayals both, the widow and the stepson, nevertheless, they follow the pattern of reduced expectation, in which Ryo, had his brother lived on, would have married more prudently, and summoned a blushing bride for procreation. Told in retrospect, "Aruitemo aruitemo" takes place, perhaps, about ten years in the past, the amount of time it took Ryota to make peace with his parents, and love them unconditionally, once again.

"Your family isn't normal," says Toshiko to her son, on the return trip from a pilgrimage to the dead son's grave. She doesn't count Ryo's stepson as his real child. Such bluntness shocks, the cruelty of her words. Clearly, the tragedy had curdled her heart. At the outset, the mother makes corn "tempura" for her familial guests, especially the children, but on this same walking tour, the moviegoer learns that she can barely stand kids, and shudders at the thought of her daughter's filial plan of moving back home with her family. The filmmaker excels at showing how oblivious the young children are to the anger that bubbles beneath the surface of each family gathering. They don't see that the grown-ups are ready to implode. The mother's worst behavior, however, is reserved for the boy who survived, an overweight dropout with no career prospects whom the family invites every year, so that he remembers the sacrifice made on his behalf, a sacrifice in vain. The mother tells Ryota that he wants the boy to suffer just as she had suffered. The father calls him "trash". In "Ordinary People", the surviving brother(Hutton) was at the scene of the boating accident, and is made to feel by the mother(played by Mary Tyler Moore) that the wrong son lived on. In light of the parents' disapproval over his family life and occupation, it's easy to see how Ryo might feel that mom and dad are projecting on the hapless guest, their disappointment over himself being the only surviving male heir.

When Ryota returns home, his parents are long-dead, but now he has a new addition, a daughter, who joins her parents and brother in honoring the grandparents she never met. As he pours water over their tombstone, the moviegoer speculates as to why Ryota finally made peace with his folks. Our eyes turn to the little girl, and we remember the old woman's words. The moviegoer wonders if he agrees with her. The dousing of the tombstones can be read as a son waking up his parents, in order for them see the grandchild they always wanted. Considering how Ryota's parents felt about the widow and stepson, it's somewhat perverse for them to participate in the ceremony. "Aruitemo aruitemo" is very, very Japanese. They're not like American people. They're not ordinary people.

The Gopniks live in suburbia, among the goys, in tract houses with perfect lawns that have no white picket fences to help demarcate where properties begin and end. Although the Gopnik tract house looks like everybody else's tract house, it's not the same, and Larry Gopnik(Michael Stuhlberg) knows it. He feels the difference after each near-encounter with his immediate neighbors, a father and son, who ignore the college professor whenever they're both within talking distance in the seamless yards, where the latter man tries to be neighborly, to no avail. It isn't the first time, this set of gentiles, the moviegoer suspects, have turned their backs on Larry, the only Jew in the development, seemingly. They toss the baseball around more as an exclusionary tactic than as a pure expression of male camaraderie. The father and son throw and catch at such an accelerated pace, Larry can't get a word in edgewise. There's no entry point for the Jew to fully integrate himself with the goys, and just be one of the guys. Life for the Jews in middle America might have been better in the sixties than the era recounted in Phillip Roth's novel "The Plot Against America", but that's because openly anti-Semitic behavior was no longer in vogue. In this instance, such racism is intimated through the cold shoulder of a neighbor, whereas in the past(the WWII homefront milieu of the Roth novel), this same neighbor might have squared his shoulders toward Larry, and fired away with his mouth. (In a dream sequence, this same man fires away at Larry's brother, which indicates that the Jew feels the undercurrent of violence during his terse exchanges with the gun nut.) The Gopniks live somewhere in the midwest. They're assimilated Jews, and it's 1966: the year Larry angers Hashem, who seems to have chosen the physics professor to be made an example out of.

A serious man doesn't believe in magic. At the outset, the film hearkens back to the old country, where a peasant woman, believing that her husband has brought a "dybbuk" home for a bowl of soup, stabs this manifestation of Jewish folklore in the chest. Fast-forward to the present, where Larry, a physics professor awaiting tenure at some mid-level university, teaches a subject that's antithetical to the spiritual realm, which he, on a superficial level, still abides by. Danny(Aaron Wolf), his son, attends Hebrew school, even though mathematics(and science) disproves the existence of god. As Danny's teacher tends to the chalkboard, the moviegoer sees how the boy is just like his father, as he too inhabits both worlds, in which the boy lends one ear to a lecture on the Torah, and one ear to Grace Slick(of The Jefferson Airplane) imploring that Danny find "Somebody to Love" emanating from a tiny plastic earphone. Even better, this negotiation of traditional and popular cultures clash to even greater heights when Danny reads from the ancient religious text while stoned on marijuana at his Bar Mitzvah. Perhaps, the Gopniks' Americanization angers Hashem. (The everyday presence of Hashem in such modern trappings is suggested by "The First Rabbi", the junior rabbi that Larry seeks counsel with.) Larry's son wants to watch "F-Troop". Larry's wife wants a divorce so she can marry a man who believes in magic, Sy Ableman(Fred Melamed); he insists that Judith(Sari Lennick) get a ritual divorce so the two may marry in the faith. Larry believes in science; he just goes through the motions of his Judaism. A serious man believes in empirical evidence to prove that something exists, like an oncoming tornado, or a shadow that mysteriously appears on an x-ray, weeks after the patient was issued a clean bill of health. What looks like science, might actually be the wrath of god, of Hashem. A less serious man would see it in such a light. A serious man, like Larry, will miss the irony.

Earlier in the film, Larry fixes the aerial on his roof(so Danny can watch "F-Troop"), and sees his neighborhood from a different perspective; the perspective that remains obscured by his dogged insistence that the children(he also has a daughter) grow up Jewish. From his position of elevation, he sees a miracle, a secular miracle, a nude woman sun-bathing in her backyard. The math tells Larry how this "divine" act is made possible.

Contrary to popular belief among the narrow-minded, not all Arabs are Muslims. Case and point: only one of the two female office workers, employees at a Palestinian bank, have their heads covered, in the opening scene of "Ameerka", a relevant film about the emigrants that makes some of us leery, still, eight years and counting after that fateful day in September. Even if Muna(Nisreem Faour) was a Muslim, and did wear a headscarf in compliance with Islamic law, would it make this divorced mother of one any less likable? Of course not. Not all Muslims are terrorists, contrary to popular belief. By default, "Ameerka" is a political movie, but it doesn't have to be one; it's the people that Muna and her son Fadi(Melkar Maleem) meet stateside, who make their presence a political matter. Despite having no outlying signifiers to correspond with their ethnicity, as if being Arab itself is supposed to denote one's religious affiliation in the first place, people prefigure their disposition, and treat them accordingly, with suspicion, with disregard.

At the outset of "Ameerka", the small Palestinian family is made instantly relatable in a sequence that establishes how close-knit Mni and Fadi are, which completely transcends their "otherness". When the mother asks her son about his homework, having just picked the boy up from his private school, they could be American, but this parental concern is transformed by context and becomes a Palestinian scene, as their intimacy is interrupted by the car's arrival at a checkpoint, ending any semblance of normality, in which the Israeli soldier goes about his vehicle inspection. Once home, a house they share with the family matriarch, Muna quietly asks Fadi to get the tomatoes from the car, reining her temper in while Fadi's grandmother complains about her daughter's forgetfulness. Those tomatoes came from the produce market, a hole in the wall where Muna, recently divorced, had encountered her ex-husband's new wife, who is both younger and skinnier, and arguably, prettier, than her. When Muna boards the plane to America with her son, she's carrying around a broken heart, not a bomb.

The Farahs go to Illinois. That's where Muna's sister Raghda(Hiam Abbass) and her family lives. It's also where Fadi got accepted to an expensive school. Blissfully unaware of her own Americanization, Raghda possesses an American's arrogance, talking about Palestine as if she still knew her. Muna knows. She knows it's better to be a foreigner than a prisoner. Muna corrects her older sister, who feels Palestinian because she shops at a Palestinian grocers, and can speak in her own native language without the cold stares of American housewives that greeted them at the supermarket. With enough English to get by, Muna goes job-hunting, and ends up serving burgers at White Castle, a last resort to unemployment, after being turned away by a host of prejudicial bank managers. The job embarrasses Muna, but she's a go-getter, so there's definitely a place for her in this country. When Muna's principal, a Polish-Jew(remember: Muna is Palestinian), drives her back to work(after being called in for a conference over Fadi's fisticuffs with his tormentor), he stays for lunch, after returning the handbag she left behind in his car. As he eats the famous White Castle fare, she mops, but then he invites her to sit with him(remember: the principal is Jewish), because she's entitled to be there, like she and Fadi are entitled to be in America. Muna has the right to dream of a better life. Living paycheck to paycheck is not good enough for her. She sells a weight-loss drink, and later in "Ameerka", she slips on the liquid, the handiwork of Fadi's tormentor, who knocks an open can off the White Castle counter. Flat on her back, that's where Muna might end up in this country, but she has a right to fail, and she has a right to get up, and try again.

It's the open doorway that keeps you on edge. That's where our eyes are trained. Something in the house is making those booming noises, and the anticipation of its source materializing within the black rectangle fuels our fear, because the "mis-en-scene" feels spontaneous. There's no music cue to brace us for any imminent surprises. Micah, the daytrader who moonlights as a naive art-house filmmaker, employs the long take to good effect, which allows you to search the frame for paranormal activity without the didacticism of camera angles and editing. The scares aren't canned; the scares are fresh, generated from a build-up of long-simmering dread. The scares are based on observation, not cheaply earned through flash cuts, which only startle the moviegoer. The objective distance between the camera and the bed that contains the sleeping couple is deceptively artless. The camera isn't looking for the demon, you are: the camera is passive, forcing the moviegoer into a more pro-active mode. "Paranormal Activity" makes you a ghostbuster among ghostbusters, in which the camera is subjugated, transformed into a corroborator to the sentry, that is you, who looks over this woman, and to a lesser degree, this man. From the open doorway, the hall running north to south can be glimpsed, and the stairwell that connects to it. The moviegoer measures the proximity of the potential demon traversing the hallway to the couple's room towards the camera, and realizes how vulnerable Katie seems, especially since Micah is sleeping on the wrong side of the bed, the side closest to the doorway to her left, as if she's protecting him. Even worse than the prospect of a malevolent presence methodically approaching the bedroom from the farthest reaches of the entrance/exit, that malevolent presence could manifest itself without warning from the hallway parallel to their room, revealing itself where the wall gives way to the threshold of their sleeping chamber without a musical soundtrack to orientate the moviegoer of the transition between the build-up and the reveal. Unlike other horror movies, we're not told in advance of what is, hypothetically, supposed to terrify us.

The moviegoer never sees anything bodily enter the room, but there are the footprints, captured in posterity by the baby powder that Micah deposits on the floor. It changes the rules: the demon can get to Katie without detection. Katie's sleepwalking, and her dramatic snake-like slither off from her bed, jolts us, because the doorway serves not only as an entrance, but as an exit, as well. The moviegoer is rendered powerless, and maybe, unconsciously, a little guilty too, since the film surreptitiously makes us responsible for Katie's safety(the demon was in the room and we missed it), even though we know that the events on the tape had already transpired. Such is the faculties of digital video to project a present tense ambiance. We're the last line of defense; we're doing Micah's job. By all appearances, the amateur filmmaker uses his girlfriend as a human shield against otherworldly harm. Katie's safety becomes secondary to, in Micah's own words, "good stuff". At the time of its creation, the "found tape" that would become "Paranormal Activity", was never a formal film, but nevertheless, Micah puts Katie through some compromising positions that violates the pact between a filmmaker and his actor, none more so than the moment he employs the ouija board to draw the demon out. "Paranormal Activity" gets to the essence of the exploitation film. Micah creates a setting where the girl is put in jeopardy, and somewhat dispassionately records her suffering, because he never takes the matter of the demon seriously enough. Like genre film itself, horror especially, the filmmaker and the audience are having fun.

But what about Katie? Well...see for yourself, what her feelings are on Micah's machinations to drum up action for his home video.

The critical reception for John Keats' long poem "Endymion" was generally poor; "the coarse-bred son of a livery stable keeper"(what his contemporary William Butler Yeats called him) never knew real success and died a failure at the age of twenty-five. Yeats denigrated Keats' work as being akin to "luxuriant song", too introspective; his poems, nothing but manifestations of his own frustrations. If Keats wrote mere songs, then "Endymion" was his album; it was long, unlike a 45, a short poem, and in "Bright Star", the filmmaker nimbly shows how great literary works, now relegated to academic circles, once were at the center of "popular culture", when Fanny Brawne(Abby Cornish) dispatches her younger brother and sister to pick up a copy at the bookshop. The look of anticipation on the little girl's face as she requests the title to the bookseller, seems dislocated, despite our awareness of the film's time and place. Such is the general public's disdain for literature so acute, it's hard to fathom Victorian poetry as being fashionable. At the same time, because the filmmaker presents Keats as a reclusive, but congenial rock star, the moviegoer does comprehend the little girl's conspiratorial spirit of her little adventure, since she too agrees with her older sis that the poet is cute, and is eager to hear his latest "songs" too. The act of unwrapping the book, which she performs for Fanny, is like unsleeving a vinyl record. Her mouth becomes a needle; her voice, and the amplification of her voice, correlates to a stereo unit, and although you still can hear Keats' greatness through the small girl's "equipment", the words truly become sublime when Fanny reads them. With this scene, the appreciation of good literature, can be extrapolated through the language of rock and roll fandom. The two girls could be swooning over the New Romantic band Spandau Ballet.

Fanny Brawne was no intellectual, but she had breeding, and a talent for making her own outfits. It was clothes more suited for the city than the countryside, a point that the film makes by placing her in the most rustic of tableaux, where the young girl looks conspicuously overdressed, walking, perhaps, with too much ceremony. Whereas John Keats resembles a proto-rock star, his lover is analogous to the glamorous girlfriend, the proto-supermodel, who shouldn't be taken seriously by anybody. Posing as a serious poetry student, Keats' friend and patron, Charles Armitage Brown(Paul Schneider), susses out Fanny's interest in the poetic arts as nothing more than a romantic ploy, when he catches the "clothes horse" in a lie about having read John Milton's "Paradise Lost", a poem without rhymes, a much more arduous read than Keats' work, and a long piece that Charles guesses Fanny would struggle with. Charles underestimates her(and his friend's work, conveyed through the artistic juxtaposition of rhyming and non-rhyming poetry), and maybe "Bright Star" too, unintentionally, by the filmmaker's reduction of Fanny into some girl in a proto-music video. The filmmaker visualizes Keats' line about being butterflies from a letter that the self-exiled poet wrote to his flame, who is subordinated to his imagery, like a model. Neither "groupie" nor sophisticate, Fanny reads "Endymion" and knows immediately that the critics are wrong; she knows Keats isn't an "idiot". Since Fanny is just a reader, labelling her opinion as being contrarian would be inappropriate, because she reads emotionally, not critically. Her love of Keats, and his work, is, to quote Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, "True", a song that Yeats would probably have labeled as "luxuriant", as well.

"For me, it's very important that people like my music at home," is what Senegalese singer-songwriter Youssou N'Dour told Hank Bordowitz in a 2003 interview for the music journalist's third-world music anthology "Noise of the World: Non-Western Musicians in Their Own Words", and judging by N'Dour's humble demeanor in this promotional video for his 2005 album "Egypt", um, I mean, documentary film "Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love, you believe him, in spite of the film's obvious idolatry toward its subject. With the release of his ambitious, but polarizing album, which faced a national boycott resulting in poor sales, N'Dour made good on his proclamation to Bordowitz that "he wanted to enter into realms that Senegalese musicians had never entered before," when the Sufi Muslim angered his countrymen by putting their faith on the commercial marketplace. The forward-thinking(and cosmopolitan) vocalist expected too much of his native fans, many who are too poor to leave the continent, let alone, their own country. Although N'Dour, to quote John Mellencamp, "got nothing against the big town," Africa's biggest musical star still lives in Dakar, and seems pretty accessible for a man of his stature. To support this everyman image, the documentary crew follows N'Dour back to his griot roots, his grandmother's house, a shack, in which the moviegoer may wonder why this frail woman is living in such poverty-stricken trappings. The cynic in me can't help but question if the film's sole purpose is to function as a public relations tool, by which N'Dour may continue to hold victory parades in honor of his personal achievements. The question that lies at the heart of the film is this: Did N'Dour have the right to release "Egypt" during the sacred month of Ramadan? Upset over the album's reception, N'Dour's London agent complains that the harsh criticism brought upon her client is unwarranted. He's one of them, she says; a Sufi Muslim, a Senegalese, but a man who has been "attracting the famous and wealthy to his concert" for years, writes Peter Fletcher in "World Music in Context: A Comprehensive Study..." All that time overseas pursuing fame and fortune, all the hobnobbing with famous friends(Peter Gabriel, Bono, etc.), must have westernized N'Dour to some degree. Had an outsider, say David Byrne, done the same, he'd be accused of cultural insensitivity and hubris. But N'Dour, a man with an awareness of how Contemporary Christian artists reconfigure the gospel in a secular language, should have known that the implementation of this blueprint for the Islamic world would face stiff opposition from his unworldly fanbase, whose simple lives need no baroque touches on their faith.

"Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love" bears the unmistakable air of having an agenda; it's a verification of his Sufi cred, like in the scene where the father takes his two sons to a mosque. In another scene, N'Dour is expected to sacrifice a goat for Ramadan, to the obvious delight of his father. Since the basis of N'Dour's career was "to prove a point to his father"(an excerpt from the Bordowitz interview), who had discouraged his son from pursuing music as a career, the singer's hands on participation in this ancient, barbaric ceremony might be a balm to heal his personal relationships, as well as his professional ones. Killing an animal is a pretty retrogressive act for somebody who recorded "Egypt" with the expressed interest of bringing Islam into the twenty-first century. Fundamentalism is antithetical to his whole musical outlook, so only a father, perhaps, worried that his son is too cosmopolitan, too westernized, could inspire such a compromise to his lofty ideals. The father's disapproval of the "Egypt" project is never plainly spoken, but it's suggested by the knife in N'Dour's hand.

"Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love" needs explicit dissenting voices to be of any interest for the non-fan. Only briefly, when the filmmaker cross-cuts worshippers at a mosque with revelers at a concert do we see a strong argument against secularizing Islam being made. Since little is heard from his strongest critics, when N'Dour wins a Best World Music Grammy for "Egypt", the moviegoer's impression is that the whole breadth of the Sufi-Muslim community celebrated his win. The Grammy, a signifier of western hegemony, can't possibly mean anything to a devout Muslim, but the film persuades you that it does.

After the surgery, Paul Giamatti resumes rehearsals for a stage production of Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya", in which this method actor performs the part of the title character without his soul. No longer equipped emotionally to handle the burden of the merge between actor and role, Mr. Giamati had it removed, a hasty move he then regrets, in which the star of Alexander Payne's "Sideways" seems at a lost over his craft, as he alarms the cast and crew with this new, idiosyncratic interpretation. Using a more classical approach to acting(classical acting emphasizes external devices), Paul labors to get the right vocal intonations and facial gestures, and knows that his career is over. It's this very trade-off, sacrificing professional happiness for personal happiness, which had appealed to the miserabilist, early on in "Cold Souls", when he reads about soul storage in the pages of "The New Yorker". Prior to the fateful procedure, Paul seems like a potential suicide candidate, a man who prefers to eat alone and sleep alone, due in part to the consuming nature of the method process. Although "Cold Souls" never makes this point, it could be argued that Paul's decision to go soulless was made under the presumption that he'd transition into a different school of acting, without any problems.

Unfortunately, this is not the case: his Russian is no good. Although the sight of Mr. Giamatti playing Vanya in a purple hoody makes for great entertainment, this post-surgery scene doesn't quite make narrative sense. After all, Paul had removed the essence of his talent voluntarily because he could no longer deal with "the agony of existence". Since this rash action of soul removal amounts to career suicide, it would be reasonable to deduce that the actor wasn't merely foresaking the method process, but the acting profession itself. This is the direction that "Cold Souls" needed to take. Paul looks so tortured in the opening scenes, his discovery of "The New Yorker" article serves as a blessing, because this new science gives him another option; he can kill his talent instead of killing himself. Had the, otherwise, smart film included a few scenes which showed Paul with a sunnier disposition, this potentially clearer delineation between the actor's former self and his altered state would have made his choice to be soulful again, a more intriguing one. While the film contends that Paul undergoes a soul transplant in order to restore his prodigious acting prowess, the real reason(in my own mind), as suggested by the original surgery, should have been that he missed acting. In the meantime, how about this for an idea: Paul could have been a representative for the company, counseling other unhappy method actors into having the procedure. For instance, soul storage might have benefited the late Heath Ledger, who reportedly was haunted by his role as The Joker in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight".

Don't get me wrong: what transpires in "Cold Souls" is actually quite inspired. Knocking it for being Charlie Kaufman seems unfair, since the filmmaker takes great pains to acknowledge the influence of Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich", explicitly in a scene where Paul says that he doesn't want his soul to end up in New Jersey. The somber tone of the film helps normalize all the absurdities(soul-trafficking, the Russian soap opera actress, the chickpea) into plausibilities. My only objection is that an actor of Paul Giamatti's caliber, wouldn't mess around with his acting ability, unless self-preservation was contingent on the removal of his soul.

A rock critic once described the ringing guitar line on U2's most unforgettable song "Pride(in the Name of Love)" as The Edge's "imitation of God". Accompanying Bono's usual bombastic, but heartfelt vocals, "God" humbles man, and stands firm against the latter's fiery petition to release slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King from the kingdom of Heaven. In other words, it's the Edge's song, despite Bono's sterling vocal performance, in which the U2 front-man transforms the famed "Unforgettable Fire(The)" track into an occasion for a seance during Phil Jonoau's documentary "Rattle and Hum", when to a enraptured sold-out audience, he implores, "In the name of Martin Luther King: Sing!" As it turns out, however, there is no God. Through the metaphor of technological wizardry, The Edge unintentionally demonstrates how God is man-made. The Irish ax-man shows us how effects pedals transform ordinary guitar-playing from something pedestrian to something grand. Although this demystifying revelation takes nothing away from The Edge's incendiary riffs on "Pride", his musical voice seems more earthbound, dishonest, as if the chords were on steroids. In revealing his trade secrets, this exceedingly humble man(he performs an acoustic version of "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" that sounds more sincere than Bono's), he messes around with his legend of being among the pantheon of great musicians. According to him, "an effects unit pushes music forward," which dispels the whole notion of a guitar god, since a god needs no improvement. When he says, "That is my voice coming out of the speaker," it's with all the humility of a mortal.

Tell a Led Zeppelin fan that there are no gods, and you're liable to start a fistfight. They believe in Jimmy Page. "It Might Be Loud" does nothing to dispel this myth. In front of his English manor, Robert Plant's legendary sidekick tears up the mandolin on an acoustic version of "The Battle of Evermore". A god doesn't have to plug in, but Page doesn't act like a god; he smiles too much, you would think this former wild-man was the Buddha. Inside the music room of his palatial estate, in the film's best scene, Page selects Link Wray's 45 "Rumble" from his collection of vinyl albums and singles for the camera. Of all the people to be playing air-guitar, Page, the former-Yardbird, who along with Jimi Hendrix, rewrote the rules for this once relatively new instrument(which had famously annoyed Bob Dylan fans at the Newport Folk Festival), commands those shriveled but functional fingers through the invisible axe on cue with a look of pleasure across his face that demonstrates the seductive power of good rock and roll. It can even seduce a god. While punk-era Edge, and Jack White as an Upholster(pre-White Stripes), shock us with their youth, as all before-they-were-stars incarnations of famous people usually do, hands down, the best archival footage belongs to Page, impossibly young on a local television program, performing with a skiffle band.

Since Jack White is considerably younger than Page and The Edge, and his status an an all-time-great, still an ongoing case being mounted in his favor with each successive album, the filmmaker has fun with this Detroit-born neo-traditionalist by building his myth through scenes that shows White as a mentor for his nine-year-old self, a pale-faced boy dressed in the same black and red ensemble of coat, tie, and hat. In spite of his relative youth, the moviegoer can see that White is instantly relatable to his elders. Unlike most young people, this old soul knows his history. When White joins the two older musicians in a low-key, but nevertheless, rousing version of The Band song "The Weight", he carries his weight with aplomb.

During a cutaway, we smile with recognition, as the cameraman(who we come to know as Bob) points the lens toward Anna Wintour's assistant, who is answering the phone. It's one of her Emilys, we think, and think again: What's her real name? Instead of using the more formal "Anna" while addressing the caller, she refers to the Vogue maven as "Ann". For most people, the not-so-beautiful people, first familiarized with the heightened world of "haute coutre" through "The Devil Wears Prada", this throwaway moment will make them wonder: Did she make a mistake, referring to this imposing taste-maker in such a casual manner? Were this the exaggerated comic world of the Meryl Streep vehicle, in which Wintour's stand-in acted pompously unreasonable every chance she had with her assistant Andy(Anne Hathaway), the "fat" girl(a size six, but smart), this assistant would get a raised eyebrow, or worse, from her boss, who seems far too austere for a girlish name like Ann. This young, nondescript woman, who we never learn the name of, reminds us as to why "The September Issue" interested us in the first place. We want Wintour to behave badly("My name is Anna, you twit! You're fired!"), some sort of wickedness to validate the film, and novel.

Anna Wintour is nothing like Miranda Preistly in "The September Issue", but we suspect the rolling cameras has something to do with her relatively congenial way with her colleagues and collaboraters. Instead of a boss from hell, the documentary captures a hard-working woman who's an exceedingly good editor, and comfortable in her own skin. Never one to back down from making tough decisions, Wintour alienates her partner-in-crime Grace Coddington(a former "Vogue" model turned art director), when she cuts the Welsh woman's favorite photograph from a fashion spread that is to be included in the magazine's season-starting issue. (September, we learn, is the fashion world's January.) Anna-haters, wanting to start something, might argue that Wintour knows the picture is a knockout, knows that Grace loves it, but yanks the baroque photo from publication for the sheer pleasure of seeing her longtime associate suffer. We consider the potential ramifications of being privileged enough, as Ms. Coddington is, to speak bluntly with a woman who people normally walk on eggshells around, let along, speak deferentially towards. Perhaps it's retribution, disguised as a shrewd, creative decision, this editorial killing, a reminder to Coddington, that she alone, Anna Wintour, is "de facto" boss of the "Vogue" empire. Since the well-spoken British woman(who is sixty-eight) comes across as a person without the usual pretentiousness associated with fashion industry types, we take her side, grandma's side. "Vogue", however, reflects Wintour's point-of-view, and the venerable fashion magazine continues to be the industry's bible under her stewardship, her "genius". Like a filmmaker who shoots great footage but can't make it work in the editing room, Wintour, perhaps, is an aesthetic genius; she has an innate understanding that the beloved photo doesn't work in the context of the overall spread. Then again, Wintour surrounds herself with so many sycophants, who believe the likes and dislikes of this single woman is like a blessing or condemnation from the pope, it's easy to dismiss this daughter of a newspaper man as the lucky recipient of an industry's self-perpetuating myth.

To a certain extent, "The September Issue" performs an exorcism of sorts on Ms. Wintour, but the devil that Laura Weisenberg(a former Wintour assistant) cheekily diagnosed in her celebrated novel, re-enters the editor, in spite of the video repellent, the camera, which functions as both a cross and holy water. Wintour, the angel, reveals herself as a whitewashed "devil", in the scene where she makes a snide remark about the cameraman, a fat man, who appears in a photo that shows him jumping alongside a vertically inclined model. Her suggestion that Bob should visit a gym, offends Grace, a woman caught between her skinny past and zaftig present, cancels the touch-up to the cameraman's stomach. It's a glimpse into what Ms. Wintour is really like; a woman with nothing but contempt for outsiders. (In a television interview, she once compared the girth of some Minnesotan locals to "small houses".) And for the little people. Instead of shooting them(from time to time, we see cutaway shots of the low-end employees), we wish "The September Issue" gave them a voice. With some luck, perhaps the filmmaker might have stumbled across a disgruntled one, and dish about what really goes on behind closed doors.

Fed up with moving from state to state, a young George Hamilton(played by Logan Lerman) decides that enough is enough, and chooses St. Louis over the open road. Unless his mother can prove her love by answering a few basic questions about himself, George will choose substance over style, the rural life over a metropolitan one. Anne Deveraux(Renee Zelwegger), an aging southern belle, who from the outset of "My One and Only", fails at motherhood(by early-fifties pre-feminist standards), and once again, proves her ignorance of the societal rules which dictate that a mother find her children endlessly fascinating. When put on the spot, she can neither name George's favorite color nor his favorite book. True to his word, while Anne and her other son, George's half-brother Robbie(Mark Rendall) are by then long-gone(having resumed their cross-country trip in a baby-blue Cadillac), George sits down for an old-fashioned midwestern dinner with his midwestern sponsors(Anne's sister Rose and her husband), looking fixedly at a midwestern life ahead of him. His mother, an ex-wife of a womanizing bandleader(played by Kevin Bacon), might not have been the ideal parent for most children, but he was the ideal parent for George(this wisdom would come much later in life), an aspiring novelist, who unknowingly endorses his alternative childhood during an oral report on what he did during the summer(by now he's in New York).

Television codifies us, and in the early-fifties, mothers like Dorothy Malone and Donna Reed ruled the airwaves, mother who stayed at home and tended to their husband and children. Instead of marrying an insurance salesman: a dependable man, a punch-the-clock man, she married a bandleader, a hepcat whom she could paint the town red with. Twice a divorcée, Anne is back in the game; a little bit older, but nevertheless beautiful, as her search for a husband takes the mother of two from one screwball comedy situation to another. Bearing a passing resemblance to Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels"(the 1942 comedy classic which told the story of a Hollywood film director who tries to pass himself off as poor for veracity's sake after announcing his plans to mount an adaptation of "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou"), this impeccable period piece flips around the economical circumstances surrounding the protagonist(the fancy car gives people the impression that they're fabulously rich), in which the masquerade enables the artist(in this case, a writer) to record his first-hand experiences(for the ongoing story which would become an autobiography, and then this film) with a slant, created by the illusion of wealth that people gleam from Anne's glamorous persona and image-making car. As George recounts the story of his summer vacation, the moviegoer notes how the presentation of the details(in the genre's signature rat-a-tat delivery of words) have all the makings of a classic screwball comedy. As a collection of anecdotal moments as related by George to his classmates, Anne's travels, a Homer-like epic in which she gets picked up for prostitution in Pittsburgh, and almost marries a bigamist in St. Louis, doesn't suggest the dramatic reading of these seemingly absurd situations that the moviegoer witnesses in "My One and Only". To render Anne's disappointments in the language of screwball would demean her. The film serves as a correction to George's original presentation of these childhood vignettes, a time when the hasty chronicling of his mother's trials and tribulations were too contemporary for thoughtful evaluation. Removed from his adolescent anger, Anne's setbacks are presented as no laughing matter. Like all children who grow up and realize that their parents did the best they could, George Deveraux, otherwise known as George Hamilton, the guy with the tan, is also the guy who loved his mother, and in "My One and Only", the moviegoer can see how a generous spirit is the deciding factor that separates comedy from drama.

Adam(Hugh Dancy) first meets Beth(Rose Byrne) outside the laundry room of their apartment complex. They "meet cute". Startled by this variation to his regimented routine, Adam freezes, and retreats from the chaos that portends ahead. It's plain to see the man is socially awkward, but he seems harmless enough. There's something about Adam which makes Beth stop and consider, for the time being, the time it takes to do the wash, at least, that her neighbor might be "relationship material". Adam lets her use his laundry card. They do their laundry; they meet cute, which orientates the moviegoer to the inception of love that begets the love story in a romantic comedy. Due to the particular condition of the protagonist, however, the mechanics of the genre can't be taken for granted, becomes complicated, since there's an uncertainty about the man's ability to reciprocate romantic love. Contrary to his asexual exterior, Adam, who is afflicted with Asberger's Syndrome, owns a collection of pornographic DVDs, a seemingly disparate aspect in his pathologically tidy closet, because he seems too remote to be interested in sex. Does he have a love life, albeit with himself? The film suggests that he does. Seated at the dinner table with his laptop, Adam introduces Julia Roberts along with James Lipton on "Inside the Actors Studio", word for word, and then he drops a piece of macaroni and cheese in his lap, possibly near his crotch. He looks down at the stain, guiltily: a metaphor, perhaps, for the fantasies he has of Ms. Roberts. Adam understands a base emotion such as lust. But "Adam" never proves that its titular star understands love. So when Adam first meets Beth in the very next scene, the "meet cute" becomes less cute, if loveless lust is what lies beneath his impenetrable facade.

Adam needs a mother, somebody to nurture him, not a lover, since he's more child than man. Beth is perfect, too perfect, as if she was written for him. Coming off a bad relationship with a philandering boyfriend(and increasingly irked by her overbearing father), Beth seems prime for a situation where she's firmly in control and can call all the shots. Moreover, she's a teacher at a fancy private grammar school. At this school, Beth asks a colleague about Asbergers, and the colleague tells her that people like Adam are high-functioning austistics. The colleague should be more blunt when Beth goes fishing for an endorsement of her new embarkation. She should translate "high-functioning autistic" in layman's terms. Beth's new lover, in all likelihood, has the same emotional development as the children she teaches. "Adam" tries to portray an unconventional couple(in the vein of Jeremiah Chechik's "Benny and Joon", just to name one), but it takes two misfits to be truly winsome. Beth is normal, and should know better. Beth's father misses the point entirely when he lectures his daughter about the cons of getting involved with Adam. While he's right that his daughter's most unlikely suitor presupposes to be a liability for Beth in professional and social circles, the unfeasibility of the relationship is twofold, since she's pushing Adam past the limits of his emotional range. The father doesn't cast a critical eye towards Beth, and to a certain degree, neither does the film. "Adam" privileges Beth through the omission of filmic evidence that would implicate her as an anti-ingenue. Beth errs by getting involved with a, for all intents and purposes, handicapped man, but her transgression is glossed over with judicious editing choices and an unchallenging script. Except for a kiss, a real kiss, their sex life is merely suggested, sequestered beyond the diegesis, in the fade-out, where their writhing bodies make a promise without being judged, in our imaginations. If the filmmaker showed the physical side of their relationship, the scene in which Adam lashes out at Beth over a harmless white lie, would mean something more than just the lie itself. The film hides Adam's sexual immaturity in the tropes of the romantic comedy. Sure, Adam cries, as he tries to get Beth back, but the tear might denote a self-awareness of the deficiency in his emotional reservoir. Most people will read this tear on a simpler level, on a boy loses girl level, and since "Adam" ends on an uncomplicated and hopeful note, the film endorses genre(the romantic comedy) over real life, hence, the tear isn't as knotty as it should be.

As jaded moviegoers obsess over the staginess of Charlyne Yi's encounters with Michael Cera- and no doubt about it, the scenes between the two twenty-something actors are probably closer to Mike Leigh territory(read: Yi and Cera probably created their filmic selves in a workshop) than it is to a proper documentary(or even reality television)- they'll overlook the fact that the budding lovers have chemistry, an elusive component missing from most contemporary romantic comedies. Yi's moonstruck dorkiness is a perfect match for Cera's suave dorkiness. On their first date, Yi's modifications to her BLT(she holds the B) offhandedly recalls Sally Albright's own culinary idiosyncrasies in Nora Ephron's "When Harry Met Sally"(where the high maintenance woman played by Meg Ryan customizes all her means with something "on the side"). Like the 1989 film, we see old couples telling the story of how they met. Donning anti-Lisa Loeb glasses and some downright frumpy outfits, Yi is anything but high maintenance, aggressively so when the filmmaker can't sway his subject towards the hygienic advantages of a daily shower. Far from being a polished interviewer, Yi somehow manages to record some charming stories that proves love's existence. The conceit behind "Paper Heart" is if the performance artist can find some of her very own. Is Cera the one? The former star of the defunct NBC sitcom "Arrested Development" matches Yi's quirkiness(his riff on Mexican Beach Salad gets laughs) and raises it, with an action that renders the reality/fantasy binary moot. Yi, playing a naive version of herself, projects vulnerability effortlessly, and this naivety is put through the wringer, as Cera abruptly leaves the table and walks out of the eatery. The moviegoer feels what Yi feels; complete utter shock, and discomfort, because moviegoers think they know Cera, who transmits kindness and decency in all of his roles that stems from his self-deprecating charisma. The departure feels real; Michael Cera feels real, because he finally plays another note, a dissonant note that counters his stylized persona of serial affability. Maybe, just maybe, Cera had revealed something about himself that he never intended the public to see: he's a Hollywood phony just like all the rest. Meanwhile, back at the table, Yi, a girl who passes herself off as one of the guys, thinks she gets the joke, and waits for Cera to return; she waits for the punchline, and waits and waits and waits. The moviegoers hold his breath for her, even though he's quite certain that the whole premise was planned. Yi somehow cuts through the artifice of the mockumentary, and makes the scene work on the level of romantic comedy. Her naif and waif shtick is convincing. The moviegoer loves her. Time and time again, Yi's natural charm tests the compartmentalizing of the movie's fiction and non-fiction elements, because her sunny projection of arrested development is unwavering in both arenas. Yi doesn't have a journalistic voice, a serious voice that insinuates a formalism upon the interview format when she's probing Americans about love. She turns journalism into a naive craft. The same "character" who spontaneously(we think) accepts a ride from some reminsicing biker she interviews at a geezer hangout, looks and sounds identical to the young woman who waits with bated breath for her date to alleviate her from abandonment anxiety. Only Cera, perhaps, could get away with playing such a mean trick, as he effortlessly ingratiates himself into Yi's good graces(and ours) by explaining his extended disappearance without being the least bit facetious. He smiles, but it's a sheepish smile; his get out of jail free card.

If Woody Allen wanted to remake "Annie Hall", these two actors would be perfect for the job. "Paper Heart" gets away with a lot. Homemade dioramas are pretty damn twee, but man, those low-rent creations sure are a welcome antidote to the industry's relentless use of CGI effects. Even the twee song works, because the person who sings "You Smell Like Christmas To Me" will capture your paper heart, if you let her.

In a holding cell for babies, one indefatigable dolphin jumps the net and swims toward the shore. The cetacean knows that death looms; this intelligent cetacean can hear its elders in the cove. But the dolphin has lost too much blood and stops surfacing, stops fighting for its survival. The female diver cries; the moviegoer presumably cries too. We're supposed to cry because dolphins are self-aware. Earlier in "The Cove", former dolphin trainer turned activist Rick O'Barry explains that dolphins are intelligent beings with human-like qualities. When O'Barry was a trainer for the television show "Flipper", he observed how Cathy(one of the five dolphins used to play the titular character) could distinguish herself from the other Flippers, remarkably, on a television that the trainer would sit down next to the star's "dressing room". Needless to say, the dolphin is smarter than a cow. Further down the road, a depressed Cathy committed suicide, refusing to take another breath, dying in her trainer's arms, like something out of Mike Nichols' "Day of the Dolphin". But such behavior is not sci-fi, dolphins have been known to die in captivity through various forms of aquatic self-infliction. The melodrama is real. That was the day Rick O'Barry stopped profiteering off this small whale, and became an activist. Surely, the filmmaker must have been tempted, at some point, to use Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "The Tracks Of My Tears" because of this couplet: "So take a good look at my face/You'll see my smile looks out of place," since the moviegoer learns that a dolphin's smile is misleading; it's emblematic of a smile, turned upside-down. Like a human being, they do their jobs(at aquatic parks) for the "money", for the fish; it's not a labour of love, all that flipping around.

But what about the dumb animals? In Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation", a group of young animal rights activists try to free a herd of cows, who don't understand that they've been liberated. "Don't you want to be free?" implores Amber(Ashley Johnson) to the clueless cattle. The primary metaphor, the intended meaning behind the cows, can best be summed up by the Bob Marley lyric(from "Redemption Song"): "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery," in which humans are willing prisoners too, marching towards their deaths, their inevitability, dictated by the ideological state apparatus. On a more literal level, however, the filmmaker unintentionally suggests that cows are too stupid for life, a contention which becomes more pronounced when you juxtapose their oblivious states of standing still against the baby dolphin's desperate attempt to flee. If you translate animals into people, the dolphins, with their superior cognition, are like members of a Mensa chapter, while the cows, written off by many as unlovable beasts, could be akin to the mentally impaired.

It's easy to love a dolphin.

And it's hard to watch a dolphin die, so graphically, so senselessly, with spears, without a second thought; these Taiji fishermen who stab and turn the water red, without remorse. As for the presentation, maybe a shot or two are inappropriate, too artful(in particular, the underwater camera that captures the first sprawl of blood that darkens the submerged world, extinguishing light, extinguishing hope), because there's no need to heighten an already heightened situation. Shot from an objective distance, "The Cove" gets the job done by letting the actions of the brutish men speak for itself. The gravity of the massacre dictates that the form employed to record the event be mature, journalistic, respectful, so a Hollywood affectation, an aerial shot(from a camera mounted on a small blimp), seems gratuitous in its intent to enhance, and extend the spectacle, with a bang. (The aerial shot is used as punctuation, a master shot, a panoramic sweep that excites while the moviegoer sits in horrified contemplation.) But that's nitpicking; the footage will leave the moviegoer speechless.

Lest not we forget, however, that other animals: the lowly cow, the unremarkable chicken, the hygienically-challenged pig; animals that can't compete with the handsome dolphin, endure holocausts of their own every day. Like Dennis Leary said on his stand-up comedy album "No Cure for Cancer": "We only want to save the cute animals."

A documentary captures real life, but real life is altered when the subject is aware that he/or she is being filmed.

Not for nothing, "A Chorus Line" is a permanent fixture in the American musical theater. Every performer who ever dreamed about New York loves Michael Bennett's singular sensation unconditionally. It flatters them. The 1975 musical tells the story of their lives, their struggle. Words by Edward Kleban and music by Marvin Hamlisch, "A Chorus Line" epitomizes the performer's belief that singing and dancing constitute a religion, so when it comes to churches, the bigger the better. And it gets no bigger than Broadway. "Every Little Step" gives the moviegoer a privileged look at the rarefied world of showbiz people, the weirdos who unite in their love for the bright lights. On a snowy day outside the Schubert Theater, thousands of hopeful dancers line up for open call auditions, and almost miraculously, so are we. More so than any other revival, the 2006 version of "A Chorus Line" required men and women with humility; men and women with big feet, after all they had big shoes to fill. But big heads? No. Bob Avian won't tolerate any prima donna behavior from his dancers.

Competing for the part of Sheila, the sexy but aging dancer(played by Kelly Bishop in the original production), are Deidre Goodwyn and another woman, whose lack of humility takes her out of the running. Heading into final callbacks, it was the woman's part to lose, but due to an unfavorable last impression during her final audition, she opened up the competition. Out of generosity, Avian offers direction and advice to the chorus line candidate in private, giving her every opportunity to replicate the performance she gave four months prior. Instead of accepting this second chance with elegance and appreciation, this dancer goes into full diva mode and acts contentiously(in voiceovers) towards Avian, who was only trying to help her win the part. Tell it to the mountain, the moviegoer thinks, as she goes on about her broken relationship; this is "A Chorus Line", not "American Idol"; this is the choreographer from the original Broadway production, not Ryan Seacrest. "Every Little Step" is at its most immediate when a colleague tells Avian that the woman wants a decision on her fate right then and there, thus sealing her fate and losing her part to a less talented performer. With the cameras rolling, the woman loses what little leeway she had, since nobody wants to look weak when served an ultimatum. If Avian wasn't provoked and had time to mull things over, she might have gotten the part. Everybody in this business has huge egos, but for those without any clout, asserting that huge ego against those who do, amounts to suicide.

Baewok Lee, the original Connie, is one of those people, and she has an ego which easily transcends her petite frame. Because Lee lacks humility , she's the last person on the committee to realize that Yuka Takara was tailor-made for the part of the undersized Asian dancer with spunk and gumption. Her philosophy on casting seems antithetical towards the creative process in regard to the interpretation of old material, which is to make it new again, when the old pro insists that she doesn't see herself in Takara. She nitpicks over Takara's accent and non-American origins(Takara was born in Okinawa), qualities that make her perfect for the part, because it updates the musical by reflecting on a different era that's even more inclusive to a wider breadth of people. Electicism is the heart of "A Chorus Line", and Lee's isolationist stance goes against the spirit of this hallowed musical. With the cameras rolling, her comments work as exposition, which means she's playing for the cameras, since her colleagues already know what her part was in the original production. The moviegoer learns that Lee was Connie when she expresses a desire to cast the part herself.

Did Tom Hansen(Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) misread "The Graduate" not once(as a wide-eyed child raised on the songs of Morrissey/Marr), but twice(as a self-deluded adult still wallowing in teenaged idealism), who in both instances, gets the counterfactual notion that Benjamin Braddock(Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine Robinson(Katherine Ross) will end up together, contrary to the young couple's reticence at the back of the bus. After watching the high romance of Ben's glass-banging at the church that was holding Elaine's wedding, Tom saw what he wanted to see, and never reorientates himself to the calm after the commotion, in which the moment of undying love quickly dissolves by the time both the graduate and the runaway bride find their seats. And then he might have played something by The Smiths as reinforcement of his identification with the wildly-in-love Benjamin. Tom was young. But years later, in a greeting card company boardroom, Tom wakes up from his romantic stupor, and accuses, in particular, pop music and film, of conspiring to break our hearts with an idealism that doesn't transcend its artistic boundaries. Before this epiphany, however, Tom meets Summer(Zooey Deschanel) and he loves her, just flat out loves her. And even though a grown man should know better, Tom is still a hopeless romantic, so he projects the crazy adolescent love expressed in a couplet like "and if a double-decker bus crashes into us/to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die"(from The Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out"), onto the bus that transports the distracted couple at the end of the Mike Nichols film, when the truth couldn't be any more self-evident. This misreading of "The Graduate" comes back to haunt Tom, late in "(500) Days of Summer", as life imitates art, in a scene where the greeting card writer finds himself on a bus with Summer after attending a wedding(a co-worker's wedding). With the memory of having seen "The Graduate" with Summer still fresh in his mind, Tom confuses expectations with reality, and takes her willingness to sleep against his shoulder as a sign of reconciliation, of love. It's the movie in his head where Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross live happily ever after, come to life; somehow ignoring the fact that "The Graduate" had made Summer weep and was the catalyst for their break-up.

Since "(500) Days of Summer" is devised in a non-linear fashion, when Tom shows up at Summer's party, the audience is unaware that he had a second chance at rectifying his original childhood interpretation of 1967 love, incidentally, the summer of love, as the diegesis goes split screen, expressing in formal terms, Tom's expectations(shaped by his naive readings of "The Graduate"), and Tom's reality(shaped from a corrective reading that his adult self never made, which would comply with the consensus reading of "The Graduate"). Fueled by love songs from the "creme de la creme" of post-punk bands who rose to prominence during the mid-to-late-eighties, Tom envisioned Ben and Elaine as soulmates, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they were not built to last. To him, "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" is practically a commandment that lovers stay in love. But at the shindig, Summer breaks this commandment irreparably, when Tom sees his one and only showing off her engagement ring to a friend, causing the "reality" side to push the "expectations" side out of frame, right to left. It's the same direction that Ben takes on the moving airport walkway, famously, in the opening scene of the Nichols film, famous because most filmic movement goes left to right. Now that Tom has finally grown up, he stops espousing his belief in fate and predestination that lives inside the pop song, which had kept him in a perpetual state of adolescence. Now he knows why Summer cried at the end of "The Graduate". Elaine didn't love Ben. If Tom conceded the truth on this matter, he'd have to admit that Summer didn't love him too. Played by Zooey Deschanel, it's plain to see why Tom had kept his Smiths goggles on to induce a state of vertigo, because who would want summer to end with a woman like that?

Adapting Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" would have been a natural for documentarian Michael Moore(just imagine the zaftig one giving Ronald McDonald a bad time), but then an upstart provocateur named Morgan Spurlock altered filmic destiny with a bit of journalistic performance art, in which the "Super-Size Me" star took the subjective approach to documentary film-making towards new narcissistic heights, when the Sundance sensation almost died for the sake of his own self-promotion. Thanks to Spurlock, "Fast Food Nation" was adapted by Richard Linklater into a wildly ambitious multi-narrative film that at times seemed to be more about the difficulty of translating a non-fiction book like Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief" in Spike Jonze's "Adaptation". Now comes "Food Inc", a long overdue non-fictional account of the food industry that hopefully won't be preaching solely to the converted.

Under Moore's helm, one can imagine the sometimes self-aggrandizing filmmaker making more ado about the FDA administrators who once worked for the companies they're supposed to be regulating. One can imagine Moore ferreting out these complicit facilitators of a fatter America as they avert their faces from the cameras with pointed questions about the outrageous conflict of interest that comes with their jobs. At a crisp ninety-three minutes, "Food Inc." gives short-shrift to the bought "watchdogs" who helped aid the consolidation of the agricultural gatekeepers with an all-too-brief computer graphics display of their mugshots(I mean, identities). Perhaps fearing accusations of a liberal slant, the filmmaker doesn't try hard enough to make these people who, at the behest of their friends, play loose and free with people's lives, more accountable through a confrontational, pro-active approach, which is Moore's specialty. Throughout "Food Inc.", disclaimer after disclaimer state that the desired interview subjects were not available for comment start to annoy, because muckraking aficionados suspect that somebody of Moore's stature might have been able to break through the silence. Comparable to "Sicko", in which the issue at hand should be a non-partisan concern(as health care was), "Food Inc." fails to incite the sort of populist anger that the crisis deserves. Ironically, it's the food safety advocate, the mother whose child died from a tainted hamburger, who links agricultural deregulation practices with conservative ideology, when she identifies herself as a lifelong republican in the state capitol building, en route to a meeting with a democratic senator.

This time, it's no laughing matter that there's "s*** in the meat," like it was in the Linklater film, in which the fast food executive(played by Greg Kinnear) learns about the beef industry's dirty little secret from his boss, and from one of the higher-ups(played by Bruce Willis). In "Food Inc.", at its most sobering, the filmmaker puts a human face on the toll that unconscionable avarice breeds, as the audience contemplates the boy in the video; the boy who ate s*** and literally died. Since "Food Inc." never aspires to be a populist entertainment(some may argue that Moore's op-ed manner of documentary film-making dumbed down the genre), such obviously gut-wrenching material doesn't come across as exploitative. In "Fahrenheit 9/11", the segment in which Moore hugs the inconsolable mother of a dead Iraqi war soldier, who the former president predictably wouldn't fit her in his schedule, may smack some as a cheap stunt to manipulate the audience into tears. Under Moore's stewardship, one can imagine a scenario where the filmmaker would make a shameless attempt to confront the camera-shy interview subjects by evoking the child's memory while they elude his badgering. Moore's grandstanding tactics somehow managed to remake NRA spokesperson Charlton Heston into a sympathetic figure in "Bowling for Columbine", when his harassment of the aging actor ended with the filmmaker leaving the photo of a gun victim at his front door. While "Food Inc." is a far less dynamic movie because of its failure to get anybody important to talk on the record, it does render this perceived liberal agenda to near sublimity, therefore giving the conservative constituency less reason to politicize such an obvious universal concern.

Against the backdrop of a professional women's baseball league, Penny Marshall's "A League of their Own" is best remembered for its sibling rivalry between wartime sisters Dottie(Geena Davis) and Kip Keller(Lori Petty), who goes head-to-head in the big game, a prerequisite of the inspirational sports film that completes the genre's form. Disparate from John G. Avildsen's "Rocky", and other movies of its ilk, in which nobody would have mourned Apollo Creed(Carl Weathers) had he lost, Marshall's film is unique because you're divided, happy as you are for Kip, the moviegoer also sympathizes with the loser(well, that's what the film is calibrated for), Dollie, who drops the ball after Kit blows off the third base coach's signal to stop, and proceeds to run roughshod over her sister in a violent homeplate collision. After all, Dollie was responsible for Kip's career. Similarly, in "Rudo y Cursi", it's the loser you feel for, Tato(Gael Garcia Bernal), whose penalty kick is blocked by his brother Beto(Diego Luna), who unlike Kip, loses too, while seemingly the victor, because he was supposed to throw the game. In both films, albeit circumstantially different, there are no winners where a winner is the genre norm. "Rudo y Cursi" is a sports film without catharsis, which puts this Mexican import in the same league as Antonio Cuaron's recent "Sugar", another underdog sports story that ends on a decidedly different key from its Hollywood counterparts.

Neither Davis nor Petty(or Madonna for that matter) had a lick of baseball talent, but through the magic of rhetorical editing(quick cuts), wishful thinking prevailed, and the audience became co-conspirators in the fiction that Davis could swing for the fences with regularity, while Petty took the mound with an arsenal of effective pitches. In "Rudo y Cursi", when Batua the scout(played by Gullimero Francella) gauges the brothers' potential in a pick-up soccer game, he's the only witness, because the camera stays on him, having a cold one. This directorial choice is made time and time again, a self-reflexive and humorous aside about actors faking athletic greatness, as the moviegoer never actually sees Tato score a goal, nor Beto successfully defend the net; the moviegoer sees reaction shots, instead of first-hand accounts of athletic mimicry. There's no need for a double to do the tricky stuff(e.g. Moira Kelly and D.B. Sweeney's doubles in "The Cutting Edge"); there's nobody to double for. The montage, the most expedient way to persuade the audience that the actor is excelling at his/her sport(best recent example: Hillary Swank in Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby"), gets parodied in a scene where the soccer ball in quick succession, hits the back of the net from the off-screen leg of Tato, kicking in the negative space. When the benchwarmer finally sees some game action and scores his first goal, the moviegoer sees his family, in unison, shouting, "Goal!" instead of Bernal putting his best foot forward, literally, in a diegetically enhanced fantasy camp for actors. Not satisfied with only its atypical approach towards depicting sports in a sports movie, "Rudo y Cursi" is no etnography(like Gregory Nava's "El Norte", or "Mi Familia"), in which a western audience expects Tato and Beto to act in an explicitly prescribed way.

More likely than not, the filmic norm of "wetbacks" in most narratives about the Hispanic culture, shows its people as the conscientious sort who send money back home to their destitute families they left behind. Arguably, in "Rudo y Cursi", the brothers go "gringo", as Tato lavishes his high maintenance girlfriend with exorbitantly priced gifts(for starters, a SUV), while Beto gambles his money away at back-room casinos. Where's mama's SUV; where's mama's house, the one that her sons promised to build for her? Mama does eventually get the house of her dreams, but not from her American-like sons. Like Ridley Scott's "American Gangster", mama gets her house from a gangster, her daughter's husband. Tato and Beto are people like us: Americans, "football" players who have American football player counterparts.(Tato could be Tony Romo, a player distracted by her excessively attractive celebrity girlfriend, while Beto could retired quarterback Art Schlichter, who had a severe gambling problem while throwing passes for the Baltimore Colts in the early-eighties.)

Hal had the ultimate poker face. A yellow pupil of sorts ensconced in red light, the rogue computer who commandeered the Discovery in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was unreadable; a mere orb, an "eye" that looked into the eyes of its crewmen, and lied. Just before Hal makes a fallacious prognosis on the spacecraft's well-being, this inscrutable piece of conscious hardware projects its own misgivings about the Jupiter mission onto Dave(Keir Dullea), who doesn't realize that the computer is downplaying the veracity of the moon excavation findings. Late in the film, we learn that HAL knows about the monolith, which vexes him, as does the ongoing sojourn to the stars. When HAL says it's "protecting HIS own concerns" about the mission, the crewman misses the malevolence in this statement. In Hal's unnervingly modulated voice, belies the hatching of a murder plot. If only HAL had a face, then maybe the hapless astronauts would stand a fighting chance of guessing at its duplicity.

The computer in "Moon", GERTY(voiced by Kevin Spacey) has one of those "have a nice day" smiley faces that may, or may not, correspond to what its "feeling". It's the second face we're interested in, the one with the ulterior motive, underneath that pixelated smile which assures Sam(Sam Rockwell) that "he's" the next best thing to being human. Whereas HAL was remote and carried an air of condescension towards Dave and Frank(Ken Lockwood), GERTY seems nurturing and approachable, an illusion created by the representational face on its screen. While GERTY isn't a murderer like HAL, this affable piece of technology is definitely complicit to the murders on board the ship. When the Lunar Industries employee(who sends moon-based energy back to Earth) communicates his excitement about returning home over breakfast, GERTY puts on a happy face, knowing full well that Sam is a clone, and will die in space. Unlike HAL, however, this computer can be outsmarted. The new Sam discovers his predecessor in a wrecked lunar vehicle after convincing GERTY that the ship needed some outside repairing. Unlike HAL, this computer tows the company line. The new Sam overhears GERTY talking to its terrestrial-based bosses from a live feed purported to be inoperable. They're on the same page: for the economical virtue of profit, both man and machine work together to prevent the laborer from learning the truth. Unlike HAL, when GERTY goes rogue, and this is the biggest difference between the two artificial intelligences, the computer's agenda is to save, not kill, like a subordinate the machine is purported to be. But GERTY's conspiratorial decision to keep Sam's recovery a secret from headquarters lacks motivation. In spite of the film's anti-Bay approach to science fiction("Moon" has the tone of Douglas Trumbull's "Silent Running"), this admirably restrained indie, compromises itself, much like the Spielberg/Kubrick joint venture "AI", in the sense that GERTY plays like a Spielbergian take on HAL. In other words, "Moon" starts off as sharp cheddar, and ends up like a soft brie. The second Sam convinces the computer to wake up another clone so he and the first Sam can avert certain death at the hands of the company's fast-approaching trouble-shooters. The second Sam wants to kill the new Sam and stage his corpse inside the lunar vehicle. And that's where "Moon" starts to wobble. Late in the film, the second Sam explains to GERTY that humans aren't programmed, and yet, by participating in a potential murder plot to save lives, the computer acts as if it's already made the distinction between man and machine, therefore not care if the clones lived or died. GERTY turns out to be more like "E.T.", than the cold and calculating HAL. Whereas HAL needed to be shut down(the computer feared that a higher intelligence than himself awaited them in Jupiter), GERTY voluntarily powers off, and reboots, to erase all traces of the earthbound Sam. The difference between GERTY and HAL reminds me of the moment in "AI", when a moon(pure Spielbergian imagery), reveals itself to be an aircraft on the prowl for runaway androids in the woods(Spielberg gone dystopian). It was a perfect synthesis of Spielberg and Kubrick's filmic, and philosophical sensibilities. "Moon", however, didn't need the former's influence. But still, the film is pure science fiction, and is the best of its kind(more "speculative fiction" than space opera) since David Twohy's "The Arrival".