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First a New Yorker article and then an expanded nonfiction book, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief is the type of unexpectedly captivating read that screen adapters distress over more than admire. Her biographic sketch of John Laroche, who was arrested for stealing orchids from Florida preserves (as a means to bring attention to endangered species), turns into a chronicle of the power of the flower and immediately coming into a reader’s mind is that it would make a great National Geographic special. But for screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the difficulty in making a narrative movie out of the fascination for orchids becomes instead the critics’ darling about what countless numbers of authors deplore about what movie makers do to original works. If there’s a crippling decline in criticism, the movie version of Orlean’s story entitled Adaptation is more than an example, it is warning. What else accounts for a screenplay that turns the legendary orchid into a “tall tale” hodgepodge of sex, drugs and violence winning a slew of critics’ honors? Not sure when it started—perhaps in Peggy Sure Got Married or Moonstuck and if not those then certainly with Leaving Las Vegas—but any movie starring Nicholas Cage is already a severe handicap for viewers, so imagine the agony of a double dose of him. (On TheHuffingtonPost.com: “The very idea of a Cage movie usually strikes fear in the American public that the Taliban only wishes they muster.”) Once you valiantly try to get past the two roadblocks, and some of us don’t, the movie holds a modicum of curiosity in how it will close. Borrowing from Romancing the Stone, what with the alligator munching, the climax doesn’t cut it as award-winning, though you know something eventually deserving is coming when Meryl Streep (tiresomely breathless as Susan) and Chris Cooper (as John) keep wading through the swamps. When Adaptation was released, Streep did the usual round of interviews and in one of them I heard her say that the script was one of the best she had ever read. Also saw an interview with Orlean who admitted to initial misgivings about Kaufman’s screenplay until she found out Streep was playing her. How both managed to hit aesthetic breaches this low is perplexing, unless they were flying on the dust of the Golden Orchid. LUSTBOXING: After bagging a married “bird” in a parked vehicle, Michael Caine's Alfie says directly to us, “They never make these cars big enough, do they?” The 60s mod “dirty beast,” charming in his Cockney and blond hair, Alfie takes us on a London tour of his sexcapdes and for a while it works—caddish drollery without the affrontery. He's the bon vivant as sexual therapist dispensing remedies to a dry cleaning clerk, to the Monday-Wednesday Dora, to Gilda the mother of his out-of-wedlock son, to the good nurse Shirley Anne Field who asks “Would you like me to give you something to sleep?” already knowing the answer. And there's “How do you want me?” Shelley Winters, about whom Alfie assures us is in “lovely condition” as he amorously rubs her fat. (With mirrors on the ceilings, she's the “lustbox” disdainful of romance; when she's ready for action she snaps her fingers and commands, “Bedroom!”) Then the preggers dramatics: seems Alfie's too potent in the baby-making department and one of his birds—drab Vivien Merchant giving the movie's single poignant performance—faces the awful illegal decision. As viewers we're taken aback—this may be a more powerful sequence than director Lewis Gilbert and screenwriter Bill Naughton had originally intended. (Though Terence Stamp, Laurence Harvey and Anthony Newley turned the role down because of it.) Obvious are the consequences of irresponsibility—Alfie admits that his understanding of women goes only so far as the pleasure (he does ask his birds when their “little friend” is due)—yet what we're watching becomes harrowing. It's rather a slap in our faces that the moviemakers are very intent on not even slightly redeeming their loverly bloke: Alfie never considers the benefits of Trojans. If sometimes over-chatty, Caine engenders a rascal rapport that's still emblematic; this is a performance that speaks to many men. As a NHS doctor, in thick-lensed, black-framed glasses, Eleanor Bron is incessant with questions but this may have been the last time she looked this pretty. Sonny Rollins does the jazzy score, and Cher sings the title song (for the American release). Gilbert would years later have another go at the “talking to the audience” format with Shirley Valentine. (Don't get me started on what Jude Law and his fellow idiots did to their version of Alfie.) The Appointment has to be a prime contender as Sidney Lumet’s worst picture. Not even a guilty pleasure, you watch transfixed by the appallingness of the whole thing, on every level. The first sight of Omar Sharif in that Hitlerish John Waters mustache is more than enough to frighten the horses. The watery eyes and bad hair style (suggesting a toupee) further creep us out. When Anookie Aimée arrives, walking down a street filled with swanky shops, she retains that chic Un Homme et une femme somnambulism, and in no time she pretends to be an even more vacuous puzzle. With Capucine’s thinness and wearing that wallabalsam hair up in an Irina Demick number, she’s nothing if not a nincompoopish nympho. Her English has improved, though it’s not nearly as appealing as in her previous bummer Model Shop. Poor Fausto Tozzi: ever since playing Dolfus in El Cid, he’s never sounded like a human being; his voice, thought to be but apparently never dubbed, sounds as if it is—mechanized, hollow, without integrity. He has a handsomeness here, especially when he’s wearing a fedora, and you end up wishing he had kept it on in all his scenes. Lotte Lenya is back selling flesh again, absent the contempt she sneered in 1961's Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. It's a safe guess The Appointment is a multi-purpose homage to Antonioni, Resnais and Fellini. They were masters at leisurely constipated Eurotrash; Lumet’s a maestro of farty fumblings. redbox SPECIAL:  If you haven't seen Australia yet and you're within walking distance of one of those handy redbox DVD vending outlets, the $1.00 cost makes it worth picking up. If you rent it early enough the first day, you'll find the time to replay it for your friends so you can all howl, “WTF was Baz Luhrmann thinking?!” Australia is a CGI merge of Giant, The Sundowners and Dusan Makavejev's 1985 The Coca-Cola Kid, with Nicole Kidman—turned into a bad variant of Grace Kelly and Deborah Kerr burdened by bitsy steals from Scarlett—and Hugh Jackman, the healthiest specimen of Aussie stud the movies have ever known, trapped in an equally bad reprise of Rhett as Indiana Jones. Perhaps unfair but Baz, who would claim he's not, is a closet case as incompetent moviemaker. How can it be that he spent $130,000,000 making this overload of clichés and not give viewers more of Jackman, to give viewers what they want—some heat in the inguinal regions? Reportedly Baz originally had Jackman killed off at the end, until Fox read the preview audience cards. It's easy to conclude Baz fooled himself into believing Kidman's blanched physicality and (early on) overacting would serve as major attractions—he deems her a timeless Chanel #5 princess ever since their success together with the kewpie doll glam of Moulin Rouge—but it's pure sadism to think of giving the movie's only attribute a death sentence. (Though the execution didn't make the final cut, viewers can see how it could have come about at the climax.) We wouldn't be able to bear the mystic aborigine deserts, plains, rocky terrain and a fired-up stampede without Jackman, even when he's being photographed inside a studio for some of those goofy outdoor scenes. Not yet a particularly good actor, he's the best ad for form-fitting T's since Denzel Washington rejuvenated the white sleeveless in Devil in a Blue Dress. What's infuriatingly unsatisfying about the whole god damned botch is Baz's reluctance to go the distance he sets the audience up to expect from him; viewers perceive his bent more clearly than his efforts in trying to hide his tendencies. And surely it is more than enough already for an eternally noodle-headed romantic like Nora Ephron to use “Over the Rainbow” in You've Got Mail but for Baz, who apparently didn't know or care that Nicole sang the lyrics “somewhere over the rainbow” in My Life, to con us by borrowing it as a central linking device is the height of repressed idolatry; he just couldn't resist making sure that even the aborigines got Garlanded to death. SMOOTHED OVER: Inarguably Julie Christie gives a good—okay, very good—performance in Sarah Polley's Away From Her. Every step she takes toward Alzheimer's seems like another vote for the Academy Award, just as her display of measured nuances in the appalling Afterglow was. Maybe that's part of what held me back: you can virtually see her and the director(s) at the controls, modulating the performance to guarantee the rougher edges of the disease(s) are smoothed over so as not to frighten us too much. (In Afterglow she seems to be suffering from an overdose of esoterica.) The fear is valid: the baby boom generation will soon produce the largest segment of victims, an ironic belated thank you for being the caretakers of the next largest group—their parents. Without meaning to, Away From Her suggests it won't be quite as bad as we might believe it to be. That is, if you're lucky enough to live in Canada and find the kind of facility Julie enters. (Having recently visited depressing facilities for both long and short term rehab in Houston, I'm even less optimistic about conditions for Americans with Alzheimer's.) The movie's other discomfort is that not one of the majors—Christie and her husband Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis and her hubby Michael Murphy—ever has an outburst resembling the disheartenment of their situations. Sure, Dukakis is a bit prickly, and Murphy has a crybaby moment but that's it; the level of suppressed emotions is too managed to relate to real experience. The most unbelievable of all is Pinsent, one of Canada's premier talents. Educated, a playwright as well as novelist—his most famous work The Rowdy Man, made into both a movie and a musical—Pinsent with well-groomed beard and Body by Pantene hair is 2007's most patient and tolerate adulterer spouse. Albeit a fat-gutted one. Cost to make: $750,000. NOVOCAINED: Only Joseph Mankiewicz would dare pull this kind of rubbish on us: Ava Gardner as The Barefoot Contessa not insisting on a hot fuck or two from Rosanno Brazzi prior to their nuptials. Moreover, Mankie has her getting some really bummer news on her wedding night and then, thirteen weeks later, he has her planning to inform her schwantzless count that she has a big surprise for him, one that will restore him to the public as face-savingly potent. Since this is 1950s stuff, Brazzi's “climax” is the necessary perverse morality to make amends for Ava's needs. Smart audiences concede early on that there's no way to believe what they hear and see in Mankiewicz's pictures, except the applaudable determination of his actors giving the nonsense all they've got, like Bette Davis in All About Eve, Ann Sothern and Paul Douglas in A Letter to Three Wives, Katie and Liz in Suddenly, Last Summer, or Olivier and Caine in Sleuth. In The Barefoot Contessa, with no earnable applause for its acting, the disbelief factor is so off the scale that we watch out of compulsion. Because Mankiewicz's characters here chatter on so neurotically they seem not to be of this world or from any other world any one's ever heard about. (Much of the movie was filmed in Italy but it often looks like a garish mausoleum junkyard.) When Warren Stevens as a movie producer is at a cocktail party and he starts his Karl Rove routine against a supercilious Italian director, an act that would otherwise be the latest dish reported by ragsters Hedda and Louella, who can figure out why he's this worked up? Mankiewicz is shameless with verbalized diarrhea that to a pinhead degree makes him the semi-literate John Waters of retard quip; he's Hollywood's ultimate conjurer of pre-feminist fantasies of sexual horrors. (You can certainly envision the deeply missed Divine sending up Ava's itching-to-be-unleashed Maria Vargas.) Humphrey Bogart does what he can with endless lines he was surely embarrassed by; Edmund O'Brien sweats; Stevens sickens; Brazzi slaps the right pain in the ass. There's one good moment from Ava: standing before oglers on a yacht, she throws down her sun jacket as if it's a gauntlet and at the same time gives the classic black bathing suit its greatest plug. Providing excuse for Ava's indifference throughout, O'Brien tells us that she's “loaded with Novocain.” The audience feels equally numbed. Black Orpheus isn't for everyone. If you're able to accept its terms, which more than anything else is a demand of tolerance for dirt dancing amateurism, there's a good chance you'll find Marcel Camus's 1959 updating of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend watchable. If not, if you just can't take the bad looping and often cheesy performing and the extras staring into the camera, if you find that the myth is too antiquated and transparent, if undulating Carioca “ballet” al fresco isn't your bag, you're going to have a very hard time of it. I'm divided. The hyper-shrillness of the females gets to me—I laugh only partly because it's intended, mostly because it's out of control; the character Mita (Lourdes de Oliveira), for instance, is one of John Waters' teenage dreams of a thin Divine. And the leads—Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn (born in Pittsburgh, went to England as a teen, became a dancer/nightclub singer in France)—border on the clumsy. Yet who amongst us can resist the location—Rio, during Carnival—and it's about as apropos as any place to refresh the legend. There is a fatalism in this most spectacular Atlantic coast metropolis built on jutting hills, slopes and mountains—a living, throbbing juxtaposition which explodes into a melee of emotions once a year. (And during the rest of the year into mini-eruptions on those famed beaches.) As with other world citizens, the poorer the poor are, the more acquiescent to doomy scenarios. Only here the pulsing, vibrating, ass-shaking music is one half of the antidote, providing a fast recovery. No visitor doubts that power, nor doubts the other half of the remedy—the overwhelming pulchritude of Rio. Camus is essaying that in spite of tragedy inherent in the poverty of Rio, where death can sweep in as fast as torrential rains come down, where death squads have been known to move in as menacingly as a raging flood, the sun never fails to rise over the paradisiacal setting, the sensual music never ceases its medicinal dispensing, the samba transporting the survivors forever onward. I'm making the movie sound more pleasurably lofty and less fraudulent than its critics will argue; for sure Camus pulls a few too many doomed bits on us, especially after Eurydice's demise and before Orpheus meets his. (There are oppressive echoes of South American fascism in the high-rise's paper-filled floors.) It's also been reported that when Black Orpheus opened in Brazil, its moviegoers were insulted that the world would get the impression that the only thing Rio dwellers do is shake their booties. And the acclaim for Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa's score not quite so deserving, especially in light of the fact that it took TV's “Kraft Suspense Theater,” in an episode filmed in Rio starring John Forsythe and Diana Hyland, to bring Jobim's “The Girl From Ipanema”—and the groundbreaking Getz/Gilberto album from which the song came—a much wider audience. What's not in dispute: considering the competition, Black Orpheus was easily the Oscar winner for best foreign picture. But here are the movies it wasn't up against: Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Satyajit Ray's Aparajito, Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Blu-ray restoration now available. AGREEABLY CHILLY: Ann Beattie's Chilly Scenes of Winter will recall for readers/viewers that other Anne—Tyler, who wrote The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons. There's the same quirkiness, the same bent toward ordinary lives. Tyler goes in for extensive character bric-a-brac; there's no small detail she'll leave out. Beattie, however, is close to laconic; she writes as if giving instructions and she's blessedly unsentimental. Joan Micklin Silver's version of Chilly Scenes is reasonably faithful in both content and mode. The novel's major attributes have been preserved: Charles, played by John Heard, and his mother, played by Gloria Grahame in her last American movie. Appearing relaxed, enjoying his character's openness, Heard is at his most likable (until he became Shirley MacLaine's spiritual guru in “Out on a Limb”). Borderline neurotic—eating a box of laxatives—and contemptuous of duties and proprieties, Grahame is also enjoying herself and most agreeably when she announces that “there isn't any dinner” to her son and his friend who've come for a holiday turkey meal. But like Tyler's troubles with her leading female characters, Beattie can't quite make Laura, who Charles has fallen head over heels in love with, someone we care about. It may be that these writers simply don't like their drama queens, and Mary Beth Hurt playing Laura follows suit. When originally released, as Head Over Heels, it bombed. Later re-released with the book's title restored and with one major and critical change—the ending—it failed to garner any more attention. The novel has a half-full/half-empty conclusion, with Charles and Laura rocking in the chair he gave her, and in HOH Laura returns to Charles after he says goodbye. The current version has them separating, which of course flies in the face of Charles' obsession. What's the point of all this if he doesn't get what he thinks he wants? Isn't Chilly Scenes of Winter a reflection of the 70s? When many of us got what we thought we wanted, only to end up regretting that we got what we didn't need at all? HOGS THE CAMERA: Takes a great deal of forbearance to sit through Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, a deeply tanned epic of 80s-minted American mythology. Laughably mired in romanticized heroics that it produced a typical inevitability: when Marlon Brando refused his Oscar for The Godfather because of the way American Indians have been treated, he was promptly criticized by his fellow Academy members for his public stand; Costner earned a standing ovation when he wins Best Picture for his. An amalgamation of Ford’s The Searchers and Cheyenne Autumn and Huston’s The Unforgiven, Dances with Wolves wouldn’t be too objectionable if it didn’t have that saphead narration and delivery. For every good thing Costner tries as an actor—working to build up authority, strength and sympathy—his simplistic accounting destroys by the use of his little-boy Tom Selleck voice that bears no kinship to his on-screen character. And transplant squaw Mary McDonnell can’t get us passed how she looks too much like a blitzed-out combo of Gracie Slick and Jane Fonda. Other uncomfortable borrowings: John Barry’s score is a lazy lift from his Out of Africa; some of the Indian costumes, makeup and hairdos (particularly the first ones viewed) look like rejects from The Road Warrior; the buffalo stampedes resemble those in Never Cry Wolf; the romantic rolls in the snow courtesy of A Man and a Woman and Mrs. Soffel. After watching the movie a friend emailed me noting that Costner evidently can’t get enough of himself on screen and quipped, “Why do they keep calling him Dances with Wolves? Shouldn’t he be called Hogs the Camera?” THE COOTIE DUET: The grasping, growling, harping, bellowing, drunken, wailing sounds that come from Albert Finney as an aging, ailing second-rate Shakespearean actor in The Dresser are the closest to audible carcinogens since George C. Scott's smoky throatiness in Patton. There's undiluted power and majesty in Finney's voice, but also things malignant and menacing. Hearing those excruciating cries of his Othello are almost the real thing, and the brief glimpses we see of him as King Lear are we hope test takes for the Lear he'll eventually do for us. Finney looks tragically grandiose, weighty and towering, fatigued, affected but still kiddishly impetuous, diseased through obsession with Shakespeare and diseased by the possession Shakespeare has of him. The Dresser, however, isn't really about actors and how the Bard consumes them, and that's what's partially the matter with it: as much of a joy it is to watch Finney in his getups, becoming perplexed, spitting out ground rules to support his sagging vanity, there's nothing deeper than an actor's artifices to respond to his character. Whatever there might have been is soaked up by the movie's major drawback—Tom Courtenay as Finney's backstage dresser. Courtenay's effeminacy—the whining, the whimpering, the shrill theatre babble he spouts, the way he holds his hand to his face, his arched fingers (that pinky!), the pulls at his shirt, how he so precisely bends his knees or curtsies—it's all so controlled that it's out of control. And itchy: he gives us a case of the cooties. (He's like TDC's Christopher Lowell without the humor and relieving commercials.) This is partly due to Courtenay having done the role in London and on Broadway as the star, which gratefully he isn't here, so we can see how rehearsed his deadly mannerisms are. In a larger sense, the part is too vaguely written; we're not at all sure if he's supposed to be this homosexual, or asexual, or a theatre precisian as toxic mutation. It's an overpowering and terminal performance: when Finney succumbs, you believe the lethal power of the louses that got him. Playwright Ronald Harwood based the play on his experience as a dresser to actor-manager Donald Wolfit (Laurence Harvey's future father-in-law in Room at the Top, General Murray in Lawrence of Arabia, the Bishop of London in the movie Becket) who, from 1937 to 1959, toured with his own repertoire. It's unpleasantly revelatory that Harwood's relationship with Wolfit is the same as the one played out in the movie, but whatever Harwood is trying to say about theatre seems a desperate melancholy. Director Peter Yates, who gives way to Finney's and Courtenay's stunt work, gets England's bleakness right. Everything's dark, grayish, sooty—very unlike his Breaking Away, a cheery and sunny A & P symphony. During the movie's initial release, a private research group in England reported that England had the highest number of neurotics in Europe, downing the most tranquilizers, sedatives and anti-depressants. After enduring The Dresser you're convinced it's true. All major movie stars have had their share of bad movies and Ingrid Bergman's no exception. In Goodbye Again, a 1961 sudser directed by Anatole Litvak, based on the supposedly ground-breaking novel Aimez-vous Brahms? by Françoise Sagan, Bergman uses every ounce of savoir-faire she can muster to get through it without too much embarrassment. Not only is she stuck opposite Yves Montand, suffering from the dual curses of Parisian caddishness and droopy eyelids (hilariously evident while driving a car in which one of his bimbos is nibbling at his ear and later on the dance floor at a pissy-swank restaurant), but she's also involved in a rebound fling with flesh-crawling Anthony Perkins. His animation and apparent relaxation in the role won him the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor trophy, but that shouldn't preclude our wanting to hand Ingrid a barf bag after she kissed the creep. (A year later in Jules Dassin's Phaedra, we'd end up much less sympathetic to Perkin's co-star, the gargoylian Melina Mercouri—her emoting and Tony's finale are Razzie worthy—and we like it a lot when Sophia Loren runs her car over him a few times in 5 Miles to Midnight.) Ingrid's got one good scene—in her bathroom, when she realizes Yves's weekend trip wasn't for any business other than monkey business. Less nervous here than she was in Litvak's Anastasia, but not all the jitters are gone: after receiving a phone call soon after her nuptials, she faces the mirror and perceives that cold cream is an interior decorator's best friend. More than a few designers-as-viewers claimed to have seen it coming via her style: while inclined towards antiques and French provincial, it really failed her with that chintzy uninviting artist-sketched headboard in her bedroom. “NOW WHAT?”: Mike Nickols said about The Graduate: “I wanted to stop the Los Angelesization of America.” Ironic, isn't it, that he ended up making the L.A. movie of the 60s? Four decades later, it's still very entertaining as one of those “social commentary” period pieces pretending to want to say something derogatory about the materialist, rat-eat-rat world of the parents of baby boomers. That it ends up condemning their kids for being just as blankheadedly narcissistic is of course the bigger joke, though at the time of the movie's release, few from the baby boom generation wanted to accept or see the “insight.” Like most of Nickols' movies, this one is ready-made for the box: you don't lose much if any detail, scope, or composition because the director hasn't a real moviemaker's eye; he's theatre as boob tube. And since the movie has its own built-in contempt, you can feel yours as you pause for the commercials: all the characters over twenty-five are stereotyped as cretins or boozers or maliciously both; they're plastic inserts from a catalog of disdain. Dustin Hoffman becomes so blurty and nerdish that you begin to understand too clearly why his Berkeley landlord hates him. He's got his moments, though, all of them with Anne Bancroft. As Mrs. Robinson, Bancroft's never been such a trenchant viper, an upper-middle class glamour sourpuss, what with gold-blond streaks in her dark hair and the leopard print coat and slips. It's okay for Ben to screw her, just don't screw her daughter. (Simon and Garfunkel sing that Jesus loves her more than she'll know but surely he'd want to run like hell from her as well.) We're not suppose to have much if any sympathy for Mrs. Robinson, but it doesn't take much to understand why it's untenable to her for Benjamin to date her daughter Katharine Ross. Doesn't it make sense for Ross to be outraged that Benjamin's been pumping away on Mommie? And why are her divorcing parents so apoplectic that they rush her into a marriage to one of those bleached pansies? The famous ending silently asks what is the boomers' ultimate goofus mantra: “Now what?” Playing Benjamin's mother, Elizabeth Wilson has just about the greatest, most penetrating scream ever heard in a comedy. Karel Reisz's Isadora gets taxing not long into it; Vanessa Redgrave as Duncan the pioneer expressionist-dancer is so infused with flippant free spiritedness that she tires you out. This is dangerous: as the movie jumps back and forth to squeeze in as much of her bio My Life as possible, you're feeling less sure that it's about Isadora's social and artistic impact and more regrettably sure that it's scenarists Melvyn Bragg's and Clive Exton's crash course on the boozed trendsetter's sex life and scandal-peddling. By the time Isadora's finished with her Russian lover and is onto to her fateful next, you're relieved when the red scarf gets caught in the spokes of that Bugatti. There's something fundamentally lacking—not the shocking, hell-raising uproar of her groundbreaking art but her artistry. With what dancing Redgrave does, it's difficult to assess if she approximates the kind of choreography Isadora made famous and was made infamous over. One critic called Duncan's nearly nude, flowing movements and pantomimes to music like Chopin's “Funeral March” and Beethoven's 7th Symphony “a species of surgical bandage of gauze and satin.” In an age of staid formalism, though, her swirling, twirling rejection of rules and rigidity was an attraction and reflective of defiant pulse. (Penelope Gilliat wrote: Isadora “looked as if she longed to unlace the corsets of the art patrons whose malicious graciousness incited her to shock them.”) Redgrave isn't and doesn't have to be a dancer but she has to convey Isadora's singularity so that we understand why audiences both applauded and jeered her. The private sins and public infamies, which the actress engages in with monumental persuasion, add allure to the legend, yet they're not why Duncan's a giant in dance. Instead of tempting the foolish, Redgrave only abbreviates eight of Duncan's famous diaphanous pastiches. Dance critic Arlene Croce hits close as to why they're not enough: dance itself is probably the most untouchable of the arts to replicate. Redgrave slacks off occasionally: her cold emotionality often stalls over us, she's in and out of accents ala Angela Lansbury, frequently looks like a rag-picking Ann-Margret, and throws off a few flashes of Geraldine Page. Universal has been blamed for what's not there: it released Isadora several months ahead of schedule, denying Reisz a director's cut. Originally released at 168 minutes; a version entitled The Loves of Isadora runs 131 minutes. Reviewed here is Reisz's personally restored 153-minute version. In Julie & Julia Meryl Streep has finally unleashed her first contagious performance. It's absolutely impossible not to be infected by her ecstatic romp as Julia Child. From start to finish, she's the famously sloppy chef who got turned on not only by her attaché hubby but also by butter, mayonnaise and boneless duck. We all know that as actress Streep is extremely studious, sometimes to the detriment of the audience's forbearance because the labor can seem too heavy, as in, to name only a few, Sophie's Choice and Ironweed. Even when she slips the finger to critics during an interview with Sally Jessy Raphael in She-Devil or shows very foxy wit in stealing her own death scene in a trashy movie inside the comedy Death Becomes Her, we're amused yet acutely aware of the pupil mechanics. In J & J, we can see she's watched the tapes of Child and hear once more how she's in magical touch with her unmatchable as well as unfathomable actor's ear to get that Edith Evans-like voice down so wondrously. But never before has she reveled in the joie de vivre of an impersonation and we instantly pick up on it. She's beaming throughout, enjoying the flaunting and flouncing and so do we—every delicious minute. A mesmerizing turn—a virtually flawless if unintended mix of Julia, Barbara Bush and Harvey Korman's Mother Marcus from “As the Stomach Turns.” Unfortunately, the movie's two stories with two different time periods don't provide an entirely satisfying mesh. Like Anne Hathaway's love life travails in The Devil Wears Prada, Amy Adams's Julie keeps interfering with the audience's hunger for more of America's greatest actor. (That honor, held in reluctant reserve by some of us, is no longer in dispute.) What's more, director Nora Ephron apparently can't get passed laptop intercourse. Charming for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks to goo-goo gaga with computereeze in You've Got Mail, but it's not terribly engaging to watch Adams blogging her way through Child's recipes. There's an ass-kissiness about it, and though innocuous, hardly worthy of our attention. Streep's husband is Stanley Tucci who, as in Prada, wears a ring that steals attention; Adams is pleasant and her love interest Chris Messina an attractive Ben Gazzara type viewers of You've Got Mail might remember as the dummie children's book clerk and watchers of “Six Feet Under” will remember as the Republican with hour-glass sideburns who becomes the eventual husband of Lauren Ambrose's Claire. The supporting performance most noteworthy is Jane Lynch as Dorothy, Child's sibling. With twin winks of huge hip cleverness from Ephron, Lynch and Streep make for the splashiest older sisters act in years and the flip story you'd much prefer to see. Their likability—and Streep's is phenomenal—surely doesn't come from their McCarthy-loving father. DOWN SANCTIMONY: The nightmare of genocide can be a photographer's dream and Chris Menges, who justly won an Oscar for his cinematography, has recreated some shots in Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields suggesting what Cambodia was most probably like under the brutal Khmer Rouge—shots nearly inconceivable to us because they're horrifying while at the same time incongruously beautiful and obscenely serene. When Haing S. Ngor, crawling through the mud and rice paddies, comes across rows and ditches of skeleton heads and remains, the mass murder is shocking; we've become so numbed by blood and gore that death's stacked fleshlessness can be almost too much to bear. Menges' images are like celluloid editorial cartoons. Based on N.Y. Times reporter Sydney Schanberg's magazine piece “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” about the reporter's friendship with his Cambodian interpreter Pran and their eventual reunion after a painful separation, the movie is a romanticized ode to their bonds and quite affecting. Unlike The Deer Hunter and Under Fire, in which the directors don't allow their macho guards to come down, Joffé, in his directorial début, goes all out for an emotional wallop: when the audience catches sight of the Lawrentian-bearded Sam Waterston as Schanberg standing at his taxi and then embraces Ngor's Pran, there's no holding back; a polemic becomes a heartfelt, prestigious thriller of escape. If Waterston and Ngor give credible performances, they're also a bit on the pansy side, with flabby Waterston right out of a Yale Yuppies Yearbook and Ngor willowy, thin and furtive-eyed. (He wasn't surprised that he won a best supporting actor Oscar: “After all, I spent four years at the Khmer Rouge school of acting.”) On the other hand, John Malkovitch, one of the movies' perpetual pansies, is surprisingly butch, bringing a pleasing surliness to the proceedings—a relief from his measured prostitution in movies like Places in the Heart. No film in recent times has a more atrocious score, or a more badly integrated use of classical music; you bang your head against the napalmed palms. Joffé isn't content with the theme of male loyalties: he's got to throw in his judgment that Nixon's 13-month secret bombing of Cambodia is mostly responsible for the deranged Pol Pot having come to power and annihilating some two to three million Cambodians. That judgment is arguably accurate but here it's truncated, superficial. (Joffé would continue his regrettable contractions with Dominique Lapierre's The City of Joy.) His shallowness, however, didn't stop reviewers, editorial writers and essayists from penning some of the most sanctimonious, often incomprehensible drivel about American military involvement in Asia, the state of journalism and the movie. I include myself in that list of drivelers—having written a 3,000 word piece that stayed locked in the basement until now. You've just read what's left after expurgation. Jan Kounen is right now the most pleasing-to-the-eye director most of us don’t know anything about, even though he’s been around for more than a decade. Born in Holland in 1964, educated at Nice’s Arts Décoratifs, Kounen has a love and strongly discernible penchant for animation, earned a high reputation for making popular music videos, and to higher acclaim used his acquirements for slick and successful commercials for Peugeot, Tang, Gordon’s Gin and Adidas in Europe. His first movie Doberman (1997), about an enigmatic Parisian criminal played by Vincent Cassel, is described as a live action comic book, a forerunner to what he’d do in 2004’s Blueberry—ineptly distributed in America as Renegade—a version of the Belgian/French Western comic series originated by Jean-Michel Charlier and with graphics by Jean Giraud. Using the terrains of Durango, Torreon and Chihuahua (as well as Andalucia, Spain), Renegade is beguiling as dramatic travelogue; the visuals are immaculate, filled with natural grandeur, and the only thing that’s really disappointing is that they aren’t held in view long enough. Kounen uses the cast—Cassel as Blueberry, Michael Madsen, Juliette and her father Geoffrey Lewis, Ernest Borgnine (cleverly confined to a wheel chair), Colm Meaney, Temuera Morrison, Djimon Hounsou (scalped but still living) and Eddie Izzard—as iconic fixtures populating the vistas. But Madsen, who sometimes in other roles resembles Elvis, has the misfortune of resembling Mickey Rourke in this one and he’s deprived of a badly needed kiss-off, missing in part because Kounen seems unable to reconcile his genuflection to the Charlier/Giraud comics with his deeper bow to and the meshing of Peruvian/Brazilian-based Shipibro-Conibo cultures and Shamanism, a term describing a communication with the spiritual world in order to heal sick souls. Yes, it becomes “one of those” and not helping matters is that, in my estimation, the animated head trips are ineffectual rip-offs of 2001 as well as being stuck in ophidian juvenility; they’re also too contemporarily digital to be convincing in the settings. The opening credits, however, are very classy and the same polish, kaleidoscopically, will open Kounen’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, a factually minimalist bio that's also a victim of poor release. This one, like La Vie en Rose, is another example of what the current crop of French and French-inspired movie makers are becoming masters at—presenting minutia with such impeccable evocation that things look unquestionably authentic even when they're not. While there have been vicious swipes at La Vie, no one who sat through all it would debate how it had the sick ambiance of Edith Piaf, that what it purported had the sting of truth. Coco & Igor has its truths—the social upheaval of the opening of Igor’s Le Sacre du Printemps, his wife’s medical problems, Coco’s invitation for Igor to use one of her homes to write his music, the emergence of Coco’s black and white essentials (in dress as well as decor), how Chanel # 5 was tagged, the mirrored spiral staircase. Most of its purportings—primarily their affair, which has never been confirmed and can only be assumed since both were serial adulterers—are less important to veracity than how Anna Mouglalis’ Coco (a ringer for Christine Lahti) and Mads Mikkelsen’s Igor are somnambulists posing for Architectural Digest portraiture, which is to say Kounen's exquiste eye compensates for his weakness in not concluding story-telling with substantiality. Recommend you snooze before viewing, and if you want to know more about the designer, the Shirley MacLaine-Barbora Bobulova Coco Chanel is more informative. Don’t want to waste much time on Letters to Juliet. It’s lovely to look at, nice to see Verona so prominently in view, but I think the days of Amanda Seyfried will be limited. She's not someone with a lasting major star power, she gets lost not only in scenes with other actors but also among the extras. She disappears from memory fast and, frankly, the faster the better. In this movie, she’s coupled with Gael García Bernal as intentional bad fit, which initially may be objectionable to the audience because who she ends up with is a ringer for that Austrian Nazi Rolf in The Sound of Music. (Bernal, by the way, has his own problems—his shortness of height is becoming a handicap.) What's worth the wait is the ultimate reunion between Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero. It doesn’t have a thing to do with the dumb-dumb plot, it has to do with movie lovers who know the actors' personal histories. Admit to having cried—for Vanessa, who within 14 months lost her daughter Natasha Richardson, her brother Colin and sister Lynn Redgrave. And those tearing it up also know that she once had a sizzling affair with Nero (when they were filming Camelot), and with whom she has now reunited. Despite the cloying chick-flick philosophy, Vanessa's dignity and Franco's chivalry earn our emotions. LIGHTS OUT: Olivia de Havilland works against the odds to pull off Light in the Piazza, a tourist soaper set in Florence, and that's not such a bad place to visit for some 100 minutes. It's the baggage Olivia carries that's quite the load: she's agonized mother to kicked-in-the-head-by-a-horse retard Yvette Mimieux—beautiful enough at 26 to attract marriageable suitors while still splashing around in a bubble bath with her rubber duckie—and politely unobliging wife to enviably thin businessman Barry Sullivan, who thinks it's best to ship the daughter off to a big bucks funny farm. On holiday in Florence Yvette falls for Italian George Hamilton, in spite of Olivia's pragmatic interventions. Her dilemma this time is decidedly more complicated because her daughter's sexual battery is charging up. Does she reveal the secret to Hamilton's daddy Rosanno Brazzi? Will she agree to commit Yvette to the fate of looney bin confinement when deep inside she hopes the handicap could be healed by love, a solution no one else considers? There's a peculiar gaudiness to Mimieux's retrograde scenes and collateral social embarrassment; still, you're not sure if it is a compliment that you come to believe her performance. De Havilland shows her customary grace wading through the deluge of suds; given her exhausting 24/7 protectiveness, it's she who deserves the sanitarium. The audience can't help wondering if perhaps debonair Brazzi's got his own little family secret to tell Olivia—that boy Georgie's dim wattage makes him the other half of a fitting union of two of a kind. (About the only real embarrassment associated with this movie is Hamilton's BAFTA nomination as Best Foreign Actor.) Director Guy Green keeps the suds from clogging; Otto Heller's cinematography might be too bright. RUEHL RULES: Though the Oscar and other awards for best actress in 1993 went to Holly Hunter for The Piano, the best “talking” performance by an actress that year belonged to Mercedes Ruehl in Lost in Yonkers. But few saw her it in and yes, there are reasons why this movie bombed: it's the least insulting, most intelligent of Neil Simon's barrages of shit-loaded one-liners as plays, thus making it at once a turnoff to the “low information” mob. The picture also feels less a movie than a Hallmark Hall of Fame special. (To get a wider audience it needed to have been presented as one.) Because it exited so fast from theatres the rest of us who cringe at just about everything Simon writes didn't get a chance to offer him rare praise. At center is Mercedes, who can frighten audiences not prepared for her kind of acting. There's definitely something scary about her as Bella when she first appears: in a pink doll's dress that's rising high above the waist and too short at the knee, in saddle shoes and carrying a purse that looks like it's made of heavily starched doilies, why, Oh God, no, she's Shirley Temple as pre-Gump. While her nephews—one who's like a miniature Comedy Club Barbra Streisand—warn us that there are to be “no jokes about Aunt Bella” even though “she missed the first year of high school because she couldn't find it,” our first impression of her is that she might be suffering from a new form of Cliff Robertson's Charly disease. (In ways she does: she suffers from close proximity to embittered, stifling, repressing mama Irene Worth playing Golda Meir as a near-harridan.) Mercedes isn't from the old school of acting exactly, she's not a diehard Stanislavsky heavy with method baggage, but if her larger-than-life characterizations—here, and in her Oscar-winning role in The Fisher King, and as the bitch moll in Married to the Mob—are more theatrical than movies audiences are generally accustomed to, I want to defend her by saying that she's not a natural for the camera. Yet that's not quite true: she takes what are sometimes gross outsizings of relics and scales them back and in the process does some sensational modulating with her voice. And how she speaks her parts may be the key to why she never quite lops over into the grotesque, as evidenced sublimely in The Fisher King in which, playing opposite America's most underrated actor Jeff Bridges, she says, “I'm not a modern woman.” That's the most revealing line she's been given to read as an actress thus far and that's precisely how we feel about her. Easily passable as the less attractive twin of Jess Walton (the irrepressible Jill on “The Young and the Restless”), Ruehl is a bit unnerving on a psychological level, too, further explaining why people back away: as actress her edgy rocky emotionality shakes some of us because deep in the recesses of our buried privacies we are like or have an affinity with the characters she plays. She does them on stage or screen or during interviews, while we are them behind closed doors: the child-forever-in-us of Bella in Lost in Yonkers conjures up our own secret quirks, weaknesses and especially those resentments most of us have buried regarding our family. When Irene Worth attempts to destroy Bella with “You are a child, that's what the doctors told me. You will always be a child,” and Bella hits back and says to her, “You make me stupid and crazy,” those utterances—going way beyond the blotto bliss of Gump—are painful flashes from our own memories, ones still not resolved and probably never will be. Of course, the mass movie audience didn't want to hear these kinds of bitterisms and surely not from the King of the Schlockliners. Some time back, before a gathering of the press, Simon said that his original concept for Yonkers was confined to the boys and how they responded to being stuck with grandma. Gradually in rewrites Bella took over. When accepting the Pulitzer Prize for the play, Simon must have felt a strange irony: having become a multimillionaire for dumping turds on the masses, his most delicate creation, a woman as universal adult child in all of us, earned him his first deserving respect. WIRED: Though the boobish Two Weeks in Another Town is pretty hyper, Vincente Minnelli's most wired movie is probably Lust for Life. Its intensity is true to Vincent van Gogh's chronic madness, as is Kirk Douglas's portrayal. Even without Miklós Rózsa's equally agitated score, the movie embraces the temper of the artist's seizures—his flares of excitability, of inspiration, his fits of emotions and rage. Purists regard Tim Roth's van Gogh in Altman's Vincent & Theo as close to definitive; Douglas of course doesn't have the painter's delicacy, because he's always been this chunk of melodramatic weight, and thus van Gogh's fragility gets displaced. But Douglas is saved by his own tremendous desire to do right and by Minnelli's concept—using van Gogh's paintings with integral as well as augmentative intent. In this, Lust for Life may be the only picture that more than benefits by letterboxing—it becomes an instantly framed movie museum. When the masterpieces come into view—interspersed chronologically and thematically—they serve not only the purpose of appreciation but also provide a double visual history. Minnelli, art directors Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters, Preston Ames, set decorators Edwin B. Willis and F. Keogh Gleason, photographers Freddie Young and Russell Harlan put together an ambient feast of period and settings. Van Gogh's work was progressively reflective of his dementia; by the time he started doing his landscapes, every stroke of the brush was a warning of what was to come. The movie would be much better without Rózsa's frenzy and it would be more powerful had Minnelli given the audience the punch that makes the story an even greater tragedy: brother Theo, played by James Donald, died six months after Vincent. (Altman's movie does.) With Anthony Quinn, who mysteriously won an Oscar for his Gauguin. But if recent speculation from scholars becomes accepted—that it was Gauguin who sliced away van Gogh's ear—then Quinn's performance will be hailed for its prescience, for he does seem ready to do the bloody deed.      Go to Top of Page ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com   Text COPYRIGHT © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 RALPH BENNER  All Rights Reserved.