Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

December 12, 2003

A look at Stuck on You; a few words with Nancy Meyers (and a heartfelt rave) about Something's Gotta Give as well as Amanda Peet; a missed gem in the form of Melvin Goes to Dinner; an exchange about the multiple versions of Kieslowski's The Decalogue on DVD, and an overview of more than a dozen of the year's best DVDs. And a new photo feature about what film people leave behind, called Remainders.

All things considered

In December 8's Weekly Variety, the full page "for your consideration" ad for House of Sand and Fog sports a single critical blurb, from Jeffrey Wells. I'm betting that name appears in Olympian isolation less because DreamWorks thinks his name is as familiar as Larry King or Roger Ebert's than because the studio's marketers somehow don't think that the outlet "moviepoopshoot.com" suits the film's gravity.

 

Gluey business

"I believe a man does what he can until his true destiny is revealed."

That line from The Last Samurai rang more true a few days later while watching the Farrelly Brothers' latest comic contraption, Stuck on You, watching a scene where Greg Kinnear does a one-man show as Truman Capote and conjoined twin Matt Damon is dressed in black, cowering behind Kinnear, drenched in flop sweat.

Filmmakers without a track record that includes hits like Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary would get one, universal response to the plot of this mix of maudlin and mayhem: "You busting my chops? If you're busting my chops, you can take it on the arches right now!." Or whatever profane equivalent a modern studio executive would shout. But modern studio executives don't work by the seat of their pants, they either crunch the numbers or cross their fingers, working with genial jokers like these two brothers from back east.

Four words sum up my reaction to the storyline of Stuck on You, when it was first announced as a vehicle for Jim Carrey and Woody Allen, as well as long stretches of the movie itself: "This. Should. Not. Work." But, miracle of miracles, at its best moments, it's their funniest movie since Dumb and Dumber, and its unlikely mix of slobbiness and sentiment kept me both in stitches and in tears. Simple as that.

Kinnear and Damon play Bob and Walt Tenor, conjoined twins who run a burger joint on Martha's Vineyard, and make a great goalie in the local hockey league. Like the best of early 1960s Jerry Lewis, the Farrellys are willing to pummel their one-joke past the point of any resistance. After a while, it's not just endurable, but adorable.

They're like David Cronenberg with Crash (with its congeries of car-crash-scarification fetishists), furthering their enduring fascination with disfigurement and handicap, but their comic allegory also examines the bonds of family and brotherhood with a metaphor than almost no one on earth will ever experience. To be only a little pretentious about it, it's like Greek dramatists dealing with gods, Shakespeare dealing with kings, and Eric Rohmer with the idle rich: these people are so unlike us, they're exactly like us, and get a load of the obstacles the authors are putting those poor saps through. It's comedy in a parallel universe, with emotions very much like our own.

Of all the critics who've gone to bat for the Farrellys, the most engaging may be Film Comment's Kent Jones, who, in a piece at the release of Shallow Hal, argued for them being the last of the great humanists. And there is a case for someone else to make for these two being our knucklehead Jean Renoirs. And when in doubt, when things seem a little too touchy or feely or artsy or fartsy? Pour on the classic rock greatest hits like you own a maple syrup factory. There are enough pop songs to fill all sixty minutes of a Clear Channel playlist.

There are jokes that are shockingly great, exploiting structure, context, intelligence, character, the best of which closes with the seeming non sequitur, "You need stamps?" I'd say there are at least a dozen perfect gags in Stuck on You.

It's worth returning to a conversation I once had with the brothers about bad taste and their casting of smaller roles: They may have more differently-abled people in their work than any other filmmakers outside of Werner Herzog. Peter says that "Bad taste is when something doesn't get a laugh. If people laugh, we're all for it." A friend of theirs named Danny Murphy has appeared in most of their movies; you'll know him as the cranky guy in a wheelchair. "We've known him for twenty-five years. In fact, I was with him when he broke his neck," Peter told me. "Danny's always complained, 'How come every time they show a guy in a wheelchair he's a sweet good guy? He's like an angel on this earth. Why don't people realize that most people who break their necks are maniacs, y'know, that's how they break their necks, on motorcycles going 110, or they're diving off cliffs. Some bad, some good, some smart-asses."

In Stuck on You, there's a middle-aged character named Rocket (Ray "Rocket" Valliere). He has a lisp, and he's the slow guy who takes grief from strangers at the brothers' burger shop. He's got some of the movie's funniest lines. (And Valliere gets the film's peculiar, mid-credits final scene.) And what else do the Farrellys offer the Rockets and the Danny Murphys in their movies?

Dignity. There's something that's goddam out of place in a studio production, huh?
Something's Gotta Give is a sustained, elegant and satisfying variation on traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, yet at certain truly high moments, I got more out of the Farrellys' unlikely contraption: something that ought not work getting out of bed in the morning and rocketing along its own improbable path to enlightenment.

Christmas given

To discover something unexpected like Something's Gotta Give is the best surprise in a moviegoing life: a superb, perhaps even great romantic comedy that evades caricature, celebrates love, and it's from a director whose previous work aggravated me so much I'd find myself biting my cheek until it bled. Nancy Meyers' Something's Gotta Give is a substantial leap above her earlier work, such as the commercially successful but disreputable What Men Want, or the forgettable, would-be zeitgeist surfing she did with her ex-husband, the director Charles Shyer (Baby Boom, Father of the Bride). At 55, Meyers has made the kind of movie you'd expect Woody Allen to still be making, if he hadn't retreated from the real world into his annual bouts of ritualistic typing. (Others don't like the movie at all; Michael Atkinson's savage pan in the Village Voice is particularly unhappy. Roger Ebert, closer in age to the characters, is good on both the film's sitcommy complications and its essential virtues.)

Diane Keaton is a divorced, prize-winning playwright whose work is still directed by her ex-husband. She's built her dream beach house for herself, occasionally visited by her sister (acerbic genius Frances McDormand) and thirtyish daughter (Amanda Peet). One weekend, daughter and frisky new (yet older) squeeze (Jack Nicholson) drop in, and sparks fly. Meyers' comedy is wholeheartedly contemporary, the complications between the primary characters fresh and logical rather than contrived, and it may also be the most accomplished set of variations, to my memory, on the romantic comedy genre since, well, Annie Hall. Honest. I still find it hard to believe I can say that. All the way through the movie and afterwards, I struggled to figure out why I liked this movie so much.

But the 63-year-old Jack has a heart attack, and recuperating, he's catapulted into the care of Keaton and local doctor Keanu Reeves (sweet and funny), who has eyes for Keaton, as well as knowing (and loving) her work as a playwright.

Is it Meyers' life? "It's Nancy's movie," Meyers stresses, using the third person. "We're both over 50, we're both writers, we've both have had some success, we both have children. There's similarities, yeah. But I mean, truly, my life is not that fabulous. It's fiction, obviously."

She writes a lively rogue for Jack Nicholson - who concedes he helped with the embroidery - yet there's no distance: it doesn't seem his character's being judged even as he's caught with his pants down (literally, on a couple of occasions). "I really tried in this movie to understand men. I really tried to [get] the Jack character. I was writing charts. When [Keaton and Nicholson] have the argument in the [New York] street [near the end of the movie], after she's found him with the young blood? I actually made a chart. His side, her side. I didn't want to be judgmental, so I gave her a younger boyfriend. I tried to understand his take. He does have a right to have a life. I liked starting where the audience thinks, 'Oh, yeah, yeah, I get it, and oh yeah, it's Jack."

She wrote it for Nicholson. "Oh, yeah. A thousand percent. I heard his voice with every line. He's a great actor. I wanted to write a movie about an older couple who fall in love for the first time, late in life, and I think he's the best actor for that. The fact that he's a well-known bachelor helps the beginning of the movie, but I can't ride through the [entire] movie."

The banter between the characters is heightened by the editing. When they're tossing repartee or flirtation at one another, there's usually a cut from one close-up to another, instead of the sort of long takes favored by stage-trained actors working together. She thinks for a second at this observation. "There's tons of two-shots. But when you get into real nitty-gritty dialogue, you have to be on somebody's single at that time. I shot lots of coverage. Once you get into [cutting] the dialogue, to stay on the two shot, it sort of falls away. But when I have a great two-shot, like when [Keaton and Nicholson] walk on the beach [realizing how much they have in common because of their years of experience], I hold more than any other scene in a movie. Jokes, for me, don't play as well in wide shots. Woody Allen likes to do it, I don't. I like to get in and see the joke.

"There's a 1970s Allen-like joke in the movie that has great emotional and comic kick. "'I like you' [Nicholson says], 'But I love-you, like-you" [Keaton says]. Yeah, he can't say it. I've seen that look on a guy's face. We've all seen that look, and Jack's made that look. Communication was real clear that night on how to play that scene.

"Why so late in her career, I had to wonder, has Meyers discovered this knack for empathy, this desire to shrug off the corny caricature in all too much of her earlier work? "Ummm... I think in What Women Want, I poked fun of the Mel [Gibson] character a little bit. I tried to show him not being a cad, but insensitive. But I think Jack conducts himself like a gentleman a lot in the movie. He's never a jerk. I didn't want it to go there. But I wanted his life to be real to him. A friend of mine says, everyone's a hero in their own life. So I had to write [the characters each] true to themselves. He's not on the exact same brainwave as her the whole time and causes her pain, but he gets there. Men are slower, you know!" she says, laughing.

"Keanu was a real fantasy," Meyers says of her casting. "When I was writing, I had pictures of Jack and Diane all around my computer and sometimes when I would write the scenes that the doctor was in, I'd go on line, go to people's websites, I'd look at John Cusack or Keanu, then I got into this Keanu Reeves thing. Y'know, he started in comedy, it would be so great to see someone do something they haven't done in a long time. I had dinner with him last night? He's hilarious."

There was some resistance to casting Keaton. "I said, 'What woman over 50 is going to make them line up around the street? These women aren't in the movies that are giant hits, no one puts them in those movies. So let's cast the best person for the job, which is Diane Keaton. It's a comedy, she plays vulnerable better than anybody, she's the right age, she's not had plastic surgery. I wrote it for her, that's the other thing! I sat down and wrote it for her!"

Peet's sake

Talking to Amanda Peet earlier this year, here's how she described working with Diane Keaton on Something's Gotta Give. Was it an intimidating prospect? "What are you, crazy? C'mon! I was just like, 'This is not possible.' I wanted to get it, but I didn't want to get it. I didn't want to do it, I just wanted to get it." She laughs. "I wanted it to be done. Somehow. They're all great, like really nice, like not scary intimidating weirdo people."

Peet sounds like a devoted movie fan. "Yeah, a little like a crazy person, yeah. Slightly deranged. Lines... I get very obsessed with moments. I'm very detailed that way. If I'm obsessed with a movie, I get it down to the tiniest... I'm a rewinder, you know what I mean? Rewind it like eight times. I just watched Racing with The Moon last night. There's this moment, Sean Penn's so young in it, it's so beautiful. He has a cigarette. He's studying planes. He's about to go to war. He brings the binoculars down and he sees the woman he loves and his cigarette drops and he just goes 'Oh Christ.' I rewound that like five times. I cannot believe the way he says, 'Oh Christ,' and the way his cigarette... it's just not really possible." She leans forward, talks faster. "And also, what was he looking at, on the day that they shot it? Did she go stand over there, how did they do that? I get obsessed! I can't help it! There's nothing more fun than rewinding. Nothing!"

So she's learning from other actors? She blows a raspberry at me. "You can't learn, that's just the thing. That's what makes something genius, it's inimitable. It's weird for me with Diane and Fran [McDormand]. We've done a lot of things, the three of us in a three-shot, like the Witches of Eastwick, we've joked. Really, the truth of what's going on in my head is like 'Holy fucking shit, I'm acting with Frances McDormand and Diane Keaton! It's not possible! It's just not possible. I rented Annie Hall last night, which I didn't see, because I had to watch Racing with the Moon and the 'Oh Christ" moment, but the other day I was doing a scene with Diane, and she says, "I love you," and she says, 'I love you more' and then one time we were doing it, I just said, 'I lurf you.' I was like, 'Oh my fucking god, I just quoted Annie Hall to Diane Keaton, I just quoted Annie Hall to Diane Keaton, I just quoted Annie Hall to Diane Keaton!' It was the scariest moment. She looked blankly, I said, 'That's from Annie Hall,' and she's like, 'Oh, oh, god, right, yeah, right.' Another time? I said, 'You do it,' and she says, 'No, you do it,' and I say, 'No, you must be Don Francesco's sister,' from Love and Death, and again, she just stares at me. They don't understand what they've meant to people! She practically didn't recognize it! I go, 'No, you must be Don Francesco's sister,' Hello! Are you crazy?"

You can't let them know, then you'd be a little psychotic," she says, smiling. "If I really told Diane, 'I need to talk to you,' then that she might think I'm a stalker, a deranged person. I try to just be... appropriate. It's really hard sometimes, though."

Remainders

Jack Nicholson's Coffee Cup Waldorf-Astoria Hotel Park Avenue at 50th Street, New York City 1:40pm, November 22, 2003	Water Glass Amanda Peet Trickled Fingerprints Over For Half An Hour Waldorf-Astoria Hotel Park Avenue at 50th Street, New York City 11:18am, November 22, 2003.

Click here for more photographs.

My dinner with ennui

Well, count me awed. I missed Bob Odenkirk's Melvin Goes to Dinner when it played at Slamdance in January 2003, but I did admire the swag that was fluttering down the slopes of Park City: a series of trading cards penned by comics artist Adrian Tomine, depicting the characters and the sort of things that pop out of their mouths. ("Last night, I came so hard I almost shit the bed" came from the mouth of the film's title character.) I only just got to see the movie on video this week. Reportedly a failure in test marketing and trimmed since its debut by its distributor, it turns out to be a modest gem, criminally overlooked. Low-key and downright authentic, it may be the keenest portrait I've seen lately of contemporary urban alienation, sharp without being unduly assertive, laugh-out-loud funny while remaining true to the poignant confusion and delusions of its four characters. It's written by Michael Blieden, a Daily Show contributor, who based it on a play in which the four leads originated the roles. Odenkirk's camera effectively captures their comfort with this uncomfortable foursome (which also include Matt Price, Stephanie Courtney and Annabelle Gurwitch). They do wondrous things with a succession of seemingly meandering, sometimes crude anecdotal conversations over wine and (sometimes) food at a restaurant officiated over by a beguilingly sociopathic waitress (Kathleen Roll) who one is hard-pressed not to love and also fear. More Bunuelesque social nightmare than the cerebral one-upmanship of My Dinner with Andre, I'm sure it's only the first of many other worthy films from all concerned. There are several pointed cameos, including Odenkirk, David Cross, Melora Walters, Jack Black and the ineffable Maura Tierney. Michael Penn's score's not bad, either.

Extras effort

Struggling to keep from falling further behind on the DVD issues and reissues I hadn't time to write about, I suggested a few weeks ago that it would be a "sin" for a serious DVD collector not to own Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue. Philadelphia journalist Mindy Benson wrote in: "I know you weren't really interested when you asked 'why don't you have Kieslowski's Decalogue yet?' But since this is an issue that pisses me off, I felt compelled to respond. I, unfortunately, have the two-disc DVD set that Facets/Imagine put out in 1999. Having seen Decalogue several years earlier and loved it, I rushed to get it as soon as it came out. Who the hell would guess that four years later they'd release a more elaborate box set? I'm used to major studios screwing around with multiple editions of high-profile films. But really, much like Criterion, I expect Facets to play fair with dedicated foreign-film buffs. So now I'm supposed to go spend another seventy to eight dollars for this? What's to say in a few more years they won't release another edition with the longer versions of Short Film About Killing and Short Film About Love?

So I turned to Milos Stehlik, executive director of Facets Multimedia and head of the Facets label. The original rights-holder for North America gave Facets a very small window for its first release. Would a longer window have allowed Facets to accumulate the extras the current edition has? "It's hard to say, in retrospect, because ten months, which is about what we had the first time around, is no time to do anything. The search for the extras in the Polish television archives, transcription, translation, dubbing, mastering ten separate [segments takes] time. I would say that the one thing which we wanted was for the extras to provide some context for Kieslowski, who made it, how he came to make it and why, rather than try to analyze (which exists, as you know, in written form) what each Decalogue "theoretically" means. This is because Kieslowski's whole intent was to be open-ended - to leave the questions posed but unanswered, and we wanted to respect the ambiguities which are a key element in the beauty of the films and their power."

The edition's highlight is an hour with Kieslowski in a television studio, facing down some of his stubborn (and seemingly mulish) critical adversaries right after he produced The Decalogue. "The long interview with Kieslowski, which is one of the extras, is quite interesting both because it reveals some of his personality--his sense of irony, for example--but also the often tense relationship he had with Polish critics. The transition in Kieslowski's work between the more directly political films (like Blind Chance and Camera Buff) in a way also anticipated the shift in Polish society from communism to capitalism." Afterwards, Stehlik contends, with films like The Double Life of Veronique, Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy, "It would not be enough to question the role of the political instrument, the artist would have to question the inner state of each individual - a much tougher challenge, as we have seen."

Another challenge is to correctly recall the original context in which particular films are made and received. "It's always easy to claim credit after the fact, as the Polish now love to do, and what's to me so great about the talk show with Kieslowski is that the impetus for The Decalogue came from lots of unhappiness on Kieslowski's part, the fact that before that he was involved in making an unfinished and tortured documentary about trials of Solidarity activists, that The Decalogue was not received particularly ecstatically inside Poland, that he ended up half-living and working in exile, and that he died by wanting to have his heart operation "at home" rather than in the west. It's of course these contradictions that make Kieslowski and The Decalogue so powerful and memorable, because they reflect the difficulty of maintaining a moral compass in the face of daily life which seems absurd, irrelevant, accidental."

Remote Possibilities

The Samuel Goldwyn company sent out copies of Peter Sollett's sweet and memorable romantic comedy Raising Victor Vargas as a year-end reminder; another worthy, just out from Home Vision, is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's hypnotic thriller Cure, a taut gem of paranoia, boasting a steadfast performance by the great Japanese Everyman Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance, Warm Water Under A Red Bridge). As the late critic Jan Dawson once described Bruno Ganz in Wim Wenders' The American Friend, Yakusho is "the perfect raincoat man." And speaking of near-forgotten movies, Wenders' own editions of his work continue to trickle out, including Notebooks for Cities and Clothes, his small, lyrical study of the preparation of a season's clothes by Japanese designer Yohji Yahmamoto, as well as The American Friend, which is probably the one movie I've seen on the big screen more than any other. It's a lovingly dislocated pan-European thriller, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, "Ripley's Game." The intense sense of displacement felt by its characters is shared by its viewers throughout the turns of the convoluted, hardly-explained plot. Ganz is memorable as the Hamburg frame-builder enlisted to commit a murder, as is Dennis Hopper as a particularly verbal Tom Ripley and a raft of film directors in smaller roles, including Jean Eustache, Samuel Fuller and an epigram-laden lion in winter, the late, great Nicholas Ray.

Polish sauciness

Criterion's invaluable edition of Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water has gotten a deserved ocean of ink since its release earlier this year; Polanski pulled a canny, claustrophobia-inducing trick on viewers of his merciless first feature about three people stuck on a ship: while it's possible to skip among the chapters of the film, you can't use the step function within the chapters. Most valuable for students of Polanski's work is the second disk, which scoops up the short films he made between 1957 and 1962, and which few people have seen in recent years.Facets and Polart have jointly issued two other important Polish classics, two parts of Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds. Brilliantly shot in black-and-white, both stand tall among the great war movies. Kanal charts the escape of untrained Resistance fighters through the endless sewers of Warsaw; Ashes and Diamonds starts on the last day of World War II, following a team of assassins out to assassinate a Communist party official. Their leader's played by the charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski, an actor often described as "the James Dean of Poland," and who died young. It's a kinetic piece of work, rich with ideas about memory, sound and composition.

How German is it?

At the start of the eighties, one remarkable filmmaker seemed like an unstoppable force of nature, much as Godard had been in the early 1960s when he was turning out tasty, provocative film essays every few months. But Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most prolific of the German New Wave directors, went out with his bad-boy image intact when he died almost twenty years ago at the age of 46, slumped (by one account) over an editing machine after a long day of hard work, cigarettes, beer, prescription drugs, Jack Daniels and cocaine. At the center of Fassbinder's output were twenty-eight stage plays and forty-three films, including the magnificent parable of postwar German life, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and the epic fifteen-and-a-half-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (as well as smaller, more personal gems like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fox and his Friends and The Third Generation). Maria Braun is the best-known, and perhaps Fassbinder's most accessible. It's a melodrama every bit as good as anything Douglas Sirk ever did, and watching it, the loss of Fassbinder is ever more painful to contemplate. While there are brilliantly orchestrated metaphors for the state of postwar German society, the film functions as a superb drama on its own, thank you very much. Earlier in the year, Criterion issued Fassbinder's 1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, an important influence on Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven. (Haynes provides a video introduction.) But more impressive is their four-disc edition of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy, three movies that critiqued postwar Germany (the Bundesrepublik Deutschland) through portraits of powerfully de fined women: The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss and Lola. The package is a extraordinary audiovisual resource for studying Fassbinder's work; beyond the lovely transfers of the features, there's a fifty-two-page book including an insightful new essay by Kent Jones and production histories of each of the movies by Fassbinder biographer Michael Toteberg. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who learned his trade while working with Fassbinder, and now shoots movies for Scorsese, James Brooks and other willful directors (his most recent credit is Something's Gotta Give), provides commentary tracks, as does Fassbinder peer Wim Wenders. There are multiple interviews with Fassbinder's co-workers, and several documentaries on his work that would otherwise be generally unavailable.

Old Europe

Fellini's La Strada (1956) has never been one of my favorites, but Criterion's new edition provides a not-convincing, emphatic introduction by Martin Scorsese, and Paquito del Bosco's engrossing documentary, Federico Fellini's Autobiography, which draws from years of television interviews with il Maestro to create a dense, accidental self-portrait. I've already written about Straw Dogs as well as Jean-Pierre Melville's magnificent Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle), both of which are out in superb editions. John Woo wrote an introduction to Red Circle, and there's a half-hour of on-set footage that offer glimpses into how Melville constructed this cool, serenely stylish masterpiece.

Jonathan Miller's 1966 BBC adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, made for a modest £32,000, is out from Home Vision, one of many retellings of Lewis Carroll's story, and one I wasn't even aware of. The straightforward telling, without makeup effects on actors like Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave, Allan Bennett, John Gielgud, Leo McKern and Peter Cook, and the look of its 35mm black-and-white images make for a memorably hand-crafted look. I can't disagree with the disc's essayist, Wheeler Winston Dixon, who calls it "nothing less than a lost treasure from the 1960s and perhaps the best and most faithful adaptation of Carroll's classic." The sitar and oboe score's by Ravi Shankar; the disc's extras include a 1903 version of the story by Cecil Hepworth.

Strange brews
Among the stranger movies ready for your Netflix queue or the bookshelf: composer Leonard Kastle's unsentimental 1970 outlaw couple classic, The Honeymoon Killers, which was almost Martin Scorsese's directorial debut. Kastle's extensive interview about the making, unmaking, and making of the movie is a precious slice of history, and the performances by Tony LoBianco and Shirley Stoler are fraught with a troubling authenticity. Criterion's double disc of David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch has a near-schizophrenic audio commentary, matching Cronenberg's cool, intellectual analysis with star Peter Weller's ultra-Californian space-case observations. Chris Rodley, author of "Cronenberg on Cronenberg," contributes a documentary about the making of the film, Naked Making Lunch, as well as audio of Burroughs reading from his crazy-quilt book. Schizopolis (1996) showcases Steven Soderbergh as actor, writer, director and cinematographer, and its oft-inspired gibberish is more memorable than the (still underrated) Full Frontal. I haven't had the time to sample Soderbergh's audio commentary, but it's surely yet another of his many very public acts of self-flagellation.

Turning east

Twisted family dynamics and sexual fixations mark most of Shohei Imamura's decades of work, and his 1966 The Pornographers is among his best. As Jim Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice review reprinted on the DVD, Imamura is "the kind of esthete who could fashion a religion out of the old National Enquirer [with] a passion for everything that's kinky, lowlife or irrational in Japanese culture." Roger Ebert wrote a swell appreciation of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, one of the Japanese master's most moving family melodramas. Extras include A two-hour doc about Ozu's career, 1983' s I Lived, But... and Talking with Ozu, a 1993 appreciation of his work from such filmmakers as Wim Wenders, Paul Schrader, Claire Denis, Aki Kaurismaki and Hou Hsiao-hsien. American Cinematheque, Vitagraph and Home Vision are teaming up to release gems from their Outlaw Japanese Cinema series, most recently, Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower, a quirky, starkly shot black-and-white widescreen gangster tale, which was described in its theatrical run at the Egyptian Theater, as "one of the greatest yakuza films... a gorgeous, obsessive blend of Jean-Pierre Melville and Gun Crazy." Couldn't have described it clearer. Toru Takemitsu scored. Upcoming in the series, a film I love (and wrote the liners notes for), Seijun Suzuki's Tattooed Life, from which Quentin Tarantino appropriated a reprehensible amount from for Kill Bill: Vol. I. Plus: Criterion's out-of-print Jacques Tati DVDs, including Playtime and Mon Oncle, are scheduled for reissue in January, with Renoir's Rules of the Game soon to follow.

Hunger artists

I've been writing more about restaurants and food: here's a brief interview with the principals of one of Chicago's best new restos.

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