TPoJJoA will be on indefinite hiatus as I wrap up some projects and prepare to move for a new job.

Cheers,

Steve

Now more than ever, we need Speed. Racer, that is.

In a matter of months, we’ve seen the record for Biggest Sham Press Conference set and broken, each time by a pro sports star. First there was the invite-only, no-questions-please, moist-eyed mea culpa by a certain Waffle House waitress-banging golfer desperate to maintain a shred of public sympathy (or at least preserve an endorsement or two). Then came the ethics-challenged decision of ESPN (an entity that grows more bloated with self-importance by the ticker roll) to manufacture an entire hour over the announcement of where a certain royally nicknamed basketball player would preside next season.

'It's the only thing I know how to do, and I gotta do something.'

Both events smacked of ego and, though staged as “news,” were as tightly choreographed as a Rockettes routine. The most depressing aspect of their collective impact isn’t that millions of people tuned into these counterfeit affairs (portions of which were then replayed ad infinitum by alleged news entities, thus legitimizing them in the public eye), it’s that their “success” provides a blueprint for future use by those with too much self-regard and too little self-awareness.

Speed Racer would be embarrassed by such hoopla. Speed is a man of action. He doesn’t talk about winning, he does it. He relies on work ethic and skill to overcome limited resources. He respects his family and team, choosing to repay their loyalty to him even when offered more money and, just maybe, a better shot at winning. He is an independent and idealistic thinker, unafraid to challenge the pack or sacrifice personal glory for the greater good. He is quick to accept responsibility for his decisions, even when wrong. He is the best at what he does, but he doesn’t let pride inform his judgment.

In short, Speed Racer is a hero for our times. Unfortunately his moment in the sun—2008’s live-action version of the early manga/anime crossover hit that bears his name—was widely panned by critics and ignored by audiences.

Directors of the sensual, darkly comic Bound and the philosophical, hit-and-miss Matrix trilogy, the Wachowski brothers may seem an odd choice to give life to a cartoon remembered as fondly for its goofiness (the rapidly dubbed expository dialogue, characters with names like Snake Oiler) as for its running theme of a principled family business doing battle against unscrupulous corporations via outlandish races, all rendered with quick cuts and a jelly-bean color palette.

The family that races together...

But the Wachowskis actually seem liberated by the simplicity of the story and working within the confines of a well-known franchise. Employing their formidable and ever-expanding bag of cinematic tricks, the Wachowskis manage to be true to the Americanized version of the Japanese Mach Go Go Go (the movie’s sleek, thundering Mach 5 has replaced Tim Burton’s jet-engined Batmobile as the film car I most want to take for spin) while putting a fresh coat of primary colored paint on the proceedings (the thankfully pre-3D CGI here is used to create an immersive, living cartoon).

The Mach 5: One suh-weet ride.

The result is a muscular, breakneck entertainment that keeps its tongue firmly planted in its cheek and rarely lets its foot off the accelerator.

The movie, er, speeds ahead with such imaginative visual momentum that one can almost appreciate it as a postmodern art film for 10-year-old boys (and their Hot Wheels-loving dads). The opening alone is a marvel of construction, as Speed (Emile Hirsch, a nice balance of aw-shucks and gritty determination) is embroiled in a race which is interspersed with flashbacks to his youth as a distracted student and the introduction of the Racer family (including Susan Sarandon and John Goodman, lending humanity to their digital surroundings), gal pal Trixie (a plucky Christina Ricci, whose bob haircut accentuates her Osamu Tezuka-style eyes) and gay¹ mechanic Sparky; we also witness the fall of Speed’s older brother Rex and the rise of Racer X (a surprising Matthew Fox, who infuses the enigmatic driver with deadpan gravitas).

Racer X: The Harbinger of Boom.

As the setpiece progresses, it’s as if Speed is trying to outrun his past while racing the specter of his (late?) brother. But he pulls up at the last minute, as past and present merge, and we learn everything we need to know about Speed’s moral compass.

The strength of Speed’s family ties are quickly put to the test by E.P. Arnold Royalton (British actor Roger Allam having a gloriously greasy good time, especially when oozing the movie’s best line in the catchphrase-that-wasn’t-but-should-be: “Pancakes are love”). Royalton heads a conglomerate that lavishes its racers with the best training and equipment available (a zippy montage provides the outlandish details), and he attempts to convince Speed that his best shot for victory lies in selling out the family racing team to Royalton Industries.

Speed, of course, declines, knowing that ability backed up by hard work and passion can occasionally win out over buying one’s way to victory (well, at least it can in the movies).

From there, the film becomes a, um, driving metaphor for staying true to one’s dream and a screed about the pervasive power of corporations. This is also where many critics found fault.

'He's going to be the best ... if they don't destroy him first.'

Oh, the hypocrisy, more than a few film writers wailed, of a hundred-million-dollar movie (one backed by monolith AOL Time-Warner, no less) having its hero battle corporate greed and corruption.

Would the film’s message have been more palatable had the movie cost $10 million and been produced by, say, Newmarket or Magnolia? Perhaps The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane can take a break from brainstorming Tom Wolfe references to apply to kids’ movies and come up with a sliding scale for budgets and the corresponding social commentary allowed. If anything, the Wachowskis (and the studio) deserve credit for adhering to the cartoon’s ideals even as it throws stones at the source of their paychecks.

Like any car, Speed Racer has its clunky moments. At just over two hours, it’s a little long for its elemental plot, which is crammed with details about stocks, mergers and price fixing that, though timely, are too heavy for most adults, let alone children. But there is enough humor and visual flair for kids and grown-ups alike—down to the graphic flourishes of the racing posters that line Speed’s walls and the T-shirt homages to the Rolling Stones tongue and Che Guevara—to more than make up for the brief stretches of play-by-play dialogue.

'You gotta win if you wanna keep driving...'

Speed Racer climaxes with a roughly 10-minute race sequence that rivals its opening as pop art in motion, and it culminates in a moment that calls to mind the crossover in 2001, albeit with a more rote resolution (note to MLB and FIFA: It also teaches us why instant replay is important).

Although Speed Racer sprang from Japanese imagination during that country’s post-war industrial and materialistic growth, Speed and his family also reflect the most appealing aspects of the traditional American persona: self-made, close-knit and hard-working. Speed has transcended countries and generations to rise again as a hero seemingly custom-built for these times; maybe someone needs to stage a press conference to spread the word on his behalf.

Speed: 'Looking forward to that cold milk.'

• When Royalton presents Speed with a purple, custom-made suit, Sparky eyes both approvingly
• As Trixie strives for the lead in a team race, Sparky exclaims, “Ooh, go get ’em, girl!”
• Then there is the following exchange prior to the climactic race:

Pascal’s Wager is one of those things everyone knows, even if one isn’t consciously aware of knowing it. Likewise, its presence in Eric Rohmer’s My Night At Maud’s is both overt and subtle.

Devout Catholic Jean-Louis (a guarded Jean-Louis Trintignant) sees a beautiful young woman at Mass and informs, via voiceover, “I suddenly knew without doubt that Fraoncoise would be my wife.” Moments later, he is in a bookstore, thumbing through a copy of Pascal’s Pensees, and reads: “They began as though they did believe, with holy water and Masses, etc. … You too may follow that way to unthinking belief.”

Blaise Pascal: Wanna bet?

Blaise Pascal was many things, foremost among them a leading mathematician and theologian. The famed gambit that bears his name is found in the Pensees and reflects the 17^th-century philosopher’s pragmatic side. “God is, or He is not,” Pascal posits. “But to which side shall we incline?” Because Pascal believed the existence of God could not be determined through reason, he said a person must wager one way or the other; the smart money, according to Pascal, is on God, because a life lived virtuously has everything to gain if God does exist, but nothing to lose if He doesn’t.

Mass effect.

Which brings us back to Jean-Louis, who is pious, but not necessarily unthinkingly so. His faith is challenged when he encounters Vidal, a former schoolmate who is now a philosophy professor and Marxist; it is established that they have reunited at a place which Jean-Louis has never been and that Vidal visits rarely (is this meeting fate, chance, mathematical odds?).

Vidal cajoles Jean-Louis into joining him at the apartment of Maud, an attractive divorcee who also happens to be a free-spirited atheist and who further pushes Jean-Louis’ comfort zone, albeit more altruistically than Vidal.

All this may sound tediously high-brow, but in the hands of Rohmer, a quiet giant of French cinema who died earlier this year, the movie plays as a breezy comedy of words. Rohmer may have favored a brand of formalist intimacy over the jump cuts and free-roaming cameras of his New Wave peers, but that’s not to say his films lack energy; the vitality of Rohmer’s films stems from his characters and the situations in which they find (place?) themselves, situations that often put their virtue in the balance (My Night At Maud’s is one of his Six Moral Tales) and have them struggling with self-doubt and life-altering decisions.

Devout Catholic or 'shame-faced Don Juan'?

But Rohmer’s gift, enriched in My Night At Maud’s by the sumptuous black-and-white cinematography of the great Nestor Almendros (a frequent early collaborator with Rohmer, who also lensed much of Terence Malick’s striking Days of Heaven), lay largely in his ability to observe these existential crises as they grow organically and humanly, with their natural, bittersweet humor in full blossom.

At Maud’s, the wine flows and so does the conversation. “I must say, you both stink of holy water,” she chides the men as Pascal’s logic is discussed. Meanwhile, Vidal, clearly smitten with Maud, and she clearly not vice versa, continues to provoke the “shame-faced Christian” and “shame-faced Don Juan” Jean-Louis:

Stinking of holy water ... and wine.

“You still chasing after girls?” Vidal asks.

“No,” Jean-Louis replies defensively.

“You used to. When I met him he was quite the ladies’ man.”

“You met me when I was 10.”

As the stormy—both figuratively and literally—night wears on, Maud (Francoise Fabian, finding just the right balance of playful sensuality and intellectualism) dresses down to merely a shirt and reclines on a bed stationed in the living room (so that her young son may have the bedroom). When Jean-Louis prepares to leave with Vidal, Maud presses him to stay given the weather and the distance home, an offer he reluctantly accepts.

He eventually spills his unspoken desire for Francoise, and Maud offers to help, saying some women are natural matchmakers. “I flee them like the plague,” Jean-Louis responds.

'Are you afraid?'

She also invites him into bed. And while her intentions seem innocent, Jean-Louis perceives at least an element of temptress. “Are you afraid?” Maud inquires. “Of yourself or me?”

It is a question that haunts Jean-Louis, even after meeting and, yes, marrying Francoise (at the end of their rocky first date, Jean-Louis discovers the book True and False Conversion, or Atheism Debated on a shelf in Francoise’s apartment). Their marriage, Jean-Louis narrates, is an “adventure of sanctity.”

The end is coming to us all. It's just a matter of how we get there.

Jean-Louis, it seems, has chosen his side in the great, cosmic coin flip and is content with his call. But as the film builds to its beguiling, unexpected final moments, destiny—or the divine or probability—once again intervenes and forces Jean-Louis to consider his choice … and to make another one that carries no less weight.

The movies of Jason Reitman thus far are cinematic snake oil, and they grow more unctuous by the film. Aim is taken at a social malady, which is subsequently surrounded by diversionary bluster and washed down with innocuous, syrupy sweetness that lingers just long enough for people to walk away momentarily satisfied.

Each of his films wears a glossy coat of glibness and moves along snappily (often coasting on emotive, indie-pop songs when actual human feelings can’t be gleaned from the situation or characters) to its uplifting, yet hollow, conclusion. Thank You for Smoking was slick and agreeable, although it sanitized the eviscerating wit of the book on which it was based; a buoyant cast and the guileless music of Kimya Dawson kept Juno afloat through the choppy waters of its cringe-inducing dialogue and trite take on teen pregnancy.

George Clooney displays a metaphorical representation of the depth of Up in the Air's characters.

But Up in the Air left a downright bilious taste in my mouth; if the movie were a plane—especially one that its main character, Ryan Bingham, was aboard—I would charge the cabin, wrest the yoke from the pilot and crash the motherfucker into the sea.

The film begins by holding a dirty mirror up to our dark economic times then promptly squeegees the grime away in favor of glowingly reflecting, with Reitman’s trademark canned warmth and winking humor, people who profit off the misery and cowardice of others. The movie aspires to social commentary at the prospect of Bingham—a man who gets paid a ton of money to fly around the country firing people for weak-willed corporations—losing his own job to the innovation of laying off employees by video (ah, modern technology). But it lacks the conviction to say anything meaningful, instead heaping on plot devices designed to make viewers empathize with Bingham; the self-absorbed and self-described “career transition counselor” has a revelatory family encounter and gets what passes for his heart ripped out and stomped on by a fellow traveler (Vera Farmiga, lending the movie and her character more vibrance and intelligence than either deserve).

As played by George Clooney at his hangdoggiest, Bingham claims compassion for these people who are about to have their lives and livelihoods ripped out from under them while he enjoys the privileges of flying first-class, staying in ritzy hotels and—oh please, oh please—attempting to rack up enough frequent-flyer points to join the 10-million-mile club; it would be unethical to just shitcan them via Skype.

Where did I pack my travel irony?

Much was made of how Reitman employed the recently laid-off in some of the firing scenes (except in the ones that required overwrought theatricality to apply a dose of liberal guilt; then he used pros like J.K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis). Never mind that any one of these folks would probably have made a more interesting character than Bingham; they’re not human beings so much as props used to trigger emotions in Bingham and his eager, head-chopping protégé that are meant to make them seem human (the reprehensibility of the primary characters is illustrated by the fact that it takes someone they’ve fired killing herself to weigh the pros and cons of enjoying a plush lifestyle at the expense of ruining the lives of others).

My favorite quote from the movie comes from the insufferable corporate-climber-cum-Bingham-replacement (played, it must be said, excellently by Anna Kendrick) when she asks her unwilling mentor if he can “stop condescending for one second, or is that part of your bullshit philosophy?” The same could be asked of the film itself.

To lose one’s job—especially in this economy and especially in America, where we hardly bat an eye at spending hundreds of billions of dollars blowing people up on the other side of the globe but get worked into a tizzy at the prospect of ensuring all our citizens (not just rich ones or those with good jobs) have quality health care—is to be faced with losing everything. It is to have every aspect of one’s life thrown up in the air.

Thankfully, there is another recent movie—one filled with genuine anger, heart and humor—that understands this. That movie is Tokyo Sonata.

Welcome home...

We first see Megumi, a housewife in suburban Tokyo, closing a door that has blown open amid the prelude to an approaching storm. The film shifts to her husband, Ryuhei, at his office job, where he learns he is no longer needed.

Thus begins the erosion of a family that also includes an aimless teenage boy, Takashi, on the brink of adulthood and an adolescent son, Kenji, who seems wiser to the world than the grown-ups surrounding him.

Initially, Ryuhei tries to conceal his joblessness; he dresses in his suit and leaves home with briefcase in hand every morning. He spends the days alternately standing in line at the unemployment department and hanging out with an old friend who has also lost his job and who counsels Ryuhei on how to maintain appearances, including programming his cell phone to occasionally ring, which he can pass off as important, business-related calls.

Meanwhile, Megumi, a dutiful housewife and mother who yearns for something more, has secretly obtained a drivers license; the oldest son is contemplating joining the American military; and the youngest has funneled his lunch money into private piano lessons strictly forbade by his father.

Out for more than a drive.

Directed and cowritten by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a filmmaker best known for high-concept horror movies like Cure and Pulse (although perhaps the real-life horror of unemployment in the current economy is a logical progression), Tokyo Sonata takes viewers to unexpected places, sometimes jarringly, always with purpose. There is Ryuhei’s quiet indignity at taking a job cleaning toilets—including one that rivals Trainspotting’s Worst Toilet in Scotland—in a mall; there is Megumi’s reawakening; there is Takashi’s discovering happiness abroad; there is Kenji’s moment of grace (and I’m not referring to his inevitable piano performance, which concludes the film and which Kurosawa infuses with beauty, catharsis and questions).

Kurosawa is not afraid to leave his characters (and, in turn, viewers) with questions. Although the film has its extreme, if not fanciful, situations, each of the characters reacts with humanity and the doubt, impulsiveness, regret and righteousness implied therein.

Performance. Art.

While Tokyo Sonata ends palatabley, even optimistically, Kurosawa (whom I am obligated to mention is of no relation to the great Akira Kurosawa) doesn’t sugarcoat a poison pill. In the film’s world—as well as in the real one—hard times can scatter us, change us and bring us back together, but they leave scars that are not easily masked.

Kurosawa also shows us that entertainment, be it images or music or words or some combination thereof, can provide a soothing salve for the wounds of these dire times. That’s not quackery; it may even be art.

In the underappreciated thriller Transsiberian, in which an American couple becomes inadvertently embroiled in drug trafficking while aboard the titular train running from Beijing to Moscow, a character observes that if you want to learn about U.S. history, you buy a book; if you want to learn about Russian history, you buy a shovel.

Few nations have as much buried history—both literally and figuratively, and often intentionally—as Russia, particularly in the years during and surrounding World War II. Consider Come and See, a film that focuses on the Nazis’ brutal invasion of what was then the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The remnants of Minsk, Belarus, following World War II.

Made during the early days of glasnost, Come and See’s script waited nearly a decade for official approval and was filmed some 43 years after the actual atrocities on which the movie is based (although it received some festival play, including—unsurprisingly—winning first prize at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival, it did not receive an international theatrical release until 2001). Cowritten by Soviet director Emer Klimov and Belarusian author Ales Adamovich, whose real-life experience as a teenage member of the partisan resistance informs the film, Come and See provides a glimpse at one of the most tragic and little-known episodes of World War II (as the end titles inform, 628 Belarusian villages and their inhabitants were torched by the Nazis, killing between 2 and 3 million people, or about one-third of Belarus’ population).

Florya in the forest.

The film opens with two boys digging in the sand, searching for the rifles of dead soldiers so that they might take up arms with the Soviet partisan forces, whose guerrilla network spanned the countryside’s forests and farmland. With his freshly unearthed gun, adolescent Florya (Alexei Kravchenko) is soon spirited away by the partisans over the protests of his mother, who has already lost her husband to the war.

Part of the film’s power is derived from the way Klimov subtly transitions the tone, from the gallows humor of the boys struggling to remove a gun from a corpse to the mother’s foreboding emotional plea to the blunt-trauma force of Florya witnessing first-hand humanity’s worst.

Come and See is a boy’s view of the war, but it contains none of the optimistic twinkle of John Boorman’s fine Hope and Glory, the lavish spectacle of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun or the austere poetry of Lajos Koltai’s potent Fateless. If anything, the movie is an exercise in psychological horror, a spiritual relative of Apocalypse Now.

A boy and his (stolen) cow.

In Come and See, the visceral blow is strengthened by the way it observes the casual inhumanity of the Nazis. I can’t think of another film that depicts Hitler’s dogma with such insinuating, chilling effectiveness.

After becoming separated from the resistance camp during a German artillery attack, Florya leads fellow young partisan Glasha (Olga Mironova) to his nearby family farm, where he expects to be greeted by his mother, sisters and a warm meal. Instead, they are met with an empty cottage and a set table, the food on which is covered with flies. As they make their way to a neighboring home with Florya desperate to find his remaining family, Glasha turns back and sees the evidence of what she and viewers already suspect, a mound of bodies left to rot behind a stable.

The horror... the horror...

In another scene, a terrified family invites German officers into their home and offers them food as Nazi soldiers storm their village; one trooper passing by outside nonchalantly punches through a kitchen window and steals bread.

Later, Nazis leave an elderly, bed-ridden woman alive to “breed” while her family and village burn around her.

Mein effigy.

That the film is bearable to watch is a testament to Klimov, a contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky (who made the thematically similar Ivan’s Childhood), and Come and See is his finest and best-known work. Although much of the movie is seen from Florya’s point-of-view, it is filmed with a sharp, sage eye. Never harried or documentarian, but lacking the visual polish of many Hollywood war movies, Come and See feels damp and cold and savage (there are rumors that live ammunition was often used during filming, so maybe there is an element of reality in the characters’ palpable sense of dread). It is not afraid to linger, though it never does so gratuitously, and it has the perfect vehicle with which to behold its devastation in Kravchenko, then a nonprofessional actor with an open, expressive face who transforms from a righteous, enthusiastic youth to a wearied shell over the course of the film (the boy was allegedly hypnotized for the movie’s closing scenes, perhaps an appropriate state for, as J. Hoberman writes in his Village Voice review, “most viewers will be as well”).

'This is war...'

In those final moments, Nazis captured by the partisans reveal their humanity through their cowardice and fear as they try to explain away their barbarity, telling those whose families they exterminated that they were “following orders,” that “this is war, and nobody is to blame…”

Florya fires his only shot at the movie’s end, and then at a picture of Hitler. Klimov cuts footage of death camps and regressing archival footage of Hitler against the prematurely aged face of Florya. The impact is impossible to bury.

“Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.” This simple reminder was famously found pasted to the writing desk of Herman Melville, whom, one may reasonably assume, used the words as motivation in his later years, when the author of what many consider the greatest American novel was toiling in relative poverty and anonymity.

Those words might also have served as a slogan for filmmaker Greg Mottola, who made his feature debut with 1996’s scrappy, underappreciated comedy The Daytrippers and has since worked largely as a television director (for scrappy, underappreciated comedies like Undeclared and Arrested Development). After a legitimate hit with 2007’s Superbad, which was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and produced by Judd Apatow, Mottola set his sites on another virginal coming-of-age comedy, albeit one that is less broad and certainly more personal.

'Put down your mint juleps ... welcome to the Kentucky Derby!'

The funny, bittersweet Adventureland may not be the Moby-Dick of first-love stories, but it deserves a better fate than the collective shrug with which it was met during its theatrical run.

It is the burgeoning summer of 1987, and bookish, introverted James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is a freshly graduated literature major looking forward to exploring the “sexually permissive cultures” of Europe with friends before returning for grad school at Columbia University. The trip, which was to be a gift from his parents, is nixed when James’ father loses his job, forcing the family to move into a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh and forcing James into premature employment.

Doing the work of 'lazy, pathetic morons.'

James, however, quickly learns that his degree qualifies him for little and ends up taking a job at Adventureland, a sad-sack amusement park whose rides and games look like the remains of a run-down traveling carnival that grew too weary to keep traveling. There, he is sentenced to work in games (rides jobs seem reserved for the more physically attractive and overtly upper-crust) with fellow overeducated outcasts like Joel (Martin Starr), who is majoring in Russian literature and Slavic languages and knowingly describes his career track as “cabbie, hot dog vendor, marijuana delivery guy … the world is my oyster.”

'Can you stop saying 'intercourse'?'

James also meets and, over the course of the summer, falls in love with the dour Em (Kristin Stewart, not confined to the idiocy of Twilight), a pretty but unaffected games coworker with a painful past and a secret.

It’s the type of story that’s been told and retold ad infinitum, but rarely with such humanity, humor and knowingness. The characters may be archetypes, but Mottola and his cast provide them with soul; among the most pleasantly surprising is Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), a trendily fashioned rides worker with a come-hither look who is the object of lust among male Adventureland employees and who turns out to be much more than the sum of her carefully coordinated outward parts.

Ryan Reynolds as Mike Connell: 'He's jammed with Lou Reed.'

And while Mottola obviously feels great affection for his characters, there is nary a hint of nostalgia in regard to time and place. When the park’s Top 40-looping sound system plays Falco’s Rock Me, Amadeus one too many times, James snaps and Joel rails, “Fucking sadists!” Meanwhile, Adventureland’s games are rigged, and James is warned by the married management team about the prize hierarchy—specifically, not to under any circumstances award a “giant-ass panda” (as Joel observes, “We pay little Malaysian kids 10 cents a day to make these toys; we can’t just give them away”).

'Hey, litterbug! In the clown mouth!'

As summer winds down and Adventureland prepares to shutter for the off-season, loves are lost and gained, choices are embraced and lamented, and lives stagnate and evolve.

In a gorgeously filmed scene near the movie’s end, James, Joel and the sack-whacking Frigo (James’ former “best friend … then I turned 4”) sit in the gloaming on a shadowed hillside, drinking and firing bottle-rockets into the rose-tinted sky. As Frigo (Matt Bush) frolics with explosives, James and Joel have a Meaning of Life conversation.

'Are we doing this?'

“Herman Melville wrote fuckin’ Moby-Dick,” Joel bemoans, “but he was so poor and forgot by the time he died that in his obituary they called him Henry Melville. You know, like why bother?”

After a moment of thought, James counters: “… he wrote a 700-page allegorical novel about the whaling industry … I hope they call me Henry when I die too.”

“One can only hope,” Joel replies.

Melville got the last laugh. Hopefully Adventureland will too.

“… this gun is pointed right at your heart.”

“That is my least vulnerable spot.”

—An exchange between pistol-wielding, expatriate nightclub owner Rick Blaine and French Captain Louis Renault as Casablanca crescendos toward its climax.

At the heart of Casablanca is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine. And Rick Blaine’s heart is vulnerable.

There are many elements that conspire to make Casablanca a great film: its pointed, Saharan-dry script; a deep, top-notch, international cast that volleys dialogue like sparring duelists; the shrewd direction of the underappreciated Michael Curtiz, whose start in the silent era reveals itself in the movie’s plaintive moments; and the seamlessly interwoven subplots and supporting characters, which fill the black-and-white Casablanca with vibrant color.

Rick: sticking his neck out for nobody.

But it may be the wounded heart beating beneath the smoky, cynical, intrigue-packed exterior that elevates Casablanca to the status of enduring classic. The film’s historical window is merely a backdrop, a canvas on which is rendered a cultural icon of lost love. And who can’t identify with heartbreak?

The source of Rick’s heartbreak is Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), who arrives in Casablanca (the film’s opening provides a nifty introduction to the Moroccan city) in December 1941 with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a fugitive leader of the Czechoslovakian resistance, seeking letters of transit and escape to America. In flashback, it is learned that Ilsa, believing her husband dead, fell in love with Rick while in Paris only to learn the truth as Nazis descended on the city.

The letter.

Standing rain-soaked on a train platform waiting for Ilsa to join him and flee the German army for French-controlled Morocco, Rick is handed a letter, the ink of which weeps away in the deluge as he reads Ilsa’s fabricated explanation. When she appears at Rick’s Café Americain—“of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”—reunited with her husband, the outwardly hard-boiled Rick (motto: “I stick my neck out for nobody”) begins to crack as he struggles to decide whether to help his former love.

The characters not only have something at stake, they have a perceptible past and, in the case of Rick and Ilsa, are forced to make decisions that are outside of—but informed by—their affair. It is a film filled with romance and resentment; deceit and truth; corruption and integrity; cruelty and compassion; and, above all, a love that is enduring if irretrievable.

In other words, it is a film in which viewers can find parallels with their own lives and loves (albeit in a more exotic setting and with wittier banter).

As time (and bourbon) go by.

Casablanca is among those rare films that reward repeated viewings; if watching it the first time is indeed the beginning of a beautiful friendship, seeing it thereafter strengthens one’s affection for it, as the film reveals its layers.

Consider the scene in which Sam (Dooley Wilson), Rick’s piano-playing band leader, first plays As Time Goes By, igniting an outburst from Rick: “I thought I told you never to play…!” Rick’s rage is cut short when he sees Ilsa and realizes Sam was playing at her request; it isn’t until later we learn that, for Rick, a kiss from Ilsa is not necessarily just a kiss.

Bogart’s reaction in this scene, in which Curtiz cuts to him in close-up after Rick recognizes Ilsa, is devastating in its vulnerability (he may not have been a rangey actor, but Bogart was a smart and subtle one). Until this moment, Rick is blunt-edged and glib, playing hardball with the president of the Deutsche Bank (“You’re lucky the bar’s open to you”) and rebuffing an attempt by rival club owner Ferrari (an unctuous Sydney Greenstreet) to purchase Rick’s or, at the very least, Sam (“I don’t buy or sell human beings”). But here, in the presence of Ilsa, Rick’s soul is laid bare in such a way that even the corrupt Captain Renault (Claude Rains, teasingly fey) begins to confirm his suspicion that the nightclub owner with a sketchy past is really “a rank sentimentalist.”

'Make it ten. I'm only a poor corrupt official.'

Casablanca is also uncommon in its conclusion, which manages to be both true to itself and crowd-pleasing; the hero doesn’t always have to get the girl (sometimes the prefect of police is a suitable substitute). Although the final scene seems decisive in its design, it was, in fact, unresolved during production whether Ilsa would depart with Rick or Laszlo; not only was the right decision eventually made, but the ambiguity during filming had the added benefit of enhancing Bergman’s performance as Ilsa, who is conflicted about her feelings for the two men and faces heartbreak of her own either way (that said, I never understood what Ilsa saw in a stick-in-the-mud like Laszlo).

Is a kiss is just a kiss?

People are made to fall in love, even though there’s always a chance it won’t last. Casablanca is about the lost loves that can haunt us, the worthwhileness of embracing those fleeting passions while they linger and having the strength to move forward in their wake. And it aims right for the heart.

Ti West is a devious, dangerous, exciting filmmaker.

His feature-film debut was 2005’s low-budget, high-pleasure The Roost, a self-assured, retro, B-level, isolated teen/creature feature interspersed with interludes from the type of late-night TV horror show that used to be a staple. His follow-up was Trigger Man, a hunter-becomes-hunted thriller that, though microscopically funded and narratively thin, was effectively terse.

West really hit his stride, however, with The House of the Devil, a diabolical, hackles-raising chiller that blends elements of the Babysitter, Old Dark House and Demon Child horror subgenres into something fresh and unanticipated.

Set during a lunar eclipse evening in the 1980s—when, as the opening titles inform us, “over 70 percent of Americans believed in the existence of Satanic cults” (approximately the same number of people also believed Ronald Reagan competent … just saying)—The House of the Devil focuses on college student Samantha Hughes (a sympathetic and game Jocelin Donahue), who is trying to raise money to move into her own apartment and out of a dorm room shared with a slovenly, sex-addicted roommate. That Samantha’s potential new landlord is played by cult horror icon Dee Wallace and that her desired new home is next to a church where the film’s title appears in freeze-frame are just two of the many sly winks in West’s repertoire.

'The kid could be from hell.'

Samantha’s best hope for quick cash is a babysitting job advertised by the mysterious, molasses-voiced Mr. Ulman (the great character actor Tom Noonan). Although her friend Megan advises Samantha against the last-minute gig (“The kid could be from hell,” Megan says knowingly, despite the pre-Scream, pre-postmodern era), Samantha has no other options, and, besides, Mr. Ulman promised to make the night “as painless as possible.” Nudge, nudge.

Needless to say, the evening goes the way of the aforementioned netherworld. To provide more detail would be to spoil the fun and fright that follows.

Mr. Ulman: making it 'as painless as possible.'

Suffice it to say that in an age of slick but hollow remakes of genre classics like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as witless, thudding exercises in torture like Saw and Hostel, The House of the Devil seems bold by its old-school virtues and sense of cinematic joy.

Although it is hard-boiled horror to be sure, The House of the Devil lowers the splatter quotient in favor of cold, controlled, efficient tension. Unlike such hacks as the makers of the aforementioned modern “horror” movies, West knows that suspense is derived not from suffering but from anticipation.

Mother?

In The House of the Devil, viewers never know what West is going to do; he has you gripping your armrest when nothing happens and gasping in surprise when you least expect. He finds tension in stand-bys like creaking floorboards, ringing phones and shadows under a doorframe, but he also milks the menace of a dripping faucet, globs of hair and even a slice of pepperoni pizza.

There will be blood.

To paraphrase an old friend talking about another (and somewhat dubious) old friend, I admire Ti West, but I wouldn’t buy an apple (or a pizza) from the guy.

As a boy, I loved the local movie theater as much as I loved the old Busch Stadium, each with its own rules and scents and causes for floor stickiness and possibilities for something new, and going to a film on a Friday or Saturday was as much of an event as going to a Cardinals baseball game. The outing was planned days in advance, the movie carefully selected beforehand and passionately rehashed afterward.

I distinctly remember the thrill of seeing Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Muppet Movie on the big screen from a plush, squeaky seat while alternately chewing Milk Duds and trying desperately to dislodge their caramel cores from my molars. On weekends, I would sit up long after my parents had retired for The Saturday Night Shocker on the then-independent St. Louis TV station KPLR; the weekly midnight program regularly featured the classic Universal monster movies and occasional horror/sci-fi schlock from the 1950s and ’60s.

Yes, even at a young age I considered myself quite the film aficionado. Then one day I saw two guys on TV arguing about a movie I never heard of directed by someone I didn’t know from a country whose residents didn’t speak English.

I became a devoted viewer of At the Movies, and thanks to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (and the rise of video stores) was exposed to a whole new world. Soon thereafter I sought out their respective newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, from the local library; although they lacked the conversational (or bickering, depending on the film) tone of their show, their reviews provided new films to explore and new ways to perceive them. Though smart, Siskel and Ebert were not snobby; they just loved movies, loved writing about them and loved talking about them, and they did both with precision and perspective.

As I grew older and developed an affinity for both journalism and criticism, I gravitated more toward Ebert; there was something both professorially wise and fan-boyishly gleeful in his writing and in his embrace of films as disparate as Anaconda and Annie Hall. Without him, I may have eventually discovered the likes of Kurosawa, Truffaut and Ozu, but I would likely not have cherished them.

Siskel is long since gone, and Ebert retired from television after multiple cancer-related surgeries left him without his lower jaw and the ability to speak (not to mention eat solid food). But Ebert’s voice remains strong; his film criticism still appears regularly in the Sun-Times, and he continues his excellent “Great Movies” essays (a third collection of which will be published in book form soon).

As valuable a contribution as Ebert has made to film appreciation, he may be making an even more valuable one as an ordinary human being (albeit one with an extraordinary gift for words) finding purpose, grace and even humor in debilitating conditions. In a lovely recent Esquire piece, writer Chris Jones chronicles Ebert’s cancer surgeries, his newfound reliance on Post-it notes, his still-passionate love affair with film and, perhaps most impactfully, his online journal, in which he often eschews film in favor of more personal topics, including, as Jones points out in a passage quoted in the article, Ebert’s own mortality:

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

I once met Roger Ebert at a journalism conference in Chicago when I was a college sophomore just dipping my toes into the waters of film commentary for the university’s weekly entertainment rag. Ebert was standing near a bank of elevators, surrounded by stern-looking, professional adults. “Go introduce yourself,” a friend prodded. I was dumbstruck. This was, to me, the Ozzie Smith of movie criticism; a nimble, game-changing force whom little snuck past. My friend pushed me across the floor, jumped into the group and extended a hand to Ebert. My friend explained that I was a budding film writer and a huge (but non-stalker) fan of Ebert; the great critic asked where we were from (“Ah, Charleston,” he replied upon learning that we attended Eastern Illinois University, not far south from his native Urbana and alma mater, the University of Illinois). He asked me the last movie I saw and loved, and I replied The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (at the time I was taking a course on Luis Bunuel); he smiled approvingly and said, “Bunuel is one of the greats.”

After a moment, the elevator bell sounded, and the group began to file in. “Keep writing,” he said.

You too, Roger.

Chris Jones’ Esquire article can be found here.

Roger Ebert’s Sun-Times reviews can be viewed here.

Roger Ebert’s journal is here.

As if being unemployed in the current economy isn’t dehumanizing enough, I recently applied for two positions that required filling out long-form, bizzaro questionnaires. (Has the Facebookization of society now infected job hunting? Like, OMG, before we actually look at your resume or interview you, take this personality test; we’ll poke you if you pass, and you’ll totally LOL when you find out we’re hiring based on what Twilight character you are ;^) …)

One quiz featured outerdimensional math questions such as “What number comes next in this series: 2, 5, 13, 7, pi …” (huh?) while the other featured a mix of no-shades-of-gray queries like “True or False: I like to be in large crowds” (there was no space for responding that I enjoy attending sporting events and concerts, but try to avoid white supremacist rallies and Republican fundraisers … or are those last two the same thing?) and nebulous conundrums like “A client who is clearly angry approaches you and begins yelling. You: (a) Shout back (b) Call your manager (c) Smile, calmly apologize and offer to help (d) Call the police” (I submit that depending on what and how the client is yelling, any one of those could be a viable answer).

Instead of asking a few straightforward questions that might overtly reveal something about one’s diligence and individualism—like “Former employers and coworkers would consider your work ethic (a) Tireless (b) Coherent (c) Comatose” or “The greatest author of all time is (a) William Shakespeare (b) Dan ‘The White Albino’ Brown (c) That British woman who made millions off a pubescent wizard”—these exams snakily try to peg one’s hireability through a lengthy series of surreptitiously worded riddles all, apparently, in the name of keeping psychology majors gainfully employed.

It reminded me of a sequence from the great Italian film Il Posto—a sort of neorealist Office Space—which follows wide-eyed young Domenico (Sandro Panseri) as he pursues employment with a large, anonymous corporation in Milan.

Fresh out of school and putting college and life dreams on hold due to his family’s relative poverty, Domenico crams into a small office in the company’s massive headquarters, which is comprised of at least two buildings, and awaits a series of exams with dozens of other applicants. The tests, explains the administrator with more than a hint of knowing ambiguity, “are designed mainly to reveal your individual qualities.”

This is only a test...

As the line of candidates is then ushered from one building to another, a man on the street asks what’s going on. “If we pass the test, we get a job,” Domenico reports.

“What will they think of next?” the man grumbles.

The testing begins with a math problem: A roll of copper wire is 520 meters long; three-quarters are cut off; of the remainder, another four-fifths are cut off. How many centimeters are left on the roll? (How answering this correctly qualifies a person as a typist or office messenger, the movie does not explain; although it does provide the solution to the question.)

The prospects are then asked a series of yes-or-no questions including “Does the opposite sex repulse you?” and “Do you often drink to forget your troubles?” Domenico stifles a chuckle at the former (having just courted a pretty job-seeker named Magali during the lunch break) and replies “sometimes” to the latter, eliciting a harsh reminder that the answer must be “yes” or “no.”

Unlike me, Domenico chooses not to further rail against the limitations and ludicrousness of the tests to the employer, passes them and is hired.

'I dropped my spoon.'

Directed and cowritten by Ermanno Olmi, Il Posto technically arrived more than a decade after the end of the neorealist movement, although it shares with those post-World War II films a focus on the working class, a concern with socioeconomic issues, location photography and a largely nonprofessional cast. And while Olmi doesn’t shy away from the harsher aspects of his characters’ reality, he also infuses the film with a deadpan sense of observational humor less prevalent in the works of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.

Domenico’s parents are hard-working and caring, his mother frequently exasperated by typical sibling hostility. “These two are unbelievable, the way they fight,” she mutters under her breath but loud enough so her boys can hear (as mothers are prone to do). “Like cats and dogs. Not like brothers at all.”

The film also provides tangential glimpses into the habits and lives of Domenico’s coworkers; one cuts his cigarettes in half (and is bluntly stingy about sharing), one has his hair cut at home by his wife (reminding her to keep his sideburns), another lobs wads of paper across an aisle of desks into the trash (occasionally misfiring), while yet another has long since retired but keeps coming into the office anyway (the influence for Office Space’s Milton Waddams?).

Shy, softspoken and respectful away from home, Domenico is as alert as the film itself, and Il Posto is anchored by Panseri’s endearing performance. Perhaps the greatest of Il Posto’s many pleasures is the way it watches Domenico actively observing the world around him.

The eyes have it.

Domenico’s eyes are always moving, sizing up his surroundings, from the people in his neighborhood (where he feels comfortable enough to lose himself in romantic song) to the crowded train he quietly takes to work (on which he witnesses a mix of students, laborers and professionals) to the spacious hall where prospective employees are tested (and where the architecturally artistic domed ceiling and ornate light fixtures are lost on most) to the plush office of the administrative official who will ultimately decide in what department Domenico will work (and who is strategically positioned in a high-back chair towering above his visitors).

His ears are also attentive, as when, during their brief lunch break courtship, he and Magali gaze through the window of a fine clothing store; she mentions she likes the trenchcoat with “lots of buttons and belts.” The coat initially proves too expensive for Domenico’s mother on their preliminary shopping trip, but after an early payday, he is shown wearing the button- and belt-bedecked coat and checking himself out in a bathroom mirror; a coworker sarcastically comments that Domenico looks like an SS officer.

Not enough buttons and belts.

Despite being immersed in the daily drudgery and exposed to the gripes of longtime employees, Domenico retains a hopeful spirit, buoyed by his affection for Magali, who is out there somewhere in the vast hive of buzzing drones and who promises to meet him at the company’s New Year’s party. He arrives to a crowd of two older employees, and is greeted at the door with a bottle: “Each man should have a lady. Or, if he’s alone, a bottle of wine.”

Like life, Il Posto has moments of bittersweetness and even sorrow. But even those somber moments are, also like life, tempered with levity and possibility (after a deceased employee’s goods are sorted—“Personal, company, personal…”—there is a battle between veteran coworkers to move up a few rows and claim the vacated desk).

Job placement and a cup of corporate hierarchy.

Death opens a door in the bureaucracy for Domenico, but his expression in the film’s final shot, with a ditto machine drumming in the background, makes me wonder how long he will keep what his father describes as “a job for life.”

Note: The Criterion Collection’s beautifully restored DVD release of Il Posto also contains La Cotta (The Crush), a short film Olmi made for Italian television in 1967 and a genuine gem. The movie bills itself as “A True Story That Could Be A Fairytale” and opens with the winsome line, “Once upon a time, a few weeks ago, there was a boy called Andrea…” The teenage Andrea is a would-be lothario (“Let’s say 16,” he slyly responds when girls correctly peg his age as 15) who is more romantically inclined than his targets. Amid a mixed-gender gathering at a friend’s house, Andrea finds a movie camera and says they should film “a love story”; the girls, however, want to make a mystery and a police drama. Over the course of a failed New Year’s Eve date (a holiday in which Olmi again finds plaintive poetry), Andrea learns a little something about love and viewers learn, via the older sister of a friend, what those other girls are missing.