Senna: Life in overdrive

Though it rather daringly confines its visual trajectory to nothing but archival footage—most of which feature its hero, Brazilian racing superstar Ayrton Senna, traversing tracks the world round at dizzying speeds—it could hardly be said that Senna simply goes around in circles. Its narrative, which skims the surface of Senna’s personal life in favour of his professional one, is burnished down to its mythical contours, rendering Senna’s meteoric rise to World Champion and tragic death at 34 in a mid-race crack-up as an Icarus tale, not one of hubris exactly—Senna spoke with great humility about his gift and his sense of debt to the god who endowed him with it—but of a deep faith in speed and glory that transcends reason. One memorable interview clip finds Senna describing a major turning point in his career arriving when he found himself behind the wheel and feeling as though he was no longer conscious. But this yearning for ecstasy was balanced by a fierce intellect, one trained to make split-second risk assessments. Senna was a champion because he was ruthless on the track, and his record for accidents was nearly as exceptional as his winning streak. Some thought him reckless, but the thrill of his greatest feats are undeniable: he won the Brazil Grand Prix with his car stuck in sixth gear for multiple laps; his fingers had to be pried from the wheel afterward.

Senna the film, now available on DVD, directed by Asif Kapadia, edited by Chris King and Gregers Sall, and written by Manish Pandey, understands very well that adrenaline is key to its appeal, whether the audience is full of racing enthusiasts, those who crave a solid sports documentary, or those who are simply drawn to high-stakes stories of ambition. Things move fast, excitement accumulates, and we’re often treated to views of the action from Senna’s on-board camera. But it should be said that this need for speed ultimately obscures everything else, and the absence of talking heads makes it tough to distinguish between the various commentators we hear speaking almost constantly on the soundtrack. So by the time Senna is over, you might feel as though you missed a great deal in the blur.

TIFF '11: We we came from

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.


Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.


No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

The Future is Now!: So think positive!

Who is the Man of Today? Someone “pessemistic and practical,” says he. A “libertarian,” says another. Someone who just needs a few days wholly devoted to rediscovering the sense of wonder that stubbornly continues to exist in our troubled world, says the Woman of Tomorrow, who then promptly sets about fascilatating that rediscovery, through poetry readings, drinks with anarchists and helicopter tours of the Chrystler Building and the Great Wall of China, followed by meetings with several renowned optimists in North America and Europe. Man of Today met Woman of Tomorrow while the latter was doing a video street survey, asking strangers what their biggest fears are. (My favourite answer was “mystery moisture,” that phenomenon that occurs when you’re just walking along and you get hit by a drop of liquid of no apparent origin.) Woman is impressed by Man’s resolute I-do-no-harm, nor-do-I-give-a-shit-about-others attitutde. Man is impressed by Woman’s perky attractiveness. The adventure begins.

Alain de Botton

This fateful encounter between Woman and Man forms the foudnation of Gary Burns and Jim Brown’s The Future is Now!, a sort of fantasy date-a-thon that takes its cues from Nicole Védrès 1949 film La vie commence demain, in which two people with similarly conflicting sensibilities meet and swap ideas with French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Agache, Jean Rostand, Le Corbusier, Pablo Picasso and André Gide. Burns and Brown’s cast of big-brained conversationalists are a little less famous but also a little more diverse in background, they include Toronto poet Christian Bök, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, artist Marlene Dumas, philosopher Alain de Botton and novelist Rivka Galchen (whose Atmospheric Distrubances was one of the best debuts of the last decade). Oh, and the ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre. The tone and format feels somewhat akin to Richard Linklater’s talkier films (Waking Life espeically) and, to a lesser extent, Mindwalk, that slightly goofy movie where Liv Ullman, John Heard and Sam Waterston just walk around and talk about ultruism.





Burns and Brown previousy collaborated on the terrific Radiant City, which took a similarly irreverent approach to the documentary format in its exploraiton of Calgary’s apocalytic urban sprawl. The Future is Now! is also somehow a very Calgarian movie, in that it feels like the work of artists who are enormously frustrated with their hometown’s rabid conservatism yet come to terms with it not through attacking it but rather through giving certain dominant conservative attitudes a plausible, intelligent voice. Man of Today isn’t one to easily buy into liberal idealism, and thus makes a nice foil to Woman of Tomorrow’s incessant cheerfulness (she’s played by Liane Balaban). Man is played by bald-headed Quebecois Paul Ahmarani, who is nothing if not persistent. The film is full of reaction shots that find him doing this “I’m dubious” face, which made me laugh out loud nearly every time. I found myself occasionally wishing Burns and Brown had allowed their Man character to have a little more, well, character, but the truth is that both Man and Woman’s cipher-like personas fit neatly into the film’s conciet, which essentially takes the premise for a children’s movie and grafts it onto a film for grown-ups. I think it’s a lot of fun. But maybe I’m a natural optimist.

Rolling sunder: Rubber on DVD

What reason does a tire need to quiver to life in the middle of the Mojave Desert and undertake a killing spree? What reason do a dozen spectators need to gather in that same desert with binoculars and sleeping bags and comment on the tire’s actions as though they were (like us) watching a movie? What reason does a pantless man need to share a cheap motel room with a wild turkey? Before we even have a chance to posit such queries to Rubber, one of its central characters, a Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella), addresses the camera (and us) with questions of his own. “In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T., why is the alien brown?” Chad asks. “In The Pianist, by Polanski, how come this guy has to hide, and live like a bum, when he plays the piano so well?” The answer: “No reason.” (Unless of course you consider something like systematic Nazi antiSemitism to be a reason.) Every movie, Chad assures us, has an integral element of “no reason.” Which is perhaps another way of saying that the movie is the reason. So what’s the reason to see the movie—this movie? It certainly isn’t to ask more useless questions.

Rubber, out on DVD tomorrow from Mongrel Media (or on the 14th from Magnolia in the US), seems like a playful essay on artifice. (The audience-chorus, who at one point collectively launch into a feeding frenzy right out of a Living Dead movie, is reminiscent of devices seized by the American avant-garde theatre of the 1960s.) Thing is, there’s not much thesis (beyond, say, the notion that the things we discard will rise up from our collective anxiety and slaughter us in our ironic bewilderment), but there is a whole lot of playfulness. Recalling both Scanners (1981) and numerous Stephen King narratives, Rubber is a meta-horror about a telekinetic tire named Robert. His first victim is a plastic bottle, quickly followed by a scorpion, before moving on to larger and messier mammals. The tire’s got something on its mind, it seems. It’s got feelings. It’s infatuated with a lone traveler played by the pretty older sister from Fat Girl (2001). It even has memories: there is an allusion to some smoky tire genocide.

Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo

Rubber is the second feature from French writer/director Quentin Dupieux, aka: Mr. Oizo, recording artist for Ed Banger Records, following the little seen Steak (2007). There’s much to recommend Rubber on a bit-by-bit basis, though it runs out of fuel long before the end of the road. Regardless, its audacity, resourcefulness and propulsive silliness convey an appealingly distinctive sensibility. You’re left with the impression that there’s plenty of tread left on Dupieux’s goofball imagination.

In high Gere, with nowhere to go: Breathless

There’s this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) where Jean Seberg holds up a reproduction of a Renoir for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s approval. “It’s not bad,” says Belmondo. “Renoir’s a really great painter,” says Seberg. Belmondo doesn’t budge: “I said it’s not bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a little like my feelings about Breathless itself. It formed the crest of the French New Wave. It’s a landmark on several fronts. Godard’s one of our true geniuses. But once you know more of Godard’s work and comprehend his debut’s historical significance, Breathless is finally, by the high standards set by Godard and his peers, not bad. In any case it’s no horrifying sacrilege to me that it was remade some years later, in Hollywood, with way more money, and Richard Gere. Worse things have happened to the movies. And Godard's Breathless is still there for us to see whenever we want.

The other Breathless (1983) was directed by Jim McBride, whose David Holzman’s Diary (1967), was not without its own postmodern ambitions. McBride co-wrote it with Holzman star Kit Carson, who wrote significant parts of Paris, Texas (1984). This Breathless reverses a number of Godard’s configurations: the girl’s a Parisian in America, rather than an American in Paris; the mise en scène’s characterized by flamboyant, art-directed artifice (rear projection, gels that swath entire scenes in one primary colour) rather than guerilla-style filmmaking (which yields its own sort of artifice); it attempts (rather laughably) to justify its characters’ actions, to psychologize them, rather than chalk their violence and betrayals up to genre dictates. Yet it shocked and sort of fascinated me just how faithful the other Breathless is to the story (if not the spirit) of the original, with Gere’s compulsive criminal, now very clearly a sociopath, killing a cop, living on the lam, and even resurrecting several of Belmondo’s gestures, such as his uses for newspapers. Instead of Bogart, he idolizes the Silver Surfer, which I like if for no other reason than every time he reads a Silver Surfer comic Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s magical, woozily beautiful Evening Star bubbles up on the soundtrack. These are for me the best moments in the movie.

But man, there’s something unnerving about Gere talking to himself (sometimes in funny voices, sometimes vaguely ethnic), or singing (Jerry Lee Lewis), or dancing, with such utter, blazing conviction. I mean it. You have to admire it. Gere's on fire here, and it can be tough to watch. You might say that something in his performance, along with aspects of the narrative itself, looks forward to Nicolas Cage and his Elvis-loving Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), though the latter film is obviously far more focused and confident in its stylistics, even if its particular mania has proved equally divisive. It’s amazing how much of Breathless Gere manages to spend shirtless, the character’s narcissism dovetailing nicely with what would appear to be the actor’s. “I know I’m crazy,” he says. “I can’t help it.” Poor guy. But here's the sticky question: are we actually supposed to like him? It’s hard to tell, and it only gets harder as thing go on. And on, and on. There’s a bit where Gere and the girl get busy in a movie theatre while Gun Crazy (1950) plays behind them. I found myself wishing they’d get out of the way so I could just watch Gun Crazy. At one point we see a bus stop advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum. It’s very apt. McBride’s adoration of cinema’s past lacks the same level of critical inquiry or playfulness we find in Godard (that's a lot to live up to, I know), so his Breathless, however curious an artifact, however weirdly entertaining, feels only intermittently breathless and rather often lifeless.

Traveling Light: Kelly Reichardt: New Auteurs

River of Grass

The pair meet at a bar, shortly after the guy nearly hits the girl with his car on a dark rural road. “You’re not from around here, are you?” asks the girl. “Nope,” the guy replies, “I’m from Dade.” A seemingly unremarkable exchange, until you consider that the bar these lonesome souls occupy lies somewhere in Broward County, somewhere apparently very close to the Broward/Dade County line. The exchange then becomes ironic, except that the girl and the guy don’t seem to find it all that funny. These lovers on the run in Kelly Reichardt’s debut River of Grass (1994) inhabit what many viewers would deem a decidedly small world, but to them their immediate surroundings feel just as vast and difficult to traverse as any sea or continent. This is a road movie where the protagonists can’t get past the first tollbooth, having embarked on a crime spree with very little in the way of actual crime. At one point the girl (actually a woman, probably in her early 30s) mentions how every place seems the same. This may be a subtle wink to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which a similar sentiment is expressed when it’s New York-based protagonists find themselves in Florida, which just so happens to be the setting of River of Grass. (Reichardt’s vision of Florida, dingy, eccentric, a place for wanderers, seems somewhat akin to that of novelist Joy Williams). But in this context, the sentiment assumes new hues, because the person who expresses it has hardly gone anywhere.

Ode

River of Grass feels very much like a first film (albeit one by an unusually gifted maker of exceedingly personal films) in that it carries the traces of an artist trying out as many things as she can (the camera movements, the cutting, and the use of voice-over would be tempered or eschewed altogether in her future work) and still craft something with an unmistakable signature. That word, signature, calls to mind things written by hand, and things handmade. The first word expressed in Reichardt’s newest film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) isn’t spoken but rather traced upon a stone: “LOST.” There could be no better single-word summary of Reichardt’s body of work thus far, stories about people trying to get somewhere and having a tough time of it, unassuming, quiet films made with the bare minimum of participants and equipment. A record gets played in River of Grass: a rendition of ‘Traveling Light.’ A theme song perhaps. Reichardt has often spoke in interviews about her refusal/inability to “move up” to larger scale productions (something that helps explain the decade’s hiatus between her first and second features). This should not be mistaken for lack of ambition. On the contrary, one of the things that make her one of the finest, most distinctive, rigorous American filmmakers alive is her ability to cultivate so much feeling, atmosphere, narrative, character development, and even polemic out of the simplest of stories (many of them coming from collaborations with Jonathan Raymond) and humblest of materials.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s mesmerizing western about homesteaders lost in 19th century Oregon, seen largely through the eyes of women, opens today at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and I urge you to see it. The film’s Toronto premiere has also prompted a most welcome retrospective of Reichardt’s work. They’re showing everything save the short-shorts. (1999’s Ode, a mid-length work, shot on Super 8, which I’ve been waiting years to see, screens on Sunday afternoon.) River was last night, but still to come are multiple screenings of Meek’s, two screenings of Old Joy (2005), two of Wendy and Lucy (2008), and one screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), which was selected by Reichardt for TIFF’s Carte Blanche series. The retrospective is part of TIFF’s New Auteurs series.

Hiding all over the world: Hot Docs 2011

The 2011 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival draws to a close today in Toronto, where the belated arrival of spring has failed to lure filmgoers away from lining up and huddling into theatres throughout the city. I’m at least sitting near a sun-warmed window as I write this, my report on some of the festival’s highlights, in a quiet converted coach house deep in Parkdale, hidden off Sorauren Avenue, where it’s slightly easier to reenter my unlikely to ever be realized fantasy of hiding from the world altogether.

The hermits, monks, freaks, fascists, dropouts, druggies and survivalists of French filmmakers Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove’s Somewhere to Disappear, all of them male, all of them American, all of them unmistakably incurable misfits of one kind or another, have gone to greater lengths to hide from the world than most of us could ever fathom. Flammarion and Uyttenhove’s film is the product of a protracted road trip with US photographer Alec Soth, who has forged an ongoing project out of making portraits of those who have attempted to fall off the grid, nearly all of whom, ironically, are more than happy to be photographed and to talk about their lives once tracked down in their hovels, shacks, caves and campsites. Soth spends part of Somewhere to Disappear shopping around for a remote piece of land of his own, yet he confesses that what appeals to him is not genuine escape from civilization but “the idea of escape.” He’s an artist, not a recluse. He wants to get a lost a little, “to be carried along,” yet he keeps a GPS on the dashboard of his minivan. He’s our surrogate, cruising the outer margins to convey the eerie allure and obvious hazards of life lived in rejection of all we take for granted. The filmmaking in Somewhere to Disappear is (perhaps inevitably) grubby, lacking the distinct highly personal perspective, craft and precision of Soth’s work, but it ultimately serves its theme very well, evoking a sense of rough roads rarely taken, rabbit holes in a world hard at work to keep its every corner tracked and measured, hovering in cyberspace.

Bobby Fischer tried to hide from the world, but it’s not so easy to pull off when you’re the greatest chess player in history, an ideological pawn in Cold War one-upmanship, and quite probably, and flamboyantly, mentally ill. Liz Garbus’ Bobby Fischer Against the World attempts to map out Fischer’s story, his peculiar and precarious sort of single-minded genius, his uneasy relationship with fame and urge toward isolation, his erratic behaviour and the grotesque politics he adopted late in life. She doesn’t entirely succeed, utilizing a treasure trove of archival images and footage and drawing upon a number of fascinating interviews with Fischer’s colleagues, but arranging these pieces into a somewhat muddy narrative arc that more than once abandons the path it seems briefly invested in. If you don’t know chess deeply, the film doesn’t help you much, and once it does begin to offer some insights, it does so only after working through the period in Fischer’s life when understanding chess is most useful. The general style of this HBO production is perfectly conventional, though, given the amount of biographical information and cultural context it wants to convey, its structure finally feels not quite conventional enough. Still, Fischer’s a fascinating figure who couldn’t resist the opportunity to expose some parts of his troubled psyche to the public, so the film, flawed or not, is very much worth watching.

The Forgotten Space (pictured both above and in the lead-off image), easily the finest work I caught at Hot Docs this year, is a collaboration between photographer Allan Sekula and theorist Noël Burch, a sort of follow-up to Sekula’s 1995 book Fish Story. This “film essay,” shot on both Super 16mm and digital video, traverses the world to investigate the global transportation industry, so much of which remains hidden or invisible to consumers, exploits labour, and undercuts the economies of developing countries. Sekula and Burch are especially interested in sea transport, in the “floating warehouses” that, for example, carry cod from the North Atlantic to China for cheap filleting and then sends it back again, or moves American wastepaper to recycling factories in the developing world. 90% of the world’s commerce travels by sea, packed into shipping crates than renders the cargo anonymous, unloaded in yards where its shuffled around by robots and rarely inspected, even in the post-9/11 US. As an elegantly structured critique of late capitalism whose visual refrain is an image of ships sailing onward, it’s tempting to think of The Forgotten Space as the coherent version of Godard’s Film Socialisme, but this is finally a very distinct, arguably singular kind of film, its discourse so thoroughly grounded in interviews (with laborers, with historians, with the homeless) that you occasionally forget how exactingly conceived it all is.

A safe place for cinematic risk taking (and lots and lots of Jack Nicholson): America Lost and Found: The BBS Story

The initials stood for Bert, Bob and Steve, but however cavalier, cutthroat or chaotic BBS Productions may have been during it’s short but tremendously influential run during the late ’60s and early ’70s, this was the home of an extended family of multi-talented movie artists head-deep in collaboration. The name could just as easily have been LKJ, for László, Karen and Jack, as in cinematographer Kovács, actress Black, and writer, director, producer and, of course, actor Nicholson, each of whom could seemingly always be found working in some capacity on some movie somewhere within the BBS boutique. Seven such movies, a couple of them produced before the inauguration of the BBS brand, can be found in America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, a new box set elegantly curated by the Criterion Collection, released last month on Blu-ray, last week on DVD. A cinematic roadmap of post-studio era, pre-Star Wars Hollywood, it’s easily one of the most remarkable thematic assemblages currently available on home video.

Producer Bert Schneider and director Bob Rafelson, their partnership initially dubbed Raybert, made a splash with The Monkees on TV in 1966. Neither the eponymous band nor their show could be regarded as an auspicious foundation for creative daring, but Head (1968), ostensibly the Prefab Four’s own Hard Day’s Night (64), took the Monkees’ image in an audacious direction, openly confirming the critique that had been accurately leveled against them from the start: the band was manufactured from market research. “The money’s in/We’re made of tin/We’re here to give you more,” goes the chipper chant that launches this free-associative satire on antiquated genres and politics. Written by Rafelson and Nicholson in offices, closets and Harry Dean Stanton’s basement while under the influence of LSD, drunk on Brecht by way of Godard, brimming with bizarre cameos by the likes of Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello and Victor Mature, Head responded to the needs of a youth movement who didn’t identify with what movies had been, an audience grooving instead to Bonnie and Clyde (67) and 2001 (68). Truthfully, unlike everything else in Criterion’s box, Head, its satirical targets as broad as its humour, feels at best like a time capsule.

Everything changes, for Raybert as well as the entire industry, with Easy Rider (69), bad-boy actor Dennis Hopper’s directorial debut, which took the aggressive, drug-addled provocations inherit in the exploitation cheapies helmed by Roger Corman—the producer who gave many BBS associates their first breaks—and elevated them into the realm of personal statement. A story of hippy bikers touring a country with whom they share a sense of mutual alienation, their restless journey unfolding to a soundtrack of Dylan, Hendrix, the Band and Steppenwolf, Easy Rider meant a great deal to me when I discovered it, as people generally do, in my teens. If it means slightly less now it’s partly because Hopper’s career only became more strange and fascinating from here on, partly because its most enduring innovations have their roots in richer European predecessors. Easy Rider made buckets of money. Shocked studios scrambled to mimic it. The biggest feather yet in Schneider’s cap, it gave birth to BBS, Rafelson’s first serious narrative film, and a peculiar star by the name of Jack Nicholson.

Five Easy Pieces (70), scripted by Nicholson's friend Carol Eastman from Rafelson's own story, remains Rafelson’s most fully realized work. If it tells us a lot about the ’60s, it does so strictly through the lens of a textured character study that’s got nothing to do with flower power. When we meet Bobby Dupea (Nicholson) he’s working oil rigs outside Bakersfield, going bowling, drinking beer, and living with Rayette (Karen Black) who dreams of becoming the next Tammy Wynette and is frequently found perched on the bathroom sink like a giant witchy kitten. We gradually learn that Bobby comes from a very different class, region, and skill set, that Bobby has seemingly condemned himself to a life of constantly frustrated escape attempts. Discovering that his father’s ill, Bobby ditches drives north to visit his family. He’s at home nowhere and perhaps for that reason seems most in his element on the road, where he can let his mind wander while hitchhikers babble on about Alaska or memorably tell off cold-blooded waitresses. With Five Easy Pieces Nicholson finally found himself on-screen, capitalizing on that callous confidence that masks a fathomless despair. Bobby Dupea is mostly an asshole, but his fascination with other people and how they live their lives outweighs his contempt.

With Drive, He Said (71), based on Jeremy Larner’s novel, Nicholson proved to also possess directorial chops, using the contrast between a libidinous college basketball star and his prankster/activist friend as an opportunity to swing between classical and fragmented, sensation-oriented storytelling. For all its interest in student demonstrations it’s not as politically engaged as it might want to be, but the film is lively, unpredictable and sometimes hilarious, very playful with form and music, and very concerned with male potency and its multiple shortcomings. And Nicholson clearly loves the court—I can’t think of another basketball movie that captures the same nimble fluidity.

Having long been familiar with the more celebrated titles in America Lost and Found, my single most exciting personal discovery arrived in the shape of the hypnotic, haunting, at times hallucinatory A Safe Place (71), the debut of writer/director Henry Jaglom, whose constant shuffling of images from different points in time recalls Alain Resnais’ Muriel (63), and who, not surprisingly, helped cut the stroboscopic transitions in Easy Rider. It’s based on, of all things, a play, which Jaglom wrote for Karen Black, though the film’s lead is Tuesday Weld. Slipping between various Manhattan apartments and rooftops and stretches of Central Park, the film deliberately dissembles chronology in favour of rippling, disorienting psychological portraiture. The story as such is simple enough, concerning a love triangle between Susan (Weld), Fred (Philip Proctor) and Mitch (Nicholson), yet one of the most arresting sequences features a monologue spoken by a secondary character played by Gwen Welles, and one of the most memorable characters is a magician played by Orson Welles (no relation), intent on making someone or something disappear. Disappearance is indeed a goal for Susan, whose life, fraught with emotional turmoil, has become so unmoored and dreamlike that she almost seems to be disintegrating from the start. Though it’s initially shocking to see Nicholson in this supporting role (!), I dare say he gives one of the greatest performances of his career, at once seductive and sad, heartbroken and horny, encircling Weld, eating a sandwich, showing up in the middle of the night, desperate for companionship, yet almost palpably uneasy with cuckolding Proctor. I don’t know that he ever registered such genuine surprise on-screen again.

Okay, there’s still more praise for Nicholson to come, but in the meantime let’s remember that once upon a time Hollywood raconteur—that’s French for shameless name-dropper—Peter Bogdanovich made truly wonderful movies. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show (71) seems at first the antithesis of a hip BBS production: a period film, shot in black and white, rife with homage to the great American studio era directors Howard Hawks and John Ford. But this is a story about aimless youth, pointless war—swap Vietnam for Korea—and most of all sex, a force which rules, changes and never quite ruins lives in a small Texas town in the mid-’50s, where everyone knows everyone’s business and the local disc jockey never runs out of Hank Williams records to play. Bogdanovich’s bittersweet erotic web includes an achingly young Cybil Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges, and the not-so-young, but quite possibly aching, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn. The town’s most respected bachelor dies, the kids go off to fight or get an education, and the beloved movie house closes down. Everything is ending in The Last Picture Show, yet life is stubbornly just beginning for its soft-spoken, irresponsible, uncertain hero.

When The King of Marvin Gardens (72) begins David (Nicholson) speaks in darkened space, his face in close-up, telling a story about the everyday terror of family suppers. Turns out David’s a late-night talk radio storyteller. He’s timid, wears owlish spectacles and ties, is resigned to solitude—in other words the opposite of Jack Nicholson. Yet Nicholson’s superb here, as is Bruce Dern, who plays Jason, the lively younger brother hell-bent on convincing David that they’re about to hit the big time by building a casino on a private island in Hawaii, though the bulk of the story takes place in a wintry Atlantic City. Rafelson, collaborating with László Kovács, who previously shot Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, never moves the camera, preferring to let these mismatched brothers face-off against bleak land- and seascapes that feel frozen in time. Of course Jason’s a con-man, and everything goes bad, but there’s a muted vitality to The King of Marvin Gardens that makes it a perfect note to finish America Lost and Found on. There would only be one more BBS production, the documentary masterpiece Hearts and Minds (74), which Criterion has already put out.

Who's Bad?: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart

We see this old buck amble out of his ’78 Suburban, sunglasses on, pants undone, brimming jug of highway pee ready to be upturned on the sun-baked parking lot. He’s arrived at the bowling alley where he’s to play tonight’s show with some local band he’s yet to meet. He’s seen better days. His manager has to nag him to write some new material. He’s 57-years-old, he’s got $10 in his pocket and a bad dose of hemorrhoids, but he is, after all, a country singer, so this creaky list of lamentations means a new song should practically write itself. Crazy Heart is the story of how this singer hits rock bottom and starts to pull himself back up. It’s a very familiar tune played with some genuine freshness. It’s a well-crafted, thoughtful movie for adults. It might have been respectable and kinda ordinary, but it stars Jeff Bridges, a fact that elevates the picture to the level of something you probably don’t want to miss.

It’s nothing new to say that Bridges is one of the most underappreciated actors in American movies. They may be actors just as good that you’ve never heard of, but none who have spent so long on the cusp of the limelight, who've starred in countless big Hollywood movies yet is most beloved for the cult favourites. (You know what I'm talking about. This isn't Bridges' first time in a bowling alley.) Bad Blake, the weary yet resilient hero of Crazy Heart, an aging country troubadour addicted to booze, smokes, rough women and tawdry telenovelas, is yet another performance of shaggy beauty and pathos from Bridges, who already won the Golden Globe for the role and will hopefully get the Oscar he richly deserves. Bridges looks like Kris Kristofferson and sings a bit like Merle Haggard. The film’s music, a set of unusually strong and poignant songs, comes from T-Bone Burnett and Kristofferson’s late collaborator Stephen Bruton, but Bridges makes it his own, as he does with every gesture in the movie, however fleeting: the way he wakes from an accidental nap and muzzles three cigarettes from his bedside pack, the way he fumbles with a chain lock with no hook, or breads fish fillets while talking on the phone to a younger woman he’s fallen unnervingly in love with. It’s just a pleasure to watch him, even while he slips toward wreckage.

Based on the novel by Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart marks the debut of actor turned writer/director Scott Cooper. There are more than enough elegantly wrought moments throughout the movie to prove Cooper’s got chops, such as the shot where we watch a witness to an accident rush toward a crashed car in the reflection of the driver’s half-open window. There are wonderful bits of dialogue. “How are you, Bad?” an old friend asks. “I’m worse,” replies Bad. “What do you want to talk about?” asks a fetching young interviewer, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I want to talk about how bad you make this room look.” There’s a supporting turn from an effortlessly charming Robert Duvall as a spry barkeep that’s virtually worth the ticket price alone. Duvall’s also one of the movie’s producers, and once played a country singer himself, in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies.

It’s only in the movie’s last third or so that it begins to reveal its weaknesses: a baldly contrived bit of conflict to hurl us toward climax, a too-neat final scene, a little much too much squinting from a well-meaning Colin Farrell as Bad’s hugely successful protégé, and the hurried unraveling of Gyllenhaal’s love interest, a character who feels a bit undernourished for the emotional gymnastics she’s asked to perform. But such a handful of bum notes can hardly steal anything from Crazy Heart’s resonant grace, one that flows from the heart of a rare young filmmaker more concerned with letting great actors create gentle magic onscreen than impressing restless viewers with empty glitz, two words that pretty much epitomize everything wrong not only with a lot of shitty movies but with most country music in the last 30 years or more.

Middle of nowhere: Paris, Texas on DVD

There is the man in the desert. Brown suit and tie, red cap, bearded, shrouded in dust like some forsaken antique no one’s touched. Four years ago he tried to disappear, a difficult thing to do, even in country as vast as this. He got as far as shaking off his voice. When Travis Henderson’s found passed out on the floor of some Texas tavern in the middle of nowhere they call his brother Walt, a maker of billboards in Los Angeles. Walt comes for Travis, to reintroduce him to the world. Travis could be mentally ill, autistic, or on the lam. But he’s the hero of Paris, Texas (1984), a sort of interrogation of American life and landscape, directed by a German, photographed by a Dutchman, financed with European money, written and scored by Americans, performed by an international cast—the arresting hybrid of cultural sensibilities is right there in the title—that’s still one of the most mysterious and moving pictures I know. It’s now available in a beautifully put-together two-disc set from the Criterion Collection.

The first half of Paris, Texas has Walt driving Travis back to California, where he and his wife live with Travis’ seven-year-old son Hunter. Along the way Travis recovers his speech, though he does not reveal where he’s been or why he left. The second half finds Travis reunited with Hunter and driving the two of them back to Texas, where Travis believes he can find his wife Jane, who, like Travis, vanished four years back, leaving Hunter in Walt’s care. Their reunion takes place in a strange sort of peep show, on either side of the one-way glass—Travis can see her, but she can’t see him. Travis speaks into a telephone, while Jane communicates through a speaker on the other side. They tell each other stories that may or may not be precise retellings of their troubled love and its collapse. So over the course of this movie Travis goes from being no voice to nothing but voice, a disembodied phantom from Jane’s past who has come back to restore something. What, exactly, is a little ambiguous, and more than a little heartbreaking. Questions linger. What makes a man give up his life, his voice, to go somewhere “without language or streets”? What makes him abandon his own child? But by the time we’ve reached the end of Travis and Jane’s stories the emotional specificity overwhelms the spare facts and unexplained actions.

The weight of Travis and Jane and Hunter’s story is alleviated by the lightness of Wim Wenders’ direction, his lack of judgment, his dogged attention to actorly nuance, his deep affection for American horizons, truck stops, and music. The score is by Ry Cooder, a bottleneck improvisation based around Blind Willie Johnson’s old blues ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,’ veering between wind-carved desolation and Mexican-tinged nostalgia. The movie, as much about walking as it is about driving, was shot by Robby Müller in such a way that emphasizes the expanse of the settings, splitting focus between faces and backgrounds and weather. The script, as such, comes from great playwright and handsome actor Sam Shepard, and if Criterion’s package focuses heavily on Wenders’ dominant authorship, I’d argue we should consider this just as equally to be a Sam Shepard movie, so in keeping with his themes and voice that even the bits not actually conceived by Shepard—the peep show device came from Kit Carson, who filled in as scripter while Shepard was knee-deep in Country (84)—feel ripped directly from the imaginative world of his writing, one of lonesome places and bad genes, ghostly fathers and opposite brothers. In any event, Paris, Texas is easily among the greatest achievements of everyone involved, including the actors.

Wenders wanted Shepard to play Travis, but this is impossible to imagine once you’ve spent two minutes with Harry Dean Stanton, in what sadly remains his sole credit as a leading man. He was pushing 60 then, while Nastassja Kinski, who plays Jane, was only in her mid-20s, if radiating preternatural maturity onscreen, having already worked with—and in some cases been romanced by—Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader. Kinski’s depth of character, the suspicion and longing in her gaze, and the gentleness and frustration mixed into Stanton’s voice, gestures, and face—itself a sort of road map—doesn’t leave you preoccupied with how Jane could love this man. Their long climactic scene together more than assures us that a thick and thorny story lay behind their union. Hunter Carson as their son feels playful and alert, yet never falsely ingratiating in his scenes with Stanton, while Dean Stockwell gives a warm performance as Walt, patient and anxious and mystified by this guy who happens to be his kin. To think that when Wenders cast Stockwell he was ready to give up movies for a career in real estate, a footnote in the movie’s history that nicely echoes one of its key moments, when Travis shows Walt a dog-eared photo of some land he bought in Paris, Texas. It’s just an empty lot, but it only makes sense that Travis would want to invest in a place where there’s nothing.

Criterion’s supplements are superb, including an audio commentary from the very articulate Wenders, as well as a fascinating interview he did for German television back in 2001. A major highlight is the 43-minute documentary Motion and Emotion: The Rood to Paris, Texas, gorgeously and inventively edited using a blend of talking heads and clips from Wenders’ already prolific body of work, and featuring commentary from Wenders, Cooder, Müller, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Highsmith, and even Sam Fuller, chomping cigars, of course, and offering memorable assessments of Wenders such as, “He can be very slow, but his mood is like a fire!” My personal favourite supplement however would have to be a new, 20-minute interview between Kent Jones and Claire Denis—one of my all-time favourite critics talks to one of my all-time favourite directors! Denis was assistant director on Paris, Texas, Wenders having managed to convince her that the best way to move forward on making her first feature would be to help him make his movie. Her stories are rich, vivid, funny—she affectionately calls John Lurie a snake-face; I guess you can do that when you’re French—and full of love for what would become a defining moment in her life.

Travelin' Dad: Everybody's Fine

Retired after a life of coating cables in PVC, his kids now scattered across the country, his wife’s death still a fresh wound, Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) has nothing but time. The prospect of a rare gathering of the surviving clan has him unloading wads of cash on a new barbecue, heaps of filet mignon, and fancy wine he knows nothing about. It’s all the more heart-wrenching then when all four of his kids call to cancel at the last minute. Even at this early stage in Everybody’s Fine events conspire to gut Frank—and the rest of us—emotionally. But Frank’s a trooper. He packs a small suitcase and sets out to visit his offspring whether they like it or not. So we have here a road movie of sorts, one where each stop yields fresh revelations about Frank’s ostensibly perfect family, the lot having long ago made a pact to withhold from dad all their disappointments, shortcomings, or personal tragedies.

Writer/director Kirk Jones’ remake of the 1990 Italian tearjerker employs some shrewd devices to deliver exposition while sticking closely to Frank’s point-of-view. The telephone wires Frank passes as he’s whisked around the country courtesy of Amtrak or Greyhound emit conversations between his children informing us of troubles unknown to him, and the blur of nostalgia that has Frank “see” his children in their pint-sized versions when they reunite in the present, building up to a dream sequence in which present-day Frank converses with a bunch of ten-year-olds about precisely those matters his adult kids won’t discuss. This last bit could have been something strange and interesting, yet Jones’ execution of these devices is across the board pretty corny—almost as corny as the light gags about Frank’s inability to use chopsticks, or Dario Marianelli’s sappy score. Everybody’s Fine is a movie determined to keep its aim safely within range of the middlebrow, its protracted denouement letting no opportunity to tie up every last possible knot, revealing a conspicuous paucity of faith in its audience’s imagination. Yet for all that, you know, the movie really works.

This is partly due to De Niro, so relaxed in his own skin, never crowding his fellow actors in any given scene, so deft with conveying bottled-up feelings, so touching in the simplest moments—the way he stifles a broader smile when he coerces his eldest daughter to say out loud that she’s a partner in his ad agency; his understated playing of the scene where he phones his own house just to hear his dead wife’s voice on the answering machine. But the greater credit is due to the essential wisdom of the story, which for all its schmaltz never rings false, at least not in the ways that really count. It’s a story about confronting that powerful myth that all your hard work will ensure you some autumnal reward in the shape of your children's successes. A lot of us have fathers like Frank, working class guys who push too hard, who we can’t bear to disappoint. Some of us are Frank—though I have a harder time seeing this aging widower going out to see this sort of movie. The point is that Everybody’s Fine isn’t very artful, but it is truthful, and quite moving. Sometimes that’s fine enough.