The History Boys, Deja Vu, The Fountain and Bobby each deal with history. I'll tell you where two of the four go wrong.

Will someone tell my why Mark Forster, now on his fourth accomplished Hollywood feature, still feels he has to prove himself as a director?  Stranger than Fiction has production design coming out its sprocket holes, affecting, technically impeccable performances (like Napoleon pastries:  crisp and flaky on the outside and filled with fabulous sweet goo) and superbly staged, surprisingly large-scale stunts.

And for what?  For a quirky little comedy that feels like it’s stuck in the Sixties.

Borat is the latest incarnation of a character older than Christ: the mischief-making trickster god of Classical mythology, half-man, half-goat, the Romans called Satyr, the Greeks called Pan, and Shakespeare called Puck.   

This creature is not evil or malicious.  He likes you.  He likes screwing with your head.  And he likes sex. 

“No ideas but in things.”
--William Carlos Williams

“The world is everything that is the case.”
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Why is a tree more beautiful than a babbling brook?  Or anything that babbles for that matter?”
--Woody Allen

Years ago, just before the release of Stephen Frears’s first big Hollywood feature The Grifters, the director of the then-celebrated My Beautiful Laundrette, and the now-celebrated The Queen, came to UCLA to give a talk.  The first question was:  “How do you pick your scripts?  And then how do you work with them?”  Frears answered, “I’m illiterate.”  He refused to elaborate.  I think I finally understand what he meant.  Bear with me.

This weekend, The Prestige and Flags of Our Fathers both offer about twenty minutes of film that’s worth ten bucks and two-and-a-half hours of your time to see.  In one case, those minutes point to a more focused and relevant version of the movie as it might have been.  In the other, they point to a different movie entirely.  But what a movie.

Little Capote

This weekend I saw two movies that were "literary" in very different, maybe even opposite, ways. Little Children, adopted from the novel Little Children, made me think about what I was seeing by giving me room (time and space) to ask questions. Infamous, adopted from George Plimpton's book about Capote, tried to answer my questions as soon as they formed. Both approaches are rhetorical, and live more comfortably on the page than the screen. A movie that gives you time to think risks boring you. A movie that takes time explaining loses its immediacy. In this case, one of the trade-offs was worth it.

GET OFF ON THE DEPARTING BUS

Two Democratic Visions by New Yorkers

Has anyone noticed that the triple-entendre refrain, "Oh, we all get it in the end..." of the song that caps off John Cameron Mitchell's erotic musical comedy ShortBus is the moral of Martin Scorsese's The Departed? I have. And now I'm going to try to tell you why it's important.

A long way back when movies still surprised me, I went to the twelve-hundred seat Avco Cinema in Westwood, California that had been the first theater on the West Coast to be equipped with THX (for Return of the Jedi) to see a film that for the life of me I can't remember. But I do remember the trailer that preceded it. It was the first trailer I remember being booed.

Obnoxious, loud, murky and cheaper looking than the shoddy Schwarzenegger actioners of the mid-eighties (remember Commando?) it featured the pouchy, balding star of a canceled TV show running around in a tank top, screaming, sweating, spraying bullets, and sprinting through endless explosions, chased by a militant German anarchist. When a portentous voice-over promised, "It will blow you through the back of the theater," someone yelled "It BLOWS!" I think it was me. By that time, the audience had been whistling, jeering and rolling in the aisles for a full minute.