Culturopolis

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...