AMERICAN DREAM (Barbara Kopple, US, 1992).  Seamless, brilliantly composed docu about a meatpackers’ strike of a Hormel plant in Austin, a small Minnesota town, in 1985.  Hormel, despite a $29M profit in 1984, proposes to reduce wages by 20%, benefits by 30%, in the next labor contract.  (This is the strike that engaged Paul Wellstone's attention at the dawn of his political career.)  Local union leaders and the rank and file want to fight this.  They can get some financial backing but not front line leadership or advocacy from the international union officials in Washington, who are convinced the local cannot win.  So the locals hire a maverick organizer/agitator from NYC to lead their charge.  His methods are to embarrass companies into caving to labor demands.  Hormel won’t cave, local union leaders prove hopelessly naïve, their Washington superiors prove to be prophets, and the guy from NYC makes a bundle as consultant.  Meanwhile 80% of the strikers lose their jobs for good and others go back to the plant for less.  This depiction is a heartbreaking microcosm of the demise of labor and the retrogressive, greed-fueled corporate policies encouraged by the Reagan government that widened the income gap between the rich and everyone else in the 1980s, setting the stage for the long economic boom in the 90s.  Kopple’s film, which earned her a second docu Oscar (after Harlan County USA) is a lesson in the art of docu making. She and Michael Moore strive to expose the same themes of corporate corruption.  But this film should be seen alongside Moore’s Roger and Me to contrast her artistry with Moore’s messy egotism, something that obtrudes into everything he does. It’s hard to be an astute filmmaker and a standup comedian at the same time.  Grade: A

BANDIT QUEEN (Shekhar Kapur, UK/India, 1994).  Adventures of a real life female bandit gang leader in northern India, based on a biography of her life by the screenwriter.  Phoolan Devi (an impressively fierce portrayal by Seema Biswas) was sold into marriage at 11, brutalized by her husband and many others, eventually clawed her way to a position of successful gang leader, was then arrested in 1983 and spent 11 years in jail.  It’s quite a ride.   (In Hindi)  Grade: A-

BARRY LYNDON    (Stanley Kubrick, US, 1975).  Incredibly beautiful and engaging film based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackarey about a late 18th century low born Irish rogue, an opportunistic adventurer, who marries a wealthy English widow and manages to destroy the whole arrangement despite his love of her.  Three hours long, the film is never tiresome, with each adventure or moment of crisis piled seamlessly on the one preceding.  The film was shot entirely in natural light, including interior scenes lit only by in candlelight, for which Kubrick had special camera lens crafted by Carl Zeisz.  With Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenson.  Period filmmaking at its best.  (last seen in 2000)  Grade: A

BEFORE THE RAIN  (Milcho Manchevski, UK/France/Macedonia, 1994).  A circular narrative joins 3 stories of love and violence, set in war-torn Macedonia in the first film made there since Macedonia declared itself a separate republic. One of  the first, and best, dramatizations of upheaval in the former Yugoslavia.   (In Macedonian, Albanian and English)  Grade: B+

BIG NIGHT  (Stanley Tucci & Campbell Scott, US, 1995).  Set in urban 1950s New Jersey, two Italian brothers (Tucci – who plays Segundo - and Tony Shalhoub – who is Primo) run a restaurant that has fallen on hard times. Primo is old world perfectionism.  Segundo wants to update the menu and atmosphere to bring in more customers. They fight.  They try to borrow money.  They fail.  And so, on the brink of closure, they decide to create the all time best ever feast for their friends and long time customers, nominally to honor musician Louis Prima.  If this goes very, very well, maybe they can turn the place around and avoid bankruptcy .  This is good fun.  And a fine food flick.  Grade: B+

BIRD  (Clint Eastwood, US, 1988).  With equal measures of devotion and realism, Clint Eastwood produced this biopic of the sad, chaotic, voracious life of Charlie “Bird” Parker, the best alto saxophone player and one of most brilliant improvisers in jazz history.  The film opens with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prophetic, self justifying line, penned shortly before he died, “There are no second acts in American lives.”   What nonsense.  America, of all places, was built on the premise of opportunity for reinvention.  Many Americans have second acts and more if they live long enough (Jimmy Carter springs to mind, and how about Eastwood himself?).   But it’s surely true that there isn’t time for a second act if you die young.  And there’s nothing like severe alcoholism to beckon death.  Fitzgerald was dead by 44, and Charlie Parker by 34, both from the consequences of alcohol dependence.  Bird’s story is one of towering appetites, not only for booze and music, but also for food, and women, and heroin, to which he was addicted for his entire adult life.  Crippled by his excesses, and resulting depression, cirrhosis, bleeding peptic ulcers and a bad heart, Parker’s extraordinary talent - like Fitzgerald’s - soared like a meteor through the skies, visible to all, only to fade and die, far too soon.   When he was 16, Eastwood, who is also a musician, composer (he just wrote the score for Mystic River) and jazz aficionado, saw Bird perform in Oakland, in 1946, at his best.  Nine years later, by the time Eastwood was getting his first bit parts in the movies, Bird was dead.  

This is a complex and difficult film to watch.  Many scenes are underlit, and there are frequent time shifts – backward and forward  – that often feel poorly edited.  These elements impart a darkly chaotic, disorienting tone to the film.  Maybe this was the intent: chaos and darkness helped shape the ethos of many modern jazz musicians’ lives, especially Parker’s.  But in watching this movie, one also becomes too preoccupied at times by simple confusion about the flow of events.  It's also hard to keep track of the identities of some of the secondary characters, a problem common to many biopics - I think of Pollock and Frida most recently.   Reading a Parker bio sketch before viewing this film would have been a big help.  I also must confess that I experience a certain unavoidable sense of tedium watching films about junkies.  “Junkie narratives” are sufficiently stereotypical that to some degree I've come to dread watching them unfold.  Sometimes it’s because junkies, like clams, lay around so much and accomplish so little of value (Trainspotting, High Art, and Requiem for a Dream come to mind).  That wasn’t true of Bird, but like most addicts he does lay waste to life, creating oceans of pain for himself and others in the process.  And you know from the getgo that all his junkie stuff will be coming at you.  The film is also very long (160 minutes), too long to be supported by the narrative itself.  But there is another, more valid reason for its length, and that’s the music.  Eastwood made two critical decisions that assure lasting stature for this production as a film about jazz.  First, he cast an actor to play Parker (Forest Whitaker) who knew how to play alto saxophone (there’s nothing worse than nonmusician actors faking instrument playing; it’s virtually never done even passably well).  Whitaker had played sax as a kid (and was later a scholarship student in classical voice - he's a tenor - at USC).  Second, Eastwood not only dubbed original jazz recordings by Bird on the soundtrack as Whitaker played, but also – and this is really the key element – he let these recorded numbers play through to the end, rather than cutting them short when scenes change.  In one wonderful segment a number by Bird’s quintet plays on to its conclusion across several brief scenes that leave the musicians behind.  Shortening the film significantly would have required either deleting several jazz numbers entirely or cutting most of them short.  I think Eastwood made the right choice not to do these things.  So did the Academy, which rewarded him with an Oscar for best soundtrack.

Forest Whitaker was a rising young talent when Eastwood gave him this chance to carry a film for the first time.  He was arguably too young, at 26, when he was supposed to be 34 looking like 65 in scenes at the end of his life.  But a lot of the film consists of flashbacks to an earlier time, the peak of Bird’s career.  Whitaker maintains a melancholy sweetness that apparently mirrors Bird’s true temperament.  His greatest love, Chan Richardson (she became Chan Parker after they got together, though they never married), said Bird was the strongest man she ever knew, and Whitaker conveys this too, as much through his football player’s body as otherwise.  He also very ably enacts states of intoxication, withdrawal and sickness, Parker’s most steady companions.  This was an ambitious undertaking for Whitaker and Eastwood, and a successful one (Whitaker won Best Actor honors at Cannes).  A pleasant surprise is the acting of Diane Venora as Chan.  She is so multifaceted: by turns arresting and tender, tough and longsuffering.  She cherishes Bird’s talent and is far more protective of it than Parker himself ever was.  Why hasn’t Venora starred in films more often?  The real Chan Parker was an intriguing person.  Daughter of a New York City nightclub owner and a Ziegfeld Follies dancer, she became a dancer herself, and later a pianist and songwriter, was attracted to the demimonde of jazz musicians, had two children with Bird, one of whom died young, married and divorced another jazz musician after Bird’s death, and spent much of her later life in France, where she died in 1999.  She was an important collaborator in making this film.  Despite fine acting by the two principals and several others, this isn’t a top notch film: it’s too long, too choppy, sometimes too confusing.  But in other ways, especially for music lovers, this film succeeds where others about musicians often fail: in both sound and visuals it gets the music right.  Grade: B   (A for jazz lovers)

BLACK RAIN  (Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1988)  The toll taken on one family by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  Filmed in black and white, it is appropriately somber, slow moving, a remarkable conveyance of the enduring wreckage wrought by nuclear war.  (In Japanese)  (seen in 1998) Grade: A

BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOR  (Jean-Jacques Annaud, FR, 1976)  Hilarious anti-war comedy set in a French controlled area in Africa.  Upon hearing that WW I has begun, a French soldier decides to lead an attack on a neighboring German fort. This is about as good as comic films get.   (In French) (seen in 1998)  Grade A

THE BLUE KITE (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China, 1994)  Fifteen years of political and cultural upheaval in China(the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath) are shown through the story of a boy and his family.  (In Mandarin)  Grade: A

Among other things, this film is gorgeously photographed: there are wonderful uses of vivid color and numerous richly imagined scenes.  It moves along well.  The characters are without exception interesting.  The implicit criticisms seem even handed, if harsh.  With Ruby Dee as Mother Sister, a grumpy Brechtian moral judge of everybody else’s conduct on the block, serenely ensconced on ethical high ground, observing the street action from a perch at her windowsill.  She's especially tough on Da Mayor, her agemate, accusing him of dereliction of leadership in favor of alcohol.   Mother Sister’s terrible, keening emotional breakdown at the end, as she stands in the street gazing at the fire raging in Sal's place, makes her the real barometer of this tragedy. To witness her loss of composure is a shocking moment.  This film holds up very well 15 years after it was made. (Seen most recently in August, 2004)  Grade:  A-

ENTER THE DRAGON (Robert Clouse, US/Hong Kong, 1973; restored first cut 1998). Bruce Lee was and still is, 25 years after his untimely death, the most accomplished and charismatic star of the oriental martial arts film genre. And this was his last and greatest film, one in which he articulated the philosophical views underlying his athleticism (some of this footage had been deleted from the version originally distributed in the US but it is all put back into the restored cut).  Lee choreographed all the fight sequences in this film.  The most breathtaking is his final duel with the evil Han (the actor Shih Kien, I think), in a room walled with 4,000 mirrors.  Lee is spellbinding: his fierceness in a fight alternates with a quiet, taut watchfulness, like a coiled snake, and with an impish sexy innocence in the presence of women.  Many of the players speak English, so that the dreadful vocal dubbing that infects most films of this genre is kept to a minimum.  The film is burdened by H-wood excesses like a needlessly lavish musical score by Lalo Schifrin and huge scenes full of extras, but with plenty of suspense and Lee almost always on screen, who cares?  The best film of its kind, probably, until the recent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  (Seen in 2001)  Grade: A-

FLESH AND BONE  (Steve Kloves, US, 1993).  Superb acting by all four principals and a stellar screenplay grace this tale of payback for evil in a tough, taut film set in the dusty hardscrabble Texas flatlands.  Dennis Quaid plays a man weighed down with a burden of despair he has carried all his adult life, a joyless loner making his rounds, servicing vending machines in a score of small, forlorn towns.  Along the way he meets a reckless woman (Meg Ryan) who is down on her marital luck.  They also encounter a tough young psychopathic woman who steals from everyone, even the dead (Gwyneth Paltrow in her first substantial screen role).  She turns out to be partnered with Quaid’s estranged father, an aging, nomadic thief and worse (James Caan).  We learn in the very first scenes of the film the basis of Quaid’s later despondency.  But the story unfolds some 30 years later in a series of unexpected turns.  The dialogue is always crisp, fresh, real, devoid of clichés.  The film is blunt and unsentimental.  These are entirely believable people living out a terrible, oddly twisted, fateful drama of justice, redemption and the limitations of these forces.  The obviously talented Mr. Kloves has written and directed only one other film, The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1989, which I also loved.  And he is the screenwriter for the first two Harry Potter films.   (seen in 2002)  Grade: A-

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY   (Fred Zinnemann, US, 1953).  Set in Hawaii in 1941, in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, this adaptation of James Jones’s novel concerns Army life at Schofield Barracks, and features Burt Lancaster as the sergeant who runs the company, Montgomery Clift as a principled maverick who just transferred in, Frank Sinatra as a fun loving but fiery trouble seeker, and Ernest Borgnine as a malevolent sergeant who rules the stockade.  Romantically, Lancaster is paired with his commanding officer’s wife, Deborah Kerr, while Clift gets Donna Reed, a hostess at a “club” that purports to be more like the USO.  There’s a lot of corny stuff here, especially in the romantic relationships.  Lancaster and Kerr’s first date, which produced the iconic image of them embracing in the surf, is full of melodrama so turgid you could cut it with a knife.  Clift seems physically too slight to be the crushing boxer he’s reputed to be.  He looks better suited to be the crushing bugler he is also reputed to be.  Sinatra, as everyone said at the time, gives a an unexpectedly good turn here.  Kerr and Reed were unfortunately stuck in two dimensional roles in this guyflick.  Lancaster shines as an entirely believable, multifaceted noncom.  The best scene in this film is not a kiss in the surf, but a hilarious moment late in the film when Lancaster and Clift, both three sheets to the wind, sit in the middle of a jeep road at night simply enjoying each other’s company.  The black and white photography is right for the job.  Given the time in history when this mainstream Hollywood film was made, its critical gaze at American military life is remarkably tough.(Seen again in 2004).  Grade: B+

THE FRONT  (Martin Ritt, US, 1976)  Woody Allen’s character acts as a front for blacklisted screenwriters, including one played by the incomparable Zero Mostel, in this poignant story of an especially ugly time in America, when the House UnAmerican Activities Committee held evil sway over the world of entertainment, among others.  (seen in 1998)  Grade: A

FUNNY BONES  (Peter Chelsom, UK, 1995)  Oliver Platt and Lee Evans are opposites in this extraordinary exploration of the nature of comedy...a deadly serious and outrageously funny film, with wonderful turns by Leslie Caron, Jerry Lewis and an army of very engaging vaudeville and circus style entertainers.  Grade: A

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT  (Richard Lester, UK, 1964).  This film has not lost one iota of its original charm.  It's great to revisit the wondrous tight harmonies of which these singers were capable.  The incredible scene in the field and central cement square where the boys run and jump and frolic while one of their songs covers the soundtrack is such a classic!   Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's grandfather - "a clean old man" - they call him, is marvelous. (last seen in 2000).  Grade: A-

HARLAN COUNTY USA   (Barbara Kopple, US, 1976).  Brilliant documentary account of a coal miners’ strike in eastern Kentucky in 1973-74.   Kopple set a new standard for documenting social crises in a series of intimate observations of the struggles of the miners and their families.  The perils of mining, the horrid conditions of daily life for miners and their families (cold water shacks, outdoor toilets), the drama of the long (14 month) strike itself, the dangers on the picket line – all are graphically but simply presented, without polemics or manipulation, although decidedly from the miners’ point of view.  The militant role of the miners’ wives is especially absorbing and well documented.  Looming in the background are the vivid recollections of older families about the violence surrounding miners’ efforts to gain improved conditions earlier, in the 1930s, a time referred to again and again simply as “Bloody Harlan.”  The 1973 battle is one the miners eventually won.  But only two years later, we are told at the end, in a new national contract between the UMWA and the coal companies, miners lost the right to strike against individual mining companies, in return for better wages and benefits, a serious erosion of workers’ most important weapon for improving working conditions and benefits.  When Kopple revisited striking union workers at a meat packing plant just over a decade later, in 1985, she showed, in American Dream, how that union lost a long and bitter battle…a clear indication of how far union strength had eroded over those years. (seen in 2003) Grade: A

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS  (Kakushi Toride No San Akunin)   (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1958).  The master breaks away here from his established dramatic style to create a marvelous comedy.  The setting is feudal Japan, in the late 16^th Century or somewhat later, after the introduction of small gunnery, an anarchic time when warlords constantly battled one another for possession of territory and wealth.  Foot soldiers carry rifles, fighting alongside Samurai warriors who employ traditional lances and swords.  This story is told from the perspective of two spineless, greedy, bickering peasants, escaped prisoners of war, who are heading home, penniless, half naked, dreading the shame that awaits them for returning in such a sorry state.  They learn of a hidden treasure of gold belonging to a vanquished ruling house, and their bumbling efforts to acquire these riches bring them together with a princess in hiding and her defeated general and protector, a Samurai played by Toshiro Mifune.  The adventures of this group form the story.  The two peasants, Tahei and Matakishi, played with comic brilliance by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara, carry the narrative.  Think of them as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Felix and Oscar, or as the Star Wars droids, C3PO and R2D2 (George Lucas says that Kurosawa’s odd couple were the inspiration for his robots).  Mifune is given free rein to strut, stare and shout here.  He fights in just one memorable sequence, an excitingly choreographed duel using lances.  Some consider this one of Kurosawa’s lesser films, but others think it is one of his three most influential, ranking just behind Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, both made earlier in the 50s.   Grade: B+

THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE  (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)    (Leos Carax, France, 1991)  An extraordinary, spellbinding story of two homeless young people, Alex (Denis Levant) and Michele (Juliette Binoche), who meet on a Paris street in 1989 and begin to share themselves and, at night, a stone bench and blanket on a bridge that is closed for repairs.  Alex is a down-and-out, self destructive drug addict and street performer with no future.  Michelle is a painter who is going blind and is deeply despairing, but she comes from vastly different, well off circumstances.  Still he fascinates and energizes her with his courage and libidinal interest.  For his part, Alex becomes completely infatuated with Michelle.  He senses her dissatisfaction living with him on the street, the only place he feels secure, but it is all he can offer.  One thing leads to another and they inevitably part; she goes off to vision-saving surgery and resumes a comfortable life, while he goes off to prison. What makes this film stunningly memorable are the many wonderfully imagined, wildly improbable, magical scenes, visual elaborations that seem so perfectly Parisian and at the same time just right for the story.  As in the films of David Lynch, the flow of the story will come to a point, and at that moment expand or digress into some provocative, totally absorbing, wildly lyrical scene that probes, more intensely portrays, or otherwise embellishes or enhances that point, and then the story moves forward again, with things either back as they were, or jumped along to some new level.  The difference from Lynch is that Carax doesn't rely on the grotesque or sinister for his stunners.  The French bicentennial fireworks display is one example here - one of the most psychedelic moments on film.  The couple's first meeting, when Alex is run over on the street, and his subsequent phantasmagoric experience at the emergency station.  Alex breathing fire in his street performance.  The priapic silhouetted chase scene of Alex and Michele at the beach; old Han's deliberate walk down a set of steps to his demise on the dock; the final scenes in the River Seine.  And throughout, one gets a vivid sense of the curious and complex amalgam of hostility, rough edged humor, extreme selfishness, suffering, tenderness, danger, aimlessness and despair that typify so many real skid road people.  Yet at heart Carax seems to be a romantic, and this may be the single false note, the one unbelievable conceit in this otherwise majestic film.  He wants a happy ending, no matter how much at odds with the circumstances it may seem.   Happy ending or no, this is a towering work of visual artistry.  And who's to say, as the couple move triumphantly together on their journey down the river, away from us, whether this scene is yet another passing image on the way to…(In French) (seen in 2000).  Grade: A

MABOROSI  (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 1995). A young woman marries; the couple have a child; her husband dies and her life becomes troubled. She remarries later. A simple tale, it is rendered here in an incredibly beautiful, meditative manner through the use of long takes employing a stationary camera, often positioned at the level of someone kneeling. Kore-eda is a young director very much devoted to employing the techniques of the great Yasujiro Ozu, and it is Ozu's photographic approach that gives this film its grace. (In Japanese) Grade: A-