When it rains…

“Both My Brother’s Wedding and Killer of Sheep are not really narratives as much as they are documentaries about the films’ actors and actresses, who are themselves members of Burnett’s community and thus the very subject of the two works. The amateur acting, shoestring budgets, location shoots, and relaxed narratives tell a story of an ignored community coming together to create art.” Eric Dienstfrey reviews The Charles Burnett Collection now at Flickhead.

Breaking wind inside a letterbox

New on DVD: For all six people who get warm and fuzzy thinking about All This and World War II, Beatlemania and Robert Stigwood’s Sgt. Pepper movie, Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007) is occasionally engaging nonsense set in The Sixties to Beatles songs. They’re not the original fab four recordings, but newcomers of passable vocal skill spilling over tacky American Idol-style accompaniment — elevator music for tin ears. Clocking in at a bloated 133 minutes and taking itself way too seriously, the picture comes to life only in fleeting moments of unintended self parody. The whole thing nearly seems an homage to the Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand collaborations of the period, but possesses the thumping inelegance of an Andrew Lloyd Webber monstrosity. Brace yourself for unnecessary cameos by Joe Cocker (the highlight of the picture) and Con-o …oops, I mean Bono.

Orchestra rehearsal

Suite: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (5:21)

Composed by Miklós Rózsa

The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra
Conducted by Nic Raine
Solo Violin: Lucie Svehlova

Flickhead at the Oscars!

Flickhead arriving on (or near) the Red Carpet


Congratulations, Javier. But don’t buy that Porsche just yet. (Can you say ‘Timothy Hutton’?)


Precious? Moi?


According to the Associated Press, polls showed that 3,896,452 American males came out of the closet after Amy Adams sang “The Happy Working Song” from Enchanted. Speaking on the grounds of anonymity, one AP source claimed, “It was as if they’d been shot right out of the gay cannon.”


Tilda: very hip, very cool


Halle Berry & Judi Dench. I don’t know who these guys are, but they were pretty funny


A combination of static cling and Frederick’s of Bedrock chic…walking slightly hunched over…hands patting down dress…naughty girl…aren’t you wearing underwear??


Ask your doctor if Cymbalta is right for you


Nice head, dude…

Bisexual planet

Jumping freely from coast to coast, Bi the Way (2008) examines the apparent trend in bisexuality in the new millennium. “When did bisexuality become such a mainstream affair?” asks filmmakers Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, pointing to the girl-girl kissing on TV’s The O.C., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Madonna and Britney Spears’s infamous MTV lip lock (see above photo).

That well-publicized smooch, according to Dan Savage, “was done because young people were already doing it…MTV was holding a mirror up to the audience.” A syndicated sex columnist, he’s among several writers and analysts interviewed in Bi the Way to focus on what we’re told is a new awareness of bisexuality.

Blockman and Decker travel the country to talk with people wafting between homo- and heterosexual relationships. There’s the teenage girl who was expelled from a Catholic high school for kissing a female classmate, and later thrown out of her house once her father got wind of it. A dancer from Brooklyn describes the downside to his situation: “Being gay in the African community is not cool—being gay is the opposite of being black.” And then there’s scene-stealing Josh, an 11-year-old whose self-styled moral and ethical code suggests a genius trapped inside a child’s body. He’s not sure whether he’s straight or gay or bi, but he’s certainly looking forward to losing his virginity.

Bi the Way asks the experts some intriguing questions—is there a difference between male and female bisexuality?; can bisexuals be monogamous?; is bisexuality determined by attraction or love or both?—but the filmmakers limit their personal profiles to members of one generation. The commenting writers, clinicians and analysts vary in age, but the ‘test case’ participants are all under 30—as are Blockman and Decker. While their individual stories are involving, they’re still the words of people groping in the formative years of growth, conflict and self-awareness. At times, it almost—and I stress the word ‘almost’—feels as if the film were handling bisexuality as an adolescent or transitory fad rather than a natural human condition.

In a chance meeting in Arizona, Blockman and Decker find their coda from a roadside philosopher drinking beer and smoking cigarettes: “Tears for Fears says it best: ‘nobody talks about the beauty of the gay.’ And you know what? There is something beautiful about the gay. Because if you take the sexual organs away, what it’s all about is what’s in the heart.” Words to live by.


(Bi the Way will be showing at the SXSW Film Festival on March 8, 11 and 13.)

The Big Dubya

“Crawford is a smart and absorbing documentary about the changes within the small Texas town George W. Bush moved to while running for President in 2000...Director David Modigliani, here making his feature debut, captures roughly six years’ worth of the heat and heartbreak…in the President’s chaotic wake.” Read the review now on Flickhead.


(Crawford will be showing at the SXSW Film Festival on March 8, 10 and 15.)

In France They Kiss on Main Street

Joni Mitchell, guitar & vocal
Pat Metheny, guitar
Jaco Pastorius, bass
Lyle Mays, keyboard
Don Alias, drums

On DVD from Amazon

On CD from Amazon

When I’m 64

Mary Woronov photographed in 2007 by David Shankbone (click to enlarge)

Mary @ IMDb

Mary’s website

David Shankbone at Wikipedia

Chowder heads

Nicole up a tree in Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding (2007) In the bonus material on this new DVD, writer-director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming; The Squid and the Whale) recalls his first meeting with Nicole Kidman. By his account, in a coffee shop neither of them ‘knew,’ he sheepishly nudged the script across the table to her when, we assume, she blushed, because both of them are so huggably insecure and childlike despite their mansions and millions. It had me thinking of the weird little game of peek-a-boo between Harry Dean Stanton and Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart…or the time Ralph Cramden howled to Alice, “I’m calling Bellevue ’cuz you’re nuts!”

    What was once quirky and chancy now feels tiresome and repetitious, and the camcorder vérité of Margot at the Wedding is 90 yawning minutes of shallow, angry narcissists trying to cope in a gray world where they’ve fallen from the center of attention. The title may be in the same ballpark as Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach (or Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero), but similarities end there. Nicole plays a writer we’re to assume earns a decent living, though all the characters seem to be on permanent holiday with no visible means of support. She and her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and son (Zane Pais) have volatile relationships; her sister’s fiancé (Jack Black) has volatile relationships except with a young girl we’re told he seduced, though this viewer doubts any young girl’s attraction to his sleazy bearing and portly physique. There are more kids, there are exes, there are strange neighbors. Zane has a kind of epileptic fit and falls into a swimming pool. It goes unexplained, of course, because life is so wearying, yadda yadda yadda…And Jack cuts down a tree…Is it over? Is it over? Please wake me when it’s over…

Too much of nothing

Rachel Bilson in Jumper

Jumper (2008) While I don’t normally read about films before seeing them — after all, what would be the point? — I allowed myself to scan the first paragraph of Michael Guillén’s review of this new action movie: “I liked Jumper so much that I wish I could be the chump who could jump right into (what I assume will be) the sequel. Do I really have to wait?” Encouraging words from a man of otherwise good taste, words that sent us to the theatre.

    Its anemic screenplay credited to no less than three writers working from an alleged novel by Steven Gould, Jumper sprints like the jumbled mind starved for Ritalin. Gruff ‘hero’ David Rice (bland, rubber-faced Hayden Christensen) leaves his broken home and alky father (cheeseball Michael Rooker) to physically jump through space portals to wherever he chooses. Assuming the screenwriters were schoolchildren whipping up playground scenarios, they forge ahead with predictable situations, from jumping into bank vaults to jumping atop the great pyramids. The three little tykes in question — David Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg — condescend to the requisite mushy love interest, a pretty young, bewildered actress named Rachel Bilson who’s given little to do other than mutter ‘what’s going on?’

    What, indeed. Jumper plays its shaky hand within twenty minutes, and pads the remaining seventy with hollow, vague digressions about government conspiracies, a duplicitous absentee mom (shame shame Diane Lane), and angry Samuel Jackson who runs around in a laughable white hairpiece. David hooks up with another jumper played by Jamie Bell, whose slurred Brit inflection warrants subtitles. There’s a lot of jumping, a lot of gut crunching, a lot of noise…none of it compelling.

    I’ve absolutely no quarrel with mindless action movies (Vin Diesel’s The Fast and the Furious and Ahh-nold’s Terminator 2 are among my guilty pleasures), but there are imperatives to form — tension, suspense, believability — which Jumper director Doug Liman sorely lacks. Upon leaving the theatre, Mrs. Flickhead gave her review: “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” Mr. Liman’s name didn’t ring a bell at first, but looking him up afterward I realized that Mrs. Flickhead had never seen Mr. Liman’s Mr. And Mrs. Smith which is far, far worse than this latest mishegas.




The Amateurs (2005) Delayed for DVD release, this low budget affair written and directed by Michael Traeger is that rare thing, a sleepy rural ‘comedy’ with an over-the-top Jeff Bridges performance. He’s some kind of hillbilly genius out to make a porno movie in his bucolic backwater. Glenne Headly and Jeanne Tripplehorn co-star, with Ted Danson as a closeted gay (imagine his Body Heat lawyer via Nathan Lane). Dull, unfunny, uninvolving, meandering — some overzealous cinephiles may deem it an unrealized masterpiece.

Hollywood’s Hellfire Club

“A major thoroughfare in Los Angeles, Bundy Drive has been home to the stars for years…The ‘Boys’ in question were an inebriated lot headlined by Errol Flynn, John Barrymore and W.C. Fields…[Gregory] Mank’s book recounts their ribald adventures which run the gamut from counterfeit art and keelhauling off a yacht, to sex with underage girls and the pilfering of Mr. Barrymore’s corpse.” A review of Hollywood’s Hellfire Club now on Flickhead.

Wit’s end

Nicole in The Invasion

Two movies new to DVD:


The Invasion (2007) I’ve never read Jack Finney’s 1955 novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, simply because the one book of his that I attempted to read — Time and Again — left a bad taste. He seemed to be a visionary author sadly handicapped when it came to characters and dialog; every sentence of Time and Again felt generic and artless, despite the color and promise of a time travel scenario.

    I don’t know whether Finney had his protagonists battling giant, conspicuous seed pods in Body Snatchers or if he described their invasion as more of a virus…which is the route taken by this new (and fourth) film version. It’s an appealing situation that’s nearly impossible to screw up on the screen: seeds from space take over our bodies and minds to forge a new (and presumably inhuman) world of, well, peace and tranquility. In Finney’s time, the story was a parable of communist infiltration. Today it pinches the nerve of terrorism and biological warfare.

    Nicole Kidman plays the doctor role essayed by Kevin McCarthy in the famous 1956 film. Here the character’s a psychiatrist prescribing antidepressants to make her patients behave like the calm drones threatening us from space. (One of her clients is Veronica Cartwright from the 1978 movie version.) When the aliens have nearly taken over, there’s a ceasefire in the middle east and peace treaties are signed from continent to continent. As someone who’s always been wary of emotional thinking, I have to ask: am I missing the downside to this?

    These intriguing elements are soft-pedaled in Dave Kajganich’s screenplay. He doesn’t punch up the social and political ramifications. (One of my favorite lines in Phil Kaufman’s movie from the ‘70s is when Brooke Adams thinks her husband’s icy new demeanor indicates he’s become a Republican.) Instead, it digresses into an action picture with Nicole running to save her child while trying to stay awake. The action isn’t bad, and Nicole is excellent…but the overall effect seems lacking.




I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) Filmed in 2005 and barely released, this was financed and mostly filmed in England, but it’s set in Los Angeles. With the exception of five or six of the lead actors, the cast is predominantly British, while young Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) does a brilliant job covering her Irish brogue.

    Written and directed by Amy Heckerling, it’s a romantic comedy ostensibly about a forty-ish woman getting involved with a guy in his twenties. But the film is wildly disjointed and unfocused…yet as hypnotic as a train wreck.

    As the older woman, Michelle Pfeiffer gets points for keeping her end up. Her co-star, Paul Rudd, is fairly engaging. But the scenario winds through a bunch of episodes with no attempt at coherency. Indeed, the whole thing feels improvised. Yet some of the comedy works, such as Ronan’s dig on Britney Spears. Given time to age, this could ripen into a trash classic.

    Heckerling gives a fascinating audio commentary on the DVD. It’s apparent she’d rather be getting a root canal. But she explains a lot, such as the horrible image. It’s a digital process that allows filming without proper lighting. As a result, Michelle looks pasty and featureless. When you can make Michelle Pfeiffer look pasty and featureless, you’ve accomplished something heretofore unknown in Hollywood.

Sterling entrance

Click images to enlarge

In her DVD audio commentary of John Sturges’s Mystery Street(1950), Elizabeth Ward — co-author (with Alain Silver) of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style— describes Jan Sterling’s entrance “as close as we can come visually [to] Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.” At first I thought Ward was cuckoo, but upon comparing the screen grabs with the painting, I can see where she’s coming from.

Nude Descending a Staircase