Nebraska

I saw Alexander Payne's elegaic "Nebraska" (2013) in Rochester, Minnesota with a small crowd of viewers not unlike many of the people portrayed in the film. In the Men's Room, two old guys stood at the urinals commenting on the film: "Didn't spend much money on sets, did they?" one guy said. His friend replied: "Nope, they didn't." This commentary is a typicl example of a backhanded Midwestern compliment -- the men's words were a tribute to the film's astounding realism. Indeed, in many ways, "Nebraska" carries the concept of realism in film to its logical, and, even, faintly absurd conclusion. Payne's actors seem to be local people and their language, at least as scripted (delivery is another matter) is pitch-perfect to the way that people talk on the high plains on Montana and rural Nebraska. The locations where the film was shot are precisely accurate to the small-towns dying in the heart of the great mid-continental prairies and the interiors, mostly bars and cafes and little houses decorated in a style that was archaic when I grew up in the early sixties are so exactly evocative as to be stunning. The audience at the screening that I attended, mostly elderly people (I count myself among their number) left the theat er in a sort of benumbed silence: I imagine that this was how people left showings of Lumiere brothers "Actualities" in 1896 -- amazed, that is, at seeing a reality that they understood and have experienced portrayed with loving precision on the screen. The ancient audience that supposedly leapt with fear at moving images of a train pulling into the station probably was frightened, not by the picture of the locomotive, but by the peculiar melancholy that we experience when we see ourselves and our peers and our world frozen in time when projected through a strip of celluloid -- the experience is a confrontation with our mortality: we understand that what we have seen will never change nor will it age, while, of course, we are always dying and will perish, leaving behind nothing but our shadows flickering on the screen. Of course, my reaction to the film is probably particularly intense because the movie's characters are specific and integral to my own life: my parents, who would be the age of the main actors in "Nebraska," were born and raised in central Nebraska and, when I was little, I often visited the little village where they had once lived and where our relatives were still farming -- even in the sixties and seventies, those little towns were terribly lonely and doomed, filled with old people too proud and stubborn to leave, but devoid of anyone young. If you had brains and ambition, you fled those places and left them to the kind of losers that populate Payne's film, at least as it depicts the next generation after the sons of theold pioneers and founding entrepreneurs. Some aspects of Payne's film strike so close to home that it is difficult for me to comment on them: a scene, for instance, in which an old woman provides a profane tour of an austere small-town graveyard, commenting particularly on the dead children and the traffic fatalities, replicates with extraordinary exactitude my own experiences -- elderly female relatives, usually a grandmother or an aunt, strolling from gravestone to gravestone, all the while providing ribald and tragic commentary on the deceased, a sort of perverse "Spoon River Anthology", and a catalog of scandal, calamity, and tragedy that always struck me as both tragic and, vaguely humorous. In fact, the cemetery is identical in all of its features to the place where my father is buried in Albion, Nebraska. "Nebraska" is a road picture. An old man, played by Bruce Dern, believes that he has won a sweepstakes and will be paid a million dollars if he can reach Lincoln, Nebraska. With his youngest son Davy driving, the old man, a lifelong drunk, sets off for Nebraska. Most of the narrative takes place in a tiny, desolate town called Hawthorne, the old man's ancestral home, and the location of an impromptu family reunion. The people in Hawthorne believe that the old alcoholic has, in fact, won the sweepstakes and this brings out both the best and worst in the villagers. Dern's character is dying and possibly suffering from dementia but he is stubborn and insists upon completing the trip to Lincoln. In a little office, a receptionist gives the old man a hat that says "PRIZE WINNER." The old man's son, Davy, asks the receptionist if this happens often -- that is, do people make the pilgrimage to Lincoln to claim prizes that, of course, they haven't really won? "Sometimes," the woman says. "Mostly old people. Does he have Alzheimer's?" "No," Davy says, "he just believes what people tell him." This exchange epitomizes the brilliant screenplay -- many films would stage the scene in the sweepstakes office with outrage and the screenwriter might devise a lengthy, and poetic, speech about trust and honesty and the guilelessness of the "Greatest Generation." Payne eschews this for a Midwestern and laconic response that is stoic and all the more devastating for its Nebraskan understatement. At the extreme limits of realism, a film like this will be tested, and evaluated, by its audience in exactly those terms -- it is hyper-real and, accordingly, any mis-step, any note of falsity, is weirdly amplified by the fact that most of the picture feels completely authentic. A couple of scenes are too aggressively emphatic -- this includes a sequence in which Davy, the son, punches a small-town bully in a bar. The dialogue is so precisely Nebraskan that it seems a shame that many of the players, all of them drawn from the small-towns where the movie was shot, aren't quite up to the challenge of authentically delivering their lines -- many of the bit parts speak like Community College actors, in voices just a tad bit too chirpy and over-inflected. There are several dissolves that belong in another film -- three dissolves in the pre-title sequence that felt subtly wrong to me and two dissolves that I thought were too showy, and too "filmic" in an otherwise almost perfect sequence in which the family members visit the old home farm. The ending of the movie is slightly contrived, although it feels satisfying -- I just wonder if the sense of satisfaction is honestly earned. My daughter and several other audience members didn't like the fact that the film is shot in very controlled and beautiful black and white. I am a member of dying generation of cinesthetes who feel that black and white adds to the realism of a film. To me, black and white is not subtracting something from the image, but, in fact, adding an additional element, a kind of warrant of photographic truth. But I must concede that many intelligent filmgoeres today experience black and white as a deprivation, as removing something significant from the image. I will defend Payne's black and white with two arguments. First, the black and white is justified by the way that it causes us to experience Will Forte's performance as Davy in the film. Forte is a famous comedian and well-known from an extended stint on Saturday Night Live. Here he is cast against type as a sad-sack loser, a man whose huge melancholy eyes tell an indelible story of defeat and failure. In color, the actor would be Will Forte -- this is because we have always seen and imagined this comedian in color. But in black and white Forte's features (and this is true of Bruce Dern and Stacy Keach, playing the menacing small-town bully) don't stand out -- he doesn't seem to be a movie star or a celebrity; his hangdog expression and drooping face fit in with the other faces that the film so lovingly presents to us. Second, black and white film is about light. Conversely, color is, of course, about tint and hue -- that is the way colors appear to us in the film's design. "Nebraska" is about a landscape in which the light is gradually dying-out -- it's about villages and empty plains and barren roads where the light is failing, where everything is descending into the darkness. Thus, the scene in which Will Forte's character drives his gravely ill father to Norfolk, Nebraska for medical treatment is staged as a trip toward blurry lights, standing out in an obscure pattern in the darkness. On the great plains, the light is going out. Thus, Payne's imagery of Bruce Dern's halo of white hair rim-lit and glowing and the repeated shots of dawn, the sky washed-out and vaguely bright while the earth looks cold and dark, are programmatic -- the film's use of bright and dark stages a sort of elegaic rage "against the dying of the light," something that I think would not be as effective if the film were shot in color.

Silver Linings Playbook

David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” feels like a screwball comedy about the improbable subject of bi-polar disorder. The movie’s tone is manic, itself, and the script is wild;u voluble -- everyone talks a mile a minute and, at times, all the characters seem to be shouting at one another. Many of the scenes have the vibrancy and emotional energy of early Scorsese -- ethnic East Coast city-dwellers clashing in rooms that seem too small, the camera wiggling here and there through the controlled chaos. Although the premise of the film is fundamentally bogus, the picture’s romantic appeal carries the day, propelling the audience through a series of events, most of them ridiculously improbable, toward a happy ending that completely violates everything that we know about the characters. But this is the appeal of a film about love -- we want to see the characters triumph over adversity and fall into one another’s arms at the end of the movie and, since the romantic leads are compelling and attractive, deserving of happiness despite their flaws, we are willing to suspend disbelief and accept the film as a pleasant, even uplifting, fairy tale. Jennifer Lawrence, playing the damaged young widow Tiffany, carries the film -- her performance is so sexually enticing and magnetic that the movie breaks down your resistance: you are invested in her wild woman, outlaw act and the subtext of vulnerability that Lawrence brings to the foul-mouthed, sexually aggressive character is central to the film’s appeal. Russell’s direction and mise-en-scene is blatantly manipulative: everything revolves around a double climax involving a football game played simultaneously with a lavish dance contest. The heroine mistakes the hero’s intentions and, broken-hearted, flees onto the cold Philadelphia streets, only to be rescued at the last moment by Bradley Cooper, her dance-partner and the man she has labored to seduce throughout the entire picture. Cooper's character raising down the chilly Philadelphia streets to embrace Tiffany is the hoariest of movie cliches, but one that reliably stirs the audience. Before we reach the ending, there are montages scored to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash’s languorous duet, “Girl from the North Country,” lots of ferocious family squabbles, fist-fights, and all sorts of frenzied, mile-a-minute dialogue. The most effective tear-jerker of all time, “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” is deployed on the soundtrack at a key moment and there isn’t a dry eye in the house. It’s all shameless but compelling and I liked the picture. A moment’s thought, of course, will persuade you that contrary to the film’s narrative implications, having bi-polar disorder (or obsessive compulsive syndrome) is not much fun and the relationship between the two principal characters is doomed -- at least, doomed in a real world to which “Silver Linings Playbook” bears only a tangential relationship. But the picture’s blithe tone, and its last half, the can-do Rocky-style dance contest plot that completely contradicts the doom-ridden first half of the film, pretty much overcomes your objections. And, what the hell, the picture wasn’t really realistic to begin with -- the same Irish cop appears reliably every time the characters get into trouble and everyone is always fighting with everyone else and true love is always just around the corner. Robert DeNiro performs impressively as the manic-depressive hero’s father, clearly the genetic source of the mental illness afflicting Bradley Cooper’s character -- it’s DeNiro’s best work for years. Philadelphia is photogenic and the film’s climax, the camera snaking and gliding through the dance competition channels Scorsese’s moving camera in “Goodfellas” -- whip pans, expressionistic colors, and enormous, sexually charged close-ups. I'm not willing to believe that love cures bipolar disorder. But I'm willing to indulge fantasies of that kind.

Room 237

“Room 237” is a cleverly constructed film essay about various interpretive approaches to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 picture, “The Shining.” The movie contains a dozen signature sequences from “The Shining” subjected to voice-over exegesis by five “critics.” I have placed quotation marks around the word “critics” because I am not certain as to how these analysts should be characterized. Obviously, all five are profoundly intelligent, although in a misguided sort of way, and, clearly, each of the speakers is obsessed with “The Shining” and has devoted enormous intellectual resources to explicating the film -- albeit with curiously idiosyncratic results: the film, it turns out, is a secret code manifesting themes apparently remote from Stephen King's source novel and Kubrick's elegant horror film. The speakers occupy an uneasy territory between film criticism and rabid paranoia with cabbalistic overtones. The symbolic images that the interpreters discover in the film are mostly peculiarities in the set decoration, things set on shelves, pictures on the walls or peeping around corners in the edge of the frame, odd trademarks and puzzling lapses in continuity. In one sequence, shown frame-by-frame, the speaker identifies various oddities in a tracking shot showing Nicholson’s character meeting his boss (and an enigmatic factotum) in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel. The exegete has determined that Nicholson is reading a copy of “Playgirl” and has manipulated the image to decipher aspects of the image that have probably never been visible before the advent of Blu-Ray. (In other words, the interpreter is seeing things in the picture that could not have been seen in VHS or on ordinary DVD transfers or even when the film was projected in the theater). The “Playgirl” magazine, when examined CSI-style, turns out to feature an article about incest, a subject that the narrator interpreting the image finds implicit in the film. Then, the frame-by-frame scrutiny of this sequence yields a fleeting glimpse of a woman walking away from the camera wearing a football jersey with the number 13 on its back -- obviously a bad omen. In another sequence, a narrator tracks the geometry of the child’s Big Wheel explorations of the Overlook Hotel. This analysis yields a moment that I found spine-tingling in its oddity -- Kubrick clearly conceived the transit made by the child within a concept of the hotel’s corridors and public places that is strangely, and I would submit, meaninglessly detailed and geometrically consistent: for just an instant, we see at the very edge of a frame a balustrade that is visible in shots of the Great Hall, a visual cue that establishes an architectural relationship between different levels of the hotel and different spaces within the building but something that is also completely gratuitous -- an audience member not obsessed with the film to the extent of watching it frame-by-frame would not notice this detail. These spatial relationships can be used to build models of the hotel and show that certain key scenes seem to take place directly above or below one another. I am convinced that this sort of pattern exists in “The Shining”. But I am not persuaded that this pattern means anything -- rather, it seems some sort of obsessive jigsaw / cross-word puzzle solving aspect of the director’s imagination, that is, an arbitrary patterning similar to the structures used by Oulipo writers like Georges Perec. The film’s stance toward its brilliant lunatic exegetes is unclear -- we hear their theories and it isn’t obvious whether we should be amused, alarmed, or persuaded by their interpretations. As a result, the film is labyrinthine itself and rather disquieting. One theorist argues that Kubrick uses pervasive Indian imagery (the Overlook hotel has Navajo-themed decor) to recount the genocide inflicted upon Native Americans -- this is argued on the basis of several shots showing Calumet baking powder prominently displayed in the background of the image. (I suspect Kubrick’s use of the brightly distinctive trademark owes more to Andy Warhol and is motivated by the product’s colorful packaging more than any symbolic reference to the peace-pipe. Michael Herr, commenting on the scene in “Eyes Wide Shut” in which the rich man, while shooting pool on a red billiard table, explains the orgy to Tom Cruise, wrote something to the effect that the scene was about the “red table” and that its color was the raison d’etre for the entire sequence -- in other words suggesting that formal and pictorial considerations motivate much of Kubrick’s imagery, more so, than thematic concerns.) Another theorist believes the film is replete with sexual imagery of demons and monstrous intercourse, all represented subliminally. One critic focuses on an image of a German typewriter and the number “42” repeated continuously in the film, to claim that the movie encodes a series of references to the Holocaust of the European Jews. (This exegete, by the way, doesn't seem to know that Kubrick's wife was the daugher of the notorious German director, Harlan Veit, the man who made"Jud Suess.") Another theorist, noting the pervasive dissolves between scenes (you see one image superimposed on another) decides that the film must be viewed both backward and forward, running two projectors at the same time to create a continuous superimposition that is, then, closely studied for clues. Most remarkably, a man named Jay Weidner believes that the film shows Kubrick’s self-loathing, reaching a homicidal/suicidal frenzy, at his complicity at faking the images of the Apollo moon-landing. This theory, brilliantly argued, reaches a scary climax when the little endangered child in the movie stands up to confront the ghosts of the murdered twin girls and we see that he is wearing a tee-shirt showing a rocket and labeled “Apollo.” Weidner cites so much evidence for his bizarre theory that, for a moment, you think that he must be onto something. The movie’s director (or really the curator for the vast collection of clips), Rodney Asher sets himself the task of creating a visual analog for the wacky associations that the interpretive voices urge upon us -- he cuts the film as a collage of references, often supporting one or the other of the interpretive theories by quick cuts from other Kubrick films. You have the sense that there is an infinite system of correspondences that can be made between the various pictures, connections that even the obsessive exegetes haven’t seen -- although Asher makes the connections visually. Even more startling is Asher’s tendency to associate Kubrick imagery with other films. As an example, at the start of the film, there is some discussion about conspiracies and paranoia and, suddenly, we see a young Robert Redford darting out of the frame and entering a sinister-looking underground parking garage. What Kubrick movie is this? But, it isn’t a Kubrick film at all -- rather a reference to “All the President’s Men”, that is, the locus classicus of seventies paranoia. In this way, Asher connects the Kubrick imagery to films as disparate as Murnau’s “Faust” and Dario Argento’s “Demons.” The movie is fascinating but, of course, goes nowhere because with this sort of obsession there is no destination in sight -- the journey is all that matters

Chekhovian Motifs

Some films are so implacably weird, and, yet, so indelible in impact, that the movie presents itself as an object for astounded contemplation and, of course, further study. This is my response to Kira Muratova's 2002 Ukrainian film "Chekhovian Motifs." Based on an unfinished Chekhov play and a short story, the film sutures together two narratives: on an impoverished farm, a father quarrels with his son, a student, while the rest of their large family, more or less, ignores the increasingly melodramatic contretemps; at a nearby church, a fat man is marrying a beautiful younger woman -- unfortunately, the interminable ceremony is marred by the appearance of the fat man's mistress who has committed suicide by poison the preceding night. As indicated by the title, both stories share certain motifs -- eyeglasses, bizarre non sequitur conversations, and some of the characters in the two episodes display a distinct family resemblance. A broader thematic structure links the two narratives: both involve crowds of people who simply ignore the febrile accelerating chaos around them until, suddenly, the mask slips and they go berserk. In the first plot, a tight-lipped dour wife hectors her husband unmercifully about giving money to their son, a whiny, scrawny adolescent student with a fingernails-on-chalkboard high-pitched voice. The father, who we have just seen combing his eyebrows (this is the Ukraine after all) and chanting to himself that he is "handsome, handsome, handsome", completely ignores his wife's nagging -- in fact, the ostensible subject of the nagging, the loathsome son, also ignores his mother's harangue. But, then, suddenly, the father explodes, whinnying like a horse, hurling his spectacles into the soup and, covering his head with a quilt, spinning around and around in circles shrieking -- this gesture rhymes in an eerie way with a manipulated video image of a ballerina, also pirouetting in circles as she dances to Saint-Saens. This image seems displayed as a kind of hologram in a little living room near the kitchen where the father is bellowing in rage -- the white dancer appearing against a jet-black background where a little semen-colored froth mirrors her motion is like something from one of David Lynch's early films, a startling, beautiful, and, also, frightening study in the whitest of whites contrasting with the most dense, and inky, black. Muratova structures the family quarrel around eating: we see farm animals chomping on their grain, piglets suckling on a sow, workmen swilling vodka and eating black bread, and, of course, the family all gathered together at their purgatorial dinner-table. When the shrieking gets the loudest, one of the smaller children simply falls asleep. Later, the student maniacally pumps air into the tire of his motorcycle while his fat sister fantasizes about the boy punishing their father by committing suicide by taking poison -- another motif connecting the episodes. In the next shot, worthy of Buster Keaton, we see the kid on foot -- the tire didn't hold any air -- hoofing it to the train-station, dressed in an ill-fitting (much too large) suit and ostentatiously carrying a cane -- skinny and bespectacled, he look like James Joyce out for a stroll. A gangster in a big car picks up the kid and agrees to drive him to town if the boy will show him the way to the church where the wedding is about to start. There is a musical interlude that is very beautiful and, then, we see cars converging on the country church, comically roaring into the muddy parking lot, limousines synchronized and fender to fender in an agressive chrome tete-a-tete. The wedding guests are all grotesque: various species of sexual perverts, grinning morons, old hags, and dwarfish mannequins, all of them rubbing together and prancing with disarticulated, inscrutable gestures into the church. The crowd seems to be packed with transvestites and the bride looks like the heroine from a silent movie or one of Warhol's porno films. Two handsome priests preside over the endless ceremony, chanting and singing and completely ignoring the Rabelaisian chaos that threatens to erupt among the spectators to the wedding. In the midst of the service, a woman with her face shrouded in a shawl suddenly appears, rising up from the floor, and the sybaritic congregation, who look like extravagantly depraved refugees from a von Stroheim orgy, laugh and mock her. But, later, when the plump groom recognizes the woman as his dead mistress, rumors begin to spread and no one can talk of anything but the apparition. The contrast between the solemn liturgy, the priests single-mindedly performing their ritual, loving filmed with halo-like rim-lighting, and the squalid chatter of the wedding guests is extraordinary and programmatic -- it is like the contrast between the ballerina and the squabbling family members or the clash in tone created by the beautiful choral music interlude juxtaposed with the gargoyle-like grotesques gathered for the wedding. Muratova seems to design the film to contain the most violent and improbable contrasts possible, an effect dramatized by the spectacularly high-contrast black and white camera-work. Muratova was 71 when she completed this film, and, although often censored by Soviet authorities, she's been making movies for more than 40 years. Clearly, she is a director who warrants attention and close study.

Kanal

“Kanal” is the Polish word for “sewer.” Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 film bearing that name documents the final desperate days of the Warsaw Uprising in World War II. The movie begins as a fairly conventional combat picture. We are introduced to a small battalion of ragged insurgents: the camera tracks along their company as a voice-over identifies some of the men. The soldiers are defending a Warsaw suburb against German attack and have been surrounded. They expect to die. The men are predictably handsome and gallant. Among their number are two attractive (and buxom) young women, each romantically attached to one of the troops. The insurgents are commanded by a tough-as-nails Lieutenant who looks like a character from a sixties’ era WW II comic book. The camera glides through horrific ruins (the film was shot in the actual debris of Warsaw in 1955-56) and there are some unconvincing battle scenes. All of this is competent stuff, but unimpressive. The men loiter in a ruined mansion and a musician tries to play the out-of-tune piano. The love affairs develop a little and there is lots of pessimistic talk and cigarette smoking. Some of the men get drunk on home-brew. Before the big German assault, the insurgents are ordered into a chaotic town-square that is under German bombardment. The square is packed with panicked civilians, hysterical women searching for lost children, and smoke drifts from burning buildings. The musician has called his home in downtown Warsaw and learns that the Germans are rounding people up and burning them alive with flamethrowers. “Where are you?” the man’s wife asks him on the telephone. “With the Resistance,” he says. The woman is incredulous: “there still is a Resistance?” she asks. The company of insurgents descends into the sewers via a small manhole and the rest of the movie takes place underground. This part of the film is extraordinarily gripping, a peculiar combination of expressionist chiaroscuro and nauseating realism that has the flavor of a Hammer horror film. The sewer tunnels are brilliantly lit but the imagery somehow suggests darkness -- this is accomplished by pouring chiaroscuro light at oblique angles onto black and glistening brick walls and vaults; the men carry flashlights which appear as bright spears of light in their hands and, when they light matches, these also flare convincingly, although as highlights against tunnels that have been flooded with movie light to make everything legible. The men and women, who strip to their chemises like the stars of a Hammer Dracula film, are smeared with filth and the water through which they crawl and trudge is turgid, syrupy with oatmeal-like feces. The effect is one of people trapped in Stygian darkness although, in point of fact, the sets are well-lit and the dirty, befouled water gleams like the streets of a film noir metropolis. The extended sequence in the sewer tunnels is convincingly nightmarish. The tunnels are a labyrinthine maze and the group of men gets split into small parties, all of them ultimately doomed. The musician goes mad and, after quoting Dante’s “Inferno” wanders the watery galleries, playing an ocarina like some perverse version of Orpheus. The lovers make it to the light but only to find their escape from the sewer blocked by bars through which they can not pass. People drown and are suffocated by methane fumes and the wounded bellow in the dark passageways like maimed bears or wolves. The lieutenant finally makes it to the surface. But he has lost his whole troop. (In a disturbing scene, we see most of the men squirming their way to the surface only to be captured by Germans who have been busily shooting civilians against a gore-stained wall, corpses heaped like garbage against the bloody masonry.) When the lieutenant finds that he is alone except for a subordinate who has lied to him about the troops following behind, he executes the sole survivor of his company and descends into the sewer again, his hand holding a revolver the last part of his body to disappear into the underground. The subject of the Warsaw Uprising was fraught with political complications when the film was made. Apparently, the Red Army stood by idly on the opposite side of the Vistula, allowing the Poles to be butchered so that they would be unable to resist the Soviet occupation of their country. For this reason, Wajda has to present the Uprising in a way that shows it to be wholly futile and degrading. The Polish patriots are like sewer rats, drowning in excrement, and their heroism is meaningless. Wajda could not depict the Uprising as courageous, nor could he provide any political context -- the result is a film that is mostly an expressionistic horror-show. But as a horror-film, some of the movie’s scenes are incomparably effective -- the tunnels gleam with malevolent eerie light and water foams with fog, misting the Gothic vaulted vistas so that the sewer looks like the moors in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. Faces leer and corpses dangle grotesquely from the grates of the manhole covers. We aren’t far from a Roger Corman production from the early sixties and, indeed, some of the performances include grimaces and staring eyes, quotes from “The Inferno” like something that Vincent Price might intone in “The Pit and the Pendulum” or “The Conqueror Worm”. It’s horrible enough but also magnificently beautiful with, perhaps, just the slightest element of kitsch thrown in for a good measure.

Lawless

A pretty, if dim-witted, gangster picture, John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” concerns three hillbilly moonshiners, the Bondurant brothers in Franklin County, Virginia. The film purports to be extracted from real life, a “true story”, but the narrative, at least, is implausible -- the hillbillies act as if they are cunning tough-guys but they are forever falling into ambushes that every dullard in the audience can see coming. Nick Cave wrote the script and it consists of guttural threats and whispers so that nothing much is intelligible -- it doesn’t much matter because the film is nothing but reprisal and counter-reprisal with a little mild romance intervening between castrations and throat-slittings. The film has too many close-ups and the action sequences are gory without being interesting. As is the case with most Hollywood productions, the scenery and the incidental details are atmospheric, rich, and fascinating. We see tattered-looking cabins and moonshining stills out of a Walker Evans’ photograph, lush hollows, and a mountain all lit up with the stars of little independent moonshine distilleries hidden in the Yucatan-like jungles on its slopes. There is a fine shape-singing scene in a church and some interesting interiors of an old road-house that the Bondurant brothers operate 20 miles from town. Jessica Chastain shows her breasts and plays the role of the gun moll to the oldest brother, Forest Bondurant acted by Tom Hardy, a sort of dull-eyed and brutish Kevin Costner lookalike. Shia Laboeuf, if that’s his name, is annoying as the youngest brother, too kind and gentle before the massacres begin to even butcher a hog -- of course, Michael Corleone-style he will take up the gun and murder people before the film is over. Guy Pearce plays a variant on the Jack Palance character in “Shane” -- the fearsome dandy in black, an assassin who is also, apparently, some kind of sexual pervert. The gun battles and atrocities are, more or less, realistically staged but this is the kind of film in which gangsters engaged in a vicious gang war pause, now and then, to pursue their romantic interest, something that usually leads to more killings and hostage-taking. It’s also the kind of film in which the good guys engage in harangues when they have their evil enemies at their mercy allowing them to escape so that the film can proceed to more killings and rapes. When we meet a character named “Cricket” it’s pretty obvious that this hapless fellow will be a victim of the gang war -- he’s a character actor and, more or less, expendable. The film looks realistic and is fairly gripping until it isn’t -- and this is most of the overwrought, operatic, and poorly written second half of the movie The picture is pointless and a waste of time with one exception -- a couple times we hear Lou Reed’s “White Light/White Heat” and it sounds like an ancient Appalachian tune; in one instance, the great Ralph Stanley keens the song and it has a primeval authenticity better than anything else in the film.

Sarah Silverman: We are Miracles

Sarah Silverman’s HBO special,"We are Miracles," a comedy show performed for 39 embarrassed-looking patrons of a small dimly-lit club, isn’t a whole lot of fun. Silverman’s schtick is making outrageous and offensive statements, daring the audience to laugh, and, then, abusing the audience for indulging her with its laughter. This strategy would be effective if the audience were laughing spontaneously. But the audience understands how the gig is structured, grasps that laughter will be met with Silverman’s derisory scorn and so, we sense, that the audience is indulging her even before she draws attention to that fact -- the audience laughs because Sarah is cute and her pouting little-girl features don’t fit with her potty-mouth and the contrast between her pampered Jewish princess appearance and her vulgarity carries enough shock-value to make the crowd giggle a little regardless of whether what she says is actually funny. The audience laughs because it understands that its laughter is part of the joke: see, they are dumb and crass enough even to laugh at something that’s cruel and unfunny and that’s supposed to be funny in itself. Some of her stuff is well-observed and, like many successful stand-up comedians, there is a curious philosophical dimension to her material -- we laugh because the alternative would be something far more terrible and painful. As an example, Silverman blurts out that “9'-11 widows are famous for giving the best hand-jobs.” She pouts, looks earnest, and says that this has been proven by a study conducted by the University of North Carolina. The audience is uneasy and people laugh uncertainly. Then, Silverman denounces her spectators saying that they should be ashamed of themselves for believing her slander against the “9-11 widows” merely because she “attributed that finding to the University of North Carolina.” Shrugging her shoulders, she asks her LA audience if they’ve ever even been to North Carolina. In this way, Silverman says something terrible (although the incessant whining of 9-11 victims certainly has caused some of us to think bad things about them that we would never dare say), then, takes the offensive statement back, and, then, bizarrely enough imputes it to the audience. She does variations on this strategy for about forty minutes. But the HBO special has to fill an hour and so Silverman has a prologue before the show in which she exchanges racial slurs with a group of Mexican low-rider gangster-types (racial invective is always good as a time-filler) and, then, ends her show with a humorless song about being a diva, the lyrics consisting of the word “cunt” sung over and over again with various inflections. Once again, Silverman’s comic strategy is obvious -- she works the contrast between her pretty, well-trained church- choir-girl voice (she sounds like someone who would sing in the Xmas concert put on by St. Olaf College) and the raunchy material in her lyrics -- in this case, reduced to a single dirty word that she just repeats ad nauseum until she has wasted enough time to end her show. It’s stupidly effective. I like Sarah Silverman because I think she’s cute and I think her dirty mouth makes her even more cute. This isn’t Wittgenstein, I’m afraid, but more a matter of a perverse personal predilection.