..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Talking with Alexander Payne and Virginia Madsen about Sideways and the ways of wine; horror forbears with the boys from Saw and the future of horror with The Grudge's Sam Raimi and Takashi Shimizu. Plus reviews of Birth, Undertow, Primer, DIG!, Proteus, Vera Drake, Shall We Dance?, Surviving Christmas, Lustre, Incident at Loch Ness, and some DVD notes, including The Hole; Rush To War: Between Iraq and a Hard Place; SCTV: Vol. 2; and the alluringly titled compendium, Audubon VideoGuide to 505 Birds of North America on Two DVDs.

Afterbirth

While Sideways is my pick for this month's film for the ages, Birth (**) is still the most compelling: an unforgettably ambitious folly. There's an old critical canard resounding down the overstuffed corridors of Jonathan Glazer's glacial, insupportably pretentious follow-up to the quirksome, inspired Sexy von Beast: only a gifted director could make a movie so serenely, egregiously awful and bad. Like Lars Trier, the commercials-trained Glazer wants to make his mark upon the timeless, statuesque porcelain that is Nicole Kidman, and with a severe and unflattering pixie cut, he refashions her as Anna, a wide-eyed New York kewpie of lapidary privilege who develops one serious problem with self-delusion. On the eve of her wedding to solemn, shambling, bearish Joseph (Danny Huston), Anna is convinced by a grim 10-year-old boy who is stalking her that he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Reincarnation? Afterbirth is more like it.

From prehistoric times, insects were preserved by amber. This chilly, strenuously autumnal effort to reincarnate the late Stanley Kubrick, gliding lugubriously through moneyed interiors and other luxe tableaux, feels equally suspended in time. The final image is majestic, unforgettable: it is a perfect, extended sequence shot of unbearable emotion spent at the verge of crashing, greasy-gray surf on cloudiest day, a barefoot bride in tears, torn by memory, her howls silent against the relentless amniotic pound of wide waters. (I want to see the movie that this beautiful thing belongs with.)

The eccentric cast includes Lauren Bacall, Alison Elliott, Arliss Howard, Peter Stormare, Zoe Caldwell, Ted Levine, Cara Seymour and a brunette Anne Heche in a scene that cruelly explains the whole damn thing away in a scene with all the gravity and unpoetic injustice of a past-last-minute reshoot. Harris Savides' cinematography (Elephant, Gerry) is, as always, estimable craft; he seems incapable of composing a bad close-up of Kidman's sculptured face, and there is one long, long take of Kidman in close-up, listening in a concert hall, that is a beauty). Glazer wrote, along with Luis Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere (marrying Eurostyle symbolism to the general crackbrain atmosphere) and Milo Addica (Monster's Ball). Alexandre Desplat's sometimes lovely but relentless score is a metric tonne of goo, with lashings of Wagner on top.

Pinot Envy

Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor's fourth film, Sideways (****) is a knockout-warm, funny, mature, complex, sexy, dirty, smart, sometimes juvenile, and humanist as all get out. The can-do-no-wrong Paul Giamatti (American Splendor) plays Miles, a divorcé who can't let go of the past, or his unpublished novel. Miles loves wine and suggests a wine country retreat the week before his college buddy Jack's wedding. As played by Thomas Haden Church, Jack's libidinous, washed-up actor is an elemental life force (AKA an undiscerning horndog). On the journey, they meet up with Maya (Virginia Madsen, stellar), a waitress who knows and likes Miles, and Stephanie (Payne's wife, Sandra Oh) as a wine pourer who's Miles' libidinal match.

Sideways is silly. Sideways is smart. Sideways is rich and forgiving and vital and alive and great in all the ways American movies generally are not anymore. From the evidence of director Alexander Payne's Omaha trilogy of Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt, I wouldn't have expected this movie from he and his writing partner, Jim Taylor. What a vital surprise: an intricate, breathing, fundamental, essential masterpiece about the fear of aging, the complexity of friendship, the gracefulness of life and the gracelessness we generally bring to bear upon it. (Who could love a man who closes himself off, turns snob against the brute shoulder blocking his ambitions in love and with an unpublished novel, and sneers, as Miles does, "If anyone orders Merlot? I'm leaving." You have to, have to, have to love him. He is vulnerable, hapless, sad and true.

There's boy-sterous vulgarity between Jack and Miles, the two setting suns, but there is so much to love in Payne and Taylor's bittersweet yet hilarious script. (Lonely Miles left alone, in a convenience market: "Could I get a Barely Legal, please? No, I'm sorry, the new one?") There's magic when Giamatti gets his painfully self-abasing acting chops onto a scene where Miles, describing his love for wine, and particularly the pinot grape, but also tenderly, unwittingly describing himself under the eyes of Maya, who cannot but fall in love with this bruised, real man: "It's a hard grape to grow. It's thin-skinned, temperamental. It's not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow anywhere and thrive even when neglected. Pinot needs constant care and attention…" The side of the conversation held up by Madsen's Maya gets a more self-knowing turn, but both actors are simply great. It sounds like it could be simply on the nose; instead it's outright joy.

As Maya ventures in Sideways, "A bottle of wine is actually alive, it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks… and begins its steady, inevitable decline." And then Maya marks it: "And it tastes so fucking good."

I ask Payne who inserted a reference to Sassicaia, a great, strong, cabernet-based Italian wine. "I did. That's the wine that changed me," he says.

Sharing that history, I confess that I have a case of 1988 Sassicaia sitting in my closet. "Drink it!" Payne says. "Don't, don't…!" He leans forward in his chair, frames the facts with his hands. "You can't wait any longer. It's almost cooked. 'Nobody wants to fuck a 50-year-old virgin!'" The three of us laugh. "I tried to get that line into the film. But you gotta drink it now. Drink it up, man. Have a nice dinner party and just down it. The '90, I have four bottles of '90 and I gotta get to that."

"When I cast Virginia," Payne continues, "I said, let's have dinner together and I brought an '88 Sassicaia, so she could connect to it, and an '88 Ornelia," a Cabernet-Merlot blend akin to Sassicaia. "I preferred the Ornelia," Payne says, "but you liked the Sassicaia?"

"Oh, but I loved the Ornelia!" Madsen says. "Wasn't that the consensus at the meal? That we all liked that one better? Both were so incredible."

In the same sort of specifics as Payne and I were discussing filmmakers and shots from their movies before Madsen came into the room-Ozu, Visconti, the range of humanists, and why he hasn't seen any Satyajit Ray - Payne continues with the vintage talk: "I had a '35 Simi cab from Napa. 1935. The guy at the [sound] mix stage brought it. His old lady neighbor died? And she had all these bottles? I knew the winemaker at Simi, and I said, 'You guys want it?' Actually, the guy wanted to trade it in for a case of new stuff if they wanted for their archives. We popped it and it was still alive, literally. [The late owner] was a 90-year-old lady with osteoporosis and stinky urine-stained crocheted dress, but [the wine] was still alive."

Except for a winery whose outlet gets trashed, the detailed "wine list" was all selected by Payne and Co. "When I see people drinking wine in movies, they always turn it away from camera for some reason," he says.

Madsen adds, "In a restaurant, a waiter always [displays the label], and I'm glad you did that."

"I'm presenting it to the viewer," Payne says. "'Here, we're drinking this stuff." Location and wine scouting were simultaneous. "They went utterly hand-in-hand. That was Jane [Ann Stewart], the production designer, and my bonding. We spent months driving around and drinking every day. Started at 11."

Finally out of Nebraska, I wonder if he feels he's got his footing in the rest of the world. "In making those films in Omaha and very consciously trying to capture a sense of the place, I feel that I am now equipped with certain tools of observation to observe other places, places I don't know and do a documentary of. I think in a way, I think Sideways is a documentary about Santa Barbara County wine country. At times it's pure postcards. How I approach scenes, I like to orient viewers to geography early on so that's just out of the way and then you just focus in on the action."

"I'd like to see more pretentious movies…"

Of all the things I can admire the all-too-young and all-too-good 29-year-old writer-director David Gordon Green for is his response when reviewers say that Undertow (***), his third feature after the great promise of George Washington and All the Real Girls demonstrates an ever-more hermetic vocabulary, a further step toward pretension. "I'd like to see more pretentious movies," the New Orleans resident says in his mid-South Arkansas-Texas twang. Undertow, seemingly set in the 1970s and shot in a style using zoom lenses and other devices from that era, is a rangy, weird, heartfelt, lush, grimy, funny, lyrical, intimately acted and boldly shot action-adventure about fathers, sons, brothers, poverty, greed, escape, and ends with a shot of open water. Terrence Malick, an admitted influence on Green's alternately lyrical and deadpan style of storytelling, brought the script to him and co-produces; Green's brilliant cinematographer-collaborator Tim Orr captures humidity like no one else, and Philip Glass' score is a vital pulse. With Jamie Bell, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Lucas and (briefly) Kristin Stewart, all of whom are indelible, and Mulroney and Bell will take your breath away with their simple, telling performances, in body language alone. Forget the love of loopy language, what about the freeze-frames? They break my heart. With any luck, I'll post a Q&A with Green in the coming couple weeks.

Primered

Paging Dr. Kubrick, paging Dr. Kubrick. Primer (*** ½), Shane Carruth's $7,000 made-in-a-garage SF doodle is a compelling storytelling tease. As writer-producer-star-director-composer (and his mom and dad made all the food, the sparse end credits tell us), Carruth's quiet, what-if of a head-scratcher hints at something I've never seen in a movie: capturing the vaporous nature of the working method, the methodical thought processes of an inventor's mind. Beyond the likes of Edison, beyond the Silicon Valley brainiac kids, there's a genus of guy-in-a-garage, a strain of applied intelligence sparking in garages across the land, with the potential for lucrative patents everywhere. Understated, fractured, and perhaps confusing to some on a single viewing, Primer is more than merely clever: the conundrums of the invention resound after you've seen it.

SeenSAW

I wanted to vomit.

It's a learned reflex in this profession, looking away from the screen when there's something that tickles the less-jaded parts of the critical gut, but the premise of first-time director James Wan's Saw, a puzzle-game serial killer thriller - described in the Sundance 2004 catalog as "indelible horror… terrifying in tone and effect," even conveys its grave grue in a coming attraction that ends, fittingly, with the words, "How fucked up is that?"

Recommended with the strenuous caveat that the trailer alone, showing a woman waking up in a dark, cold basement with a helmet on her head that threatens to either rip off her jaw or blow her up, unless she can carve a key out the belly of a body on the floor-which turns out to be alive may be one of the most disturbing things I've seen. With its jaw-dropping pile-on, like the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs multiplied a dozenfold, this movie should make a lot of horror aficionados happy.

Put up against Se7en, its inventive mindwarps go up to about 16-point-7. Taking on the ADD contraction the crew of Texas Chainsaw Massacre always affectionately referred to in that film, Saw is something you haven't seen before. (It had some of the dank nastiness of that indelible film.) Two Australian friends in their mid-20s-director/co-writer James Wan and co-star/co-writer Leigh Whannell - composed a spare mindgame of a story, thinking they'd make it on the cheap at home, but managed to convince a few big names, like Danny Glover, to participate in their reindeer games, and got to make it in Los Angeles for around $1 million. Then the games truly begin.

I met the pair for drinks after a word-of-mouth screening they'd missed. "It's not yours anymore, it's the audience's film," the affable, open-faced Whannell says. "Sundance and at Toronto, we sat through it. A couple's good enough. I'm vicariously living my rock-'n'-roll fantasy-20 cities in twenty nights. You wish you could stay, you're just getting a taste for something, and bang, you have to go."

They've both got the compulsive patter of film students and I slowed my tape recorder while transcribing just to be able to decipher our conversation. I asked Wan, a slight, impossibly young-looking, beaming Asian-Australian in a black leather jacket and punked-up hair, what gives you the nerve? What's a film or a scene that utterly grabbed you, by some other filmmaker? "I can't point anything specific out, but I'm a big David Lynch fan, he's a big influence on Saw, and another director I truly admire as well, is an Italian, Dario Argento? These two guys have a big impact on us, Deep Red, Lost Highway."

Both directors use deep space, negative space. "Yeh!" Wan shorthands, "Scenes that are dark and pitch black. You don't have anything else to look to."

Whannel adds," Lynch is the master of just scaring the shit out of you. Like that scene [in Lost Highway] where that guy says, 'I'm at your house…. Right now!'" They both laugh happily.

Originally, Saw was rated NC-17. "When we handed in our first cut, the Sundance version, we were essentially told the film was too intense. Really?" He grins, shaking him head. "I'm going to be penalized for doing what I'm supposed to do as a director? I think they have a problem with the 'tone' as well. How do you cut 'tone'? How do you censor 'tone'?"

So how do you? "From my experience of this film, I don't want to get into the whole MPAA thing too much, because y'know, it's political and I don't want to go there!"

You might want to make another film. "Yeah! From what been explained to us, the MPAA doesn't actually tell you anything specific, or what to cut. In their eye's, they're not a censorship board. That makes it even harder!"

Did the duo want to be scary as they could? Or make a name for themselves? They shot a scene to go with their script on their first L.A. journey. "Yeh. We shot a scene. It was that scene, but played by Leigh instead, and essentially the same scene that got us our attention. We picked that scene because we thought we had to pick the most shocking out of the screenplay. It would get attention and allow me to do a lot of cinematic tricks and showcase Leigh as an actor as well. Ina weird way, it sums up the film."

So it's like Tarantino's name-making ear-cutting scene? "We initially wanted to make this with our own money. We wanted it to be a guerilla film. That is why Tarantino is so smart and he had that infamous ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs. Once people walk out of that screening? They cannot believe what they have seen."

If you haven't seen the trailer, you might want to see it online before deciding to go.

Fifth time's a charm.

Takashi Shimuzu's terse, tense American remake of four earlier movies called Ju-on, or, The Grudge (***), is a neat, small snack of dread. Shot in Tokyo for under $10 million, on some of the same locations as the version released earlier this year in the U.S. but with a largely American cast, including Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Pullman, it's a cosmopolitan, curiously compelling concoction. (The cinematography by Hideo Yamamato, who also shot Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks and a lot of Takashi Miike's movies, is restrained yet lovingly framed.)

A fractured time scheme, inspired, Shimizu says, by Kieslowski's Decalogue, allows for a rollercoaster series of shocks to a series of protagonists (instead of only one), all of whom must confront a spirit that will not leave an unprepossessing suburban house. (Its most frightening emanation may be a 7-year-old boy with wide, obsidian-black eyes; the same kid's played the role since these movies began.)

Through a translator, Shimizu's producer, Taka Ichise, who's made over forty movies, including Dark Water and the Japanese Ringu series, insists American studio movies aren't scary. "American horror, monster chases, like Jason or Freddy, monsters chase normal people, they kill them. You're startled by Freddy or Jason, shocked by an image, but after an audience leaves the theater, that's it. But fear in a Japanese film, you take it home with you."

Using his Spider-Man clout and financing from German concern Senator International, Sam Raimi and longtime production partner Rob Tapert started Ghost House Pictures, looking for young filmmakers, like the 32-year-old Shimizu, with new ideas about horror. While some of the ellipsis of this Grudge comes from the need to get a PG-13 rating, Raimi, who's been quoted as saying an American audience needs "rules" about supernatural tales or, at least, internally consistent narratives. The Grudge, surprisingly, is similar to its earlier incarnations, not spelling out how precisely the "rage" persists. Chalk one up for the MPAA: inadvertently inducing discretion and artfulness.

"At every step of the way wanted to be careful to make sure that what they thought worked in Japanese horror got translated into this. [Taka and Shimizu] didn't want to have solid explanations for everything. That was the challenge, to somehow make it acceptable to the American audience, rules being one of the many things we talked about but not lose what make it striking and unique."

Raimi has more faith in audiences than in filmmakers. "I think if people love the source material, and that's really whey they're making the movie, then that's a natural outcome. That the things we all love, and work with the creators of the movie to save the things that were so effective. I think it's situations where people don't love the material, they just say, oh that was a big hit, it could be a big hit here. It's just generalizing. Things got lost if you don't understand why people like a thing. When you love something, it's easy to say, 'That's my son, cut out his heart? No, he needs the heart.' It's harder when you don't love the thing yourself."

"Shimizu works in a very subtle way," Raimi says, "in a way I hadn't seen before in a modern horror film. He allows moments to develop within the shot. In an American horror film, you usually have a character and a shot of them. Then their point-of-view moving down a hallway, approaching a door and they're coming closer to the door. And a hand reaches for the knob, and you know, the moment or the moment before or the moment after, based on the timing of the editor and the director, there'll be a big moment of an attack or a scare."

"What Shimizu does," he continues, "is a moment where Sarah Michelle Gellar is opening this closet, to see what's inside, and we Americans think something is going to jump out, there's nothing in the closet but darkness. And then you start to realize, within that darkness, you see a shape. Is it a knee? Oh, yes it's a knee and there's a face in there. That's always been there. That I can just perceive within the blackness. And it unnerves me in the freakiest way! And in a completely different way than the sledgehammer technique of some of our cruder American directors." A beat. "Such as myself!"

"Along with Rob, absolutely, I am looking for the new filmmakers," he says of their enterprise. "I don't know if they'll necessarily follow Shimizu's approach of a subtle, super-super-subtle approach. All that's necessary is the 'new' part. And I do think there's a new crop of American filmmakers coming. And they're in high school right now. They're in Mrs. Dawson's English class! They've got new tools, they've got computers and the video cameras, which are the equivalent of our super-8mm training ground. It's even better because they can shoot for free. We had to gather up like four bucks, five bucks to buy a roll of film, another three bucks to process it, and that was a very limiting [thing], in high school you've gotta rake leaves for three hours to shoot a roll of film! So these new filmmakers have these advanced editing tools with the incredible manipulation of imagery available on a standard computer" - he nods toward my iBook on the table - "Even in the public library. I think that the filmmaking process has been taken out of the aristocracy, those with money, and put into the hands of the proletariat, is that the right word? Out of the rich kids' hands and into every American's hands, there should be a new boom right now. I can't imagine that those kids aren't making them. I'm excited about it."

Dug

Ondi Timoner's Sundance Grand Jury Documentary prizewinner, DIG! (***), is a charismatic car wreck of a musical tragicomedy, a kinetic contraction of 1,500 hours of footage shot over seven years, trailing two musicians with a contentious relationship, Courtney Taylor of the Dandy Warhols and the manic, prolific Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. In voiceover, Taylor describes Newcombe as "my friend and my enemy, the greatest inspiration and ultimately, the greatest regret." Pretty much sums up the conflict, which Timoner and co-editors David Timoner and Vasco Nunez make the most of, energy and invention seldom flagging, working with unceasing dynamism. Verite, I say unto you is this what it's like to be in a band? Shiiiiiit! This is a small classic, and there's even redemption at the end.

Less than protean

Whenever there's experimental work or an experimental filmmaker whose work I mostly don't get, like Canada's smart yet not fully accomplished John Greyson, I'm always hopeful someone else is getting something from the work that I can't fathom. (It can't just be bad, can it?) There are ideas here!) Originating on video, Greyson's latest, Proteus (1/2 *), drawing from a script co-written by South African video artist and activist Jack Lewis, centers on a Middle Dutch transcript Lewis discovered of a 1735 sodomy trial on Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was kept for decades), in which a black man and a white man were brought up on charges. Explicit physicality, reflections on love, racism, homophobia and botany ensue amid anachronistic decors and fast-motion footage of flowers in bloom.

Lustre cream

The late Victor Argo embodies a vanishing New York in Lustre (***), second-time filmmaker Art Jones' poetic, post-9/11 reverie of the spirit of that city. It's such an elemental yet flighty film, lyrical but not ponderous. There's so much language, almost deranged in its dreamy lilt, so much ardor in the way gruffster Argo plays dialogue and voiceover reveries. Playing Hugo, a loan shark late in life who believes that New York is abandoning its soul, Argo seems like the only kind of actor, an unsentimental veteran, who could get away with it. Lustre is awash with splendid things, almost an embarrassment of riches, and Jones' down-to-earth sometimes up-in-air views of Manhattan are a nonstop celebration. The aged, colorful storefronts match the visionary Hugo's fallen features. Jones is terrific with sound, too. It's a postcard from inside the head of a man with a lifetime's fears and regrets resounding within. The way Jones gets to film the Brooklyn Bridge has never been done before, and it's something to witness. Lustre pulsates with street-level authenticity.

Dance floored

Masuyuki Suo's 1996 Shall We Dance? an underrated comic gem, holds a special place in my heart, with its alternation of the sentimental and the goofy in the story of a Japanese "salaryman" who breaks out of his social awkwardness through a platonic affair with ballroom dancing. (It doesn't hurt that one of the world's great everyman actors, Koji Yakusho (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under A Red Bridge) played the fumble-footed beginner.

In Serendipity director Peter Chelsom's remake (** 1/2), adapted by Audrey Wells (the hard-nosed Guinevere, the not-so-successful Under the Tuscan Sun), Richard Gere plays Yakusho's role, and the Chicago-set story was relocated to Winnipeg when SARS hit Toronto. While there's a streak of warm sap running throughout, I'm not sure why Miramax wouldn't let weeklies review it on opening weekend: a fear that sentiment will always be taken for sentimentality by cynical younger reviewers on the make? There's a sense of strain in making the cultural transposition, and Jennifer Lopez shows no appreciable growth as an actor, but the duo do look good together, especially when she doesn't speak. Unnecessary, but painless, Shall We Dance? does not offend and maybe it'll even send a few cable subscribers and Netflixers toward the wonderful original. With Susan Sarandon as wife-back-home, Stanley Tucci as the nutty comic relief, and Bobby Cannevale.

Surviving Surviving Christmas

Mike Mitchell, director of the Greg the Bunny TV series and 1999's Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo makes intermittent hay with the crudely caricatured 2003-shot family dysfunction comedy, Surviving Christmas (*), set in a mythical Chicago suburb called "Lincoln Wood." Visually undistinguished, the hit and miss--mostly miss--affair is about a rich, selfish Chicago adman (so-unfunny Ben Affleck) who lives in a loft larger than the Chicago arts club, renting a family for the holidays, including James Gandolfini, the always-brilliant Catherine O'Hara and a fetching Christina Applegate. There are some dark laughs, but it's mostly a sleigh-crash of contrivance, lightened by Craig McKay's nimble editing of conversation scenes.

The condescension to the working class is unrelenting, and the view of what a nouveau sonofabitch like Affleck's character would make of his life would be plausible only to the most jaded millionaire film executive; the portrait of his filthy rich, abominably stupid, hideously selfish girlfriend is about as ugly as it gets, unless you include the teenage boy joking, "I'd use one of those bus tickets guys want to send me over the internet." Still, the two-shots of Affleck and Applegate non-canoodling are sweet: she's a talented reactive actress and cute, too. It's almost as if Affleck weren't even there.

Nessessities

To talk about the smart and intermittently hilarious, Incident at Loch Ness (***) is to give something away: not precisely a documentary, not exactly a mockumentary, it's a spot-on whatdyamacallit of a movie-mentary, like a DVD bonus on steroids. Action film screenwriter Zak Penn (with shared credits on Last Action Hero, X2 and Suspect Zero) makes his directing (and lead acting) debut in a fanciful story about a documentary gone wrong, with veteran cinematographer John Bailey making "Herzog in Wonderland," a behind-the-scenes documentary when larger-than-legend director Werner Herzog decides to go after the legend of Nessie. Penn is the Hollywood-trained producer of the Scottish shoot of Herzog's quest, an asshole in fullest flower. Conflict ensues? Oh yeah. As a put-on, Incident never makes you feel put-upon, with Herzog a vibrant presence, a more than willing participant in sending himself up. Still, this funny, funny, funny movie is always knowing, and never demeans the German's work: he had so much fun he and Penn are doing another movie in the winter in the same style.

Veraties

When the work of Mike Leigh is discussed, there's usually a touch of flummery about his "method," in which improvisations with actors over a period of months lead him to a script (and film) with richly detailed character studies. Merely means to an end: in much of his later work, you wind up with singular movies like Naked or Topsy-Turvy, movies that no one else could make even if they cared to. His sterling work with actors is apparent, but he's a seriously underrated visual stylist. In his second period piece, the 1950-set Vera Drake (*** ½), each and every camera position and movement is efficient for story's sake, but his economy is never less than precise.

Leigh's 1950s London, still a city of pea-soup fog, cloistered and claustrophobic looks a lot like America 2005 might: what kind of stories will be told after this election? Will they be like this fable of how well-meaning mom Imelda Staunton gets her comeuppance for having helped "girls in a family way" for the preceding twenty years, as conscious of class issues as Leigh's work is? Tiny, soft-featured Staunton's sparky confidence as the Vera, followed by an immensely touching scene of collapse when the dark-wallpapered walls close in, are the center of Leigh's schematic, wrenching tale of a goodhearted, working class woman who is also an abortionist. If you stay for the end credits, Leigh's dedication to his mother and father (and why) is a touching coda.

Avedon's "Democracy"

Late photographic master Richard Avedon's "Democracy" portfolio in the November 1 New Yorker is mostly a knockout: Here's my take on the images I liked.

Remote Possibilities

Only a few days before the election and DVD technology and the Internets keep politics at a boil; a new site, Films to See Before You Vote, will likely have to change their name soon, but at this heated moment, they're a clearinghouse for the new wave of political documentary and narrative films, with ideas for how to integrate them into house parties and personal festivals. There are other resources for voters on a range of issues, not just candidates.

Robert Taicher's Rush to War: Between Iraq and a Hard Place (***) begins as an anguished personal narrative on the filmmaker's cross-country travel, speaking to folks he meets, in the three weeks after September 11, then is complemented by conversations with a range of commentators on how the Iraq conflict fulfilled Dwight D. Eisenhower's fear of "the military-industrial complex" in his 1961 Farewell Address. Molly Ivins, George McGovern, Joseph Wilson and Father Daniel Berrigan are predictable company, but, having worked on several of surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky's films, Taicher corrals the unlikely Jordorowsky in for a few choice remarks in his one-hour doc. It's another sturdy documentary to take in as we consider our complicity as citizens in the deeds our leaders perform in our names.

Unless you believe everything is political, a couple of other options are out now: SCTV: Volume 2 (Shout Factory) (****) corrals nine of the intricate 90-minute installments from the show's fourth, 1981-82 season. Even without dipping into the commentaries and extras, it's still shocking how inventively interwoven the SCTV parallel universe was with our own. (Plus their parody of The Godfather is as strange as it is funny and just right. And why is Catherine O'Hara's Katherine Hepburn impersonation so… hot?) And for a title that gives it all away, you can't do worse than Audubon VideoGuide to 505 Birds of North America on Two DVDs (Mastervision) (****). Recommended for field use with a portable DVD player, it also includes a sixty-four-page field guide to scoping out "each of the 505 species that reliably breed in North American north of Mexico." Birdcalls and nature footage are provided for each of the avian avatars; I got lost in the footage almost immediately. It makes for a weirdly compelling surf.

Straight-to-video after a long delay is a film Nick Hamm made before Godsend, and shouldn't it just fly off the shelves with the ad line, "Keira Knightley in The Hole!" The Hole's (**) story of four prep school pals who spend a weekend fooling around in an abandoned bomb shelter, only to find themselves locked in, isn't that memorable, and the make-out scenes won't enthuse too many of the potentially titillated audience. Hamm's commentary is one of the most bare bones to be heard in a while: there's no sound underneath, with only his words to be heard. I kept waiting for the sounds of the director availing himself of a crisps bag, a soda can or the legendary Motorman's Helper.

October 30, 2004

- Email Ray Pride