Soul Men: Reunited, and it feels, well, okay. Sorta.

In the 30 years following the break-up of Memphis-bred soul trio the Real Deal, singers Louis Hinds (Samuel L. Jackson) and Floyd Henderson (Bernie Mac) watched their former front man Marcus Hooks (John Legend) go successfully solo while their own thornier paths strayed out of music altogether and into jail time and the car wash business respectively. It’s only with the news of Hooks’ untimely demise that Louis and Floyd, both of them now residing on the West Coast, are given an opportunity to reunite for a posthumous tribute at the Apollo—should they be able to squeeze into the old satin outfits, patch up old grudges, keep Floyd’s green El Dorado running, get in a little on-stage rehearsal on the motel circuit, get busy with a few hungry women, and still make the gig on time.

Scripted by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, Soul Men is a comic road movie that brakes for all the usual clichés. As helmed by Malcolm D. Lee (Undercover Brother), it is from start to finish a little too comfortable, too willing to settle for mechanical gags and wrote mediocrity, and it isn’t hard to imagine a more imaginative, rigorous director taking the same material, however meager, and injecting a little more urgency and emotional truth into its realization. Fortunately, what heart and soul there is to be found in Soul Men is frequently left to its stars to conjure, and there are some enjoyable, genuinely sweet scenes that feature Jackson and Mac chewing each other out, beating each other up, and even lighting some little spark of the old magic. This is finally a movie of largely verbal pleasures, whether arising from Mac’s whispery rants, blubbery coos or surprisingly fine falsetto or from Jackson’s imposing boasts, his casual citations of Lao Tzu, or that soul rap he does in the final big number. The music they make isn't much to get excited about, but the enthusiasm goes some distance. 

Admittedly, it’s not without some sentimental bias that I managed to find a few high points in Soul Men, as in recent months we lost not only Mac, only 50, and undoubtedly with better movies ahead, but also the one and only Isaac Hayes, who has a small but stately cameo here. There is a definite lack of death’s shadow in this story of aging showmen trying to taste some fleeting hint of past glories, and that lack is one of the things that make the jokes and contrived reversals less involving. But, watching it so soon after Mac and Ike’s deaths, some flickering melancholy strikes certain moments from beyond the movie’s immediate frame, allowing us to savour another glimpse of these talented artists as they give a little extra class to these shopworn goods.

Hymns to the silence: embracing the mysteries of Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive

Set in a Castilian village in the years immediately following Franco’s victory and the end of the Spanish Civil War, Víctor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973) evokes a landscape, flat and vast, creaking and autumnal, in which inhabitants appear to have been driven into hibernation. But in this protracted, quasi-fairy tale sleep begins a richer depth of dreaming. Like Ana (Ana Torrent), the remarkable, dark-eyed, five-year-old girl at the film’s centre, we’re able to explore this landscape, while the political tumult that has scarred it is never mentioned directly. Rather than being merely oblique, Erice shaped his debut film so as to be attuned to Ana’s way of seeing, while the impressions left in the wake of recent events—events that exhaust Ana’s limited understanding of the world—still exist to be read peripherally by the rest of us.

While phasing in and out of Ana’s perception, using both time-lapse dissolves and the overlapping of discordant sounds, both thoughts and images to unify the various elements into a general spectral atmosphere, Erice exhibits a singular sensitivity to subjective experience, emphatically placing value on individual interpretation without being precious about it, or even feeling shackled to any one individual. Potent symbols abound, but their significance is unannounced, or perhaps it is just that it always remains out of reach, except for rare moments such the one in which Ana is asked to place eyes on a two-dimensional figure in front of her class at school: here is an unmistakable  lesson in seeing. By this point in Spirit of the Beehive, Ana and her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) have shared the experience that, over a short period, will radically alter Ana’s relationship to what is seen and not seen.

A truck arrives in their town. It carries in it a dubbed version of James Whale's Frankenstein, which is projected in a makeshift screening room. Films are surely rare spectacles in these parts. And Ana, overwhelmed by the story of the monster and the girl he inadvertently kills, leaves the screening with important questions she can’t answer alone. Before they sleep that same night, Isabel tries to explain the film to her sister in a way that blurs her own ideas of reality and fiction. She tells Ana that the monster is not really dead because movies are fake; however, the monster himself is real and, if he knows you, you can call out to him at night and he will visit. Rather than demystifying the film, Isabel’s complex reading makes the mystery of the artificial man more real for Ana, and soon Ana’s own tactile experience, particularly the things she witnesses at an abandoned farm near the train tracks, will confirm her sister’s testimony.

Adults move through Ana’s world either mutely or speaking in riddles. They have withdrawn from the world to preoccupy themselves with, in the case of Ana’s father Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), beekeeping and nocturnal writing, copying out passages from Maurice Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee; or in that of her mother, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) writing to an unidentified other who she knows may never actually receive her letters. Ana’s mother’s writing could perhaps be interpreted as a model for Ana’s own private missives: both enact a kind of prayer, sending out messages in spite of the hopeless ambiguity surrounding delivery.

Spirit of the Beehive is a strangely textured, hauntingly beautiful and seductively slippery film of seemingly always fading autumnal light, mirrored images and enveloping enigma. Not unlike The Curse of the Cat People, its insight into child psychology through the examination of traumas that adult eyes never fall upon bridges the magical thinking of early childhood and the melancholy observation of movies that look to the past for knowledge of the present. It’s somehow a fairy tale, a tone poem and a political allegory all at once. In short, its unforgettable, and not to be missed by anyone with a tolerance, much less a desire, for the sublime that lays in the shadows of the inexplicable. 

Fear and Loathing made wistful: Gibney's Gonzo a timid tribute to Thompson (the gentleman ordering up a round of vodka, eight-balls and ammo below)

It would clearly be unwise to expect a gonzo approach to a documentary about the daddy of gonzo journalism. Applying such flights of rambling conjecture, digression, lamentation and outright hallucination as were the benchmarks of Hunter S. Thompson’s distinctive prose to most non-fiction movies of any kind would be inadvisable—unless perhaps they were supplied by Thompson himself. Alas, Thompson’s been dead these three years, and his best work was a good three decades behind him in any case.

But you still have to wonder if the good doctor, a counterculture hero, a lefty with right wing tastes who once represented the very best spirit of Rolling Stone, a container of more drugs than Keith Richards, and author of such iconoclastic works of oddly eloquent political commentary as Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, doesn’t deserve a portrait more provocative, or at least more questioning in spirit than the one delivered by Alex Gibney, director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson may have no lack of great anecdotes and archival material to feed upon, not to mention a head-spinning array of new interviews with ex-wives and ex-US Presidents, but the liveliness of the subject matter and commentary it inspires can’t quite make up for what’s basically a safe, conventional delivery.

“He was my friend. He never paid his rent, broke up my marriage, and taught my children to smoke pot.” Now, if that’s not a tribute… It comes from Thomson’s neighbour and landlord, and it does, for the record, come with a nostalgic smile. Those who knew and loved Thompson tend to feel conflicted about the style of both Thompson’s life and his death, which came from the barrel of one of the author’s many guns one night in his kitchen in 2005, while his family relaxed in the next room. He always said he’d do it that way, and no one seemed too shocked, but it made you question the relationship between bravado and cowardice, an intersection lorded over by Hemingway. “We need his voice now more and than ever,” is something said several times in Gonzo, yet not as many times as admittances that the guy was on auto-pilot for ages, isolated, paranoid, all-too akin to his caricature in the Doonesbury comics, and getting drunk with the likes of Pat Buchanan for god's sake. As Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner puts it, in the end Thompson was “hostage to his own persona.”

Gonzo focuses, naturally, on the good years, the 60s and 70s, when like everybody Thompson went off his rocker and yet actually had some hope. He was handsome, daring, gainfully employed and listened to. He even advocated presidential candidates, invented drugs for their opponents to be addicted to, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. He legitimized fringe sensibilities in political discourse. But Gibney frames it all like a greatest hits package, replete with predictable, hokey-jokey use of period pop songs and insertions of deeply mannered readings of Thompson’s work by Johnny Depp, who for all his warm intentions just does not get the ribald tone at all.

1973: The year of awkward sex, permissive parenting and tentative transgression

Early in the commentary track he shares with writer/ producer James Schamus featured on Criterion’s new two-disc special edition, director Ang Lee describes The Ice Storm (1997) as a “disaster film.” While it might seem laughable to apply this genre to a movie concerned with upper-middle class domestic conflict in 1973 suburban Connecticut, it proves an inspired way of contextualizing the movie’s cycle of events. Based on Rick Moody’s novel, The Ice Storm does in fact contain a pair of disasters, the larger being that of the Watergate scandal, the more immediate being the weather event of the title. Neither disaster promises pyrotechnics or rampant death, yet both have some sort of transformative effect on the characters. This effect works best when functioning on the level of atmosphere, but there’s also a tangible, irreversible effect that ultimately drapes an overwhelming shadow over the entire story.

It’s about two families. Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) struggle amiably through marital disharmony, placating themselves with a casual affair and kleptomania respectively. Their teenage children Paul and Wendy (Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci) use the freedom granted to them by their desperate to be hip parents to explore pharmaceuticals and sex with a precocious inquiry. Jim and Janey Carver (Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver) by comparison seem more mutually remote and programmatic in their mid-life crises. Their sons Mikey and Sandy (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), the former an already dreamy kid precariously enamored with weed, the latter sensitive to the point of paralysis, his only outlet for expression coming from a predilection for blowing shit up (okay, so actually there are a few pyrotechnics), are the willing playmates of the pro-active Wendy, who engages each in separate games of show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. Building tensions up toward the night of the storm, where the parents abandon the kids to attend a key party drenched in pathos, the story operates around this generational role reversal: what happens when the parents act like kids and vice versa.

In the same sense that Brokeback Mountain (2005) –Lee’s other most fundamentally American film– can be regarded as being about the failure of love to overcome outspoken social antipathies toward homosexuality, The Ice Storm can be said to be about the failure of The Sexual Revolution to overcome the repressive apparatus of the American family/community. This sense of failure emerges from a series of interesting conditions: virtually every character is either too old or too young to have come of age during the radical cultural shifts of the late 1960s; the characters exist largely within a community cut off from the unruly influence of cosmopolitan life by geography and affluence; and crucially, the film climaxes with a fatal tragedy that reverberates hugely through the final sequence, feeling unavoidably like some cosmic punishment for half-hearted experiments in permissive parenting. This ending still feels to me like this terrifically rich film’s one major misfire, reducing the complex relationships by way of what feels like the act of a forsaken and vengeful God. (It bears mentioning that Lee’s only previous appearance on a Criterion disc was his introduction to The Virgin Spring (1960), a film with a weirdly similar finale.)

Of course it would be even more reductive to judge The Ice Storm solely on such a reading of its last reel. Inherent in the film’s unusual multitude of central characters, with their ongoing, measured transgressions, their flashes of fleeting insight and their general lack of decisiveness, is the idea of the movie as a multifaceted portrait rather than a traditional linear narrative anchored by some overt moral lesson or resolution. Lee himself felt attracted to a Cubist method of directing, wanting to show varying sides of a situation, an idea or an emotion all at once –and indeed, without employing any overly conspicuous formal device, he achieves this effect quite well, through the careful placement of figures in a frame, the mirroring of gestures and images from one scene to the next, and, most of all, the tremendously detailed performances from his extraordinary cast.

A lot of attention was paid to Weaver when the film came out. Her subtle balancing of Janey’s exterior frigidity with an inner vulnerability is genuinely impressive, but her character remains marginal. Allen’s character by contrast feels more central and certainly more desperate, yet Elena nonetheless feels a bit too sketched out. Kline, who Moody himself credits with deepening his character, stands out from all the other adults because his weaknesses are so acute, his humiliation so squirm-inducing, and his deficiencies so tenderly undercut by the actor’s ingratiating persona. But the fact is The Ice Storm belongs to the kids: moony-eyed Wood conveys such innocent rapture; Maguire’s wavering voice and goofily cavalier way with literary references imbues his every attempt at confident delivery with a near-palpable ache; Hann-Byrd’s unbreakable astonishment with everything around him is both heart-breaking and totally hilarious; and Ricci, more than anyone, embodies the film’s tender hesitancy and desire for some elusive self-realization and sensual fulfillment. She’s just amazing.

Besides the commentary track, Criterion’s typically superlative extras include some very good new cast interviews (which reveal Weaver in particular to be an actor who admirably takes little for granted), some reflections from Moody, plenty of fun, candid material from the duo of Lee and Schamus, some interesting deleted scenes, and some fascinating making-of stuff from costume designer Carol Oditz, cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, Night on Earth) and production designer Mark Friedberg, all of whom provide enlightening testimony on their detailed work and make an impressive case for the liberal use of biodegradable hair gel when wanting to evoke an ice storm in the middle of spring.