Culturopolis

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...