We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations of Branch Rickey–and about American spiritual history and destiny. The issues and emotions have a beautiful clarity.

42, titled after Robinson’s player number (retired for all teams by the Major League Baseball association yet worn by players every April 15th–Jackie Robinson Day), commemorates Robinson breaking the game’s color bar in 1947 as the first Negro playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Helgeland depicts this world-changing risk as a cultural story–not simply one man’s life story. Instead of biographical depth, 42 sustains the same benevolence as the MLB’s memorial; its lively and vivid narrative goes through the arduous steps of a social and moral revolution.

More than a baseball movie, 42 is a folktale touching on the spirituality evidenced in Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) and Dodgers’ General Manager Rickey (played by Harrison Ford). Seeing baseball as the medium of social change; its practice and rituals are understood as basic to America’s sense of capability despite prevailing social divisions. That explains Helgeland’s elastic sense of class. Robinson steps into the roughneck world of sport possessing higher personal principles. He and wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) are already upwardly mobile; they need only the income and recognition that white Americans take for granted.

Now let’s get rid of the narrow-minded complaint about Hollywood race stories always unequally pairing history’s black sacrificial figures with white cohorts. Helgeland’s even-handed vision of the Rickey-Robinson revolution enlarges it, taking in different aspects of America’s racial reality. Not merely the Jackie Robinson story, 42 relates tandem efforts and transformations by Rickey, Negro sports writer Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), assorted teammates (many brief, perfectly etched characterizations from Max Gail’s captivated retired manager, Chris Meloni’s virile Leo Durocher to Lucas Black’s affable Pee Wee Reese) and the crowds who fill the stands. All profiles in courage.

The back office functioning behind America’s public face rarely gets shown but 42’s story fortunately reveals that it appropriate significance and appeal, primarily through Harrison Ford. Projecting established magnanimous decency, Ford puts Rickey’s risk-taking and persistent urging in perfect balance to newcomer Boseman who portrays Robinson’s circumspect heroism. This isn’t a timed, harmless Black man; he’s self-assured yet resentful of those who want to make him humble. (Jeffrey Wright has played this Poitier complex but Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington never has). Boseman’s wary intelligence conveys deep pride, a forgotten aspect of black America’s gradual civil rights evolution. 42 revives it.
The way Helgeland balances Ford/Rickey’s courage represents the modern audience’s guileless ignorance of history and the period era’s attitudes. The young black actors–all ebullient, optimistic, determined–represent Blacks’ hopes while the familiar Whites personify fears. When 42 explicates these details, it surpasses Steven Spielberg’s morally compromised Lincoln.

Cinematographer Don Burgess makes 42 the most beautiful movie of 2013 so far. He photographs sunlight and water (when Robinson finally showers with his white teammates) with radiance. Nothing in Lincoln’s political contrivance is as resonant as Rickey confessing “Something was wrong at the heart of the game I loved and I had ignored it.” Kushner-Spielberg’s Lincoln never admitted such sorrowful complex. Lincoln pretended that political opposition was the essence of America’s moral progress when in fact it was only a power struggle; 42 is deeper and more honest in its display of how Americans changed through accepting skill, humanity, sympathy.

This is a better approach to history than George Lucas’ lame Tuskegee Airman tribute Red Tails. Helgeland has made a film totally without cynicism. Cynicism is what ruined Lincoln; cynicism was at the core of Kushner and Spielberg’s self-congratulatory arrogance–which was why liberals overrated it. Will Obama-era audiences appreciate 42’s richness with its deep understanding of how hard-won compassion has greater everyday effectiveness than the rule of law? The splendor of ball field effort? Or a silhouetted fatherly embrace? These images test fairness within the glory of nature without the falsity of The Natural or Field of Dreams like no movie since Robert Aldrich’s The Big Leaguer.

I’d like to describe more of 42’s wonderful scenes such as the shots of Robinson rounding the bases, focused on his “42” uniform imprint like an existential Bressonian icon, but viewers should discover such beauty for themselves. Rickey and Robinson unite over the idea of being “built to last” by doing the right thing. Whether or not 42 conquers the box-office, it is built to last.

Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining. Ascher’s film—a true mockumentary if ever there was one—is named after the Overlook Hotel suite where little Danny sees Kubrick’s most disturbing visions due to his gift for “shining.” Every nerd wants to shine.
But Room 237 is an even more disturbing vision of post-cinephilia asininity. The theories proposed by the five unseen nerds and elaborated by Ascher, (whose fondness for eccentricity suggests Escher), are not just wildly different from each other, they demonstrate a current style of cinematic illiteracy that has replaced critical thinking.

Actually an embarrassment to the highbrow Kubrick, Room 237 shows that the Kubrick cult consists of that breed who like to think they think. However, the hypotheses presented, (and seemingly validated by use of actual—pirated?—Kubrick clips), resist rationality.

I’ve long realized that Kubrick’s stature among film geeks certified a paradigm shift from the Hitchcock era when the legendary master of suspense—and of montage—inspired a different, popular breed of film enthusiast than Kubrick whose esoteric, post-WWII misanthropy fed recent generations of kiddie nihilists who, considering themselves especially smart, responded to his stiff (non-sensual, thus anti-Hitchcockian) compositions. (They’re now the Fincher/Nolan kids.) Recall Kubrick’s tracking shots from Paths of Glory and Lolita to Full Metal Jacket that were more deterministic than Max Ophuls who tracked to observe transitory life while Kubrick’s steadicam tracks bore down and confined life’s possibilities. No Kubrick film exemplified this determinism like The Shining, a horror movie about existential claustrophobia that seems angled to mean much more. But whatever it is exactly, (and that fastidious Stephen King adaptation is surprisingly, unexpectedly sloppy), brings the Kubrick cult of Room 237 to weird ecstasies of obsessive overthinking.

Watching Room 237 you can’t avoid the problem of contemporary film criticism shallowness. Unlike Wim Wenders’ Room 666, a celebration of cinephilia where a range of filmmakers discussed their inspirations at the Cannes film festival, Room 237 is strictly concerned with the fantasies produced by nerds’ uneducated responses to the Kubrick myth and the irrationality of The Shining.

Fans seem unable to recognize the film’s failings and so try to make virtues of its mistakes. “Kubrick often in many of his movies would end them with a puzzle so he’d force you to go out of his movies saying ‘What was that about?’” So says one zealot who responds to cinema the way a child reacts to a video game, trusting that a manufacturer cares about his response.

Another nerd says “[Kubrick] is like a megabrain for the planet who is boiling down, with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of our world and giving them back to us in this dream of a movie.”

Sorry to say but this inanity redounds to the global reach of Roger Ebert’s TV reviewing. Room 237 doesn’t raise one’s appreciation of The Shining (cue laff track), instead, it confuses response. It features reenactments of Kubrick placing a Calumet baking powder canister, paranoid shots from All the President’s Men, shots of Tom Cruise cruising in Eyes Wide Shut and, for seriousness, there are even purloined images from Schindler’s List to justify the suggestion that Kubrick was actually expounding upon timeless examples of genocide. It is Ebert’s pretense of “criticism” that moves these nerds to insist that The Shining must be important because it is more than just a horror movie. Their theories concentrate on gaffes and continuity errors which is exactly the sort of “criticism” that Ebert made available to couch potato cineastes.

One enthusiast claims “Its contradictions pile up in your subconscience.” Another recidivist viewer claims “When you see things over and over again their meanings change for you…He’s playing with your acceptance of visual information and also your ignorance of visual information.” This is hero-worship, not analysis. Another nerd says “We are dealing with a guy who has a 200 IQ.”

Reverence for Kubrick overwhelms any understanding of The Shining. It is symptomatic of today’s celebrity veneration—the flip-side of the feeling of nothingness that makes nerds bow down to the likes of Nolan, Fincher, Soderbergh and Kubrick. So they fantasize about The Shining’s supposed profundity as when one professes, “We all know from postmodern film criticism that the meanings are there whether or not the filmmaker is aware of them.” This is the mess that criticism has come to. Fake erudition causes another to muse, “Why would Kubrick make the movie so complicated? Yeah, why did Joyce write Finnegan’s Wake?” This goofy exchange shows they don’t know the difference between literary and cinematic erudition. These Shining geeks don’t even know the hotel story of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a truly profound expression of memory and desire.

They ignore the human significance of Jack Nicholson telling his son Danny “I would never hurt you.” In this warped cathexis, the cynical gotcha coincidences carry hidden importance that means more than the clear, apparent behavior and imagery.

The Kubrick cult dispenses with traditional humanist notions of art appreciation. They prize Kubrick for The Shining’s horror movie ugliness, perverting Diane Arbus’s twins, turning an elevator into a bloody diluvium (although as Pauline Kael observed “No one takes an elevator in this movie anyway”). Without any schooling in visual or literary interpretation, the Kubrick cult is left to bizarre fantasizing. One nervously giggles “I’m trapped in this hotel. There’s no escape, there’s like this endless loop.”

So we’re subjected to ideas about Kubrick’s face subliminally photoshopped in clouds, an actor’s erection, a Rodeo poster turned minotaur and a Dopey dwarf decal. Ascher subjects his witnesses to humiliation that’s no better than his unidentified steal from Murnau’s magnificent Faust, where a silly narrator adds Kubrick “found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude that he just couldn’t bring himself to treat it directly.”

When Ascher isn’t holding Kubrick obsession up to ridicule, his presentation yet implies the same credibility the Internet gives fanboys. Like Internet criticism, Room 237 resembles the kind of conspiracy theory mania that kooks used to put on single-spaced mimeographed sheets and pass out on street corners.

The ultimate nerd testimony says “In your own life, your point of view is being altered by your study.” But this isn’t study which means to examine, this is mere obsession. Room 237 is another confirmation of the end of cinephilia.

This week, America’s most overrated filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh, gets booted out of the arena by the country’s most underrated great filmmaker, Walter Hill.

The simultaneous release of Hill’s Bullet to the Head and Soderbergh’s Side Effects perfectly contrasts the art of genre filmmaking with the pretense of art filmmaking as genre. After a decade off, Hill returns to cinema with a Sylvester Stallone action movie that streamlines moral complexity and aesthetic mastery while Soderbergh pretends another exploration of topical issues while dully manipulating thriller clichés.

Side Effects’ story of medical malfeasance involves a pill-giving psychiatrist (Jude Law) and his waif-victim patient (Rooney Mara)—the girl with an insider-trading monkey on her back. Really, it’s much less interesting than a law-breaking hitman forced to regulate his conscience in relentless tests of his manhood. The former is schlock, the latter is art—if you appreciate the depth and creativity of kinetic, poetic narrative. That legacy has always inspired Hill’s artistry.

Soderbergh’s Traffic, Erin Brokovich and Magic Mike reigned over an era of cynical banality, while Hill’s sharp, inventive technique seen in The Warriors, Geronimo and Undisputed went unappreciated (and underground in TV projects like Deadwood and Broken Trail). Bullet to the Head is an exhilarating revival of efficient, expressive storytelling while Side Effects combines Psycho trick-casting and deceptive plot devices to disguise indifference to its characters’ moral crises.

Soderbergh is callous about “the culture,” offering an insincere money and class critique as shallow as his underlit videography. Hill’s critique is inherent in the efficacy and splendor of his action and montage. Fanboys raised on CGI won’t notice the difference, but true movie lovers will thrill to it (and to dialogue like “You had me at ‘Fuck you’”—beat that, Tarantino).

Soderbergh replaces the topical, medical subject of Nick Ray’s Bigger Than Life with nihilistic cynicism while Hill explores post-9/11 ideas of conflicted morality: Stallone gives a new iconic performance as a man at odds with the law, and Hill distills his story in the most exuberant American kinetics of the past few years.

If Side Effects is Soderbergh’s last film (as promised), give him an urgent farewell. Bullet to the Head’s excitement inspires a “welcome back” for Hill.

Celebrated indie film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ confuses pandering with empathy

The artistic advance of Eytan Fox’s ‘Yossi’

Oz Zehavi in Yossi.

In the new Yossi, Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox revisits the protagonist from his 2004 military love story Yossi & Jagger. A slight narrative shift shows the former army medic (played by Ohad Knoller) in his mid-30s, now an overweight cardiologist still mourning his lover’s death more than 10 years ago, sinking into loneliness: He’s introduced alseep. Fox’s project is almost a fairytale; a kiss brings Yossi back to life.

Fox’s new story deals realistically with the emotions of Yossi’s second coming out. Desire is submerged in Yossi’s flaccid body and sadness. He limits his own options in two remarkable temptation scenes: a night of bisexual possibility with a beefy partying colleague (Lior Ashkenazi) and a hook-up with a high-living gym rat and dance promoter (Gil Desiano) met on the Internet. These emotional low points are early high points in the film’s casually modern view of the situations—erotic free choice—that are part of the acceptance of gay life. Fox, a humanist romantic who bridged Israeli-Palestinian gay brotherhood in the 2008 The Bubble, understands Yossi’s potential decadence and pulls him out of his tailspin.

After a quietly devastating visit to his lover’s past, Yossi takes off. On the road to Sinai, he meets a group of young Israeli soldiers who draw him back to the camaraderie of military life (rapport memorably expressed by Brando’s lonely officer in Reflections in a Golden Eye in a longingly alliterative mumbling about “men among men”). Fox exults in that rapport. His embrace of Yossi’s humanity conveys a post-Stonewall and post-AIDS artist’s guiltlessness—a quality displayed by few American gay filmmakers. As The Bubble demonstrated, Fox isn’t caught up in issues, statements or grandstanding. (That’s why his overtly political Walk on Water failed.) Yossi’s gentle romanticism disguises the fact that Fox is making a major artistic advance.

Take the transition to Yossi’s road trip: Dissolving from solitude to the open road, it recalls a Kiarostami image without the aesthetic remoteness. The Middle Eastern landscape suggests new emotional territory. The film’s realistic sensuality (photographed with an optimistic glow by Guy Raz) makes it comparable to Julian Hernandez’s Raging Sun, Raging Sky—a masterpiece still unreleased in this country, shown only at gay film festivals. Like that film, Yossi imagines the natural complexity of gay love. Fox doesn’t go into the abstract ruminations of Hernandez’s magnificent philosophical epic, but his confrontation with the grief process and the depth of yearning is comparably profound.

When Yossi observes the lithe, sun-kissed, hyperactive soldiers on leave—including tall, smooth-faced, bow-lipped Tom (Oz Zehavi) — he’s confronted with the life passing him by and notices the gay liberation they take for granted, the burdened past that’s outside their generation’s awareness. These soldier boys’ joking sexual ease goes beyond homophobia; it’s a bit idealized to include shared enjoyment of thumping dance music which dates Yossi, who listens to Mahler and grips a paperback of Death in Venice while lounging poolside. “You can read at home!” chides the teasingly handsome Nimrod (Meir Golan).

By evoking—and remaking—Death in Venice so gently and humorously, Fox modernizes Thomas Mann’s ruminations on beauty, desire and the divine in human form an essential achievement in gay and human consciousness. Fox connects Yossi’s grieving history and rebirth with gay love’s healthy future—and does it without the sentimental melancholy of the recent British film Weekend. The scene of Yossi letting down his defenses with Tom uncannily recalls the lyric in “Love, Part II” by Bright Light, Bright Light: “Do what you want with me/Let everybody see/I’m in love again.” With such exuberance, Yossi even surpasses gay movies as admirable as Oslo, August 31st and Ira Sachs’ Keep the Lights On.

In fact, this film peaks during a wonderful seductive pantomime where Yossi and Tom go through a light-switch tug-of-war. “I want to see you!” Tom insists. Somewhere Luchino Visconti is smiling.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair.

In 2012, politics became personal fantasy. Movies weren’t just entertainment but were used to justify escapist (possibly even anti-social) points of view. Critics misread films to suit their politics, but they could do so only because filmmakers were similarly biased. The year’s movies glorified power, just in time for our presidential election (as when Spielberg’s Abe Lincoln replaced honesty with political chicanery). That heartbreaking reconfiguration of history parallels our distorted contemporary art and politics, which indeed was the subject of the year’s most masterly film, Andre Techine’s Unforgivable. Thus the 2012 Better-Than List salutes the movies that preserved aesthetic complexity, humane values and honesty. The best films weren’t necessarily apolitical, but their artistry transcended transitory politics. If you don’t know these movies it’s only because our slanted media constabulary favors crap.

Carole Bouquet in Unforgivable.

Unforgivable > Zero Dark Thirty
Andre Techine tested political correctness against the difficulty of family/social life. It was the most sophisticated and morally challenging film of the year. Its essential politics exposed Kathryn Bigelow’s non-committal and unexceptional genre movie, a “mission accomplished” delusion. Techine showed how “family” and forgiveness are unfinished missions.

The Deep Blue Sea > The Loneliest Planet
Terence Davies’ gay sensitivity to sex roles (and memorable performances by Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale) bested Julia Loktev’s juvenile view of female infidelity and male weakness.

Sacrifice > The Master
Chen Kaige finds the roots of culture in patriarchal responsibility; P.T. Anderson loses culture’s meaning in anti-religious hysteria and high-art folly. Chen also featured superior acting by competing father figures You Ge and Xuegi Wang.

Holy Motors > Cosmopolis
Leos Carax’s dreamy limousine kineticism shamed Cronenberg’s oft-entrancing limousine stage drama. Carax parked and bloomed. Cronenberg parked then harangued.

Les Miserables > Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Tom Hopper and cast preserved the power of pop opera, while Nuri Bilge Ceylan cynically, tediously observed man’s inhumanity to audiences.

Dark Horse > The Turin Horse
Todd Solondz’s modern soap opera steadily, comically bored into our self-deceptions, while Bela Tarr’s highbrow jape steadily bored us.

The Lady > Lincoln
Luc Besson’s bio-pic examined Aung San Suu Kyi’s marital and political commitment, while Spielberg’s unholy marriage to Tony Kushner pushed the cult of personality. Aphorisms vs. Propaganda.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Taken 2 > Zero Dark Thirty
Neveldine-Taylor and Olivier Megaton revealed the post-9/11 zeitgeist in genre tropes, while Bigelow reduced the zeitgeist to an enigmatic comic strip, a “mission accomplished” delusion.

A Thousand Words > Argo
Brian Robbins and Eddie Murphy dared the most personal Hollywood critique since Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife; Ben Affleck trivialized Hollywood accountability.

Damsels in Distress > Compliance
Whit Stillman showed affection for female independence, while a po-faced indie’s misogyny masqueraded as class critique in the year’s worst film.

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

Moonrise Kingdom > Beasts of the Southern Wild
Wes Anderson’s fable of childhood innocence lifted the curse of racist liberal condescension preferred by Benh Zeitlin’s obnoxious, way-late Hurricane Katrina fantasy.

The Skinny > Django Unchained
Patrik Ian-Polk’s gay comedy expanded and enhanced black American life, while Quentin Tarantino treated blacks, whites and the history of slavery to comic violence.

Americano > Amour
Mathieu Demy sourced his family heritage (our cinema heritage), while Michael Haneke celebrated the end of life (and cinema). Joy vs. pessimism.

Detention > The Life of Pi
Joseph Kahn dared trace modern moral confusion to its pop culture source, while Ang Lee offered banal 3D philosophizing.

Chronicle > 21 Jump Street
Josh Trank’s existential teen flick achieved beauty, deeper than the adolescent nonsense of a TV-franchise movie that was the year’s second-worst film.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

How SamJack stole Tarantino’s epithet orgy ‘Django Unchained’

High Information/Low Interpretation in Bigelow’s yellow journalism comic strip

Victoria Mahoney’s debut feature, Yelling to the Sky, updates the literature of writers like Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, J. California Cooper and Nella Larsen, yet it isn’t at all literary. It is entirely cinematic, a presentation of emotion and social circumstance that communicates visually more than verbally. Mahoney started out as an actress, and her filmmaking is sensitive to showing. She emphasizes—through visual illustration and emotional rhythm—a young woman’s gradual understanding of her personal feelings. Here the personal is not only political, it’s also poetic.

Sweetness O’Hara (Zoe Kravitz) lives in a broken home with a mentally frail dark-skinned mother (Antonique Smith), a white, depressed father (Jason Clarke) and an older sister (Yolonda Ross) coping with her own adolescent bad decisions. Sweetness’ story reveals not merely a history of violence but a condition of violence that is physical and psychological, inflicted from outside and internally. Mahoney delves into the pain of light-skinned black women struggling to fit in. This territory has been exclusive to literature (marginalized in Imitation of Life). Before Obama, Sweetness’s identity would be called biracial, but Mahoney starts with a scene of social hostility basic to unspoken tensions in American communities.

How Mahoney achieves this shocking moment of cultural memory (and nightmare) demonstrates that the indie movement rarely ventures beyond politically correct sentiment. She begins with social taboo then burrows into its personal sources and internal effects. Most other indie filmmakers look for mainstream approval by pushing politically correct buttons; Mahoney’s existential cry risks complexity for a healing, not self-congratulatory truth. It’s an encouragingly odd movie—only a literary analogy describes its daring, its poetry. It should remind some of Lorca’s House of Bernardo Alba (particularly Eleo Pomare’s 1967 black ballet version as much as the original play). And moviegoers may recall Dito Montiel’s similarly poetic debut A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a movie where the social and personal were powerfully blended.

Several memorable scenes (a sisterly pietà, a quiet handball court fracas, a trio of girls sashaying) shame the heinous exploitation of Precious and the rank sentimentality of The Help. These experimental, impressionistic scenes knowingly combine rebellion with self-destruction, a caring sense of a girl’s difficult maturation and the ache of imperfect parenthood. I also applaud Mahoney’s tasty musical themes (including a haunting Joni Mitchell original and remake) and her casting of Kravitz (Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet’s daughter), who has natural ease onscreen. Here, she unavoidably accesses Bonet’s sullen, unpredictable temperament, which, like it or not, is part of our cultural awareness—and part of the valuable insight Mahoney brings to the screen.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Bill Murray as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson

What’s going on here outdoes the hero-worship of films like The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, The King’s Speech; there’s a new cynicism that accepts the failings of political leaders, adjusting public disappointment to decadent approval–uncannily like the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton at the recent Democratic National Convention; his all-is-forgiven adoration where a former sex-scoundrel President’s absolution led the way to a current President’s consecration.