“Duplicity”: Seeing Stars

To those who lament the lack of movie stars in motion pictures, “Duplicity” offers solace.

Presently, Hollywood showcases actors of varying talents; what it doesn’t have on a consistent basis is silver screen icons. There are a plethora of good actors who hold our attention, surely, but far too many seem to favor self-indulgent and disconnected parts. Bankable names like Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale choose roles where they almost exclusively portray loners, apparently finding solace in their character’s insularity and by losing themselves in costumes, accents and affectations. Powerful but distant, their detachment makes them feel small and isolated. There are thespians, fine artisans such as Philip Seymour Hoffman or Hillary Swank, who, bluntly, just don‘t radiate that “It” quality. And we’re encumbered with another generation of headshot pretty, vacant line readers; while that may be no different than the age of the studio contracts, it doesn’t alter the perception that they are merely wisps of space. Animation and special effects have nudged out, if not supplanted in many instances, live actors, both the gifted and the rubbish.

Perhaps nowhere has this dearth of magnetism been more telling than in romanticism because those box-office behemoths are just too comfortable playing the emotionally unavailable. Has Crowe ever cuddled on-screen? Has Depp ever swept a paramour off her feet? Has Bale ever swooned? It seems they’re too laden with breast plates and scissor hands for a little slap and tickle. With A-List actresses summarily jilted, it’s left to foreign flicks like “Priceless” or independent films such as “Milk” or even animation to provide the spark. It is telling that “WALL-E” was one of 2008’s most meaningful expositions on intimacy. It’s gotten so desperate that it can’t be too long until lesser lights attempt a computer-generated romance; coming this autumn, “PS, CGI Love You.”

In “Duplicity,“ Julia Roberts and Clive Owen exemplify not only the essence of being a movie star; they show self-indulgent SAG sack superstars how to bring sexy back. In his follow-up to the fabulous “Michael Clayton,” director and writer Tony Gilroy returns to the rubric of corporate intrigue through a lighter prism with Roberts and Owen as CIA and MI6 operatives who become lovers, retire from government spying, and enter the nefarious domain of corporate espionage by working for competing cutthroat multinational cosmetics companies. A byzantine plot trundles in a circuitous route, leaping back and forth through the last six years, skipping across continents. And while the film never flags, the labyrinthine machinations deviate from what makes “Duplicity” so much fun: the unforced chemistry from two scintillating performers. Through all of the plot twists and story subterfuge, Roberts and Owen deliver performances that accrete seamlessly as they let fly with sharp, flirtatious repartee that harkens to an age when witty verbal jousts between besotted equals were commonplace.

Roberts radiates the supreme confidence of a Tinseltown pro in her turn as the Claire Stenwick. With a twinkle in her eye, she has a certain Rosalind Russell vibe when swatting away Owen‘s chat up lines, or feeding him one of her own. Owen cleans up quite nicely for this film. In recent years, he‘s carved out a terrific resume in such films as “Sin City,” “Children of Men” and “Shoot ‘Em Up,” where he carried a perpetual seven o‘clock shadow like it was a trusty six shooter. But with smooth, high cheekbones shading his face like a single bruise on an apple, a clean-shaven Owen generates a stellar comic technique as Ray Koval. Wearing button down shirts even when on vacation, he looks like the dapper stud in the Lancôme cologne ads. (Before this film, if he was being paid in scents, it would have been British Sterling.)

Gilroy casts the additional, secondary roles with astute choices. Tom Wilkinson is eerie disquiet as Howard Tully, the paranoid conglomerate CEO. Wilkinson is wickedly adept at finding the unnerving in a normal moment. As his rival, Richard Garsik, a snarling Paul Giamatti continues to construct the supporting actor as All-Star relief pitcher, a Mad Hungarian of frothy interjections and ruthless maliciousness. Further fine actors such as Denis O’Hare and Thomas McCarthy make up a notable “Michael Clayton” ensemble.

But “Duplicity” is best when focused on the pulchritudinous pair bonding with a terrific alchemy and it is this relationship which fomented my earlier (perhaps too) curmudgeonly rhetoric. Roberts and Owen simply provide a dwindling presence that makes going to movies so wondrous. Sometimes it’s just exhilarating to sit in a darkened theater watching movie stars.

“Crank: High Voltage”: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Nipples

Three years ago, “Crank” hurtled into theaters as absurdist fun. The taut, lean and gristle-free tale of a poisoned hit man who must keep his heart rate racing used a preposterous premise to concoct a wild, breakneck “D.O.A.” for the devil horns brigade. The sequel, “Crank: High Voltage,” released last weekend, is comparably a corpulent mess. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who in the “Crank” DVD commentary seemed quite pleased with themselves, gorge like stoned college kids at a pizza buffet. No contrivance appears to have been discarded; one can imagine that every wacky idea was met with high fives and fist bumps. This time, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) has been fixed with an artificial heart and spends the next 96 minutes electrifying himself as he scours Los Angeles for his pilfered organ while the film spends that time searching in vain for the coherence of its predecessor. “Crank: High Voltage” is a potent mix of the good, the bad and the offal.

A cornucopia of extraneous visceral images and self-congratulatory jokes and gestures, “High Voltage“ expresses mood and executes set pieces with less subtlety than the previous film, but what should one expect from a movie helmed by indulgent directors: a high-speed chase is brought to a pause when Chev’s car is blocked by a completely superfluous porn actors’ strike; a strip club shootout ends with a dancer shot in her pneumatic chest, the camera panning repeatedly over her oozing breasts; and a character is afflicted with “Full Body Tourette’s,” which is a gimmick overplayed. In a film in desperate need of felicitous redaction, when a crazed prostitute picks up a dirt bike, she doesn’t thrust it into a baddie’s groin once but over and over until his genitals have been pulverized. “ High Voltage” is littered with racial epithets and vile language as well; there’s a play on words using “Cantonese” that is headshakingly sad in its unfunny pun.

The movie is unrelentingly gratuitous, not morally but aesthetically. The ludicrous and implausible are more than palatable if illustrated with flair but “High Voltage” is so scattershot, so random, with both the camera and story flitting about with such attention deficiency that it begs the question of whether the editing process was completed during an Adderall withdrawal. Cartoonish films ask an audience to suspend disbelief; “Crank“ had you accepting that a dude could leap from a plane, fall from the heavens without a parachute, smack onto the roof of a car, bounce onto the street and survive. Over-the-top, for sure, but the scene was executed with the verve and ingenuity missing from the current incarnation. A sequence used in both films highlights the distinction between the two. In the first film, Chev and his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) engage, for medicinal purposes, in a very public (and funny) sex scene in a bustling Chinatown market. But in “High Voltage” they rut on the finish line of a horse track during a race, in front of thousands of spectators, in a myriad of positions. There’s method acting. Welcome to “meth” directing.

Statham is treated well though by the directing duo as his killer is vivified with more humor and presence than he’s bestowed with in the “Transporter“ series. An Olympic diving hopeful in his youth, Statham, with sandpaper stubble and a South London rasp, has the body of a top-level middleweight, and the face of a slightly less successful one. “High Voltage” is well served by his insistence on doing the vast majority of his own stunts. Amy Smart is plucky in the relatively thankless role of Eve. As El Huron, a vengeful gangster who wishes Chev dead, Clifton Collins Jr., so memorable as the vulnerable Perry Smith in “Capote,“ struts with an outlandish manner that an actor of his pedigree can handle. The likable Efren Ramirez, who played Pedro in “Napoleon Dynamite,” returns as the full-bodied twin brother of his deceased character in the first film. Two other roles are just disconcerting. Geri Halliwell appears in a cameo as Chev’s mother but her part is stuck by Neveldine and Taylor in a completely jarring daytime talk show segue. And David Carradine pops up as an insufferably stereotypical gang warlord.

The film ends with a severely burned Chev receiving a heart transplant from Doc Miles, his dubious delicensed surgeon, played with droll insouciance by Dwight Yoakam. After Miles and Eve leave the converted apartment operating theater believing the surgery was not successful, the camera pans closer to Chev’s bandaged face, only a swath across his eyes visible, and his hand rises and he flips the bird at the camera. Right back at ya.

“Waltz with Bashir”: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

From the opening moments of marauding, snarling dogs to the final harrowing wails of widows, the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir” is a thunderbolt, visually and emotionally provocative, arresting and riveting.

Director Ari Folman was a 19-year-old solider in the Israeli Defense Forces which invaded Lebanon in the summer of 1982. More than 20 years later, the unsettling dreams of Boaz Rein Buskila, a close friend and fellow solider, prompted the filmmaker to delve into his own murky memories of his war experience, and Folman quickly finds himself especially hounded by one particular, recurring dreamt moment. Told through the recollections of Folman, his military comrades, and the noted Israeli journalist, Ron Ben Yisahi, “Waltz with Bashir” is an eyewitness account of the Lebanese War and the army’s heedless complicity as the Lebanese Christian Phalangists massacred as many as 3,000 defenseless people in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. It is a gripping view into the psychology of the after effects of the war experience. Concrete memory and hallucination coalesce, often tormentingly; and dreams stir before consciousness admits. All the soldiers seem shadowed by the Michel de Montaigne axiom that “nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

Each of the colleagues that Folman visits conveys a remarkable story of their war remembrances, from his buddy, Carmi Cnaa‘n, who moved to Holland and found untold wealth as a falafel distributor to Shmuel Frenkel, the patchouli-soaked martial arts devotee. But the episode chronicling the experience of Roni Dayg deserves special praise. Combining artistry and pathos in a soldier’s incredible story of survival and then massive survivor’s guilt, the scene begins in daylight as Roni escapes from his flaming tank in a hostile village battlefield until he musters an ingenious getaway by water at nightfall, only to subsequently become consumed by a pall of shame as the sole member of his unit spared. His story is dramatized seamlessly between the moods of the harrowing, in-your-face action and the serene, lovely underwater animation. There is a soulful, evocative air to much of the movie, which is ably accentuated by a luminous score from Max Richter.

The imagery created by the team led by director of animation Yoni Goodman is superlative; at times, the animation carries an almost 3-D intensity. In a scene illustrating exquisite detail, the camera moves through a lush grove as cautious soldiers, slivered with sunlight, scan for combatants who have just attacked their convoy, until, through a raft of thin trunks, they lock onto their attacker. Enhanced by a realistic quality and style, “Waltz with Bashir” is coated with a smoky, dusty, earthy viscosity.

“Waltz with Bashir” ends with a jarring, searing sequence — an indelible memory — and enters the pantheon of the most profound war films.

“The Great Buck Howard”: What the World Needs Now

The illusionist Buck Howard, played with relish by John Malkovich and inspired by The Amazing Kreskin, scaled to the summit of his career during the age when ventriloquists and plate spinners had a prominent place on prime-time television. In the 1970s, talk shows were still synonymous with variety shows and the last vestiges of vaudeville and cabaret found a spot on the bill. Presently, he boasts loudly that he was a guest 61 times on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” eager to add that he never graced the telecast when the inferior Jay Leno hosted; the irascible Buck, who won’t deign to call himself a “magician,” conveniently conceals that his last appearance on Carson’s couch was a decade before Jay debuted.

In this winning comedy from director and screenwriter Sean McGinly, Buck once again undertakes his mammoth, perpetual touring schedule into the overlooked markets in the unburnished venues where the entertainment of Ed Sullivan and Dinah Shore telecasts still captivates. In a one-man show he performs sleight of hand illusions, group hypnosis and even a lounge act interlude with piano key tinkling while sing whispering Jackie De Shannon’s classic, “What the World Needs Now.” To each audience, even in the most modest of theaters in the most drab of burgs, he gushes, “I love this town.”

Malkovich inhabits the character with great physical zeal with moppish hair, Allen Ludden’s sports coat collection, and enthusiastic, rotator cuff dislocating handshakes. Genial to his fans, his offstage viper delivery underscores a sneery, leery sensibility and a constant befuddlement with modern entertainment tastes. Like his turn in “Burn After Reading” there’s always the hint of menace in Malkovich’s comic characterizations.

Into this seeming time warp enters Troy Gable (Colin Hanks), a young man fleeing mid-semester from law school who answers a print ad and, as someone who’s just absconded from the future his father so carefully planned for him, readily takes up the challenge to circumnavigate the country serving as Buck’s personal assistant. Instead of a predictable generation gap tussle arising between the two, Troy quietly observes the prickly, particular eccentricity of the late middle aged performer on the road.

They are joined by a strong collective of supporting actors with Ricky Jay as Buck’s empathic manager, Emily Blunt as a bemused public relations hack, Griffin Dunne as a curious television star and Steve Zahn as an overzealous, sycophantic fan; no one plays the friendly doofus with as much earnest sincerity as Zahn. Tom Hanks, who served as a producer on the film, fumes, coincidentally, as Troy’s father. The likable and well-cast Colin Hanks comes in a clear second though to his Pops in their on-screen debates.

McGinly keeps “The Great Buck Howard” ticking along with the breezy, finger-snapping tempo of a variety show as an extraordinary stunt catapults Buck back into mainstream consciousness. The film mines several hysterical moments from awkward television appearances with Regis, Kelly, Conan and Jon Stewart. The new found fame leads the itinerant performer to a permanent room in Vegas. But Buck quickly finds that his magical inspiration doesn’t work in Vegas. (Not necessarily such a bad thing.)

But then something quite endearing happens. Buck returns to his exhaustive touring of the hinterlands, Troy leaves Buck’s employ to become a writer, and the irony evaporates. Buck truly appreciates his audience. He doesn’t begrudge or loathe them. They adore him and he reciprocates the ardor. When Troy comes back as an audience member, he finds himself engrossed by Buck’s performance, and rooting for the curmudgeon in a vulnerable career moment. There’s a sweetness to these final scenes; it’s a robust reminder that talent is nestled even in the chintzy, that there’s skill in the schmaltz, and being sappy isn’t necessarily the same thing as being a sap.

Despite a marquee name as a producer and performer, a cast of household faves and a charming story, “The Great Buck Howard” has opened in minuscule fashion, playing to at most 64 theaters during its three weeks in release, with only a modest number to be added in the next month or so. It seems that the film will vanish without much notice; it will be one of the more wistful disappearing acts this year.

“Che”: Guerilla in the Midst

If only every movie had the director delivering his DVD commentary once the house lights come up.

The “Che” roadshow arrived in Portland with Steven Soderbergh in attendance. And after 257 minutes split by just a single quarter-hour intermission, an honest and affable Soderbergh, looking sharp in a black leather jacket, black jeans with Chelsea boots and resembling a Joe Jackson inspiration, offered a glimpse into the filmmaking saga of “Che” and the massive obstacles even an Academy Award winning director with an Oscar winning leading man faces in getting a project greenlighted. At ease, sitting on the edge of the Cinema 21 stage, he was engaging and frank as he recounted a “brutal” shoot which was the most difficult of his career.

The genesis of the project goes as far back as “Traffic.“ Eight years from conception to screen, “Che” was first developed with Soderbergh at the helm, then Terrence Malick, who alighted to the New World after several years work, and finally back to Soderbergh, who shot the two halves consecutively in the summer of 2007. He admitted that once they decided to make the film in the Spanish language, there’d be no money from the U.S. So they relied on European sources. He mused that perhaps they should have made “Che” as a multi-episode miniseries for HBO; the cable network would have provided a bigger budget. Cutting edge digital cameras arrived with just days to spare and still needed tweaking as the production commenced.

Besides the logistical obstacles, it must have been a daunting task deciding how to transfer a biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara to the screen. Plunked on a pedestal of mythology, the divisive Che was a solider and an academic, a revolutionary with the word and a weapon. But he‘s morphed into the Marxist as marketing tool. He’s a T-shirt icon with a Chris Cornell-like Rock God vibe. Upon the release of “The Motorcycle Diaries,“ Larry Rohter penned a May 2004 New York Times article titled “Che Today? More Easy Rider Than Revolutionary,” which examined Che‘s dichotomous cultural legacy. Jon Lee Anderson, the author of the seminal work, “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” and a chief consultant on Soderbergh‘s film, described Che as “a figure who can constantly be examined and re-examined. To the younger, post-cold-war generation of Latin Americans, Che stands up as the perennial Icarus, a self-immolating figure who represents the romantic tragedy of youth. Their Che is not just a potent figure of protest but the idealistic, questioning kid who exists in every society and every time.” But Mario O’Donnell, a biographer of Guevara as well, noted in the same article that these types of allusions to Greek mythology could reduce Che to a deified stereotype. “The Cubans have excluded everything about Che that is not heroic, including that which is most deliciously human about him. The personal doubts, the sexual escapades, the moments when he and [his traveling motorcycling companion Alberto] Granado are drunk, none of that fits with the immortal warrior they want to project.”

It is this warrior that Soderbergh focuses on. Part One of “Che” is stellar biographical storytelling. It intercuts expeditiously between Guevara‘s first meetings in 1955 with Fidel Castro in Mexico City to the rebel surge across Cuba in the late 1950’s and his defiant appearance in December 1964 before the United Nations. “Che” moves quickly but precisely, steadied by a filmmaker never dawdling but patiently laying out the intertwining elements. It’s methodical and engrossing. The interspersed storylines crafted by screenwriter Peter Buchman make sense and there‘s a keen understanding of Che‘s revolutionary ethos. The story was ably assisted by a quietly clever device at the beginning of the film. Soderbergh opens with a slowly exposed map of Cuba, with regions and cities clearly illuminated in succession as a respectful way to familiarize the audience with the locale and points of interest.

The second part of “Che” centers exclusively on his 1967 quest to foment revolution in Bolivia. Filmed with harsh white sunlight hue and a purposefully muted color palette, Soderbergh said that this part has a purposeful “jagged” feel. The appearance in Part Two of commendable performances from easily recognizable actors — Lou Diamond Phillips, Franka Potente and Matt Damon — doesn’t mean there’s a Hollywood gloss on this portion of the film. It’s a decidedly grittier film than its predecessor. Utilizing the Red One digital camera — a camera that not only afforded Soderbergh more maneuverability but meant that only six shots in the entire film used artificial light — Soderbergh captures a barren landscape of both geographic and political isolation. Where Che was feted as a liberating hero by village after village in Cuba, in Bolivia, he is met by local indifference (and an American presence). His revolution was vaguely organized, with less money and, most crucially, scant indigenous support. So, in Bolivia, where locals seemed hesitant, Che feels like a Marxist imperialist, exporting revolution to folks who aren’t clamoring for it. He comes across as a bit of a policy wonk as well (and this section also highlights that there’s barely an acknowledgement of a personal life in either film).

While imposing, imperious and full blooded, Benicio del Toro doesn’t overwhelm the films in the title role. He is compelling without becoming overpowering. Yet, his Guevara is indefatigable. This unceasing desire mimics the uncompromising arrogance of a demagogue. In his August 1960 speech, “On Revolutionary Medicine,” Che rallied the Cuban Militia with his oft-repeated theme of the Cuban revolution forging a “new man.”

“Then I realized a fundamental thing: For one to be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. Isolated individual endeavor, for all its purity of ideals, is of no use, and the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the nobles of ideals serves no purpose if one works along, solitarily, in some corner of America, fighting against adverse governments and social conditions which prevent progress. To create a revolution, one must have what there is in Cuba — the mobilization of a whole people, who learn by the use of arms and exercise of militant unity to understand the value of arms and the value of unity.”

He underscores this belief in the subjugation of the individual impulse with a veiled sense that his means to a revolutionary end are something more menacing than a recommendation — indeed, a threat to civil liberties.

“Individualism, in the form of the individual action of a person alone in a social milieu, must disappear in Cuba. In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collective. It is not enough that this idea is understood today, that you all comprehend the things I am saying and are ready to think a little about the present and the past and what the future out to be. In order to change a way of thinking, it is necessary to undergo profound internal changes and to witness profound external changes, especially in the performance of our duties and obligations to society.”

The Che of this speech is the Che of this epic film; unflinching, charismatic, and persuasive but peremptory; unfailingly dressed in fatigues, draped in ambivalent heroism. Soderbergh described the making of the films as “kind of like a slow motion car accident.” In Che, he’s got one hell of a back seat driver

“Tricks” & “Cherry Blossoms”: Late Bloomers

On a family trip in the mid 1980‘s, we took the London to Edinburgh line and met a young Swedish couple. While the woman in her early 20s was attractive, she was routinely so, but in the post Borg age, when Edbergs, Wilanders, and Jarryds made such a racket, it was her companion with his preposterously perfect feathered hair, flawless English and effortless friendliness who my teenaged self and younger sister engaged in casual, convivial conversation as he poured Smarties into our hands.

The pretty pair departed the train before we crossed the border, and my sister recalls that it was in the “middle of nowhere,” so perhaps, we’ve surmised, they got off at York or Darlington to hike the Yorkshire Dales. We’ve always imagined that the intrepid Scandinavians were thrust into a wondrous adventure after they disembarked.

Hinging on a boy’s obsession with the comings and goings of a man he believes to be his estranged father at his local train station, the Polish film “Tricks” is an attractive effort with many commendable elements which is somewhat foiled, one feels, by a vague central theme of parental abandonment. There’s a gnawing sense that, like an interrupted train journey, there is vitally more to the handsomely illustrated story than director and screenwriter Andrzej Jakimowski was willing to tell.

Stefek (Damian Ul) is a young boy of eightish who spends his summer days hanging out at the train station in his country town. He discovers that one of the men who regularly travels to the station in a suit and carrying a briefcase is his father who left the family, started another, and has since chosen to cut off contact with Stefek and his older sister. Stefek watches him from afar, and they interact on the platform with only passing glances. One must deduce that the father (Tomasz Sapryk) left when Stefek was no older than a baby because he doesn’t appear to readily recognize his child, even though he travels through the town ostensibly on business on a daily basis and a boy of his abandoned son’s age is lurking at the station.

Stefek begins to karmically conjure a reunion with his father. He uses borrowed carrier pigeons and strategically placed toy soldiers and sticks for his quest in scenes that are some of “Tricks” most delightfully delivered. His eighteen-year-old sister Elsa, played by the photogenic Ewelina Walendziak, is the film’s most well-developed character and while she doesn’t dissuade her younger brother from his desire, she’s not terribly interested herself in retracing a relationship with her father. Stefek’s mother is a benevolently peripheral character who spends most of the film off camera running a modest corner shop.

On one particularly sun-dappled summer day Stefek shadows the suited businessman as he strolls through the town after missing a train, buying street fruit, wading in a bucolic stream, visiting with old chums and running into former acquaintances. During the walk, the father appears to spot in a window a photo of the three he left behind in their Sunday finery. As the sun begins to set, Stefek and Elsa watch from a recessed doorway as their father purchases a modest bunch of flowers, walks to the door of their mother’s humble shop, pauses, then turns away. In the film’s final scene when Stefek finally strikes up a conversation at the end of the day with this man at the station, the film concludes a crucial moment as his the dad utters, “I’m sitting on the platform but not waiting for a train.” And then the credits begin to crawl, the film abruptly ending at a departure, one which could be the crux of a movie.

Jakimowski has a knack for shooting fetching scenes. The film moves effortlessly through charming, winding narrow old-world streets shrouded by modern concrete apartment blocks. Vignettes of swooping carrier pigeons captured in the breaks between buildings and Stefek walking the train tracks around the town leaving toy soldiers on the railroad ties are filmed expressively by cinematographer Adam Bajerski. If the film had simply wished to unfold as a verdant narrative of a summer in a young boy’s life, it contains scenes like these in abundance, with further simple, sweet moments such as a picnic in the woods, walks across a looming bridge and a carefree motorcycle ride through the town.

Stefek perpetually carries a fretful countenance, habitually chewing the inside of his lip, but as a child observer, he isn’t provided with a view into the insights necessary to illuminate the audience to a greater understanding of the father‘s reasoning. Elsa’s escapades illustrates a story which doesn’t need to be enhanced by the father’s choices, or even his presence. She struggles in a plucky way with a hectic schedule filled with a mundane dishwashing job, studying Italian lessons as she attempts to secure a job with an Italian company, and just trying to enjoy the last summer of her youth with her likable, mechanic boyfriend, all the while serving as a surrogate mother to Stefek. Most puzzling for a film apparently so immersed in a theme of family bonds is the decision to make Stefek and Elsa’s mother (Iwona Fornalczyk) such a perplexingly undeveloped character.

If the attractive “Tricks“ suffers from a paucity that suggests it’s a prologue, then “Cherry Blossoms,” the latest film from German director Doris Dorrie, is essentially two excellent, fully-formed shorter films which coalesce into a satisfying whole.

Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) learns that her husband, Rudi (Elmar Wepper), a nearing-retirement-age, unassuming bureaucrat she dotes upon, is terminally ill. They depart upon her insistence for a number of trips while she believes Rudi can still travel. They visit the mountains, journey to Berlin to see two of their children, and embark to the Baltic for a beach holiday. They are a kindly but not saccharine couple who their children barely tolerate and their grandchildren consider a distraction and it’s a deft touch by Dorrie that the person who shows the couple the most simple kindness in Berlin is their daughter’s girlfriend (Nadja Uhl), who accompanies Trudi to a Butoh performance which is so clearly important to her. After these European travels, she has the intention of taking Rudi to Japan, a country which has always fascinated, enamored and moved her. But on a still morning in their Baltic hotel, Trudi has passed away and we have at her death the conclusion of the first half of the film which, upon reflection, is a completely contained, emotionally poignant 45 minutes.

Slowly in the second portion, Rudi, an instinctually unadventurous man, begins to understand that perhaps he was too accommodating to Trudi’s role as an at-home supplicant in their relationship and even though she gained great heart from her decades of nurturing he recognizes that as the person receiving this devotion, he should have been more aware of her sacrifice and that he should have been insistent that Trudi not subsume her desires and dreams for his contentment. As he rummages through her belongings, Rudi finds postcards of Mount Fuji and long ago photos of a face-painted Trudi in Butoh poses and realizes he was both overly influential and silently complicit in her self denial. So he decides to make a pilgrimage to Japan, to take her trip of a lifetime. The journey is complicated because their third child works in finance in Tokyo, and like his siblings in Berlin, he, sadly, finds his father‘s presence an imposition and uses the rigors of his work schedule as a convenient excuse for his absences and distant manner. As Rudi begins to investigate Tokyo on his own, he befriends Yu (Aya Irizuki), an 18-year-old Butoh street dancer. They develop a friendship and a connection which will help both of them confront and then embrace grief and loss.

Dorrie, who also wrote the script, has crafted a film laden with achingly emotional scenes but at 127 minutes “Cherry Blossoms” takes the time to develop the legitimacy of these tear-jerking wallops, especially with the characterizations of Trudi and Rudi, so that the weepy moments are not manipulative. The film ends with the married couple magically intertwined with Mount Fuji looming in the background, the journey of these two people and the two mini films both meaningfully and movingly merged.

(“Tricks” and “Cherry Blossoms” screened at the Portland International Film Festival earlier this month. “Cherry Blossoms” will be released to theaters in the United States by Strand Releasing.)

“Gomorra”: Dolce & Camorra

Diego Maradona, the coked up little genius of world football, was an artisan and a renegade and nowhere did his penchant for sporting sublimity and personal self destruction flourish more than in Napoli. The scruffy, diminutive El Pibe de Oro (the Golden Child) won a World Cup for Argentina in 1986 but the next year he accomplished something even more transcendent for his club side, SSC Napoli, by winning if not single handedly then with singular indefatigability the 1987 Serie A title. It was the first championship ever won by a southern Italian team after almost a century of competition, an historic moment with ramifications more far-reaching than the confines of a football pitch. The tifosi adore the skewed virtuoso with the low center of gravity and a high tolerance for the bacchanal even though he left the club, disgraced, in 1991.

Reports propagate that Maradona enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Camorra, the mafia of Napoli. As Richard Williams of The Guardian noted earlier this decade, “Maradona’s nocturnal adventures inevitably drew him into a demi-monde of intrigue and clan warfare.” In his 1996 book “The Camorra,” Tom Behan underscored this intimate connection the footballer shared with the city’s organized crime syndicate. “Furthermore, there is considerable circumstantial evidence to link Maradona to the Camorra: he was photographed socializing with some of the Guiliano brothers on more than one occasion, he had relationships with women closely linked to Camorra clans, and developed a cocaine habit which eventually led to his rapid departure form Naples as a result of a ban on playing and the obligation to face a trial.”

“Gomorra” is the film about those who couldn’t scurry off. Based on the 2006 non-fiction exposé of Napoli’s organized crime clans by Roberto Saviano — a book whose publication meant that the author reportedly never slept in the same bed two nights running until deciding to emigrate late last year to avoid the constant threat of retaliatory assassination — “Gomorra” is grim, violent, visceral, fascinating, unnerving and unrelenting. Ensnared and centered in derelict apartment blocks stacked like LEGO on crank in the Scampia quarter of Napoli, it’s a stark and brutal panorama from director Matteo Garrone of lives locked in mortar and moral squalor.

It is filmed through a macro lens, with an unnerving claustrophobic view. This tiny prism is tight on the foreground, blurring the background out of focus, and so close that only a part of a person is visible. There‘s very little visual perspective, and the foreboding sense of danger this creates is palpable and redoubtable. Characters are captive. But so is the audience. Opening with a tanning salon massacre, “Gomorra” announces itself in a close-cropped hail of gunfire, the blue-lit beds transformed into blood-stained coffins. The camera work by Marco Onorato is raw but not jutting about in the all-too-familiar hand-held staccato.

As the movie embeds itself into five intertwining and engrossing stories juggled beautifully by Garrone and editor Marco Spoletini, the tension only intensifies. Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese) is just entering his teenage years and recruits himself into the underworld. Sporting an England No. 7 sleeveless jersey, rings on almost every finger and plucked eyebrows, he endures an initiation both terrifying and uncomplicated in its warped crystalline concept of machismo.

The corruption of the waste disposal industry is unearthed by the travels of Franco (Toni Servillo), a snake smooth Camorra broker, and his fledgling protégé Roberto (Carmine Paternoster). Criss-crossing the country securing contracts doesn‘t leave much time for them, or the film, to sight-see., Even a Venice gondola ride is shot so tightly that we watch the wonder in Roberto‘s eyes but see very little of the sights.

Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is an earnest, kindly and respected dressmaker who perilously befriends a factory of Chinese immigrants by tutoring them at night, for a fee, on sewing techniques while his own boss is financed by the mob. His arc provides the film with its most altruistic moments — sitting on the edge of his bed regaling his sleeping wife and child about the sumptuous bass dinner cooked by his hosts or the car rides to the factory where he is tucked into the trunk for his protection and pokes his head through a hole in the backseat platform to chat — but even these are cloaked in danger and threat.

Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), the middle-aged bag man, is a beaten down money carrier who’s face is plastered with a Buster Keaton melancholy. His plight only becomes more precarious as shifting clan dynamics alter his existence from protected foot soldier to vulnerable pawn.

And finally, two stupid ass punks by the names of Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) smashing through the film quoting Tony Montana, stealing coke from Nigerian dealers, pilfering ammo from mob bosses, letting loose cannons on the briny shore, signing their death warrants with chicken scratch stunts. But “Gomorra” isn’t a film which lets you off the hook by telegraphing who survives and who gets snuffed. Everyone’s in the scope. The fact that Marco and Ciro each have a bullet with their name on it from their first steps on screen doesn’t mean there aren’t enough cartridges to go round.

Classic crime films such as the brilliant “Goodfellas” and “City of God” are phenomenal entertainment but they are filled with reassuring qualities. But “Gomorra” is bleak. It’s the mafia film redacted, stripped of the soothing effusions and familiar tropes; there is no guiding, helpful voiceover, no death rattle soliloquies, no cop from the neighborhood, no intrepid photographer, no sagely pontificator, no soundtrack to bop along to, and no body making it out of the neighborhood.

And there’s no code, either. Revenge is sought but splayed, directed in a spiral. A scene at the morgue where Toto and the older young men in his clan plot retribution underscores that they don‘t know who ordered the hit on their compadre. Yet they feel compelled to react, mercilessly. But there’s no color coded visual to distinguish friend from foe, no venerated and feared families, no regard for territory. It’s a horizontal hierarchy, not vertical, so it’s all happening at ground level. Nihilism can be born in those with no future, but what if a community populated by Toto’s has no past, just a cycle of living in a regurgitated present. “Gomorra” ends with a dump truck and corpses, a confluence of murder and waste disposal, in a present untended by a God, forsaken by man, with no hero, not even a footballing deity, in view.

(Previously released in New York and Los Angeles in January, “Gomorra” screened at the Portland International Film Festival earlier this month. It opens February 27th in Portland with an anticipated wider national release planned for the coming months.)

“Twilight” & “Let the Right One In”: The Kids Are All Fright

The infobahn is atwitter with “Twilight.” While the North American box office nears $200 million and the world-wide figures double that return, and stories abound of behind-the-scenes intrigue with machinations so rabid that the director has been excised from the sequel and a third film has already been marked on calendars for 2010, the clamor can’t conceal that this vampire movie is a trifle, an unremarkable film so slight that random episodes of “Buffy” bustle with more humor, charm, wonderment, and, most importantly, verve. Catherine Hardwicke has directed a film without magic or vitality, fatal exclusions for a fantasy flick.

The story of Bella, an Arizona teenager who shuttles herself off to small-town Washington state to live with her police chief father and subsequently becomes enraptured by a relationship with a dashing vampire, is told stiltingly, with too many scenes of high schoolers staring longingly at each other across the school cafeteria. (It suggests, as much as anything, that they are unimpressed by the tater tots and wiener wraps.) The voiceover from Bella adds very little to character understanding and fails to enhance the narrative. From a vampire flick perspective there‘s precious little pep so by the time anyone is Columbia Gorged, the attenuated “Twilight” offers nothing fresh in its execution with uninspiring special effects and meager action sequences, especially in a baseball game sequence which is equally hokey and undeveloped. The final battle in a hall of mirrors feels both forced and small — a fair reflection of the preceding story.

Exacerbating a tepidly told tale is the casting of Bella, a character of no particular individual spark in the first place, with Kristen Stewart, an actress so wooden it was difficult to distinguish the old growth forest from her tease. She delivers almost every line in an uninspired hushed rush, a breakneck breathless monotone that doesn’t evoke teenaged awkwardness as much as suggests laconic boredom.

As Edward, the perpetually 17-year-old vampire, Robert Pattinson exhibits some nice acting chops as Bella‘s paramour. He conveys Edward’s brooding intensity, conflicted impulses, and self-conscious sweetness with style. To compound Bella’s somnolence, the ancillary roles of her new, eager schoolmates (whom she appears to be find tedious) are played by an energetic and funny lot.

“Twilight” is a franchise in search of fangs and is devoured by “Let the Right One In,“ the Swedish masterwork, which despite currently earning less than $2 million on this continent and just over $5 million across the globe, is an enriching experience which deserves massive message board devotion and an audience more substantial than one delivered by midnight movie cult status. Director Tomas Alfredson redefines the vampire flick with a film that, while respecting the elements of the genre with beautifully choreographed genuine scares and unsightly frights replete with swirls of cats and bleeding eyes, is infused with intelligence, grace and humanity.

Based on the 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted his work for the screen, it tells the tale of 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a latch key kid bullied at school, who befriends a new arrival to his apartment block, a fellow 12-year-old, Eli (Lina Leandersson), who is actually a centuries old vampire. Oskar is adrift — not saddled with loneliness as much as that inexorable pre-teen sense of awkwardness and uncertainty that even the most self-assured youth is pursued by — and finds a quietly receptive partner to his unassuming desire to bond in Eli. She is alone, immersed in a secret life, and Oskar is a trustworthy ally with an affection that is more than a crush but not yet carnal. Alfredson does a remarkable job of building this burgeoning friendship, illustrating the tender uneasy steps of the pre-teens, and nurturing pitch-perfect performances from the pair as well.

But what makes “Let the Right One In“ so exceptional is the way Alfredson and his crew handles the ever-changing moods so deftly with the quieter, more evocative moments and the grisly sequences delivered with equal aplomb. The switching back between the differing tones is expertly mastered by co-editors Alfredson and Daniel Jonsater (and filmed compellingly by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema) so that the gentle moments never feel ingratiating and the eerie scenes are thoroughly dense and chilling. Nothing feels stop gap; every is integral. Similarly, the soundtrack by Johan Soderqvist is wonderfully adept at enhancing the variation, producing sweeping orchestration for the thrilling scenes but also very melodic, spare musical interludes during the softer, more introspective instances.

By the time “Let the Right One In” culminates in a brilliantly realized swimming pool sequence which submerges the film in an act of devotional vigilantism, it is clear that this is a superlative work, one of the finest films of the last year, whose quality is not hinged to any niche and which has no need for a sequel to embolden its legacy.

“Taken”: Schindler’s Pissed

When Liam Neeson lays siege on Paris, he transforms the capital into “The City of Lights Out.”

Before his turbulent arrival in the French capital, Bryan Mills (Neeson), is a retired operative for an unnamed US agency, previously stealthily deployed for years in the world’s hot spots as an ambiguously menacing “Preventer.” Suffering from a papa’s guilt of abandonment, he has moved to Los Angeles to be closer to Kim (Maggie Grace), his just turned 17-year-old daughter, who lives in opulent splendor with her mother (Famke Janssen, sporting almost Vulcan eyebrows) and a wealthy, obliging step-father (the dependable, bearded Xander Berkeley, whose name has always evoked the Ziegfeld Follies). Neeson smartly plays these California scenes with a halting and awkward undercurrent, his fussy remonstrating about Kim’s impending European vacation with a friend smacking of overcompensation. He’s well-meaning but still smothering, and Neeson adroitly transmits Bryan’s parental rustiness.

After Kim and her buddy unpack in the friend’s family’s spacious Parisian digs which the two teens have all to themselves, she takes a call from her anxious dad in LA and the movie alights powerfully with a well-constructed sequence by director Pierre Morel where, while Mills is on the line, she views the abduction of her friend by several men across the courtyard of the horseshoe-shaped apartment. His spy muscle memory kicks in as he advises his frantic daughter with specific instructions. The editing cuts and thrusts between the two cities until, as he predicted to her, she is kidnapped, drug from the beneath a bed, the cell phone left on the floor per his orders so that he can record every detail.

And then once he lands at Charles de Gaulle, the film tears along with his furious search, rarely dallying as Mills lays waste to swarthy contingents of criminal continentals (a demographic not overly vilified by the filmmakers but, still, perhaps they could have thrown in a puffin-eating Icelander). With martial arts expertise and Grand Prix driving skills, Mills erupts in full vigilante mode — he even wounds a main character’s wife with a bullet; this is clearly a dad in a hurry to make up for lost time.

For this brogue warrior, every clue is dissected instantaneously, every scenario scanned swiftly, and every contingency deciphered immediately so that when he happens upon a table of Albanians at meal time, he knows exactly where the butter knife goes. I thought it was on the top left, resting on the bread plate; apparently it’s the larynx.

Neeson, who turns 57 this year, is an uncomplicated and dependable actor, with a bit of Burt Lancaster‘s sturdiness about him, if not his magnetism. Clearly fit and energetic, Neeson executes the countless martial arts scenes with vitality. (As a point of comparison, the craggy William Holden was 58 when “Network” premiered.) He completes the transition from put-upon dad to rugged snoop quite nicely.

Morel, who helmed the frenetic “District B13,” oversees a taut, gristle-free thriller. He’s ably assisted by cinematographer Michel Abramowicz and editor Frederic Thoraval. “Taken” is co-written and produced by Luc Besson, who has found in Morel a worthy protégé.

“Wendy and Lucy”: A Haiku of 16 Syllables

Not all films have to be the cinematic equivalents of novels, hulking celluloid tomes tipping the three-hour mark, so distended they should be fatted with an intermission. Some are poems. Two years ago, “Old Joy,“ a film meager in budget and a mere 76 minutes long, emerged, like the two reacquainted buddies and protagonists who spend a weekend in the Oregon woods, as a thoughtful meditation on friendship renewed, reviewed and ultimately reconciled as something lost from the kinship of youth. It cleverly steered clear of pretentiousness when insufferableness seemed unavoidable. Kelly Reichardt, the director of the resonant “Old Joy,” has returned with “Wendy and Lucy,” a movie chronicling the plight of a young woman ensnared in spiraling circumstances. But regrettably, the new, slight film is a vague and incomplete cinematic missive; Reichardt and co-writer Jonathan Raymond have scripted a haiku of 16 syllables.

A rapid cross-country trip shown in the pages of her journal has brought Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her dog, Lucy, westward from Fort Wayne, Indiana to the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. As we are introduced to them, Wendy and Lucy walk through a clearing at night where they chance upon a few folks huddled round a campfire. The quiet and reserved Wendy tells a camper that she’s on her way to Ketchikan for work, and a wild-eyed dude (Will Oldham) overhears and delivers a rambling, delinquent story about his escapades in Alaska. So we know where she’s come from and where she’s headed, but the 20-something Wendy herself is a mystery. In the subsequent 80 minutes, as events become more harrowing, the taciturn Wendy provides precious few tangible glimpses into her state of mind or her reasoning. There’s the barest acknowledgment of her past other than the one pay-phone call she makes to an uninspiring father and disinterested mother. Williams, an actress of mounting reputation, is a perceptive performer, adopting an unfeigned, haunted countenance and a Joan of Arctic Circle haircut, but even she can only say so much with her eyes.

In his essay on the works of a mercurial filmmaker, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” David Foster Wallace writes,

“When his characters are sufficiently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to cut the distance and detachment that can keep Lynch’s films at arm’s length, and at the same time it makes the movies creepier — we’re way more easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves.”

In “Wendy and Lucy,” when the wrenching moments occur, I experienced an indifferent sensation, based, I’m assuming, on my tuning out because Wendy’s character provided me with so little insight. I had become disconnected. The film is disquiet inhabited and the distillation of loneliness, but instead of gaining insight into these concepts, I simply felt ground down and uninvolved. Films steeped with bleak themes can be difficult to watch but they don‘t have to be obtuse. The abundantly talented director Ramin Bahrani has recently chronicled merciless quotidian working class lives in New York City in the films “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop” where fate conspires, sometimes unfathomably cruelly, against characters but there’s history, detail and humanity to these people so that the predicaments have context even when they are heartbreaking.

Reichardt has an evocative filming style, and she certainly attempts to utilize the un-said to speak volumes, a device more successfully employed in her previous film. But it can be asserted that the silence is only poignant in a narrative film (Spaghetti Westerns excluded) if it supplements the dialogue; from a story telling perspective, we cannot be expected to contend that what is left in the margins is more poignant than what is in the script. Compared to “Wendy and Lucy,“ the subdued storytelling of the far superior “Old Joy” is an overbearing party guest of exposition. To paraphrase the poet Stevie Smith, Wendy is not waving, nor is she drowning; indeed, her hand might be telling us very little at all.