Culturopolis

Women suffer through interminable summer movies centered on the kind of comic book heroes that delighted little boys. Now recast as “thoughtful,” “complex” Incredible Iron Bat Guy Men because they suffer and struggle. They are now soulful. And dark. We have to listen to all of the critical excavation of depth and subtext in the big summer bang-bang, kapow, muscle-bound multiplex product. And one summer, a movie comes along that women like. It’s called Sex and the City . Women eat it up, partly because it treats female friendship and relationships and infidelity and marriage with the earnestness they deserve. But also because like a drink of water offered to a dying desert traveler, it is blessed, sweet relief. But are women allowed to enjoy the escapist pleasure of a summer movie? Hell no. We get writers who use film criticism as a venue for their erotic fascination telling us Sex and the City is shallow and insipid. These women are too old. Superficial. Too into shoes. And closets...

(Photo courtesy: Magnolia Pictures) Almost everyone must at some point harbors a secret desire to drop off the grid: to leave behind the racket of health insurance and home payments and just, be , in that hackneyed Sixties sense. Surfwise , the documentary about Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, a Stanford-educated M.D. who dropped out of the rat race to raise his nine kids in a 24-foot camper, is both a cautionary tale and advertisement for living free. I have a deep affection for lovable iconoclasts and for surfing movies, so teamed up, this film is pure narcotic.

How not to feel like Queen Sourpuss when your 7-year-old sits guffawing beside you and the rest of the movie theater audience sounds ready to bust a gut and all you can do is squirm for some release? The Get Smart movie had some amusing moments, but not the kind of full-throttle hilarity I'd leave my house for. I find comedy the consistently most disappointing and alienating of film genres. Everyone else is making like Hands Across America over Superbad and Borat , and there I am with my arms folded feeling like the sad-eyed goth in a Tim Burton film. I recently met an Atlanta artist who told me he enjoyed my art reviews, but thought my movie reviews took all the fun out of film. He's apparently not the only one, as this golden oldie proves. I still smile every time I read it.

Roman Polanski remains one of my favorite filmmakers despite some personal life snafus that test my ability to admire him. Both pop and profound, his films stand up to countless repeat viewings. Rosemary's Baby remains my favorite film for straddling that Polanski line; a slick potboiler on one hand, but on the other prickly and subversive for how it delves into the way women's bodies are colonized, occupied and owned in pregnancy. Polanski has an identification with life's victims that adds moral depth to his artistry. But what to say about the man himself, with that unpleasant yen for young girl flesh? I love him like a deeply flawed relative: I can't seem to break the ties. Read my review of the new HBO documentary (coming to theaters soon) of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired , in New York Press .

There hasn’t been such a gratuitous abuse of slow motion since Flashdance as there is in Standard Operating Procedure. Errol Morris’s film gives the same emotional significance in his tedious overuse of the technique to a drop of blood falling from the body of an Iraqi man who has been tortured to death, as it does to a cracked egg artfully dropped into a frying pan by super-bad man Saddam Hussein. Pretty, pretty pictures. Errol Morris’s “expose” of Abu Ghraib is like watching two hours of “The Jerry Springer Show.” Never has there been so much play-by-play description of senseless, base behavior with so little insight. Coupled with Morris’s artful reenactments and endless slow-motion imagery, and the film makes Abu Ghraib into a music video, circa 1985. It’s an intensely disturbing, obsessively documented film about the disturbing, obsessive need to document. The bulk of Standard Operating Procedure is a succession of Abu talking heads: poster girl Lynndie England, and some equal...

Some films bring out the smart-aleck in me. It was hard not to take the piss out of the tempest in a teapot faux-Merchant Ivory production Before the Rains , reviewed here for New York Press .

I was amused by a recent interview with writer/director David Mamet in The New Yorker . Somewhat sheepishly amused, because I am one of the journalists who has occasionally opened with a lame question like the one he cites in his litany of clichés, “What inspired you to do this film?” I often think on press junkets how tired people must get answering the same questions over and over, but also of how hard it is to ask a truly original question. I reviewed Mamet’s latest Redbelt , in The Charleston City Paper.

Few things, perverse though it may be, give me more pleasure than an unhappy, alienated film hero. I will always identify more with the Travis Bickles and the tortured chumps like Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity than with cinema's winners. If I have a movie culture Achille's Heel, a surefire way to slay me, it's the loser, the oddball. La Vie En Rose , Old Joy , Ghost World : show me a failure and I'll show you a five star rating. On that note, two recent films about alienated guys, The Visitor and The Counterfeiters spoke to that part of me that wants to see suffering, miserable-looking sadsacks struggling to connect.

Tina Fey is sublime. And oh, how I wanted to enjoy Baby Mama , which I reviewed for the Charleston City Paper . I loved Tina Fey's Mean Girl 's script and appreciate her skeptical-lady take on contemporary life (a favorite Fey-ism was her calling Hugh Hefner's gaggle of bimbette girlfriends "tit meat"). There were some laughs in Baby Mama to distract, and take the sting off the world outside the theater doors, as any comedy should. But movies like this remind me of how hard it is to get excited about going to see a movie sometimes, when there is so much half-baked or just plain awful product circulating. Watching Werner Herzog's documentary Land of Silence and Darkness last night, I felt a pang of longing for directors with such a ravenous interest in people and life and with such a quiet, delicate touch. Delicacy and subtlety seem so rare these days. Like so many people I talk to, I want to sandbag the front yard and hole up with Netflix and forget that ...

Where In the World is Osama bin Laden? Opens April 18 Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema – 931 Monroe Drive – Atlanta Ummm...not especially. Read my New York Press review .

(Photo courtesy: IFC Films) The Duchess of Langeais Not Rated / 130 minutes / In French with English subtitles Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema – 931 Monroe Drive Opens April 18 Like so many stories centered on regret and heartbreak, The Duchess of Langeais begins in the present and works backwards. We immediately understand from director Jacques Rivette's contemplative long shots and the pervasive stillness that defines these early scenes, that matters of fate are at work. A handsome Napoleonic General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) with a grave air, sits in a white Spanish convent high on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. Armand is disturbed and restless, consumed by some unnamed force. His obsession is the French woman living in the convent, a woman Antoinette (Jeanne Balibar), he knew long ago who has since become a barefoot Carmelite nun. Their reunion – her behind metal bars and him longing to reach out to her – begins Rivette's enthralling...

Though I was a fan of Boys Don't Cry , as much as I wanted to like Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss  I just couldn't.  The best film about the war in Iraq is, I think, as yet unmade.

I don't think my Vogue subscription has lapsed since I was 13. I love fashion, even though I'm hardly a clothes horse and would probably recoil in horror at any real proximity to the industry. But when fashion and documentary collide? Frothy goodness. I am anxiously awaiting my first viewing of Frederick Wiseman's 1983 The Store now available on DVD about the fabled Dallas Neiman Marcus. I have been feeding my frivolity jones in the meantime with more contemporary fashion fixes, like the purported "insider" view of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld in Lagerfeld Confidential , he of the frosted hair, finger bangles and brittle Teutonic air. Andy Warhol had nothing on Lagerfeld's studied aloof, hologram-like cult of personality. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the vivacious, quip-master American hipster designer Marc Jacobs, the subject of a recent French doc, Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton I also reviewed for the New York alternative weekly New Yor...

Watching Shirley Temple in Heidi (1937) last night was the ultimate comfort-drug. It’s almost embarrassing to admit to a fondness for Temple considering our contemporary scorn for unironic, non-Takashi Murakami cuteness and cloying children. Author Graham Greene's apprehension about what Temple "means" still lingers. In a 1937 film review for Night and Day magazine, of Wee Willie Winkie , Greene implied a pedophiliac appeal to the half-pint minx, "Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire." While I can certainly see Greene’s point - anyone who has caught one of the lurid “Baby Burlesques” short films with their racist and sexual suggestiveness and pouting tots in diapers may feel a bit tainted by the experience - to me Temple is a s...

I find it rich beyond belief that as I prepare to step down from a 15-year tenure as an alternative weekly critic, my 7-year-old son’s reviewing career is ascendent. Illustrating the value of independent businesses, a recent visit to the beyond-charming Little Shop of Stories in Decatur yielded a mega-dose of bookwormophilia in my man-child. One hint of A’s interest in Ripley’s and other oddball phenomena and the bookstore manager Terra, who was so righteously named, was off and running. She was grabbing books about parasites, books about Houdini (score!). The woman knew a slightly freaky book kid when she met him. Then, the coup de gras: Terra unloaded a stack of advance reader’s copies for A to peruse. You know, check them out, make some recommendations. “You are a book reviewer!” I squealed with delight at preparing my child for professional obsolescence. His first, rather ambitious if you ask me, undertaking was a 12 and up (yes, I’m bragging. No he didn’t read it on his own) t...

(Photo courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures) If you thought Michael Haneke's 1997 Austrian feature Funny Games was an exercise in sadism, then you should check out the ad campaign associated with his current Hollywood remake of the film starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt centered on a vacationing family tortured by a pair of privileged Bret Easton Ellis-type teenagers. In a certifiably sick movie tie-in, viewers can go to the Funny Games website : Click on "Play the Game." You customize an email message and a phone message using the name of a friend or loved one and receive a message for your friend delivered in the voices of the film’s killers. It's an incredibly creepy promotional gimmick. It's strange to see this diabolical device used to promote a film by this exceedingly smart, subversive director. Does Haneke know? If I had his email address and phone number, I might have to customize one for him. I have written about Haneke a number o...

Why "Oskar" with a "k"? It's only that the "k" reminds me of my favorite cinematic Oskar, played by David Bennent in Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum . Why have a pet at all, if you aren't going to embed a cryptic movie reference? I never thought I was a dog person. That doggy smell, wet and musky, always made my stomach lurch. But Oskar has become such a beloved baby-substitute, such a Dickensian waif with those sad, dewy eyes, it is taking all my stamina and the barest trace of self-respect not to plant a big ole kiss on his gooey doggy lips. Must. Not. Turn. Into. One. Of. Those. People. I won't name the very high profile Atlanta gallerist who once tried to get me to kiss her pooch. I thought it crossed a line, in an art world where there are no lines. But now with my own dark, goofy dog-love tendencies awakened, the impulse doesn't seem quite so bizarre to me. I don't know if that's growth.