The Screengrab : village voice

Hard Economic Times May Translate into Hard Sales at the Box Office

Phil Nugent — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The New York Times reports that, in these economically troubled times, business at movie box offices is rallying. Better than that, really: "with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion," the industry is enjoying "a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era." And with attendance up "by nearly 16 percent", if the trend continues, "it would amount to the biggest box-office surge in at least two decades." If this is surprising news, it's partly because it means that there might have been something to the immediate, kneejerk reaction to the recession, a reaction that smart people have been debunking in recent weeks. When the economy first went off a cliff, two thirds one heard a lot was that people went to the movies a lot during the 1930s Depression, and also that, if the '30s early talkies and the American movies of the 1970s are any indication, great movie eras are often born of what the old "Chinese curse" calls "interesting times." According to the Times, though, actual statistics pointing to a history of rises in moviegoing during bad economic times tend to be thin on the ground. And besides, J. Hoberman argued in a Village Voice piece a few weeks ago, even if it had been the case in the past, it wouldn't be now: "A reorganized and self-regulated Hollywood bounced back in 1935, but times were different then. Movies were America's universal culture. Now, they're not even close. Like then, the technology is changing—but in a far different way. Movies are expendable. Folks will give up $12 tickets, cancel Netflix, and cut cable to save their high-speed Internet connection."

Talking to people at the multiplex, one finds that there is indeed a connection between the current rise in moviegoing and the current dip in everything else, but people may be using a different calculus than Hoberman envisioned. The Times talked to one harried mom who dropped, not $12, but $15 a head to get her four daughters in to see the 3D Jonas Brothers concert movie. As she explained her logic to the Times, “Spending hundreds of dollars to take them to Disneyland is ridiculous right now. For $60 and some candy money I can still be a good mom and give them a little fun.” This notion that dropping sixty bucks "and some candy money"--at the theaters I go to, that might mean another sixty bucks--is a bargain compared to what it would cost to storm the Magic Kingdom may be a sign that the mindset of the last few decades is going to die hard. (So is that TV commercial I saw the other day that seems to tout, as a money-saving gesture, spending upwards of $70 on a Wii music player as an alternative to a night out clubbing.) It could be that, after a period when more and more people became devoted to expensively cocooning, the chill in the air makes people want to once again be entertained in the company of other people, giving them a taste for shared enjoyment that might be a socially healthy development. And what about the second half of that prediction, that bad economic times produce better movies? Of course, the first movies to go into production post-crash haven't appeared yet, but in the meantime, people seem eager to line up for the Jonas Brothers in 3D, Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, Taken, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Baby steps, baby steps.

2008: Still Combing the Wreckage

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The results if the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly year-end critics' poll are in. The snarling, pointy-headed elitists who make up the core voting bloc went with a kiddie cartoon and box-office smash, Andrew Stanton's Pixar instant classic WALL-E, a choice that meets with the Screengrab's hearty approval. "Sometimes", writes Voice Grand Poo-bah J. Hoberman, "the movies really are universal." However, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which finished out of the Top Ten at #12, deserves recognition as the year's "prize critical cult film...Despite generally mixed reviews, Demme’s independent feature received a higher percentage of first- and second-place votes than even WALL-E, meaning that the people who liked it really liked it." Hoberman detected an optimistic strain in many of this year's top films, not just WALL-E and Rachel but also such favorites as Happy-Go-Lucky and (its ending aside) Milk, extending even to Let the Right One In, "an unexpectedly touching treatment of child vampirism", and his own choice for best film of the year, "the relatively cheerful" Flight of the Red Balloon. Maybe if this optimistic vibe can be fully tapped, the Voice itself will be able to last another year.

One last, must-see on-line portal for tributes to the year past: "Moments of 2008", parts one and two, at the Museum of the Moving Image's "Moving Image Source" site. Here, a lively selection of writers and film folk, including Guy Maddin, Karina Longworth, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jonathan Lethem, Todd Gitlin, Joshua Land, Dennis Lim, Scott Foundas, and others, cite their own most thrilling "moving-image highlights", with results that include movies both new (Man on Wire, Before I Forget, Madden's own My Winnipeg) and old as well as TV (The Wire, The Wire, The Wire) and news and politics. Also among those participating: David Hudson, whose work at GreenCine Daily has set a high standard, and provided invaluable assistance, to the Screengrab and all on-line film writers. Hudson has just gravitated over to IFC's fil blog The Daily, leaving the GreenCine site in the capable hands of Aaron Hillis. We offer our thanks for past services and wish them both well in the coming year.

Libertas Launches A Broadside

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It's been a while since we checked in with Libertas, the perpetually frowning film blog of the culture-warrin' right wing. Not that we want our dear readers to think we're getting lazy, it's just that usually, you don't actually have to read the site to know what Jason Apuzzo and company are panty-knotting about: the filth coming off of our screens is a perennial favorite (usually in the form of homo-, or at least metro-, -sexuality), second only to their incessent blare about how Hollywood is full of treasonous terror-abetting monsters who want to weaken our resolve to win in Iraq. (This is usually accompanied by a similar, if slightly contradictory, bit of crowing about how out of step these al-Q'aeda-loving movie producers and/or directors are, with Exhibit A being the allegedly dismal performance of some anti-war documentary that played on eight screens. If these guys are so powerless and out of touch with the heartland of America, who cares that they won't make pro-war propaganda? Do we really need the rah-rahing of 38 people on the Upper West Side to achieve final victory in the global war on terror?)

But it just goes to show you: with right-wing crazies, as with the Jerry Lewis telethon, you miss a little and you miss a lot. Jason has a new complaint about the world of moviemaking: there are no good roles for women. But unlike some people, who would blame this on rampant ageism, sexism, the flattening of available roles, the narrowing demographic focus of blockbuster movies, or even the fact that movies, as a rule, tend to kind of suck, thus leaving no good roles for anyone. No, Jason knows where the real trouble lies: with feminism. Or, to put it another way, with women themselves. "As far as I’m concerned the complaining needs to stop at '…more female executives in Hollywood than ever before'," he says, making it clear that there is no need to look any further for the cause of sexism in Hollywood than the obvious fact that women are bad.

Apuzzo then launches into a flat-sounding back-in-MY-day litany about the Golden Age of Hollywood, in which female movie stars were treated with the utmost respect and honor (no one thought of women as sex objects back then, goodness no!, and sexual harrassment was unheard of and thus nonexistent). None of the blame, of course, lies with the American people, because "we're certainly not a more sexist nation than we were", he reckons, having somehow missed the "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon, or, more likely, blamed it on women. The problem as he sees it, is that once women got power, they became morally confused, and now they are all trying to be like men instead of super classy like they were in the liberated 1930s. The article ends, as predictable as clockwork at high tide, with the usually beefing about movie stars who "cuss like sailors, show us their tatas, or take whomever to bed in a fit of some twisted definition of empowerment".

It's all very salutory, and if, as Roy Edroso points out, Apuzzo himself is plenty guilty of glorifying cheesecake in the same way he accuses confused, power-mad female executives of doing, so what? He's performing that most valuable of all public services offered by the right: absolving himself and everyone like him of any role in making our culture a cesspool, and placing the blame where it always belongs: with the victims. Well done, Libertas! Way to fight the good fight!

Winnipeg is the New Cleveland: Guy Maddin's Hometown

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As Tribeca kicks into high gear, New York filmgoers brace themselves for a spate of the strange and unsual, and they don't get much stranger than the fact that Guy Maddin, Canada's master of the bizarre, has apparently made a documentary.

Well, maybe that's going a bit too far -- in this brief interview with the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis, Maddin makes it clear that his new film debuting at the festival, My Winnipeg, isn't exactly a documentary so much as it is a "docu-fantasia", and that the idea of a documentary as little more than straight-up representation of the sort he says could easily be made with a security camera doesn't really appeal to him that much.

But Maddin (who here, as elsewhere, is a mighty fun interview) says that he jumped at the chance to immortalize his hometown on screen: "Canadians, especially Winnipeggers, are lousy self-mythologizers—pathologically so. I think it's because we're sitting next to a country that's so great at it," he says. "I decided, while I'm living here, I should try my best to bring Winnipeg at least up to speed with Cleveland on this sort of thing. "

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Redbelt"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In his recent, attention-getting Village Voice article proclaiming himself to no longer be a "brain-dead liberal", David Mamet chided those who fail to appreciate how great it is here in the land of the free and who sit around trying to think up reasons to be dissatisfied with democratic capitalism, just so they can have something to be sore about. In Redbelt, Smiley Mamet's latest stab at writing and directing a movie, the hero, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a hard-working, incorruptable black man who's trying his damndest to make an honest living running a martial-arts academy that does its bit for society by training police officers in methods of self defense. But when we meet him, he's already in danger of going out of business, and then evil Hollywood types steal his technique of pitting combatants against each other after selecting one to be "handicapped" for the bout. Robbed of the only thing he has that may have monetary value so that these sharks can cheapen it by using it in circus-like arena ring competitions, he's ultimately reduced to agreeing to compete in one of the bouts in hopes of at least winning some prize money, and then he discovers that the contests are fixed. ("Whenever two guys are fighting for money," mewls the crooked promoter played by Ricky Jay, "the fight is never fair.") Does Mamet ever see any of the plays and movies he signs his name to, or is he so committed to the capitalist system that he has a bunch of cranks hired off park benches staffing a sweatshop where they grind this stuff out by the yard?

Chiwetal Ejifor brings his role a strong presence and the ability to convey complex thought and emotional storms going on beneath a placid surface. He deserves a lot of credit for not appearing ridiculous when his character pounds away at the jujitsu formula that appears to be his all-purpose mantra for life: "There is no situation you can't escape from. There is no situation you can't turn to your advantage." The movie only leaves him completely out to dry once, when Mamet, letting his hand (and his woman problem) show all too nakedly, has him bestow these wise words on a woman (Emily Mortimer) who's been raped, while demonstrating that with more skill and determination, she could have fought off her attacker. Although Mortimer is required to make a full-blown crazy-broad entrance, twitchy and paranoid and all but frothing at the mouth, it turns out that she's the movie's Good Woman; after Ejifor starts telling her what to do, she shuts her yap and gratefully concentrates on supporting him, while Ejifor's wife (Alice Braga), a "Brazilian princess" who worries about her business and dares to have doubts about whether her husband's noble principles will be enough to keep the lights turned on, throws in her lot with the rotten show business people who are conspiring against him. They include Tim Allen, insanely cast as a tough-guy movie star with a bad haircut, and Joe Mantegna, all too perfectly cast as the movie star's slimeball manager, who gives you the feeling that he could produce a line of male body oils from his pores and market it under the brand name "Dishonestee'." Having used these guys to establish that the world is totally rigged and everything's phony, Mamet then turns around and flatters the audience by insisting that the ticket-buying rubes the world over will still notice and appreciate true quality when they see it; when Ejifor and a bad guy get into a tussel in the corridor leading to the stage of the big fight, every head in the place ignores the glitz they've paid to get in to see and swivels to pay attention to the true jujitsu master in action. Mamet himself is the show-business equivalent of one of those politicians who've spent twenty-five years in Congress screaming about how you need to keep re-electing him in order to send a message to those out-of-touch Washington insiders.

Hot Mama

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Over in the Village Voice, Julia Wallace pens the first of what's likely to be many, many profiles of suddenly ubiquitous comic actress Amy Poehler. Poehler, who went from being featured in almost any comedy show worth watching in the early 2000s to everyone's favorite pal-around comedienne in recent years, is co-starring with Saturday Night Live co-star and inexplicable It Girl Tina Fey in the embarrassingly titled but promising Baby Mama, debuting this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her career has taken an odd turn, to say the least, and Wallace thinks she stands poised to make the transition from well-liked 'alternative comedian' to the most famous Hollywood Amy not named Ryan, Archer or Adams.

It's a pretty funny interview on its own merits -- with her improv background and a decade of experience, Poehler's always been one of the more able interviews in terms of coming up with spur-of-the-moment laughs -- but it gets especially enlightening when she decides to let a few glimpses of seriousness sneak into her jokey answers. Baby Mama has gotten a decent amount of attention for its focus on class issues and the difficulty of raising children from a financial standpoint; Poehler describes the film as a comedy version of Reds. Likewise, when Wallace tries to draw her out on the issue of making a career as a leading lady who specialized in comedy, using Christopher Hitchens' now-ancient "women aren't funny" essay as bait, Poehler won't bite: "I think that story's an old story. Same thing with 'SNL is a boy's club...they're all just kind of lazy headlines to me." But she does wax effusive about Baby Mama's status as that rarest of beasts, a female buddy comedy. "It's exactly what we were going for. We wanted it to be as much Wedding Crashers as it was Working Girl -- something that felt just like two buddies having a fun time. It was us getting to do comedy in a way that didn't necessarily have to be specific to 'lady comedy'. Not that I even know what that is, since I am a lady."

The Rep Report (March 7-14)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

BAM is also paying tribute this month to J. Hoberman, the brainy and idiosyncratic film writer, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his settling in at his regular perch at The Village Voice. Running from March 10 through April 3, the schedule begins with Eraserhead, the subject of Hoberman's first review for the Voice, and includes such "personal favorites" of the critic as King of Comedy, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuffle, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. (Pleased as punch, the Voice has posted Hoberman's 1992 review of Naked Lunch, a stellar example of the kind of fireworks that Hoberman can set off even when writing about a movie that many sane people wouldn't watch again if blindfolded.)

The Voice Has Spoken

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In what may be, and indeed, had damn well better be, one of the very last outbreaks of opinion regarding the movies of 2007, the seventh annual Village Voice Film Poll (now joined at the hip to the L.A. Weekly) has arrived in port. Topping the list, which is based on the views of 102 voting critics: "Paul Thomas Anderson's wildly ambitious meditation on God, oil, and family values," There Will Be Blood. (The description is from Voice critic and living institution J. Hoberman, whose own person top ten list begins with I'm Not There, to which he devoted umpteen memorable words last November.) Other to picks: Blood star Daniel Day-Lewis, I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett and No Country for Old Men's Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actress and Actor, Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight, and Sarah Polley's Away from Her for Best Forst Film. The Best Actress nod went to the highly deserving Anamaria Marinca of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a movie which landed in fourth place in the Best Film rankings--not bad at all considering that the movie wasn't actually shown here in 2007 except on the festival circuit. Considering that it opens theatrically here soon--we just saw a trailer for it today, in fact--we're not sure why so many critics agreed that they just couldn't wait until next year to vote for it, but hey.

Close To The Edge

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:30:00 GMT

In the Village Voice film section, Michelle Orange reviews the inelegantly titled Chuck Close: An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist. Set for limited release the year after Manufactured Landscapes signalled a great leap forward for documentaries about visual artists, its director (and friend of the subject) Marion Cajori won't be around to enjoy any success her film might encounter; having worked on the film for over fifteen years, died in 2006 after completing work on the film. Cajori's previous work as a documentarian also focused on the art world; her best-known films were Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Louise Bourgeois: Art is Sanity, and a previous iteration of the Chuck Close documentary, in a shortened form broadcast on PBS and entitled Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress, was nominated for an Emmy in 1998. The completed film focuses on Close, best known for his gargantuan, photorealistic self-portraits, as well as other artists and creators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Philip Glass who received the same treatment (Gerhard Richter is a curious omission). The focus of the film, however, is Close's artistic process, and not his often-irascable personality -- Close was partially paralyzed in the 1980s and since then, has used a self-designed system of leverl, pulleys, ladders and other Rube Goldberg devices to allow him to finish his massive paintings. Cajori's film, Orange says, alleviates the usual arts-doc talking head boredom as she "regularly slows the gorgeously crisp, high-def film down to the brush-stroke" and notes that "Close's piecemeal, coherent style is wonderfully, almost winkingly well suited to Cajori's". Matt Zoller-Seitz, reviewing the film for the Times, likewise calls the film "splendid" and notes that it "truly excels is in its depiction of the physical process of making art." Close is a major figure in the world of art, and has deep ties to the Pacific Northwest and Chicago as well as claims to international fame as a painter; we're hoping that Cajori's documentary gets wider release than just the New York arts scene of which she was a part.

Hoberman Hails Haynes

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

In a long piece in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman calls Todd Haynes's I'm Not There "part of the larger, ongoing Dylan revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen" and also "the movie of the year." Hoberman suggests that this might be the Bob Dylan movie that Dylan himself repeatedly tried to make but never could have achieved; nobody but Haynes, "who studied film as semiotics" and who in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine had already "taken pop stars or pop music for a text," could have. As Hoberman sees it, only a filmmaker as audacious as Haynes could be worthy of this subject. "Certain cultural figures have a particular inevitability. Charles Chaplin and Elvis Presley rode technological waves, surfing to superstardom on powerful socio-economic currents. Had Chaplin never come to America, another slapstick comic would have emerged to reign over the nation's nickelodeons; Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." — Phil Nugent

Writers' Strike Hits Indie Film

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Anthony Kaufman of the Village Voice reports that indie film production may well turn out to be the "unintended casualty" of the current Hollywood labor troubles. The ongoing writers' strike has heightened the likelihood that there will be a Screen Actors Guild strike as the June 30 expiration date on the current SAG contract draws near. The big studios, which stockpiled scripts in anticipation of the writers' strike, is now putting high-paying productions into overdrive in anticipation of actors walking out next summer. This means that lower-paying indie productions are strapped for talent because, as producer Mike S. Ryan puts it with regard to one actor whose agents won't return his calls, "they're trying to fill his dance card until June 30." Another producer, John Sloss, says that "There's an actor I know who is getting a threefold raise just because he's the only comedy guy left." Many of the indie filmmakers are sympathetic with the goals of the strikers but still have to wonder just how hard they'll end up taking the brunt of the blow if the current talent drought is followed by a lack of side jobs from the studios, which many an indie director relies on to make ends meet. "Mumblecore" guru Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) says, "Worst-case scenario: I have to pull some kind of shitty day job." Insert joke here. . . — Phil Nugent

Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

After years spent working his way back after the box office failure of his second feature, the underappreciated 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy, the writer-director Noah Baumbach struck gold with 2005's The Squid and the Whale, about the emotional fallout from the divorce of a culturally ambitious Park Slope family. Because Baumbach's own parents divorced when he was a teenager, and because his father, Jonathan Baumbach, is, like the hero's father in his movie, a novelist — his mother is Georgia Brown, who used to be a film critic for the Village Voice — part of the buzz around the movie was always based on assumptions that it was autobiographical. Baumbach tells Dennis Lim that while he was doing promotion for the film, "Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true. I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real." Baumbach's new follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, is another emotionally charged comedy about marriage and family, and it too draws on Baumbach's life, which now includes the experience of having people ask you presumptuous questions about your life based on what they assume they know about you and your family from your work. The new picture's title character is a writer (Nicole Kidman) who has to contend with readers hell-bent on seeing her fiction as a blueprint of her life and the lives of her family, including her sister, whose busted first marriage served as the basis for one of Margot's stories. (The movie is a family project in another way: Margot's sister is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to Baumbach.) So, now that the director can get his projects funded again, does he have any other pipe dreams about the future? "My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical." — Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent

Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

But the people who've been waiting these past months for the movie to open so they could weigh in on it have no intention of being left out. Paste magazine calls the character "splendidly coiffed", but that's either sarcasm or the minority opinion weighing in. More typically, Dana Stevens of Slate calls him "a bob-haired golem," while Jan Stuart of Newsday refers to his "forklift mop of hair." Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club, and David Edelstein of New York magazine have all invoked Prince Valiant, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir thought Bardem looked more like Ringo Starr. In the Village Voice, Scott Foundas invoked Cousin Itt. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, a man with a literary background who understands the value of understatement, simply described Chigurh as "a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.")

This is hardly the first time that a Coen brothers movie has attracted attention of a tonsorial nature. The corny-surreal tone of Raising Arizona was quickly established by Nicolas Cage's haircut, which suggested an attempted imitation of Kevin Bacon's tastefully spiky 'do as executed by an epileptic barber with the blind staggers. As the title character of Barton Fink, a leftist playwright who seemed to be a cartoon of Clifford Odets, John Turturro wore a pop-top hairdo that actually made him look more like George S. Kauffman by way of Eraserhead. We may never know for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to make the Odets-like character seem more "universal" or if the hairdresser on the picture was working from a miscaptioned photograph. In The Big Lebowski, all the political and cultural battles of the 1960s seemed to have come down, decades later, to an uneasy truce between Jeff Bridges' hippie-burnout look and the squared-off cropping of Walter, the reactionary Vietnam vet played by John Goodman [and inspired by John Milius! — ed.], who looks like a cinder block wearing tinted shades. "I'm a hair actor and proud of it!" George Clooney once insisted, and maybe the Coens wish there were more performers out there willing to define their characters somewhere above their eyebrows. After all, it was the Coens who, in O Brother Where Art Thou?, established that George Clooney isn't just a fine actor, a major star, and the unashamed voice of show business liberalism: he's a Dapper Dan man! — Phil Nugent