Reviews

Beauty in Trouble (Kráska v nesnázích) is not a great title. All the descriptions of this film fail to capture what it really is – an adult fairy tale. A poor girl is wooed by a prince. The "girl", Marcela, played by the stunning Anna Geislerová, has an Isabelle Huppert beauty, with a red hair, face and figure that are beguiling, sexual, and endlessly fascinating. She has a louse of a husband, but they have great sex. The kids listen to the lovemaking through walls. It's rough and passionate, as the sex of the working class seems to often be portrayed in film. But it's also for us to recognize that this is the thing that binds them together in an otherwise incompatible marriage. The husband, a professional car thief, is eventually caught and thrown in jail. How she got into this marriage we don't know, but she is not exactly a high-class herself. But she's beautiful, intelligent (we assume) and loves her gorgeous and resilient kids. She deserves more. And she may get the life she deserves - eventually. (no spoiler!) She is forced to move back with mom after her husband is sent to jail. Mom has a hideous second husband (read ugly stepfather). He is a real horror show. He borders on being a child abuser to the kids. He's obsessive about cleanliness, but ungraciously farts at the table, all the while demanding manners and decorum from the kids. He's real low class socially handicapped wretch. Mom puts up with him, like Marcella's husband, at least he's lusty - hideous but horny. The ambivalent, confusing, layered characterizations are what make the film so powerful and interesting. These characters have flaws, some seemed driven by class, some by innate character. These flaws and details of character are charming one minute and contemptible the next. The audience really has to negotiate conflicting feeling of class, sexuality, ambition, commitment, and the role of a woman as mother and wife through the quickly changing terrain of the story. At the bottom line, as with many films like the wonderful Icelandic movie "Thicker Than Water (Blóðbönd), the children can be the victims. What's right in the end may be what's best for the children – who are our salvation and our future. It's a theme played out these days in films ranging from Pan's Labyrinth to Children of Men. Foreign. Cinema is recognizing in intricate morality tales that life is confusing, brutal, unfair and, as adults, we must get our act together in order to pass something worthwhile to the next generation. If we give in to our baser instincts, we may lose ourselves and the world in the process. The extraordinary and complex and colorful characters in Kráska v nesnázích speak to the qualities of what makes a man, what drives a women, what embodies hope, what is class - is it economic status of the fabric of one's character? The film is richly human as embodied by the very last 2 shots, which moved me incredibly and unexpectedly. The director's choices are so subtle and intelligent that to compare this to an American film seems unfair. Americans sometimes seem to lack the desire to consider that paradoxes in human nature don't offer set resolutions. But here, perilously couched in ostensible fairy tale for adults, are interesting moral questions. Don't be fooled by the simple story; this is a great movie.

After an intensely screened screening featuring nervous suits delivered in limousines and gentle but firm gentlemen controlling the ticket flow to assure a certain target group would be tested for their age, predilections, and proclivities, and wand wielding security guards frisking patrons for any signs of recording devices - including cellphones - I entered what we were told was the first-ever-in the-world test market screening of the Taymor/Beatles extravaganza "Across the Universe".

Thoughts of Peter Frampton in Sergeant Peppers' haunted me, but my admiration of Taymor, and, well, I was actually a kid IN the audience of the Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. I was even in a band that appeared on MTV in their first hour (Robin Lane & the Chartbusters)! Iattended my share of protests, worked with Reverend Daniel Berrigan, got psychedelic and ... well... enough about my qualifications to review the movie - it seems I still don't fit the intended demographic - it's the first time I ever lied my age downward! So despite that the studio may change some things - here's what I saw at this stage of tweaking the film.

Without quibbling over loose plot points and misguided scenes as they seem to be still tinkering with those things (and there are there are several out of place and unexplained scenes) - I've rarely seen such a feverish work of persistent video art in the service of great music. These are NOT small music videos wrapped around a questionable plot. Taymor's vision as a director seems to borrow from everything. Her story ideally wants to conjure up the not just the frolic, but the frenzy and passion of the 60's.

There is what looks like Jan Svankmajer in a stunning industrial dance scene in a draft board as civilians are turned into soldiers. Another scene has giant puppet pageantry straight out of Peter Schumman's Bread and Puppet Theater and Resurrection Circus. There are joyous location street dancing scenes, and breathtaking Technicolor composites. One such scene is a dreamlike vision done entirely in the psychedelic solarised colors of Richard Avedon's Beatle portraits. Her set designs are at times so clever and colorful, you laugh at the unrestrained joy and daring.

She begins with a glorious reinvention of the fifties musical, and careens into pure psychedelic delirium. The cinematography is rich and varied to the purpose of each scene, and dance sequences explode into place. The film moves from the innocence of small town upper-middle class America, to the nascent hippy scene in the village, to a sort of hallucinatory Garden of Eden (with too much but amusing Bono as a Ken Kesey Merry Prankster guru type). It moves to romance, and onto the dangers and volatility of the anti war 60's. All this is rendered through a constant flow Beatles songs delivered amidst magnificent set designs and video composites.

For the most part the music is respectfully and tastefully rearranged. (and without the Pavlovian shamelessness of the Beatles as they were used in "I Am Sam") A ballad version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" movingly reinvents the song. I don't know if the actors actually sing but you could have fooled me. It is all carefully synched up. Even the drummers and strummers are always in synch. The actors are charming, but once again, as she has done in "Digging To China" to "Down In the Valley", Evan Rachael Wood rivets the film. It would too much to believe she could also sing like the angel - but darn if her throat isn't in sych! The voice is beautiful. At times songs and sounds collide like the Beatles in "Number Nine". The collision of a war protest at Columbia University with Helter Skelter over Dear Prudence is brilliant. Taymor has edginess that matches the sixties zeitgeist, and avoids the vacuous cotton candy fluff of Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge".

I think it would be wise to address Taymor's strength, which is the darker political vision. The film's intented audience ought to be as angry as they were in the 60s, marching in the streets and standing up to an arrogant and corrupt administration with their trillion dollar war. The parallels to today are obvious. The time is right for such a film with such politics. It shouldn't get comprised by too much gooey and gratuitous romance.

I overheard two young girls afterward say; "I don't know why they have to redo those great songs?" - whereas a much older couple were saying; "This was great – very artistic, fun - it really caught the feeling of the era." I hope the handlers in their infinite wisdom don't sell out the ability of this film to be politically relevant as well as beautiful.

Characters and situations that obviously echo Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, the Weathermen, the Weather Underground, Abbie Hoffmann, Ken Kesey, draft card burning, 60's clubs in the East Village (Café Wha? becomes Café Huh?), and other sly references are fun to pick out, though I assume details are undergoing revision for clarity. I don't think this is just a film for 20 somethings. The kids I sat with remarked; "This is important stuff for our generation to remember." Taymor's darker sensibilities are what the film really needs to keep it from being perceived as so much razzle dazzle and romance. There's a subversive edge to this story.

Visually, it is unquestionably a masterpiece of video art. Its final judgment may be that it can speak across generations.

John Ford's 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is an ode to the end of the classic western. It is a satiric look at the civilizing of the once wild American west where Ford deliberately uses stereotypical characters and situations to undermine and reexamine the very myths that he helped create. Ford's world is one of moral certainty and untamed villainy where legends are born and cowboy heroes ride free amidst the broad natural landscapes of America's West. In the west of Liberty Valance, the hero is not made nor born, but manufactured by the media. As the editor of the Shinbone Star says; "This is the West. When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend."

The legend concerns lawyer Ransom Stoddard, played in typical earnest aw-shucks fashion by Jimmy Stewart. Stoddard has been brought, bruised and beaten, to the western town of Shinbone following an altercation with a gang of stagecoach highwaymen, led by arch-villain Liberty Valance. As played by Lee Marvin, Valance is deadpan and over-the top evil. His uncompromising performance is one of the pleasures of the film. With his lethal black whip and his giggling and glowering henchmen (played by Strother Martin and Lee VanCleef), Marvin is unabashedly nasty and taunting at every turn. His nemesis is that stalwart icon of the heroic west, John Wayne as Tom Doniphan. His code of honor is as solid as his skill with a six-gun. Doniphan knows that might rules the west, and will inevitably vanquish evil. But Stoddard's mission is to see that justice is done through the more civilized rule of law. Of his nemesis Valance, Stoddard says; 'I don't want to kill him, I just want to put him in jail!' Not likely, in John Ford's west.

Into the mix come a parade of character actors whose vivid stereotypes have enlivened westerns for decades: Edmond O'Brien as the drunken but noble newspaper editor; Andy Devine as the whimpering, good-hearted, but cowardly sheriff; Woody Strode as the silent, noble black man, backbone of the west; and last and most essential is Vera Miles as Hallie, for whose heart our heroes compete. It is in that romantic triangle that the real heart of west may be won. In this way the Hallie, like the cactus rose she carries to Doniphan's funeral, becomes a bittersweet symbol for the loss and the hope of the new west.

Ford makes Liberty Valance into a western that seems to examine itself as a western. He removes the window dressing to focus on the intricate play of characters and symbols. Gone is the Technicolor of the Searchers. This is in stark black and white. Gone are the outdoor landscapes of Ford's west. Most of the film looks like it was on the back lot, and many scenes take place indoors. He moves his camera in on faces not vistas. The world of 1960's America was changing and beginning to reexamine the usefulness of certain cultural mythologies. The new decade was about people; the grand ideals of postwar America were being reexamined and were about to become even dimmer with the assassination of President Kennedy. America was beginning to be about recognizing unique individualities, about embracing change, about individual rights, strong women, sensitive men. Ford didn't like that much, I imagine. The film's characters are flawed and cartoonish. I suspect his film was a wry satire on his own mythology and a critique of what he viewed as a softening of American society. Some critics didn't get it, while others consider this one of his more remarkable films. There is no doubt that it is nothing short of brilliant the ability to balance the elements of satire and seriousness, comedy and melodrama.

As the train leaves Shinbone, the truth forever gives way to the legend. The conductor leans over to light Stoddard's cigar saying; 'Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.' In that moment we are incredibly moved. This is, after all, about the creation of stories. But in those stories there live truths about human nature that are universal and forever.