The cynicism that makes Iron Man 3 so lousy is defied by the good-time camaraderie of Fast & Furious 6. Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Connor (Vin Diesel and Paul Walker) are more likable than Robert Downey’s snarky Tony Stark and their friendship makes for greater drama and comedy than Stark’s joshing relationship with Rhodes (Don Cheadle). What’s finer is Fast & Furious 6’s sense of solidarity; Dom and O’Connor’s criminal-and-cop alliance avoids the Iron Man franchise’s juvenile brand of excitement, (that shrill blend of exaggerated violence and superheroism), to provide truly heroic lessons in skill, courage, unity and speed.

Both films use previously established characters and rituals to explicate 2013’s post-9/11 malaise, (it’s remarkable how the low pleasures of mere genre movies can answer the disappointment of a high-serious thriller like Zero Dark Thirty). But where Iron Man 3 offends lingering fear and doubt and misrepresents the commonweal, Fast & Furious 6 with its gang of outlaws, (including Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez), joining federal agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to capture a terrorist offers a metaphor for recognizable community mobilization.

The Iron Man movies cannot overcome their essential cartoonishness. They count on inherited comic book fans but the Fast and Furious franchise’s origin in kinetic filmmaking, (the first film’s beautiful nighttime chase scenes have not been surpassed), provide a more realistic, richer thrill. Fast & Furious 6 doesn’t resort to Iron Man 3’s pessimistic but basically meaningless conceit “We create our own demons.” Such comic-book derived sarcasm insults post-9/11 history.

That fake Bin Laden figure in Iron Man 3, (played by Ben Kingsley at his most amusing), favors a dubious political position on the war on terror — trivializing it — while also exploiting it. Yet Fast & Furious 6’s Julian Assange-like villain Ian Shaw, (played with suave ruthlessness by Jason Statham), updates and upgrades the post-9/11 moral quandary. In fact, Shaw’s threat is uncannily similar to Iron Man 3’s specious promise. Tony Stark’s billionaire intrepidness (like Batman) replaces a democratic ideal with aristocracy. (No wonder critics who hated the colorful class satire in Pain & Gain preferred Iron Man 3’s mediocre, class-denying sarcasm.) In this way Iron Man 3 turns patriotism into elitism — as in the scene where the empty-shirt President of the United States hangs in crucifix effigy wearing an Iron Man suit.

Fast & Furious 6 restores democracy to the people. Its working-class cast of heroes represents ethnic street variety — from Diesel’s bi-racial virility and Walker’s blonde/blue virility to their multi-culti male and female comrades. This accounts for the series’ ongoing popularity. Its can-do concept of heroism (“Show me how you drive, I show you who you are,” says Dom) beats superhero projection. The series has progressed from being an underground noir expressing urban conflicts to confronting international crisis in a homey way.

When Gadot, (as one of Dom and O’Connor’s expert driver-martial artists), boasts “This is what we do!” she improves on President Obama’s expedient “That’s not who we are.” Her assertion defines both the gang’s skills and loyalty. Dom puts a fine point on it: “It’s all about family.” His implicit soldierly patriotism gives the film significance beyond its genre. In a central role, Rodriguez plays her scenes truculently, dulling the effect of a loved one who loses memory yet bonds through instinct, but in this kind of movie, action is character, (as Walter Hill said), and director Justin Lin moves quickly between each character’s set-piece. Lin has achieved greater action skills, especially in the airplane/cars chase sequence juggling several climaxes at once. Too darkly lit, it should have been major and revelatory like the multivalent action scenes in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race or Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin; instead it suffices as metaphor for democracy rallying against jumbo jet peril.

In Iron Man 3 the terrorist-villain maliciously teases “America, ready for another lesson?” That adolescent taunt conveys historical cynicism in the guise of entertainment; director Shane Black implies that America craves images of its own destruction. Fast & Furious 6 revels in action but it relishes feeling. Just like the Jesus piece Dom carries, a comrade lost-in-battle adds depth and historical resonance to this film’s creation of heroes, not demons. Not malicious in his 9/11 reference, Dom/Diesel in the slowed-down final scene prays “Bless our table.”

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Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight’s ongoing chronicle of an aging, talkative, narcissistic couple Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (he’s author of two books This Time and That Time; she’s artistic) threatens to become the The Thin Man series for indie movie hipsters.

And that’s precisely the problem. Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) are dramaturgically thin. Like any sequel, Before Midnight follows a formula: Jesse and Celine babble, flirt, babble, fight, babble and reunite. This time they jabber while vacationing in Greece which director Richard Linklater photographs like Hoboken, (not the Mediterranean jewel of Clare Peploe’s Greece in High Season), just to keep the bland franchise aesthetically consistent.

No doubt this talkathon appeals to indie geeks who haven’t realized that cinema is a visual medium; basing the series on dialogue allows its fans to utilize the screen simply as a vanity mirror. This verbal emphasis suggests that the script, (credited to Linklater and his actors), might well include improvisation. But is it the actors or the characters who think every thought in their heads must be uttered?

Hawkes and Delpy seem so natural in these roles that their characterizations stress behavior over action; self-involvement over interaction. The opening scene shows Jesse escorting his teenage son to a return flight back to America where he lives with his divorced mother. The possibility that Jesse will deal with the personal complications of parenthood continues when Celine arrives with their angelic twin daughters. His guilt and her self-sacrifice are promising. But the children and their obligations are soon shoved off-screen, leaving Jesse and Celine to imbibe egotism the way Nick and Nora Charles downed martinis.

The European locale doesn’t sharpen their sense of being in the cosmos because their world only extends as far as their noses. Jesse’s scraggy gruffness and Celine’s spreading rear-end displace any eroticism; what’s highlighted is the way these characters still embody all the liberal pieties, biases and affectations. Their constant boasting and self-flattery and philosophizing accurately reflect the utter banality of the half-educated—the essence of all Linklater’s films.

Before Midnight’s most profound observation isn’t a sense of mortality from approaching middle-age, (as suggested by the title), but a facile agnosticism. Celine accuses Jesse of being “a closet Christian” then behaves blasphemously in an ancient church. Existentialism is offered when an elderly woman mourns “We are important to some but we are just passing through.”

Later, Celine argues “There’s no one human state. The human state is multiple.” That’s really funny because Before Midnight, like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, has but one mode: discursive self-infatuation. Only when the parenthood subject crops up later do Jesse and Celine focus their logorrhea. It gets personal and hurtful. Delpy throws herself into Diane Keatonesque emotional extremes while Hawkes’ exasperates to a draw. It’s what Noah Baumbach can’t do yet Linklater does nothing with it. He makes the mistake of referencing Roberto Rossellini’s marriage drama Voyage to Italy and even imitates the climactic sunset moment of Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert. This is hipster filmmaking at its most ignorant: Linklater, Delpy and Hawkes don‘t seem to realize that Rossellini and Rohmer’s masterpieces were about miracles, not mundane naturalism.

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Frances Ha runs a very long 84 minutes. It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker — played by Greta Gerwig — running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be a professional dancer, even though she demonstrates no aptitude for it.

You gotta love her, is writer-director Noah Baumbach’s privileged position. Frances Ha is Baumbach’s love letter to Gerwig, his current paramour, (she was the ingenue in his film Greenberg who replaces Jennifer Jason Leigh in the protagonist’s affections). Yet Baumbach is the one American filmmaker with the least aptitude for showing love on screen after William Friedkin — yet Friedkin has skills in the opposite direction. Once again aping the self-absorption made fashionable, (though never popular), by the Mumblecore indie film movement of young hipsters, Baumbach’s title refers to Andrew Bujalski’s early Mumblecore release Funny Ha Ha. Baumbach uses Gerwig, that movement’s female icon, to express his own confusion of artistic-pursuit with social-climbing — which here comes off as ambivalent misogyny.

Greta Gerwig stars in Frances Ha.

Probably because Baumbach never examines his own hatefulness, he expects others to view it affectionately. The embarrassing spectacle of Frances/Gerwig gracelessly trotting across dance studios, flopping on beds and peeing in the subway, (she’s called “undatable” by a couple of dorks), is only comparable to grotesque females in Baumbach’s previous films. Frances/Gerwig’s “weird man-walk” might be intended to recall Cybill Shepherd’s gauche stomp in Daisy Miller, but Peter Bogdanovich made her sympathetic, (as Whit Stillman miraculously did with Gerwig in Damsels in Distress). Here, Frances/Greta’s lunatic personality crosses the parvenus of Woody Allen’s Manhattan with the Left Bank jeunne filles of the French New Wave.

While Frances Ha looks terrific, (cinematographer Sam Levy imitates the Nouvelle Vague’s sunlit black & white fairly well), its gloss lacks the New Wave sense of discovery. Everything’s so derivative, from using street addresses as chapter titles to lifting Georges Delerue’s King of Hearts score, it merely matches Allen’s unoriginality. Check out Criterion’s new Blu-Ray version of Godard’s Band of Outsiders to see the style of black and white chic that Baumbach simultaneously aspires to and disgraces. Godard made then-wife Anna Karina the disarming center of a still-stylish triangle, (with the irresistible Samy Frey and Claude Brasseur), and subjected them all to absolute moral scrutiny—whether racing through the Louvre, robbing a mansion or improvising an immortal line dance in a bar. But Baumbach only celebrates proud hateful retorts and transparent privilege (Frances/Greta’s Paris trip becomes the same nowhere as Tokyo in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.)

Baumbach can hardly get a fair review in this town where his personal spider-web network of family/media connections guarantees indulgent endorsements; so his deficient poison pen letter gets praised as a cinematic valentine by confreres who share his warped values — the private life exploitation and payback of New York’s Manhattan-Brooklyn boho/bourgeoisie, (same as with his detestable The Squid and the Whale). Private code is what Frances/Greta pines for when she describes a “secret world [shared with her best friend played by Mickey Sumner], that’s what I want in life.” Maybe you have to be a Mumblehattan elite to love this kind of self-love.

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The ad campaign for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is pretty snazzy, the movie itself not so much. The poster’s anachronistic Art Deco silver letters on a black grid evoke the chrome of shiny old Dusenberg’s plus the velvet casing of jewelry boxes. It’s about luxury and that’s what the media response, (foregrounding Luhrmann’s $125 million budget and hyping Jay-Z’s irritating hip-hop music score), respects above movie content.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in director Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

When we talk about this Great Gatsby, the event and advertising hype are more meaningful than the film. It signifies a transfer in cinema’s cultural impact from narrative enjoyment to the artificial processes of commercialism. Interest in this film derives from political and cultural forces exemplified by advertising, not F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel which romanticized working class 1920s bootlegger Jay Gatsby, (played by an aged, agitated Leonardo DiCaprio), whose social-climbing obsession centers on Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the flame of his youth now married to rich, bigoted lout Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton, wasted).

Fitzgerald’s tale here loses its trenchant all-American subject. Luhrmann trades the story of Gatsby’s personal striving for another pointless exercise in excessive computer-generated gimmickry and pop-culture hodge-podge. Shill journalists, ignorant of film style, submit to this visual torture as if it were original or effective. Luhrmann’s signature camera move changes the zoom into a whoosh—a simulated evocation of cinema’s most glorious kinetic gesture. What an Italian film critic once described as “the bliss of camera movement” becomes a shrill, over-amped, unnatural sensation.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan star in The Great Gatsby.

Scale and spatial logic disappear, so does any emotional dimension. Luhrmann bloats Fitzgerald’s slim, breezily-worded tale to a draggy, repetitious and pretentious epic. Ideas about class, (hidden points about ethnicity), details about desire, frustrated idealism and American history get both dragged-out and run-over. Luhrmann’s screen images whiz around Long Island and Manhattan just as they did Paris in his 2002 Moulin Rouge, destroying any realistic sense of place or experience. Luhrmann’s visual exaggeration is like is Gatsby’s corrupt aspirations: he asks “You think it’s too much?” after sending a roomful of flowers to Daisy yet doesn’t heed when told “I think its what you want.”

Instead of representing an authentic modern vision of class, Luhrmann’s lack of narrative skill destroys comprehension so completely that he inadvertently exposes the novel’s flaws. Luhrmann’s own opportunism reveals Fitzgerald’s. The important subtext of Gatsby’s (ne Jay Gatz) attempts at Wasp integration is lost. His mentor Meyer Wolfsheim in becomes an Indian Bollywood figure; Daisy and Tom’s friend Jordan Baker’s haunting line “We’re all white here” is omitted; and narrator Nick Carraway is turned into a sycophantic dolt, (miscast Tobey Maguire’s googly-eyed performance is one of the worst in recent screen history).

Carraway’s voice-over narration sounds like he just learned to read which may be the key to Luhrmann’s Attention Deficit Disorder directorial style; it replaces visual significance and precision. Making a Great Gatsby that looks like both a comic book movie and Peter Jackson’s King Kong reduces our culture to little more than a TV commercial marketing Hollywood product.

This Gatsby is only about the profit-making potential of what movie exhibitors used to call “film exploitation” and it confirms our news media’s surrender to that goal.

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Newscasters have disgraced their profession and politics by making cameos with apparently no qualms that news is just another form of celebritized fiction. There’s an unholy alliance between the news industry and Hollywood. No matter the deprivations Americans across the country still suffer from Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, West, Texas and the economy—the Correspondents’ dinner is a ritual for the privileged, the ruling class that Americans like to think doesn’t exist. That’s one reason they go to the movies, (the most shameful reason), and Spielberg made this short to further that ends of mystification, misguidance and manipulation.

Steven Spielberg’s Obama.

The mockumentary’s unfunny jokes start with Spielberg asking “I mean who is Obama, really? We don’t know. We never got his transcripts.” This would only be amusing if it weren’t true. There’s obscenity in joking about the media’s protection of Obama’s image and its implicit lack of decorum which began (negatively) with the media’s assault on George W, Bush’s presidency. But Nevermind. (That might have been a more clever title for the short—what, was Tony Kushner too busy reading Entertainment Weekly?).

Steven Spielberg’s Obama was made redundantly, to disguise the euphemistic Beltway metaphors of Lincoln, (such as that despicable moment when Abraham Lincoln, arms outstretched, mendaciously emulates the scales of justice—but politicking with his right hand and prevaricating with his Left). Yet, those who care about the honor of Spielberg’s best work have to pay mind to this short’s dishonesty. It gainsays the fact of Obama’s media-based mythification by joking about it.

Spielberg pretends in the short to be thinking about doing a first film about Obama and smirks, “Picking the right actor to “play Obama that was the challenge. So I needed someone who could dive in and really become Barack Obama. And as it turns out the answer was right in front of me all along: Daniel Day Lewis.” This plays the movie going public cheap, as if they weren’t smart enough to catch that Obama was already the subtext of Lincoln. Spielberg knew this, he let screenwriter Tony Kushner go forward with the rhetorical ruse which The New York Times only cottoned to after the film’s release.

In an analysis titled “Confronting the Fact of Fiction and the Fiction of Fact,” two thumbs-up reviewers chimed “Lincoln isn’t just about how President Lincoln navigated the passage of the 13th Amendment; it is also about President Obama whose presidency could not be imagined without that amendment.” So much form the limits of Times critics’ imaginations. They finally admitted that Spielberg and Kushner’s fabrications were rooted in the dark heart of millennial White Liberal fantasy, not historical fact or African American dreaming.

Because Obama has become the fulfillment of White Liberal dreaming, his mythification in Lincoln and throughout the mainstream media is accepted without vetting—so much so that even Spielberg can contribute to the mythification, attempting to sway an election and then kid about it.

His short’s suggestion that the Obama myth required an actor of Daniel Day Lewis’ stature is inadvertently revealed. Spielberg boasts about Day Lewis’ method of ”becom[ing] his character: Hawkeye from Last Of The Mohicans, Bill the Butcher in The Gangs of New York and Abraham Lincoln from Lincoln. And you know what, he nailed it.” Nailing it is the correct, crucifying term for the Washington Correspondents Dinner’s deprecation of American history.

Spielberg’s litany accidentally links Obama’s presidency to questionable representations of American history: James Fennimore Cooper’s White fantasy that Leslie Fiedler once explicated, (in Love and Death and the American Novel) as the embodiment of Eurocentric fears and the basis of America’s racial delusions, (a critical thesis now forgotten in the Ebert age); Scorsese’s post-Vietnam imagining of America’s hostile social legacy and immigrant brutality. Spielberg ties all that to Lincoln, not to absolve it but to unconsciously root it to the racial and political confusion about slavery and identity that the unvetted Obama represents.

But, wait! It gets worse! Obama himself takes part in Spielberg’s charade. After once claiming “I have a lot on my plate,” Obama generously took the time to complete Spielberg’s fantasy by showing how he prepares for public performance: Looking into a mirror, Obama preps “Hello, Ohio! Hello, Ohio!” “I love you back.” “Look, look, let me be clear about this.” The only thing that’s clear is that the gathered media aristocracy, (including the low-down yet highly-placed of Hollywood and Manhattan), approves this disingenuousness. It’s all right with them. They want a President as lacking in dignity as they are, so they reduce him to their level—morally, professionally, politically.

This short is Spielberg’s most Brechtian comedy: he gets the President of the United States to ridicule the supposedly sincere reasons his constituents support him, undermining the prestige of office that even his opponents are obliged to respect. (One could argue that the media’s out-of-control disrespect the presidency began with George W. Bush or maybe our lapdog media was born during the Clinton administration). For Spielberg, Obama willingly portrays a performer in the act of deceiving the public. (Only Bill and Hillary Clinton taking on the roles of the mafia gangsters The Sopranos was as offensive.)
It is not funny when Obama-as-Day-Lewis confuses things, saying “The hardest part? Trying to understand his [my] motivations. Why did he [I] pursue ‘health care’ first? What makes him [me] tick? Why doesn’t he [I] get mad? If I was him I’d be mad all the time. But I’m not him, I’m Daniel Day Lewis.” It’s as bad as a Saturday Night Live skit. Or a Jon Stewart Early Show skit. Or a Real Time with Bill Maher skit. (Or a Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow skit, I mean, “newscast.”) That’s how low the producer of the terrific early Zemeckis-Gale comedies has sunk.

For the past seven months I’ve personally been fielding questions about why I didn’t like the movie Lincoln. Going through the unpleasant effort of explaining the film’s basic inaccuracy and unfairness to people who were prepared to love and defend it simply because it was customized to their political sentiments, made my explanation all the more frustrating. (When die-hard Spielberg scoffers praised Lincoln, I knew their commendations had nothing to do with esthetics or history, only with the film’s slanted politics and strenuously forced contemporary parallel to Obama’s lame-duck presidency.)
Now, after the disappointment of the Kushner-Spielberg Lincoln, we get its unfortunate sequel—actually a coda. A coda ought to reinforce a work’s preceding revelations but it’s become apparent that after his previous great films showed the humane aspect of the human experience, Spielberg has taken up the partisan view. Now that Spielberg shows us what Lincoln actually meant, one can really, rightfully rue it.

Broadway’s new Black (or non-traditional cast) production of The Trip to Bountiful comes alive when Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly Texas widow longing to return to her titular hometown, stands up and sings a church hymn in a desolate bus station. It is the chestnut “Blessed Assurance” and as Tyson prances and sings, the audience spontaneously joined in.

Was it a response to the actress and her legacy of cultural landmarks (Sounder, Roots, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, East Side/West Side) or gospel’s call-and-response tradition that veteran Black performers and audiences bring to Broadway? It was a surprising—and unexpectedly satisfying—moment; unscripted by playwright Horton Foote whose synthetic Southern doggerel treats the human condition like bolts of preprinted fabric. Familiar ideas about family, aging and the passing of time are cut and stitched into ready-made, second-hand drama—the half-tragic equivalent to a sitcom.

But there’s Tyson as Carrie Watts, the role that originated by Lillian Gish and that won Geraldine Page an Oscar. This occasion forces one to realize the paucity of roles for older actresses (Tyson is 80), especially black actresses. Tyson seizes the vehicle to communicate her principled talent to a culture that has forgotten what that means.

When Carrie cries “I want to go back to Bountiful,” Tyson gives it the yearning of a woman who feels existentially stranded in a debilitating, non-nurturing place, a cramped two-room Houston apartment with her son Ludie (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and his frustrated, harpy wife Jessie Mae (Vanessa Williams). The situation parallels the lack of mobility faced by black actresses toiling in an unwelcoming or restricting profession.

Tyson and Candola Rashad in A Trip to Bountiful.

Tyson‘s career milestones have always happened against the odds yet her successes are impressive because their always demonstrate moral integrity. Not the worse legacy, it puts Tyson in the same league as Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte–powerful performers who also stood for something. In this case, the memory of a bountiful artistic and political calling in which personal artistry illuminates mere professionalism.

That Tyson’s lack of sentimentality—her defining quality—fits Carrie Watts is ironic. Foote’s determined yet nostalgic crone is utterly average, suffering typical old-age dilemmas. Not exactly a warm matriarch, Tyson makes her stubborn, self-obsessed drive to return to her roots seem vital, (her subtle anger recalls Tyson’s Rebecca in Sounder). She works Foote’s threadbare, pseudo-homey clichés for all they’re worth.

There’s no richness in Foote’s writing, the flat, naturalistic language resists poetry; Geraldine Page gave the film her hammy but great emotionalism to stave off Foote’s unintended yet unavoidable bleakness. In the last act, director Michael Wilson lets Tyson nearly transform Carrie Watt’s dotage into principle: “I found my dignity and strength” she says looking at her girlhood home with the symbolic name, (a bland version of the yearning psychology William Inge expressed better in Come Back, Little Sheba).

That line isn’t quite believable but we know what Carrie/Tyson means: The search for stronger values and desire to restore personal heritage are clear. The sympathetic audience provided a Tyler Perry response, giving more implicit Christian fellowship than Foote intended. (Singing “Blessed Assurance” also recalls Tyson’s very excellent Peter Bogdanovich TV movie Blessed Assurance.) With Tyson’s presence, this production’s new ethnic focus evokes the Great Migration history of blacks relocated to urban living yet retaining ambivalent memories of the South as home. Jeff Cowie’s set, superlatively lighted by Rui Rita, recalls the Hudson River School of bucolic radiance; creating a visible, nearly cinematic passage of time.

The years since Tyson performed in the legendary 1961 production of Genet’s The Blacks have seen the once-thriving Black American theater movement pass. In this not-good-enough play Tyson’s richness and will makes one nostalgic for Black theater’s forgotten bounty.

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Unmistakably, Pal Sverre Hagan’s appearance in Kon-Tiki as Norwegian explorer Thor Heyedahl is modeled after Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Not just tall, blue-eyed with burnished blond hair, Hagan also conveys obsessive determination like O’Toole’s Lawrence, making Heyerdahl’s decision to build a balsa-wood raft and float from Peru to Polynesia more than a landmark in anthropology. It’s also a heroic European’s foolhardy adventure, verging on genius, which the directorial team Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg obviously admire.

Pal Sverre Hagan in “Kon Tiki”

Taking Lawrence of Arabia as a model, Ronning and Sandberg demonstrate a multi-leveled approach to Heyerdahl’s famous 5,000 mile voyage. They achieve the rare combination of historical replay, intelligent spectacle and sensible biography. Without the luxury of David Lean’s epic length, Kon-Tiki conveys the breadth of Heyerdahl’s 1947 daring as he opposes complacent scientists, gathers a five-man group of risk-takers as crew and ventures from cramped civilization into the limitless physical world.
Ronning and Sandberg shape both the danger and monotony of Heyerdahl’s mission to show the personalities of explorer and crew. The sub-theme of existential self-discovery starts with Heyerdahl’s near-drowning in childhood which explains the irony that he never learned to swim. It’s not a metaphysical study like Ang Lee’s sentimental sea adventure The Life of Pi but a day-to-day demonstration of men testing themselves amongst themselves and against the elements.
Despite Kon-Tiki’s grand subject it isn’t grandiose. It recalls Lawrence of Arabia‘s simplest qualities: a close, fascinated look at a historical figure, recreation of post-war global temperament and awe at nature’s majesty. These Scandanavian directors, (previously known for the breezy feminist western Bandidas starring Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz and produced by Luc Besson), chose a classical model in Lawrence, but they also honor their native heritage in an approach to environment that also recalls Jan Troell’s atmospheric filmmaking.
Extraordinary sightings of luminous underwater creatures, whales swimming beneath the raft and sharks threatening the Kon-Tiki as it becomes waterlogged are marvelous and thrilling, (colorfully shot by Geir Hartly Andeassen), but never overblown. It’s a perfect mix of CGI and nature ­— unlike the cartoonish extravagance which made The Life of Pi contradict its own spiritual premise.
Ronning and Sandberg’s modernity requires them to query nature, fate, existence. They do so less subtly than David Lean whose pre-computer generated imagery (CGI) respect for the infinite was part of his narrative richness. Kon-Tiki begins with Heyerdahl’s mother saying of his childhood rescue “God had nothing to do with it!” The film’s remaining narrative, though not exactly reverent, shows ambivalence about Heyerdahl’s ultimately discovery and triumph.
A night sequence panning from the raft, up to the heavens and back again, challenges us, the viewers, through visual awesomeness. Then Heyerdahl theorizes “Nature accepts us as part of itself like birds and fish.” Not as eloquent as Lawrence of Arabia, Ronning and Sandberg fit the wonders they show to contemporary skepticism. At least they never reduce Heyerdahl to the explorer’s cynicism in Werner Herzog’s man-vs.-nature films.

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Funny that the Film Society of Lincoln Center paid tribute to Barbra Streisand last week with its 40-year-old Chaplin Award — even though Streisand’s movies are not the kind typically shown in Film Society programming. As a fundraiser, it was unparalleled. Co-chair of the event, Ann Tenenbaum announced that it had raised $2 million, twice as much as the highest amount in the history of the annual event. This confirmed the shrewd choice to honor home girl Streisand just as Brooklyn’s Barclay’s Center featured the Funny Girl star to initiate its opening last Fall.

But there were also good reasoning to the Film Society’s decision: Streisand is the last old-fashioned movie star of the sort first celebrated by Lincoln Center; such Hollywood personages as Charlie Chaplin, Claudette Colbert, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck whose work represented the legacy of American movies–stars rather than auteurs.
It would be great if the Film Society scheduled retrospective public screenings for its honorees. Instead, the clips shown to recall Streisand’s film career were curiously unconvincing about her contribution to cinema. The inevitable let down of moving from her electrifying 1968 film debut in Funny Girl to her subdued matronly performances in drab movies like Meet the Fockers and The Guilt Trip failed to convincingly illustrate Streisand’s cinematic achievement. It certainly isn’t as a director; Chaplin Award presenter President Clinton’s proclamation that her three directorial efforts Yentl, The Prince of Tides and The Mirror Has Two Faces were “magnificent” only showed that a politician is not a critic.
Streisand’s musical dynamism, womanly warmth, Jewish humanism and lovely speaking voice make her an outstanding Hollywood star who won audiences over put the class identification of a Cagney, the romantic idealism of a Garbo, the bravura of an Olivier. But too often the Lincoln Center tribute lapsed into standard superstar worship — mentioning EGOT (her winning of the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar and the Tony) rather than specifying such bold achievements as Up the Sandbox.
There are three iconic moments in Streisand’s film career: the tugboat passing the Statue of Liberty climax of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in Funny Girl, the virtuoso live performance of “My Man” at the finale of that film and her duet with Louis Armstrong in Hello, Dolly! Only one of these iconic moments were part of the clip selections. Oddly, Wynton Marsalis’ wordless live performance of “Hello, Dolly!” seemed more a race man’s tribute to Armstrong than an acknowledgement of Streisand’s participation in one of pop culture’s racially integrated epiphanies. “Hello, Dolly!”, unfairly underrated, showcases Streisand’s radical immediacy, transcending her potential miscasting; her duet with Armstrong — who had a chart-topping success with the title song–made the film startlingly modern, timeless. This aesthetic and historic triumph is exactly what the Film Society is perfectly situated to uphold — and Marsalis understood it.

When the evening resorted to Streisand adoration as “beautiful,” “genius,” “hyphenate,” “perfectionist” (her own terms) it went too far without going where it should. Comparison’s to Chaplin were inapt, except to note Streisand’s undeniable prominence as a globally admired cultural figure — although not as a genius filmmaker. As filmmaking, her three directorial efforts range from mediocre to abysmal.
Seeing a movie star’s deification is unwarranted and tasteless. (It gives rise to more of Streisand’s unseemly egotism.) Streisand watchers know that Up the Sandbox’s surreal/verite aesthetic innovations (by director Irvin Kershner and cinematographer Gordon Willis) and challenge to political correctness (“If that’s what being a mother means I turn in my ovaries!”) are more meaningful than the chick flick sappiness of The Way We Were. The latter (plus A Star is Born) may always attract undemanding viewers, but Streisand’s early film work such as energizing the conventional comedy The Owl and the Pussycat and last-gasp preservation of the movie musical genre — particularly in Vincente Minnelli’s metaphysically profound On A Clear Day You Can See Forever — are successes that matter more than her celebrity status.

Sloppy storytelling has become so standard for American filmmakers (Side Effects, The House Behind the Pines) that Francois Ozon’s new trifle In the House feels especially pleasurable. Storytelling is its subject in the same sense as Todd Solondz’s 2001 Storytelling. Ozon plays with his increasing filmmaking skill to illustrate the stirred imagination of a high school composition teacher Germain (Frabrice Luchini) who becomes obsessed with his most talented student Claude (Ernst Umhauer)who shows scary, enticing writing skill.
As Germain urges Claude to expand his gift for perception and language, the student’s series of essays (another show of obsession about a fellow student) allows Ozon to play with the audience’s perceptions. Claude befriends a not-bright classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), coveting the home life he envies and plotting ways to invade the classmate’s home, seduce each of the parents and break up the family. This not only mirrors the teacher’s arrogance but does so to the extent that it also critiques the teacher’s sneaky intellectual selfishness.
Ozon’s objective is classic surrealism—exposing the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, especially as it is encouraged and taught at the Lycee Gustave Flaubert. Luchini is a perfect actor for this kind of revelation, his intellectual upheaval was well practiced in Eric Rohmer films, but Ozon avoids such gentility. In the House recalls Ozon’s Fassbinder experiment Water Drops on Burning Rocks. This is also a theatrical adaptation (based on Juan Mayorga’s 2006 play The Boy in the Last Row) conceived to be subversive. So while Claude seeks to undermine one bourgeois home, he also unravels Germain’s marriage (to Kristen Scott-Thomas).
In the House recall early badboy Ozon, although he has lately approached mastery through such humanistic films as 5×2, Time to Leave, Ricky. This exercise recalls Old School Transgression. Glacially smooth, clever and fun to watch as In the House is, Ozon’s expertise is constantly at war with a sense of smugness. Umhauer’s Claude has a dark-eyed devious aspect like when Anderson Cooper smirks—so smugness is well judged. Ozon’s mature work has shown genuine dissatisfaction with the self-satisfactions of gay cinema transgression and puts distance from it. This gives Claude’s Omnisexual seductions—particularly with his classmate’s feral father (Denis Menochet)—a particular erotic viciousness.
It’s also a knowing viciousness. When teacher and wife go to the movies, they watch Woody Allen’s despicably cruel Match Point. The teacher’s advice not to confuse desire with story holds for the failures of much would-be subversive cinema and Ozon must know it. Good thing he has great filmmaking-storytelling instincts. In the House ends with a tableau that recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but it is also, essentially, a Bunuel toy.

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Barry Gordy, founder of the legendary record label Motown had to do something. His landmark artistic venture had some of its historic stature stolen by the lame-brain drama and trifling music of Dreamgirls (which traduced the story of Motown group The Supremes for a cliché-ridden yet widely-promoted melodrama. Gordy had to correct that defamation by telling his own story, co-producing and writing the book for Motown: The Musical Motown—an authorized account of how he initiated the record label, thus revolutionizing popular culture.
Because envy has always motivated Gordy’s emulation of established showbiz forms and inspired him to elevate them, Motown: The Musical is not as original as it ought to be. Each Motown hit, (at least one of them—from Barrett Strong’s “Money” to Stevie Wonder’s “Living For the City”—is in the heart of every pop-loving Earth-dweller), tells a story of romantic ambition and social reportage. Their lyric stories would make imaginative Broadway plots, yet Gordy imitates recent jukebox musical formula. His show is like a Las Vegas review of popular hits performed by talented impersonators.
It could have been more. Gordy’s personal story of following Joe Louis’ heavyweight boxing championship that meant so much to aspiring African Americans and all desperate WWII-era Americans combined in a rarely explicated achievement of Black intelligence and ambition. Gordy’s history encompasses the story of the Great Migration when Southern Blacks came North for opportunities like Detroit’s auto industry and forged ahead romantically, intellectually, professionally. Using his boxer’s nerve and family financing, Gordy idealized the family model to build an artistic salon that to this day is American pop’s only rival to the fabled glories of Hollywood. MGM Studios boasted having “more stars than there are in the heavens” and Gordy’s stable of writers, musicians, producers and performers held equal magnitude. At one brief, fascinating point in the show Gordy laments his protégés’ ingratitude saying “Stars I polished are now in orbit.” (His lyricist gift still intact.)
Recalling the Gilbert & Sullivan line “We really know our worth the Sun and I,” Gordy makes his Broadway debut by treating Motown’s history like looking through a telescope at celestial constellations. Compressing Gordy’s personal family story and his professional family story, (with special emphasis on his Svengali relationship with Diana Ross), director Charles Randolph-Wright makes the drama skyrocket from success to success to the corporation’s eventual crash–always moving too fast to bore.
Motown: The Musical begins with a medley of hits that bursts the bounds of Broadway musical tradition. It is both ecstatic and ironic. Taken from the opening performance of the 1984 TV special “Motown: 25,” this recreation of the sing-off between new-and-surviving members of The Temptations and The Four Tops isn’t so much a competition as a tandem exhibition like jet pilots flying in formation—it soars and soars. In contemporary musical terms it’s called a mash-up but the quieter customs of Broadway know no equivalent for the simultaneous jubilant and nostalgic effect it creates.
This mash-up of love-pledges, torch songs, dance themes and romantic anthems immediately demonstrates the great range of Black American feelings, thought and language that our mainstream culture still has not adequately understood.

Motown—an icon and mantra as much as a historic cultural entity–represents that widest possibilities of knowledge and expression. This is something that most cultural critics are still reluctant to confer upon Motown’s neo-soul sound. Because Motown represented the aspirations and fluency of upwardly-mobile Black people, it is too often deemed inauthentic to those who prefer circumscribing Black folks to the gut-bucket stereotypes of uneducated Southerners who don’t command the English language, who sing and play music greatly, though without refinement—that, without demonstrating the smooth mastery of Western art tropes that Motown, (the ultimate symbol of Civil Rights Era progress), apprehended and transformed.
The new language of American success that Motown sang demands a more innovative show than this. (The potential is apparent when the sublime “I Hear a Symphony” underscores a less-than-perfect love scene.) I wanted something tougher like the way Gordy’s signature tune “Money” was used in the film Killing Them Softly in order to combat the lies of the dreadful Dreamgirls and reclaim the legacy that had been cheapened, (even by the excellent Sparkle). Something that explained Gordy and Ross intimately referring to each as “Black.”
Instead, Motown: The Musical settles for the pleasure of watching Brandon Victor Dixon (Gordy), Valisia LeKae (Diana), Charl Brown (Smokey Robinson) and Bryan Terrell Clark (Marvin Gaye) act out biographies that musically-emotionally belong to all of us. Has any talented performer ever wanted success as nakedly as Diana Ross? LeKae’s caricature is all smiles, exuberance, determination and captures the sweetest, most underrated voice in pop music history.
Each performer is uncannily right and the way audiences cheer the idea of Michael Jackson testifies to Motown’s great significance. You’ll have to read the various Motown autobiographies to feel the details—or just go back to the records.
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