What I Peeped: Day Nine

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, UK): Why do I so hate films about causes with which I’m sociopolitically sympathetic? Because I hate being told what I already know? Because I’m physically allergic to hamhanded polemic? Because I’m just a grump malcontent? Sarah Gavron’s tale of an oppressed Bengladeshi woman in a miserable arranged marriage in miserable old London hits every single one of these point and others besides. D.p. Robbie Ryan knows how to craft a sensual, colorful image, but screenwriters Laura Jones and Abi Morgan (adapting a Monica Ali novel) are pure hambone. It’s not enough for Tannishtha Chatterjee’s meek protagonist to be stuck in an arranged marriage; her hubby must also be tubby, arrogant, selfish, pump her for loveless coitus and force her to trim his corns. (And he snores!) Of course, Brick Lane is just setting it up so that this louse can become sympathetic at the 11th hour, a more reputable man than Chatterjee’s dashing young afairee who turns into one of those angry Muslim activists after 9/11 mucks up racial relations. Pure ew.

You the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden) (pictured): As usual, I was right: Roy Andersson’s follow-up to his absurdist masterpiece Songs From the Second Floor (rent it!) is if not also an absurdist masterpiece, then at least really, really damn good - easily my favorite of the festival. Like Songs, Living consists of a series of impossibly deadpan black-out sketches about life and misery in modern day Sweden. Some of them have a classical comic structure to them, as one about a guy’s dream involving an unlikely cause for capital punishment. Others are just pure non-sequitur. Others still have a nutty but genuinely moving undertow to them. The mix of recurring characters, comic set-ups and dreams is reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and Andersson, in only his second feature, exudes a similar mastery over his film - it’s effortlessly melancholic and hilarious, and even has a finale reminiscent of some of Buñuel’s later work. Just make sure you arrive on time (or remember the details of first scene - thanks, Jer!). Otherwise the finale makes not much of the sense.

I was going to finish the day with the awesomely named Timecrimes (the long-awaited sequel to the MST3K classic Time Chasers?). But I felt the need for a slight break from my three-films-a-day average, and besides, on draft Leffe beckoned. I’ll get back to being hardcore this weekend.

Interview: Son of Rambow filmmakers Nick Goldsmith and Garth Jennings

Known together as Hammer & Tongs, the British team of Nick Goldsmith and Garth Jennings (pictured, left to right), like many before (and after) them, got their foot in the door with music videos for the likes of Fatboy Slim, Blur, Supergrass and R.E.M. (They did the latter’s brilliant “Imitation of Life” clip.) Goldsmith (who produces) and Jennings (who writes and directs) graduated to movies with the daunting task of bringing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to the screen. But their follow-up is radically different: the small-budgeted comedy Son of Rambow, follows a pair of kids in the ‘80s who, spurred on by First Blood, try to make their own version on a clunky camcorder. Rambow arrives not long after Be Kind Rewind and as a movie about three kids who did a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the ‘80s is rolling into pre-production. PW sat down with Jennings and Goldsmith - who joked about the British interpretation of the Inquirer headline “Nutter Passes Gun Law” - as they appeared at a screening of Rambow at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

Though it premiered at Sundance last year, Son of Rambow is coming out as this wave of films about people making lo-fi remakes of Hollywood fare is really taking off. Why do you think that is?

Garth Jennings: “I think it’s just one of those things. We started writing this eight years ago and we never intended to make something that was part of a scene. There were lots of people growing up in our generation who had similar experiences. If we hadn’t written [Son of Rambow] someone else would have.”

Nick Goldsmith: “Also, at its heart it’s about friendship and the possibilities when you’re a kid, when there’s no fear of consequences and anything’s possible - that wonderful innocence and naiveté we have back then. It just so happens that it all comes through the process of making a film.”

Jennings: “We were trying to capture how great it was for us to be 11 or 12 years old. We didn’t feel limited in any way. We didn’t think anything we did was stupid. It was a lovely, free, exhilarating memory. It gives you quite a lovely feeling. If it was just about them making a movie, it would be a very boring film.”

Is Son of Rambow at all autobiographical?

Jennings: “I used to make films when I was a kid and the first one was inspired by having seen First Blood. But very quickly we realized this was a mere starting point, because my actual life was not that interesting. Whereas the kid next door was a Plymouth Brethren [roughly the British equivalent of the Amish]. It felt like if you took these ideas and you moved them to that kid’s house, we could make a movie that did capture all those feelings we were trying to capture.”

When making the film, had you heard about the kids who remade Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Jennings: “Not till we were well into the scriptwriting process. But again, I wasn’t surprised to find that people wound up having similar experiences.

By choosing First Blood, were you trying to make a satirical point about kids latching onto a film that has sociopolitical themes they don’t remotely understand?

Jennings: “No, it was purely because that was my experience. It was the first film I ever saw that was not meant for my age group. I saw it and was inspired to make my first home movie with my friends. We didn’t chose First Blood because it was a great film. Rambo wasn’t like the other heroes. He just had a knife and a stick and he had to take on 200 men. It’s deeply impressive when you’re that age, especially because he was running around in a forest. It was very easy to emulate. Besides, there wasn’t an easier way to become Rambo. All you had to do was take your tie off and wrap it around your head.”

Goldsmith: “When we were kids First Blood was just a guy who was brilliant in the woods and could kill things with his bare hands and eat things that made him puke and all that stuff. The fact that it was about a Vietnam Vet and how they were not being accepted into society - that went completely over our heads.”

Jennings: “This is a country reacting against a man who represents a war they’re ashamed of - we just didn’t get that.”

Goldsmith: “He could cauterize his own wound! That’s what we got!”

Has Sly Stallone seen it?

Jennings: “He saw it in January and he loved it. He really loved it and he sent us an unbelievably lovely message. The fact that there’s a Rambo movie coming out within months of ours is ridiculous, because we started writing this eight years ago when there was no chance of there ever being another Rambo film.”

Did Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy make it easier to make Son of Rambow?

Jennings: “No, it made it worse. It was hard enough beforehand because you were doing a film with no stars. But after Hitchhiker’s - number one in five countries and technically very successful - we were proposing a film that was utterly different. That didn’t make good business sense. If we had done another film with robots that would have been fine. People weren’t concerned with the content. They were concerned with the budget. They were like, ‘Will there be lasers?’”

Goldsmith: “In a way Hitchhiker’s closed a lot of doors for financing on Son of Rambow. People see you as studio people now and you’re not taken seriously by some of the independent financiers. We thought foolishly that we’d finish Hitchhiker’s and that we’d just call someone and start Son of Rambow. We had at least a year of rejections before we got financing.”

What was the experience of making a film the size of Hitchhiker’s, especially coming off of music videos and commercials?

Jennings: “The short answer is everyone told us it would be different and we realized it wasn’t. The mechanics of making a film or telling a story is the same whether you’re doing an indie movie or a big budget movie. You’re always running out of time, there’s always something broken so you have to do something else, you’ve always trying to get that magical thing you’ve had in your head all these years onto the screen. It’s the amount of people that’s different. That’s all.”

Goldsmith and Jennings, who are very nice, will be present for tonight’s screening of Son of Rambow at 7pm at the Ritz 5. It also screens tomorrow, Saturday April 12, at 2:30pm at the Bridge.

Picks, Pans, All That - Day Nine: Friday, April 11

The Good
One of the PFF’s best, New Jerseyite Greg Kohs’ doc Song Sung Blue spends eight years chronicling the seriously roller-coaster-like life of Milwaukee’s Lightning and Thunder, a couple who bring impersonations of Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline together. Not long after Eddie Vedder brings them on-stage for a Milwaukee Pearl Jam appearance, Thunder loses her leg in one of the freakiest accents I’ve ever heard. And that’s only the beginning. More than just insane drama, it’s a chilling reflection on the balance required to succeed in art and life. (Fri., April 11, 9:30pm. Prince Music Theater.)

Also: Deeply confusing and perversely bizarre, Jiang Wen’s The Sun Also Rises (2:30pm, The Bridge) is amazing stuff, and one can read my elaboration here. Children of Men genius Alfonso Cuarón is linked to two of the day’s directorial debuts: The Year of the Nail (4:45pm, Ritz 5) is from his young son Jonás, and tells the acutely observed bittersweet tale of an impossible romance through still photos à la La Jetée; and Deficit (7:45pm, Ritz East) is his Y Tu Mama Tambien’s Gael Garcia Bernal, who also stars as a rich kid throwing a fateful fête for high school graduation. Soon to be released theatrically, Son of Rambow (7pm, Ritz 5), from the team Hammer & Tongs, wholly atones for their Hithchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Movie, relating the tale of kids in the ‘80s making their proto-Sweded version of First Blood. Carlos Saura’s visually striking and baldly theatrical Portuguese music film Fados (9:30pm, The Bridge) is also well-worth your time.

The Not So Good
The Swiss That Day (3pm, Ritz East) strands Bruno Todeschini and Natacha Régnier in a by-the-books fractured look at a family torn apart three-ways. Directed by Hana Makhmalbaf, the daughter of Iranian legend Mohsen (Gabbeh, Kandahar), Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame follows a button-cute little girl as she’s abused and oppressed by men, boys and teachers; it aims for classic Iranian cinema but succeeds only in crafting one of the least subtle metaphors in the history of the metaphor. Regular and muse to Taiwanese minimalist master Tsai Ming-liang (The River, What Time is it There?), Lee Kang-sheng shows with Help Me Eros (5:30pm, Ritz East) what a really bad Tsai Ming-liang film would look like, if Tsai Ming-liang actually made really bad movies. Which he doesn’t.

Not seen
I have it on good faith that the Estonian Autumn Ball (12pm, The Bridge), while a bit of a rough going portrait of people in a rundown hotel, is quite strong. The Take (12:15pm, Ritz East) has the PFF-fêted John Leguizamo as an armored car guard shot and left for dead. From the acclaimed director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop (230pm, Ritz 5) focuses on another low-wage American worker, this time a 12-year old Dominican-American who takes up odd jobs. PW music critic Doug Wallen wanted me to tell you about the awesomeness of Kenny (2:45pm, Ritz East), an Australian comedy about a septic tank worker with an accent so thick it requires subtitles. Frank and Cindy (5pm, Ritz East) shares with the above-mentioned Song Sung Blue the roller-coaster life of a married musician. The new doc (deep breath) Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed in the Mountains (4:45pm, International House) is a detailed account of the crashed 1972 Uruguayan rugby team related in the movie Alive. Sure, it’s opening next Friday, but catch the Jet Li-Jackie Chan team-up The Forbidden Kingdom tonight if you want (7pm, Prince Music Theater). His follow-up to the absurdist masterpiece Songs From the Second Floor, Roy Andersson’s You the Living (7:15pm, The Bridge) is no doubt twenty kinds of awesome. And Robert Englund pops up in Jack Brook: Monster Slayer (9:30pm, Ritz East).

Coming soon! An interview with Son of Rambow team Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith.

What I Peeped: Day Eight

The End (Nicola Collins. UK): My mistake: turns out Nicola Collins’ sit-down with a cadre of retired East End gangsters wasn’t shot on impossibly grainy 16mm - just B&W video that was beaten up in post à la Grindhouse. Either way, it radiates pure menace, a feeling that’s a touch misleading as Collins’ film is neither sensationalistic nor teeming with the absolute worst things you’ve ever heard. Instead it’s well-rounded and non-judgmental, which I suppose you could argue was even more disturbing given the horrid shit these blokes have done. One of Collins’ interviewees is her own dear dad, and the rest are his friends - people Collins has basically known all her life and who, for the record, only hurt fellow villains, not innocent bystanders. Their frank - but not tooooo frank, for obvious reasons - accounts are wisely rooted in class and life in a violent part of London. It could stand to be longer than 74 minutes and I wish it delved even more into their rationalizations for what they’ve done to live what looks like a life of middle class comfort.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad (Eddy Moretti & Suroosh Alvi, Canada/USA): The title, as it turns out, is slightly misleading: there is no heavy metal in Baghdad, even for the film’s subjects, thrash metal band Acrassicauda. Found by the filmmakers at the outbreak of war, the band - who covered the likes of Metallica, Megadeth and Iron Maiden in addition to writing their own tunes - soon after split for a multitude of reasons, chief among them being the destruction of their rehearsal space by a scud missile and their inability to, you know, actually walk around in their native country. Heavy Metal checks in with them a couple years later when they’ve one by one decamped for Syria where, as refugees with no connections and no family, they arguably stand even less of a chance. Though it begs for a sequel, the film gains much from its wry outlook - the filmmakers marveling at the near platoon of armed bodyguards that follow them when they’re shooting in Baghdad - and its unassuming verité, whose home movie-ness snowballs into something truly, tragically gutting.

Violent Saturday (1955, Richard Fleischer, USA): Recently dug up from deep within the insanely prolific rap sheet of animator Max Fleischer son Richard (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, made for his pop’s arch-nemesis, no less), this ‘scope heist pic is really only a quarter bank heist pic, maybe less. A proto-Altman survey, it lumps the invading hoodlums (among them Lee Marvin, introduced stomping on a kid’s hand) in with the rest of the town, who aren’t so decent either. (The exception is a remote Amish family lorded over by - yes! - Ernest Borgnine.) In his introduction the great Irv Slifkin described this as “Reservoir Dogs meets Twin Peaks meets Peyton Place,” which is pretty accurate shorthand for what goes on. It’s a strange film, starting off as a portrait of pure rot and then abruptly turning into a rumination on chance and chaos in the universe.

Picks, Pans, All That - Day Eight: Thursday, April 10

The Good
Thanks to Spellbound (which, like many evil trendsetters before it, is actually quite terrific), niche documentaries have adopted an increasingly tiresome template: meet the participants in the first half, watch them in some ultimately irrelevant competition in the second. So my hat is off to Erich Weiss’ Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, a doc on the art of tattooing that’s strictly old school. Weiss explores the artform - all while making a strong case that it is an artform - through the tale of pioneer Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins. The film’s gallery of aging tattoo icons - among them gravel-voiced Philadelphian Eddie Funk - relate a walking contradiction: On one hand Collins was a right-wing blowhard and bigot; on the other he was a man of culture and high artistic principles who helped bring elaborate Japanese designs to the States. It’s a transcendently salty experience and, more important, it only screens once. (9:30pm, Prince Music Theater)

Also: A rave for Alexandra (2:30pm, Ritz East) here, even if it is being screened on video. The Mugger (5pm, Ritz East), from Argentina, is an intense, succinct account of an aging thief that suggests what a genre film from Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta, The Child) would look like. Not, sadly, a revival of Werner Herzog’s great 1971 doc of the same name, Fata Morgana (7:15pm, International House) has some perdy Moroccan vistas but its tale of a pretty young couple lost in the desert and at the hands of an ambiguously-motivated stranger (Betty Blue’s Jean-Hughes Anglade) is eventually impatient-making on both sides of the screen.

Not So Good
A rare exported film from Uruguay, The Pope’s Toilet (7:15pm, Ritz 5) takes a satirical, anticlerical set-up - the impoverished trying to get rich off a visit from John Paul II - and only winds up proving that light and nearly declawed comedies know no borders. Where’s Luis Buñuel when you need him? Pistoleros (9:30pm, Ritz East) is Guy Ritchie in Copenhagen. Epitaph (9:45pm, Ritz East), from South Korea, offers up another fractured narrative, this time with vengeful ghosts and roughly ten thousand big plot twists.

And those I haven’t seen (yet) but which possess buzz and/or look promising
Phawker’s Dan Buskirk raved to me about the Mexican Bad Habits (2:30pm, Ritz East), which features interconnecting stories involving eating disorders and one seriously torrential downpour (see above). I also have it on good faith that the Estonian Autumn Ball (4:45pm, Ritz 5), while a bit of a rough going portrait of people in a rundown hotel, is quite strong. University of the Arts presents its animation program with Cartoonucopia (4:45pm, Prince Music Theater). The End (5pm, International House) sits down with some troublingly candid former East London gangsters, all of them shot in impossibly grainy 16mm. John Leguizamo picks up his Artistic Achievement Award in tandem with a screening of his new film The Take (7pm, Prince Music Theater). The doc Heavy Metal in Baghdad (7:15pm, International House) is about just that. Finally, there’s the first of two screenings Richard Fleischer’s newly reevaluated 1955 heist pic Violent Saturday (9:30pm, Ritz 5 - and also screening, you guessed it, Saturday), which shows not just the thieves but the rot of the town in which they’re stationed. The drool-worthy cast includes Victor Mature, Lee Marvin, Sylvia Sidney and Ernest Motherfucking Borgnine.

What I Peeped: Day Seven

I.O.U.S.A. (Patrick Creadon, USA): Last seen with a doc that could barely drag its subject to feature length (the crossword-fixated Wordplay), Patrick Creadon now tackles a subject that requires more than a mere hour and a half: the ever-skyrocketing national debt. Creadon’s, and most of the interviewees’, reaction is a shellshocked but bemused realization that we’re fucked, which is demonstrated through explanations that could charitably be dubbed Freakanomics-lite. The cut shown wasn’t final, but I hope Creadon puts more than just a spit-shine on his film. Organization is sketchy, with nearly half the movie devoted to fancy graphics that somewhat condescendingly explain the history of this and that, or try to convey the apocalyptic size of what America owes. I never thought I’d say this, but here’s a documentary that definitely needs more talking heads.

Dust (Hartmut Bitomsky, Germany): Any fears that this “metaphysical documentary” on the sooty substance would offer up New Age hooey right out of Bill and Ted (“Dust. Wind. Dude.”) were quickly dispelled, as it turns out Dust is about…dust! As in actual, icky-to-the-touch dust! German director Hartmut Bitomsky isn’t afraid to be extremely dry, interviewing wordy scientists on the stuff whose eyes-glazing-over abilities are no doubt exacerbated by the fact that they’re in subtitles. (And even further exacerbated by the way the shots often slowly pan away from the speakers, as though the camera itself had also grown a touch bored.) But there’s an unmistakable playful streak, as Dust examines the stuff from just about every possible angle. Along with scientists there are OCD housewives fighting an existential battle against dust, film experts who discuss the way dust poisons and destroys celluloid and a narrator who sporadically pipes up on the general mindblowingness of the subject. Perversely quotidian, Dust gave me the vague suspicion that it was partly fucking with us.

The “Mystery Film”, as I discovered shortly after expressing ignorance on this very blog, turned out to be The Wackness (Jonathan Levine, USA), to which I decided what the hell. In case you haven’t heard, The Wackness is the Sundance hit where Ben Kingsley gets to second base with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth. That kind of daredevil, attention-getting, cynically calculated tactic is the film’s very lifeblood. Indeed, a significant chunk of the movie is dedicated to a not-unentertaining game of “What really crazy ass thing can we get Gandhi to do next?” I wouldn’t dream of revealing too many of the surprises (though see if you can guess which of the Wu-Tang Clan he shares a tête-à-tête with). Suffice to say Kingsley looks like he’s having the time of his life, with his broad New Yawk accent and gut-busting long yuppie locks. The onetime Sexy Beast plays a bong-smoking Upper East Side therapist who winds up befriending one of his clients: perpetually stoned drug dealer Josh Peck, who also has the hots for Kingsley’s stepdaughter (Juno’s Olivia “Honest to blog?” Thurlby). The film is set in 1994 and so, alas, are its sexual politics: Thurlby turns out to be a bored rich bitch who snatches Peck up for some summer lovin’ - very much the daughter of Famke Janssen, herself a one-dimensional ice queen mere inches from divorcing poor Sir Ben. Fortunately it’s saved by its generally endearing actors: Peck is convincingly dopey while Kingsley makes his bored, self-destructive, lonely shrink quite affecting. More to the point, The Wackness is just flat-out stoned on both weed and great mid-’90s hip hop. I tried to play it cool and resist but frequently succumbed, particularly when it deigned to have a cheerfully blitzed Kingsley doing magic marker graffiti on one of Rudy Giuliani’s bus stops, joint dangling from lips.

Picks, Pans, All That - Day (Ulp!) Seven: Wednesday, April 9

The Good
One of two all-so-timely election-themed docs in the festival (the other being Holler Back, playing Saturday), Electile Dysfunction (7pm, Prince Music Theater) comes to us from locals Mary Patel, of the Philadelphia City Paper, and Joe Barber. (An awkward apology, by the way, for a bizarre mistake in the print edition of PW where I claimed they were, er, married. You got me.) Though it’s more breadth than depth, Dysfunction is quite verily filled with breadth, hitting most conceivable notes on election-related woes: how politicking has ruined the democratic ideal; how ads are even more manipulative than you thought possible; how the media and public have grown to have the attention span of a goldfish, et al. The extremely impressive array of interviewees sometimes leads to questionable appearances - why Bruce Vilanch? But this may become the definitive 101 on the election process and its countless ills.

Also: A mixed-but-kinda-positive response to Mister Foe (2:15pm, The Bridge) here, a solid cap for The Other Boy (5pm, Ritz 5) here and a foaming-at-the-mouth rave for Phoebe in Wonderland (7pm, Bryn Mawr Film Institute) here, which is strong enough to warrant a trip up to Bryn Mawr for Center City-ites. Also mostly worth your while is Eye in the Sky (7:15pm, Ritz 5), a Hong Kong surveillance saga that does a fumbling but earnest imitation of Paul Greengrass’ shaky-cam/quicksilver editing style.

The Not So Good
The Swiss That Day (5pm, Ritz East) strands Bruno Todeschini and Natacha Régnier in a by-the-books fractured look at a family torn apart three-ways. Epitaph (7:15pm, Ritz East), from South Korea, offers up another fractured narrative, this time with vengeful ghosts and roughly ten thousand big plot twists. John Woo produced the Chinese Blood Brothers (9:45pm, The Bridge), which pays back the favor by doing a so-so homage to classic Woo, if way short on both the bloodletting and especially the over-the-top melodrama.

And those I haven’t seen (yet) but which possess buzz and/or look promising
The French In the Arms of My Enemy (2:30pm, Ritz East) is a “thinking person’s action film” about two sets of brothers crossing paths in the early 19th century. The metaphysical-minded Dust (7:30pm, Ritz East) - which traces everything on the planet back to dust to show how we’re all connected, man - could either be enlightening or the latest bunch of What the Bleep Do We Know-style hooey. As the name suggests, the shorts program The Liberty Bell Tolls For Thee (7:15pm, International House) is all local, and part of the Festival of Independents. And try as I might, I can’t find anyone who knows what on earth tonight’s Mystery Film (9:30pm, Prince Music Theater) is. But even if I could, my lips would be sealed. Maybe.

What I Peeped: Day Six

I Just Didn’t Do It (Masayui Suo, Japan): Just as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu let you experience the near-real-time demise of a sickly man shuffled through Romania’s health care system, so does Suo’s insanely patient drama let you experience Japan’s criminal court system, what with its 99.9% conviction rate. After being mistakenly tagged for groping a 15-year old on a packed-to-the-gills subway car, a young man (Ryo Kase) insists on his innocence, even when a quick guilty plea would send him back onto the streets with a slap on the wrist. And so begins a lengthy and expensive trial, the joke being that innocence in Japanese courts is partly based on whether or not you actually plead innocent. The defense at one point states that the occurrence, which happened quickly and confusingly, requires a “deliberate and calm analysis.” That’s exactly what you get, with occasional slips into polemic (the judge is caught sleeping during final statements, etc.), but mostly remains a simulation of the frustration of a long trial, where the same already -answered issues - the jacket caught in the door, the not-terribly-incriminating pornography found in his apartment, why he got off at the wrong stop, etc. - crop up over and over again like weeds.

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia): The latest from Russia’s experimental (or sometimes just plain gimmicky) Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, The Sun) is his Statement on War, with a frail old lady (Galina Vishnevskaya) visiting her grandson at his base in the midst of the Chechen war. But apart from some unsubtle symbolism (Vishnevskaya is Mother Russia, looking out of place in war) and a couple not-so-offhand inquiries on why humans tussle so, it’s closer to a reverie than agitprop. Though Vishnevskaya, one of her homeland’s premiere opera divas, doesn’t sing - in fact, rarely rises above a barely detectable gutteral mumble - Alexandra remains very musical. Sokurov covers the film, nearly head to toe, in mournful classical music (mostly Mahler, I believe) and the film, with its minimal plotting and lightly forceful message, feels like a Mahler symphony - steady but bottomlessly mournful.

Secrecy (Peter Galison & Robb Moss, USA): Calm, collected and not entirely partisan, this doc traces the history of classified information to its origins in the 1940s to its troubling rise post-9/11. Despite assembling talking heads from both sides of the debate, there’s never a doubt where Galison and Moss’s allegiances lie; one operative seems on hand chiefly to fill the stereotype of government officials as latent fascists. (Does this windbag say something to the effect that he supports a free press but wishes they weren’t so darned free? Sure does!) But even if Secrecy could stand to be more of a debate, it’s priceless all the same, asking troubling questions and often getting troubling answers. The disturbing, though oddly refreshing, frankness of ex-CIA Jerusalem bureau chief Melissa Boyle Mahle particularly raises the hair on the back of the neck, even when she’s not remarking that the real tragedy of Abu Ghraib was that the participants weren’t torturing people for intelligence purposes. Most of all Secrecy makes a gung-ho stand for accountability in government, if not for moral and ethical reasons then at least for practical ones. As one talking head notes, it was government secrecy that prevented people from connecting the dots before 9/11. After all, he says, there weren’t enough dots to connect.

Tomorrow (hopefully): In the Arms of My Enemy, I.O.U.S.A., Dust and whatever turns out be the “Mystery Film.”

Picks, Pans, All That - Day Six: Tuesday, April 8

The Good
I have a rave for Scott Hicks’ Philip Glass doc Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (2:15pm, Ritz East) here and a more hesitant plug for the Indian religious drama Dharm (230pm, Ritz East) here. The remote Chinese province mood piece Night Train (5pm, Ritz East) orchestrates a potential affair between a glum executioner and the husband of a woman she offed, though any hoary coincidences are more or less atoned through the film’s hushed and wintry visuals. Directed by Japanese explorer-cum-documentarian Kazuya Yamada, Puujee (5pm, International House) locates a fascinating, photogenic little girl living in on a tiny farm in remotest Mongolia, though it very nearly overdoses on ethnography - the film oscillates between highest verisimilitude and just plain boring. Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story (9:30pm, I-House) provides the great film director/gimmick meister with a bouncy (but not too reverent) 101, and if aesthetically it’s no different from TV, firsthand accounts from the likes of John Waters and Joe Dante more or less compensate.

The Not So Good
A film with a deaf protagonist that replicates the experience of being deaf, Universal Signs (4:45pm, Ritz East) also happens to be a wan redemption saga, with some uncomfortably unsubtle plugs for the glories of getting your mean ass back in church. Hopefully the film print of Romania’s California Dreamin’ (6pm, Prince Music Theater) finally made it in after Friday’s disastrous screening; my heavily mixed reaction can be found here. The dystopian Exodus (7:15pm, The Bridge) is a severely troubled updating of the story of Moses that I eviscerate here. Sorry about yesterday - turns out today is the last time to catch the super-light East Berlin comedy Mrs. Ratcliffe’s Revolution (4:45pm, Ritz East). And the Thai Sperm (9:30pm, The Bridge) is vaguely likable sub-Troma nonsense, featuring some of the ugliest CGI since Little Nicky.

And those I haven’t seen (yet) but which possess buzz and/or look promising
Last seen with the fluffy Shall We Dance? (later remade with JLo), Masayui Suo goes serious with the well-reviewed I Just Didn’t Do It (2:15pm, The Bridge), an epic takedown of Japan’s court system that’s put to the test when a boy accused of a groping persists in exclaiming (altogether now) “I Just Didn’t Do It.” Russian experimentalist Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, The Sun) returns with Alexandra (7:15pm, Ritz East), a less out-there than usual film about Chechnya. City Paper’s Sam Adams raves highly about Secrecy (9:15pm, Prince Music Theater), an Errol Morris-style doc that unflinchingly examines the fact that more government information than ever before is being labeled as classified. And The End (9:30pm, Ritz East) sits down with some troublingly candid former East London gangsters, all of them shot in impossibly grainy 16mm.

What I Peeped: Day Five

Deadline U.S.A. (1952, Richard Brooks, USA): “Windy, self-righetous newspaper film,” sez Dave Kehr. Sure…but not till the final reel. Philadelphia native Brooks evolved into a purveyor of middlebrow issue movies like The Blackboard Jungle, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood and Looking For Mr. Goodbar. But this early into his career he apparently still knew the value of pure entertainment, or at least was suitably in awe of star Humphrey Bogart, who chews scenery and much else besides as your stereotypical newspaper editor. Upon learning that his New York paper has been sold to someone who wishes to dissolve it, Bogie decides to spend its last gasp trying to nail a local mob boss. The finale is a battering ram of monologues on the importance of journalism, whipping out not just a courtroom soliloquy but also an elderly immigrant who weeps through a spiel about how Bogie’s paper taught her to read, learn about America, yada yada. Happily, goodwill has already been earned and then some. With solid work from Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter, Ed Begley and Jim Backus.

Afghan Muscles (Andreas Dalsgaard, Denmark): Starts out as the gayest decidedly non-gay film since 300 - bronze-oiled gym bunnies clad in only Speedos flexing in front of an all-male crowd who sometimes actually throw out cash money, all in one of the most homophobic regions of the planet - but quickly turns into a perceptive doc that gets a lot done in only 58 minutes. Following around Hamid, a bodybuilder from a rural Afghan village en route to an all-Asian competition, Afghan Muscles dissects the mentality that values a powerful bod while tethering it to a genuinely moving story that finds its subject getting one serious humbling.

Mister Foe (David Mackenzie, UK): When did David Mackenzie grow a sense of humor? The Scots director’s last two films, Young Adam and Asylum, were dour, humorless, glum, pretentious portraits of antiheroes with opaque self-destructive streaks ripped straight from Albert Camus. If Mister Foe is the sell-out, then here’s to whoring out one’s artistic dignity. The increasingly great Jamie Bell plays a rich boy voyeur weirdo who heads out to big bad Edinburgh, where he finds a hot young thang (Sophia Myles) who looks like his dead mom. If this were Mackenzie of only three years ago Bell’s condition would remain oblique and the whole thing would end in murder. But no: Bell’s grieving for his mom, all while dad (Ciarán Hinds) has married a gold digger (Clare Forlani). The film even winds up playing down the whole creepy Oedipal/Vertigo aspect almost completely. Strip Mackenzie of his artistic pretenses and there’s not much there, frankly, and even Bell’s freakier psychological tics receive some sentimental treatment. But Mackenzie’s also a clever lad and Mister Foe benefits from a fiendish sense of humor and the non-stop presence of Bell, who somehow remains likable without dialing down the intensity. Even when he’s smeared makeup on his face and sports a skunk-skin cap, he’s an okay guy.

The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wien, China): For the second night in a row the day’s last film made just about no damn sense to me. This time I have an even better excuse: you try to tell me what’s going on in the film’s four intersecting stories, much less what’s happening from manic moment to manic moment. Set in the far-off provinces during the end of China’s Cultural Revolution, The Sun Also Rises has nothing at all to do with Ernest Hemingway. Even director Jiang Wen’s style is the seeming inverse of the author’s famous terseness, instead adopting a style that’s akin to a wind-up toy zipping around a room with no direction at all - just a need to move. The stories involve a young man dealing with his newly insane mother, a professor accused of public groping and a teacher who takes revenge on the young man from the first story. But narrative is so not Jiang’s concern that you could be forgive for getting lost in the film’s many absurd highlights - talking birds, a dirty prank call for the ages, a strange scene where a guy gets lost in a room of hung-up white sheets only to walk square into a white wall - and the way it blithely, refreshingly obliterates the traditional wax museum way with portraying the past. Ten viewings may not make the film make any more sense, but then, sense can be pretty overrated anyway.

Tomorrow (in…some likelihood): I Just Didn’t Do It, Alexandra and Secrecy.