Why is there no great Hollywood soccer movie (Los Angeles Times)

By John Horn, Los Angeles Times

June 6, 2010

Graham King has worked with countless A-listers: Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Jack Nicholson, Cameron Diaz and Daniel-Day Lewis, to name just a few. But ask the Oscar-winning producer of "The Departed" which celebrities made him giddy like a star-struck teen, and he won't mention any actor, saying instead it was the players from the Chelsea FC soccer team.

The day the English-born filmmaker won the best picture Academy Award for "The Departed," King awoke before dawn to watch his beloved soccer squad defeat Arsenal in the Carling Cup final (one friend says it was a sweeter victory for King than his Oscar triumph over "Little Miss Sunshine"). King has hurried off the American set of several of his films on a Friday, flown to England to see a Chelsea match, and been back in the States before cameras rolled Monday morning. King interrupted his 2008 Cannes Film Festival stay to share a private jet to Moscow for the Champions League Final between Chelsea and Manchester United (Chelsea, King's team since age 4, lost in a shootout).

King's passion for the beautiful game is shared by many inside Hollywood — directors, studio executives, actors and other producers. But for all of the industry's most devoted soccer supporters, the movie business has yet to make what anybody considers a definitive mainstream movie about the sport, an especially glaring omission on the eve of the World Cup, opening Friday in South Africa.

Boxing might have "Raging Bull" and "Rocky," baseball "Bull Durham" and "Field of Dreams," football "North Dallas Forty" and "The Longest Yard," basketball " Hoosiers," ice hockey has "Miracle" and "Slap Shot," and even billiards has "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money."

When it comes to soccer, though, the sport's most memorable Hollywood movie probably has been Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine and Pelé's cheesy 1981 World War II drama "Victory" — only a marginally better treatment of the sport, in some detractors' view, than "Happy Gilmore" was for golf.

Movie critics (and some art-house film patrons) have embraced several independent movies with strong soccer settings, including "Bend It Like Beckham," "The Damned United" and the recent "Looking for Eric." Documentary filmmakers have delivered a few acclaimed soccer films, including "Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos" and the new "After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United."

It's not so much that the big studios don't make good soccer movies, it's that they don't really make them at all. When 20th Century Fox adapted Nick Hornby's book "Fever Pitch," the subject sport was changed from soccer (the Arsenal Football Club) to baseball (the Boston Red Sox). Universal Pictures is developing "The Fugees," a movie about refugee kids who play soccer in Atlanta, but that's a rare exception to the rule.

It's not as though a lot of people don't love the game, particularly around the World Cup, the every-four-years global soccer championship.

The television audience for all soccer matches in the last World Cup exceeded 26 billion, with nearly 12% of the globe's population watching the final game between Italy and France (Italy won the match on penalty kicks). There are more than 50,000 American Youth Soccer Organization teams in the United States, representing more than 650,000 AYSO players.

But soccer interest pretty much vanishes when the nation's studios decide which features they want to greenlight. It took shoe maker Adidas to finance the three-film "Goal! The Dream Begins" soccer movie series, none of which were box-office hits. When the big studios make a soccer film, it's often a goofy comedy like "Kicking & Screaming."

Soccer's most fervent fans in and around Hollywood, many of whom are British and insist on calling the game football, offer a variety of explanations for the shutout: It's not an indigenous sport, and the World Cup has none of the domestic cultural relevance of the Super Bowl or the World Series. The game is distinguished by split-second athleticism that can't easily be re-created on screen. Scoring can be low or even nonexistent. Football, baseball and basketball are episodic sports with countless pauses to discuss strategy and set plays, but soccer is an uninterrupted 90-minute slog. Actors can't effectively fake playing the game. Moviegoers would rather watch the real thing.

Studio executives "think soccer is for some suburban mom with a 4-year-old," says Joe Roth, who ran Disney, Fox and Revolution Studios and is also the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders, a new (and so far incredibly popular) Major League Soccer team. He believes Hollywood's anti-soccer bias is rooted in a fear (and ignorance) of what's foreign. "We're basically a xenophobic country and don't look at what's going on in the rest of the world as closely as we should," Roth says.

Roth, who is consulting on a biographical film in early development based on the Brazilian soccer great Pelé, says that the sport is well-suited to filmmaking. "It's a hard sport to show on television, but a much easier sport to stage on film," he says.

Not everybody agrees.

"I don't think the two go together," Ken Loach, the director of "Looking for Eric," says of the soccer-movie combination. His film stars former Manchester United goal-scoring legend Eric Cantona in a story about how a soccer-obsessed, down-on-his-luck British postal carrier's life is restarted when he is visited by Cantona, who plays himself. "A film has its own narrative — they have different rhythms," Loach says.

If you've noticed that Kevin Costner doesn't display a perfect golf swing in "Tin Cup" or that Tommy Lee Jones can't really swing a bat in "Cobb," you know how easy it is to spot actors trying to be athletes. When Gavin O'Connor cast "Miracle," a drama about the gold-medal-winning U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Olympics, he cast real hockey players who could act, rather than actors who might vaguely know how to skate and shoot a puck. More often than not — in a business driven by star casting — it's the other way around.

"But you can't replicate that level of skill," says Stephen Frears, the British director of "The Queen" and "Dangerous Liaisons" and a supporter of Arsenal. "There's so much coverage of the game now that trying to fake it is very difficult. It's daunting. You are never going to make a soccer film as good as the real thing."

David Anspaugh, the American director of the classic sports films "Hoosiers" and "Rudy," also made 2005's "The Game of Their Lives," a drama about how the American squad upset England in 1950's World Cup in Brazil. Though some say it's among the better soccer movies around, Anspaugh says money woes kept him from making the film he set out to direct. "A lot of the good parts of the film we had to cut out," he says.

But Anspaugh says he was determined to make the soccer match look as authentic as possible, auditioning about 6,000 people for the film and populating his cast with legitimate players, including actors Jimmy Jean-Louis and Richard Jenik, and brought in former U.S. pros Eric Wynalda and John Harkes as soccer consultants. "Will someone make a great movie in the future with soccer as a canvas? Absolutely," Anspaugh says. "And it won't be that long from now."

Some remain skeptical, particularly because soccer is often subtle in its action and its play is defined by individual brilliance as well as intangible team chemistry.

"In soccer, things happen on the spur of the moment, the blink of the eye," says Daniel Battsek, the former head of Miramax Films (which distributed the documentary "Once in a Lifetime") and who is the new president of National Geographic Films. The British-born studio executive says that American football, with more set plays and team maneuvers, is far easier to capture cinematically.

A lifetime Chelsea fan, Battsek says director Gurinder Chada's "Bend it Like Beckham" accurately depicted what it means to be a soccer fanatic. "It captured the spirit of the game — it helped make Americans understand how all-encompassing football is, that it's the greatest game on the planet," he says.

Chada, who was born in Kenya but grew up in England amid fans of Tottenham Hotspur, spent three years trying to get financing for her movie about Jess, an Indian teenage girl smitten with soccer and then-Manchester United star David Beckham. Spurning her conservative family's wishes, Jess (Parminder Nagra) secretly starts playing on a women's soccer team with Jules ( Keira Knightley). Neither Nagra nor Knightley were accomplished players ("But do people really think Harrison Ford can jump out of a helicopter?" Chada asks); she surrounded them with passionate young female athletes so that the film's matches not only looked authentic but were.

But Chada said that focusing too narrowly on the sport itself is to lose sight of the objective. "Sometimes, the problem with sports movies is that you get too caught up with the sport and forget that sport is a metaphor," she says. Like other affecting sports movies, "Bend It Like Beckham" is ultimately less about soccer than it is about the people playing it: a character story, not a sports film.

"One of the greatest boxing movies was 'Raging Bull' and yet it wasn't really about boxing. It was about this amazing character," says British actor Ray Winstone, who is so committed to soccer (he's a supporter of West Ham United) that he will spend most of June in South Africa with several dozen friends on a World Cup bender.

That raises an almost existential question: Are great sports movies really about the sport itself? Isn't "Field of Dreams" ultimately a father-son story? Is "Hoosiers" a study of an underdog Indiana high school basketball team, or a redemption tale about a coach and the town drunk? At its center, isn't "Bend It Like Beckham" a tale of girl power?

"Looking for Eric" director Loach (a supporter of the second-tier Bath City Football Club) says one of the central ideas in his film is that we are much stronger as a collective than we are individually, that we can turn to other people to help our "becoming the people we want to be."

There might be a fantastically talented soccer star at the center of Loach's film, but when Cantona is asked to describe the greatest moment in his playing career, he replies that it wasn't a goal but a pass to a teammate.

john.horn@latimes.com

Judgment day approaches for Diego Maradona (Los Angeles Times)

By Ken Bensinger, Los Angeles Times
June 6, 2010

To the soccer faithful, Argentina should be a lock to win the 2010 World Cup. After all, it has god on its side.

God, as Argentines are wont to point out, is their coach, Diego Maradona, the greatest soccer player of his generation and, arguably, of all time.

To understand the gargantuan shadow Maradona casts over his soccer-mad homeland, one has to conjure up the athleticism of Michael Jordan, the power of Babe Ruth — and the human fallibility of Mike Tyson.

Lump them together in a single barrel-chested man with shaggy black hair and you have El Diego, idol to the millions who call him D10S, a mashup of his playing number and the Spanish word for god.

His divinity is about to be tested.

This week in South Africa, he will lead one of the globe's most gifted teams — one blessed with stars such as Lionel Messi, the reigning world player of the year, and Gonzalo Higuain, whose 27 goals for Real Madrid came behind only Messi in the Spanish league this season. Last month, England's manager singled out the Argentina side as the "most talented" in the 32-nation tournament.

Despite all the firepower, oddsmakers don't like Argentina's chances — not because of its players, but because of its coach. The book on Maradona, 49, is that he's too inexperienced, too volatile, too unsophisticated and too arrogant to capture the trophy for Argentina. That's made Spain and Brazil the favorites in the quadrennial tourney, which kicks off Friday.

The question now is whether Maradona can once again bring glory to Argentina, a feat that would cement his immortality in the world pantheon of sports.

Or will Maradona — as he so often has — succumb to his seemingly insatiable lust for protagonismo, the desire to be the hero at the center of attention, and in the process spoil his team's chances?

Failure could well mark the final fall for soccer's troubled deity.

"The years go by and Maradona continues to be the most popular athlete in the world, the most loved and also the most hated," said Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan intellectual and author of the seminal "Soccer in Sun and Shadow."

"Maradona is a very popular god because he is the most human of the deities, a dirty, arrogant, overbearing, deceitful, swaggering, vicious god, and all this serves only to multiply his prestige. The problem with Maradona is that the gods don't retire," Galeano said. "It's very difficult to return to anonymity after being adored in the highest altars."

Rise of a star

Born desperately poor into one of Buenos Aires' worst neighborhoods, he rose to stardom at just 15 years of age and, at 20, won a club championship with Boca Juniors, Argentina's most popular professional team. He went on to Europe, becoming the highest-paid athlete in the world playing for Barcelona and later Naples, where he still draws throngs whenever he visits.

He is best remembered for the two goals he scored on England — a rivalry sharpened by bitter feelings in the wake of the Falklands War between the two nations — en route to capturing the 1986 World Cup.

The first was infamously scored with his left hand, which is illegal, but somehow escaped the referee's notice. (Maradona attributed it to the "hand of God.") The other, in which he dribbled with his left foot past five English players and the goalkeeper to score, is widely considered the greatest goal of all time. It left the television commentator sobbing in joy, and apologizing for his outburst.

Maradona's world transcends soccer. Argentina's Pibe de Oro, or Golden Boy, is close friends with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, with whom he appeared at a rally protesting then-President George W. Bush. Maradona dedicated his biography to Shaquille O'Neal and Tim Duncan, among others. In 2005 he even hosted his own television talk show in Argentina, "Night With No. 10."
But his failings have been as monumental as his accomplishments. En route to a laundry list of soccer laurels strewn across three continents and as many decades, Maradona managed to get himself thrown out of the 1994 World Cup for using ephedrine, was busted twice for cocaine and convicted of shooting an air rifle at journalists. Divorced from his high school sweetheart, he pays child support to several illegitimate children and owes the Italian government more than 30 million euros in unpaid taxes.

"It's a terrible way to represent the country," said Yoni Grassi, who repairs speakers in Santa Fe, 300 miles north of Buenos Aires. "The only thing the whole world knows about Argentina is Diego, and this is how he behaves."

Only 5-foot-5, Maradona ballooned to nearly 300 pounds after hanging up his cleats in 1997 and was hospitalized several times before slimming down after having his stomach stapled. He spent months in Cuba to kick his cocaine habit, hosted by Castro himself.

He now bears a Castro tattoo on his left leg, the face of Che Guevara on his right shoulder and the names of his daughters, Dalma and Giannina, on his forearms.

His fans never wavered. At least three dozen songs have been written about him, and his most fervent fans 12 years ago founded the Maradonian Church, which today claims to have more than 100,000 members worldwide. If he were to run for president, some Argentine polls have shown, he'd stand a good chance of winning.

New challenges

Scowling behind a table in a room beneath Uruguay's Centenario Stadium in October, El Diego didn't look like a coach who had just qualified for the world's premier sporting event.

Four days earlier, his team had dodged elimination from the World Cup by beating Peru with a last-minute goal by aging striker Martin Palermo. Maradona celebrated by belly-flopping in the mud.

That set up a 1-0 victory over Uruguay that guaranteed a bid, saving Argentina from missing its first World Cup since 1970.

Rather than celebrate, Maradona used a post-match news conference to accuse the media of treating him "like garbage." He mocked the reporters and TV crews, suggesting that they perform an act unprintable in a family newspaper.

The outburst was only the latest in a series dating back to the startling selection of Maradona as the team's coach a year earlier.

Maradona's entire managerial experience consisted of coaching less than a full season's worth of games for two mediocre Argentine club teams in the 1990s.

Almost immediately after taking the job, Maradona seemed to be making his detractors' case. His team struggled in World Cup qualifying matches, falling to Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and bitter rival Brazil. Most humiliating of all was a 6-1 drubbing by Bolivia, which has never won a World Cup match.

By getting the team to South Africa, Maradona earned a chance at redemption — and another chance to be in the spotlight.

Butting heads

Soccer's greatest debate still rages: Who was better, Maradona or Pele?

Pele, the sport's most prolific scorer with more than 750 club and international goals, tops most lists. Maradona scored just under 350 goals, but adherents point out that most were netted in tough European leagues, whereas Pele played his entire career in Brazil and for the short-lived Cosmos of the North American Soccer League. The Brazilian's three World Cup titles overshadow Maradona's sole championship, but Pele was injured for one of those and barely played.

The two played in different eras, with different teammates and with different styles; a true comparison is as impossible as pitting Johnny Unitas against Peyton Manning.

Maradona acts as though there is only one soccer god. Accounts of the episode vary, but three months ago, he kept Pele cooling his heels in a Madrid bar for well over four hours before a photo shoot for Louis Vuitton by Annie Leibovitz.

The fashion brand insisted that the two spent time together that day, but pictures of the event tell a different tale: Pele and French soccer icon Zinedine Zidane together, laughing; separately, Maradona, alone before the camera.

The anecdote hints at what could be the greatest risk for Argentina: that Maradona's jealous ego could trip up players like Messi, who scored 47 goals in Europe this season on the way to FIFA's world player of the year award. Under Maradona, Messi scored only one goal in World Cup qualifiers.

"Maradona doesn't play soccer anymore, he coaches it," said Mario Kempes, star forward for the Argentine team that captured the World Cup in 1978. "He needs to remember that."

For some, however, there are hints that there's method in the madness.

"What he lacks in experience, he brings in courage to the team," said Guillermo Barros Schelotto, a midfielder for the Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer, who played alongside Maradona on Boca Juniors for about six months in the 1990s. "Nobody has more passion than he does."

In addition, some say, the media circus surrounding Maradona may shield his stars so they can focus on soccer. He has gone to great lengths to make his players comfortable, flying them to South Africa early to have time to adjust to the altitude (five of the nine Cup venues are at 4,000 feet or higher) and ensuring that they have plenty of beef in their training meals, a key for any red-blooded Argentine.

Messi, who is often compared to Maradona, said his coach was getting better. Maradona "was a little imposing" at first, he said in an interview on CNN International last month. But now he "gives me a lot more confidence than he did before."

What's at stake

Coaching a national team is trying. Handling delicate superstars, playing a grueling schedule and risking constant second-guessing and scorn has a way of grinding down even the most committed managers.

For a man like Maradona, with money, a brilliant legacy and unparalleled adoration from a nation that considers him a living national treasure, it would certainly have been easier to stay away from the fray.

But a championship, against all expectations, would be something truly sweet, a chance to answer lingering questions about greatness, a chance to secure his reputation as D10S for all time.

"It would be safer to stay home and accept the adoration and love of a soccer-loving public," Maradona says in a television commercial currently airing in Argentina. "It would be safer to sit atop all my glory. But that wouldn't be me."

In recent weeks, Maradona's antics have continued. He ran over the leg of a TV cameraman with his Mini Cooper, then called the victim an idiot. He promised (some may say threatened) to run naked around Buenos Aires' 220-foot-tall Obelisk landmark should Argentina win the World Cup. And he made it known that his players would be allowed to have sex with their wives or girlfriends in South Africa, but that they should keep nighttime consumption of champagne or Cuban cigars to a minimum.

"If he didn't say such things, he wouldn't be Maradona," said Diego "El Chavo" Fucks, a soccer commentator and columnist in Buenos Aires who has covered six World Cups.

Now, with Maradona's team in Pretoria, South Africa, preparing to face Nigeria on Saturday, soccer's fallen archangel once again is at the center of it all.

Can he on the sideline do what he did on the field, joining Germany's Franz Beckenbauer as the only man to win the World Cup as a player and a coach?

And if he does, will his glory overshadow that of his 23 players?

"Today's football has overvalued the role of managers, who apply complicated scientific formulas to direct their teams," said Galeano, the Uruguayan writer.

"The best I ever met was named Coppola. He was the barber in the Uruguayan town Nico Pérez, and he was coach of the town's team. His tactical and strategic plan was limited to saying to the players: 'Good luck, boys.' "

ken.bensinger@latimes.com

Times staff writer Grahame L. Jones contributed to this report.

"Liverpool", de Lisandro Alonso (Los Angeles Times)

Set in Tierra del Fuego, Lisandro Alonso's 'Liverpool' follows a merchant seaman's quest to find his mom.

By Kevin Thomas

March 5, 2010

Acclaimed experimental Argentinian writer-director Lisandro Alonso's "Liverpool," which was featured in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2008, is a bold, successful attempt at a film narrative in which images are everything and words are few.

Juan Fernandez's Farrel is a lean, good-looking but introverted merchant seaman who asks his freighter captain for shore leave in the port city of Ushuaia, the southernmost town in Tierra del Fuego. It is the dead of winter and Farrel has decided to make his way to his native village to see, after a 20-year absence, if his mother is still alive. (The film's title most likely refers to the freighter's city of origin.)

It takes Farrel about an hour of the film's 84 minutes to get there and, by then, it is more than clear that Farrel is a hard-drinking loner. The freighter seems like a spacious cocoon with an atmosphere of low-key camaraderie in which Farrel is not much of a participant but which probably gives him a feeling of security.

His home village, a community with sheep and a sawmill, could just as well be anywhere in the world where there's lots of snow. What awaits him there is complex, elliptical and ambiguous -- and quietly devastating. In his fourth feature, Alonso trusts fully in the power of the camera to communicate emotions and connections with a stunning grace and total confidence.

For love of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' director Spike Jonze goes long (Los Angeles Times)

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By Dennis Lim

February 28, 2010

Spike Jonze's adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are" turns the slimmest of books -- 10 sentences, 18 pictures -- into a feature-length film. This feat of expansion is perhaps all the more surprising when you consider the director's track record -- in music videos, skate videos, short films, commercials and various off-the-cuff goofs and larks -- as a miniaturist par excellence.

"Wild Things," out on standard and Blu-ray DVD this week, is only Jonze's third feature in a decade, and it's clearly a labor of love. In fleshing out the adventures of young Max (played by newcomer Max Records), Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers preserve the mysterious sense of delight and danger that defined Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's classic. The furry wild things, undifferentiated in the book, are given names and personalities, and brought to life through an elaborate process combining puppetry, digital animation and voice work.

But as labor-intensive as it was, "Wild Things" is hardly the only project that has been occupying Jonze since 2002's "Adaptation." While the industry norm dictates that filmmakers graduate from calling-card shorts to feature-length assignments, he continues to work and thrive in the short form. Within the last few months alone, he has premiered two new shorts every bit as inventive as "Wild Things."

"We Were Once a Fairytale," available on iTunes, is a 12-minute collaboration with a self-spoofing Kanye West, who plays "Drunk Kanye" rampaging through a club and eventually purging the demonic rodent in his stomach. (Produced before last September's MTV Video Music Awards, it now seems to presage West's notorious outburst.) The half-hour "I'm Here," a lovely, dark-edged story of the fraught romance between two robots, overshadowed most of the features at Sundance last month.

It's fitting that a true appreciation of Jonze's sensibility requires a familiarity with his shorts, videos and promos, which mainly circulate online. A born prankster, a descendant of the silent slapstick comedians, a master of the high concept, he was a YouTube artist before the fact. (There is one DVD compilation of his music videos, dating from 2003. The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a retrospective last fall -- Jonze came up with the show's tongue-in-cheek title: "Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years.")

He's no one-trick auteur -- serving a wide range of bands and corporate taskmasters requires flexibility -- but Jonzeian hallmarks are discernible through almost all of his work: absurdist humor, a melancholic streak, the ability to commit with a straight face to an outrageous high concept. (Jonze has worked with more or less the same team of collaborators on big and small projects alike: cinematographer Lance Acord, production designer K.K. Barrett, editor Eric Zumbrunnen.)

"Wild Things," often interpreted as a story about the childhood id, is a logical fit given Jonze's taste for anarchy. A founding member of the "Jackass" crew (he appears as Gloria, a saggy, naked nonagenarian, in the second "Jackass" movie), he also directed the spooky kids-run-amok video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Y Control" and a controversial 2005 spot for the Gap that ends with the comprehensive trashing of a store.

The most vivid scenes in "Wild Things" are also the most physical: the rough-and-tumble brawls and dirt fights. In keeping with his skate-kid roots, Jonze is usually at his best when communicating his sheer love of movement. Think of the lead character's Dance of Despair and Disillusionment from "Being John Malkovich" or the ecstatic choreography in the videos for Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" and Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" and "Praise You."

Another side of Jonze -- the sensitive documentarian -- can be glimpsed in "Tell Them Anything You Want," a portrait of Sendak co-directed with Lance Bangs and out this week on DVD from Oscilloscope. Deftly edited down to a brisk 40-minute near-monologue from several interviews with Sendak at his Connecticut home, the film shows the author -- bleakly, amusingly and very movingly -- reflecting on his childhood, his homosexuality, his books and, most of all, his obsessive morbidity, which he traces to seeing a newspaper photo of the dead Lindbergh baby.

Precedents can be found in Jonze's earlier work: his shorts on Al Gore (then a presidential candidate) and the rapper Fatlip are equally intimate. Even in films squarely focused on others, Jonze's presence is felt. Revealing plenty about their subjects, they say almost as much about the filmmaker's easy rapport with them.

calendar@latimes.com

Critic's notebook: 'Shutter Island' as a new-music haven (Los Angeles Times)

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The trailers at the cineplex the other day included the usual summer blockbuster suspects showing off their special effects -- one cartoonish morph after another after another. Every soundtrack was loaded down with the same super-deep, but sonically shallow, electronic bass. I wasn’t sure what felt more depressingly manufactured: a deserted and alienating L.A. Live, where I happened to be, or the expensive nonsense in the nearly empty new Regal Cinema, which boasts very big subwoofers.

Then “Shutter Island” began, and yet more bass. But this time it was the sound of a foghorn, and it had the rich, compelling texture of music. It was music. It was also a real, old-fashioned foghorn. Out of this sonic relic grew French horns, as if they had been there all along struggling to get out. The misty Boston harbor was on the screen, compelling and mysterious as a painting by Turner. I was transported. Music, sound effects and cinematography joined to evoke a sense of place and mood as only they can in great cinema and only, these days, when Hollywood looks the other way.

That opening music turned out to be Ingram Marshall’s haunting “Fog Tropes.” The 1981 new-music classic found its way onto the screen thanks to the famed singer, songwriter and guitarist Robbie Robertson, who was music supervisor for “Shutter Island.” And Marshall’s wonderful piece, which was a hit of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recent West Coast, Left Coast festival, is only the beginning of a remarkable and gratifying collection of classic avant-garde scores Robertson has assembled for Martin Scorsese’s new, and I think mostly misunderstood, film.

You certainly wouldn’t know it from the awful album cover – which looks like your typical schlock horror film soundtrack recording – but Robertson’s two-CD set of music from “Shutter Island,” released by Rhino, proves to be an excellent compilation of short pieces by John Cage, John Adams, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Alfred Schnittke, Max Richter, Nam June Paik and that otherworldly Italian, Giacinto Scelsi. Brian Eno, Mahler and Dinah Washington also find their welcome way into the mix.

How did this happen?

After seeing the film, I reached Robertson on the phone. He explained that he has been a fan of these composers for decades. In fact, he said that sometime around 1969, in his years as a member of the Band, he was so moved when he first heard Penderecki’s disturbing “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” that he began a correspondence with the Polish composer, and they became musical friends.

As for “Shutter Island,” Robertson said, “the opportunity to show off these brilliant composers really makes me feel good.” It has been something he’s wanted to do for a long time. “I’d always thought Cage’s ‘Root of an Unfocus’ ” – which is for prepared piano – “would be great in a movie. And when Marty sent me the script, this is just where it went.”

That script is, on the surface, a psychological thriller, and it is being obnoxiously marketed as a scare-athon. The reviews have been, as they say, mixed, with the music thought of as melodramatic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Robertson says he wanted something that didn’t sound like typical film music and it is the boldness of these composers that appealed to him. “In the back of my mind was the thought, why don’t we have some geniuses who could really amplify the emotional ideas?”

At first, Roberston says, this notion threw even Scorsese -- whose relationship with Robertson began with the 1978 documentary of the Band, “The Last Waltz.” “ ‘Shutter Island’ is the eighth movie I’d worked on with Marty, and it was the first time his response was, ‘Oh, man, I don’t know what to do with that.’ ”

But Scorsese is a musical director and he clearly did know what to do with it. Although he didn’t ignore the throbbing possibilities of the Passacaglia movement of Penderecki’s Third Symphony, most of the music is used so subtly that even the geekiest new-music geek will have trouble identifying everything. I think I got maybe 60%.

Robertson went through a lot of trouble to make things work as well. He pointed out that while everyone agrees the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Ligeti’s “Lontano” is the best, he chose the Vienna Philharmonic recording under Claudio Abbado because he thought the warmth of the Vienna sound suited the film better.

But the real brilliance of this score is that the music doesn’t cue the action or explain anything. It adds emotional texture, serving as an alternate universe for a film that has at its essence an alternate universe. Still, I do think it's one alternate universe too many to present this excellent introduction to late 20th century music on CD as horror film music.

-- Mark Swed

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (críticas)

LOS ANGELES TIMES By Betsy Sharkey

February 19, 2010

In "Shutter Island," director Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.

It's 1954, the heart of the Cold War, with a conspiracy theory around every corner, when Leonardo DiCaprio's U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, played by Mark Ruffalo, are dispatched to an asylum for the criminally insane to investigate a dicey disappearance. One of the facility's most notorious patients, a young mother who drowned her three children, has somehow vanished from a room monitored 24 hours a day, its door bolted from the outside.

But there are deeper mysteries here, and Scorsese has a lot more on his mind than one crazy inmate on the loose. The A-bomb threat is ever present, memories of Nazi death camps linger and rumors of questionable scientific experiments by the asylum's doctors are circulating. Though the more central question, gathering force like the coming hurricane, is the very nature of sanity and insanity.

Bit by bit, the filmmakers begin to shift all that trouble onto Teddy's shoulders, already weighed down, we've been told, by the death of his wife and the knowledge that her killer is an inmate at the asylum.

But Teddy's problems are never too much for Scorsese and DiCaprio, who in their fourth collaboration have developed an ease evident in every scene. Here the actor slips so deeply inside Teddy's skin that it allows his anxiety to creep under ours, while the director makes the most of that naked vulnerability, moving the camera in so close we can see the look in his eye, and that is unsettling indeed.

All the action takes place on a remote island off the Eastern Seaboard where Ashecliffe Hospital sits, with the sinister look of things serving to ratchet up the sense of jeopardy. Dante Ferretti, in his seventh film with Scorsese, sets the stage with his production design, the asylum itself a looming Gothic architectural throwback that never looks less than intimidating. There is a carefully orchestrated soundtrack from another of the director's pals, singer-songwriter Robbie Robertson, literally coming in with a crescendo every time you feel the urge to whisper, "Cue ominous music."

Between the psychopaths, the psychiatrists and the skeletons in Teddy's closet, the line between reality and delusion, sanity and insanity, soon begins to blur. It is here that the film really begins playing around with the psyche, both Teddy's and ours, though the agenda is laid out from director of photography Robert Richardson's first images of Teddy reeling from seasickness in the claustrophobic latrine of the prison ferry on the ride over -- tortured eyes looking back at us from the mirror as he splashes water onto his face.

Water is an image Scorsese returns to again and again -- the ocean that isolates the island, the relentless hurricane that rages down, the drowned children of the missing inmate. Peril, rather than life-sustaining, seems to be the relevant allegory here, so you soon start worrying when anyone turns up wet.

Using noir's narrative style, often to brilliant effect, it is pure pleasure to watch as Teddy parries with his partner, the hospital staff led by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the inmates or the security detail, with John Carroll Lynch particularly good as the brick wall of Deputy Warden McPherson. It's probably never better than in a confrontation with the shadow king of Ashecliffe Hospital, Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring, Teddy throwing down hypotheses suggesting his guilt like a gauntlet, Dr. Naehring deflecting each one with bemused irony.

In its own way, Laeta Kalogridis' screenplay, which is based on the Dennis Lehane bestselling novel, turns into Teddy's most formidable adversary -- never letting him rest as obstacles are thrown in his path and paranoia rises with every step he takes.

We're pulled deep into a maze so complex it threatens to cloud the story, beginning with Teddy's tortured memories of his wife, Delores (Michelle Williams), and the migraines that plague him, to say nothing of his World War II soldiering days, including the liberation of Dachau and the horrors that implies. When the missing patient (Emily Mortimer as the younger Rachel, Patricia Clarkson the elder) mysteriously turns up, Teddy's gut tells him a lot of questions remain. As if by design, the hurricane finally blows in, cutting off access to the mainland and creating a dark and stormy night filled with scary sounds, ideal conditions for sleuthing around all those off-limits areas that any decent insane asylum has. While it's clear Scorsese is having great fun tightening the screws at every turn, some of the psychological tension that should have the crackle and shock of electricity in a thriller like this is lost in the crowd.

There is always a sense that Teddy's running out of time, and for a while we don't know exactly why. Once we do, Scorsese sets about tidying things up a bit too fast, like a college professor who knows he's got to let the class out, so let's just get through this, shall we.

Whether it's a rushed dénouement or a tendency to overindulge in delusions, the flaws are never enough to do permanent damage to the film. Ultimately, Scorsese has given us a new noir classic, though watching Di- Caprio's Teddy twist in the wind while his mind unravels would be satisfying enough.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

THE NEW YORK TIMES By A. O. SCOTT

“Shutter Island” takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. I’m sorry, that should be OFF THE COAST OF MASSACHUSETTS! IN 1954! since every detail and incident in the movie, however minor, is subjected to frantic, almost demented (and not always unenjoyable) amplification. The wail of strangled cellos accompanies shots of the titular island, a sinister, rain-lashed outcropping that is home to a mental hospital for the CRIMINALLY INSANE! The color scheme is lurid, and the camera movements telegraph anxiety. Nothing is as it seems. Something TERRIBLE is afoot.

Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself, directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a peculiar contraption of a thriller by Dennis Lehane. Like Shutter Island in the opening scenes, the full dimensions of the catastrophe come into view only gradually. At first everything is fine, or at least not quite right in a way that seems agreeably intriguing. Mr. Scorsese uses his considerable formal dexterity — his intimate, comprehensive understanding of how sound and image work together to create meanings and moods — to conjure a tingly atmosphere of uncertainty and dread.

The vessel of these anxieties is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Mr. DiCaprio, having grown perhaps overly fond of his accent from “The Departed,” brings it along for the ride, and it spreads through the movie like a contagious disease. Teddy’s partner (pahtnah), Chuck Aule, played by Mark (Mahk) Ruffalo, is supposed to be from the Pacific Northwest but he seems to have left all his R’s back in Seattle. Michelle Williams pops up in smudgy, color-drenched memories and hallucinations as Teddy’s dead wife, Dolores, her intonations as thick and clammy as chowder.

Those dialect-coached Boston inflections predominate in “Shutter Island,” but are not the only voices heard on the grounds of the asylum, where the patients perambulate like zombies and the orderlies lurk like vengeful specters. Ben Kingsley is Dr. Cawley, the psychiatrist in charge, with silky upper-crust menace in his voice and a diabolical little beard on his chin. Max von Sydow spouts Freudianisms in insinuating Germanic tones that remind Teddy — and of course not only Teddy — of Nazis, an association that helps to induce gratuitous flashbacks of corpses stacked outside death-camp barracks.

Those images emanate from Teddy’s troubled mind, the status of which is one of the movie’s chief mysteries. There are many others besides. Intimations of conspiracy, supernaturalism, cold war shenanigans and a whole lot more float around in the atmosphere, which is convulsed by operatically bad weather and the energetic furrowing of Mr. DiCaprio’s brow. As he interviews patients and staff members, trying to figure out how a woman named Rachel Solando could have vanished, barefoot, from her cell, Teddy is plagued by headaches, bad dreams and paranoia. Everyone he talks to seems to be harboring a secret, but what can it be?

Is there some kind of espionage-related psychological experimentation going on? Is it connected in some way to grisly medical research undertaken during the Third Reich? Are Dr. Cawley’s methods, which he claims are a humane advance over the cruelty and superstition of the past, really a form of madness in their own right? And what about the strange coincidence that Shutter Island apparently houses the firebug who caused Dolores’s death?

All of these riddles send out tendrils of implication that end up strangling the movie, the plot of which does not so much thicken as clog and coagulate. Mr. Scorsese, ever resourceful, draws on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of carefully orchestrated psychological confusion, and also nods in the direction of Mario Bava, the Italian horror maestro whose gothic fantasias routinely assert the triumph of sensation over sense. Mr. Scorsese’s camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp.

And the movie’s central dramatic problem — the unstable boundary between the reality of Shutter Island and Teddy’s perception of it — becomes less interesting as the story lurches along. You begin to suspect almost immediately that a lot of narrative misdirection is at work here, as MacGuffins and red herrings spawn and swarm. But just when the puzzle should accelerate, the picture slows down, pushing poor Teddy into a series of encounters with excellent actors (Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson) who provide painstaking exposition of matters that the audience already suspects are completely irrelevant.

Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.

There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt. But in this case the equivocation, the uncertainty, seems to come from the filmmaker himself, who seems to have been unable to locate what it is in this movie he cares about, beyond any particular, local formal concern. He has, in the past, used characters whose grasp of reality was shaky — or who stubbornly lived in realities of their own making — as vehicles for psychological exploration and even social criticism. But both Teddy’s mind and the world of Shutter Island are closed, airless systems, illuminated with flashes of virtuosity but with no particular heat, conviction or purpose.

“Shutter Island” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Blood, swearing, cigarettes.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; production designer, Dante Ferretti; produced by Mr. Scorsese, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer and Bradley J. Fischer; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels), Mark Ruffalo (Chuck Aule), Ben Kingsley (Dr. Cawley), Michelle Williams (Dolores), Emily Mortimer (Rachel Solando), Patricia Clarkson (Rachel Solando), Jackie Earle Haley (George Noyce) and Max von Sydow (Dr. Naehring).

VILLAGE VOICE
By Nick Pinkerton

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby's parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory in flashback and dream. Now topside, he joins his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), and their destination looms into view: an ominous hunk of rock in Boston Harbor that houses Ashecliffe Asylum, where they've been assigned to find a missing inmate.

Pounded eighth notes by Krzysztof Penderecki score a gathering-storm approach that anticlimaxes at a tidy, ecclesiastical-looking brick campus. They're shown the grounds by progressive chief physician Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley), who manages to seem both a natty, patrician liberal, circa 1954, and a bit of a satyr, with his Anton LaVey bald head/goatee combo and ironic twinkle—an ambiguous balance Kingsley keeps seesawing throughout. They also meet Cawley's colleague, Herr Doktor Naehring (Max von Sydow)—and Daniels, an ex-GI who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, takes an immediate dislike to the German.

As Daniels and Aule begin to investigate, there's a sense that their presence is an inside joke with the staff, that they're being given rehearsed misinformation. Daniels reveals that he'd heard sinister rumors about Ashecliffe long before this assignment, and not even a pretense of cooperation and normalcy can outlast their first hurricane-force dark-and-stormy-night on the island, when they trade their soaked civvies for orderly uniforms. (The film is elemental, whipped with fire, ash, snow, paper, bracken, and torrents of rain.)

As the outline of a conspiracy comes into view, Daniels's digging brings on strobing headaches, hallucinations, and a shrinking list of trustworthies that ultimately includes only his dead wife, dolorous Dolores, visiting him as a beyond-the-grave Technicolor prophet (Michelle Williams, not quite right for "ethereal"; it doesn't help that she's upstaged by Emily Mortimer's psychopath, who takes only one scene opposite DiCaprio to establish an immediate and spellbinding intimacy). As for DiCaprio, well, he'll never step onscreen and immediately suggest a liver-and-onions Greatest Generation Ralph Meeker he-man—Ted Levine's warden almost eats him at one point—but he has made suffering a specialty, and does so with an abandon that is frightening.

Production design maestro Dante Ferretti's island is a rugged symbolist mythscape, pocketed with hidden places: soothsayers' sea caves, Ward C, a squat Civil War–era fort where the most violent offenders are kept in a Goya madhouse, and, beyond it, the ultimate locked door—to the lighthouse! Scorsese's return to his Roger Corman AIP roots is an object lesson in the proximity of high and low culture—Shutter Island is lousy with modernist references, soundtracked by avant-garde 20th-century composers, pretentious in the best Pulp-y tradition.

138 minutes is dangerously epic for a talky thriller, but you forget the time and even whether the plot makes sense—and if you don't notice, it doesn't matter. Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.

Though the film takes place entirely out-to-sea, the mainland isn't left behind—it's concentrated here into a midcentury chamber of manmade horrors. Loonies praise their island as a safe haven from news "about atolls, about A-bombs." There are rumors suggesting the House Committee on Un-American Activities (!) is dabbling in brainwashing experiments. Daniels flashes back repeatedly to Dachau: a camp Kapo choking in his own blood; a firing line tracking shot popping with squibs like a string of firecrackers; piled corpses frozen into a horrible sculpture. No violence is unsuitable for aestheticization; at one point in the film's web of visions, the perpetrator of a triple filicide points proudly to her handiwork and says, "See, aren't they beautiful?"—and DP Robert Richardson's image concurs.

Scorsese is as famous a movie lover as a moviemaker. This is manifest in his too-much-discussed homages, but also in his understanding of how his characters have themselves been shaped by entertainment, how they model themselves as actors in the American drama—Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, or Bill the Butcher addressing his public with Edwin Forrest brio at a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Gangs of New York. (The announced Scorsese project, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, dealing with our nation's premier self-publicist ham, has enormous potential.) Without revealing too much of an ending that everyone will soon insist on telling you their opinion of, Shutter Island, deep in its camp gothic trappings, seems to me a flea-pit occult history, with Daniels's headspace a confusion of "Hideous Secrets of the Nazi Horror Cult" schlock, hard-ass Mickey Spillane machismo, Cold War psychic confusion, and the post-traumatic bad dreams of ex-servicemen.

In his documentary Personal Journey, Scorsese spoke of the '50s as a time "when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter, or even more important"—and in Shutter Island, his most distinctly '50s movie, he replays the trash culture of the era as the manifestation of an anguished subconscious.

J.D. Salinger: a Gift of Words and Silences (Los Angeles Times)

In his greatest works, a clash between self-expression and self-effacement.
By David Ulin

January 29, 2010

"Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of "The Catcher in the Rye." "If you do, you start missing everybody." For more than two decades now, I've thought about that ending as a piece of code. Not that Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91 in Cornish, N.H., was an oracle, despite what his most dedicated followers -- those who hung around his driveway, hoping for a glimpse of the reclusive author, or parsed his sentences on a million websites -- might believe.

But Salinger was a writer who refracted his perspective into language, producing work that was personal and profound. Between 1951 and 1965, he produced four uncommonly sensitive books of fiction -- "Catcher," "Nine Stories," "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" -- before retreating to his home in Cornish and refusing to publish any more. As he once wrote to biographer Ian Hamilton (in the course of suing Hamilton for quoting from his unpublished letters), "I think I've borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime."

For the last 45 years, this was the encoded story, Salinger's self-imposed silence, as readers debated whether he was still writing or off in some twilit oblivion of his own. For his part, Salinger's interactions with the public were infrequent and largely litigious. As recently as July, he won an injunction preventing the release of an unauthorized sequel to "The Catcher in the Rye." And yet, our collective fascination with his life rather than his writing suggests another bit of code, or at least a set of clues. Wasn't this, after all, what Salinger was rejecting, a culture of celebrity in which the most important thing was appearance and no one cared about the level of the soul? "I just quit, that's all," Franny Glass tells her boyfriend early in "Franny and Zooey," explaining why she gave up acting. " . . . I don't know. It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm."

For all that "The Catcher in the Rye" made him famous, "Franny and Zooey" is Salinger's masterpiece, an evocation of loss and longing within the bonds of family. Composed of two novellas, it introduces the youngest members of the Glass family, about whom Salinger would devote more than half of his published work. The Glasses are a New York creation, theatrical but also intellectual, middle class but bohemian at the same time. They talk and fight like immigrants, but they pursue esoteric pursuits, most notably Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, like members of the leisured elite.

In a sense, this was reflective of Salinger's experience; growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the son of a Scotch-Irish mother and a wealthy Jewish father, he had a foot in several worlds. Yet more to the point, the Glasses offered Salinger a wide lens through which to look at the intersection of mystical and secular culture, at the satisfactions of the spirit and of the flesh. In "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," he describes a night on which Franny, then an infant, is moved into the room shared by her brothers Buddy and Seymour, to avoid "a siege of mumps." As the baby fusses, Seymour reads to her; the story he chooses is a Taoist tale. "To this day," Salinger writes, "Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her" -- an echo that reverberates throughout his work. Seymour, after all, is the sainted genius of the Glass family, the oldest brother whose suicide Salinger recounts with just the right touch of understatement in his short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

And "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is an account of Seymour's wedding, an account that, because we know about his death from the outset, comes encoded with its own end. That, of course, is true of everything, of all human endeavor, which is an expression of futility in the face of the void. Salinger understood this, maybe because of a nervous breakdown he is said to have experienced during World War II, maybe because of his embrace of Buddhism.

Either way, the Glass stories are all about renunciation -- as is "The Catcher in the Rye," in its way. This is why generations of adolescents have responded to "Catcher's" 16-year-old hero, Holden Caulfield, for his ability to see through the machinations of the adult world. "Hey, Sally," he says to a girl he's taken on a date. " . . . Did you ever get fed up? I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something? I mean do you like school, and all that stuff? . . . Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it. . . . But it isn't just that. It's everything.

"What Salinger is evoking here is the contradiction of his own heart: the need to express himself, even though he knows that it won't get him anywhere. Ultimately, perhaps, this may be why he took his leave from the world nearly half a century before he actually left it, why he stopped publishing. It makes for a complicated legacy, since how are we to know what to think of him, when so much remains beyond our reach? And yet, it doesn't matter, not really, for in his books, we find the essence of a fully articulated worldview, in which silence and expression go hand in hand.

Ulin is book editor of The Times.
david.ulin@latimes.com

Bigger than Batman: Christopher Nolan says 'Inception' is 'the biggest challenge I've taken on' (Los Angeles Times)

So what exactly is “Inception”? That’s a popular question after a visually dazzling but enigmatic trailer was released for a film that didn’t exactly clear things up with its title.

Is it an international thriller? A story of madness and lost love? Or Hollywood’s very first metaphysical heist movie? The answer is “all of the above,” according to writer-director Christopher Nolan, whose follow-up to “The Dark Knight” seems to have Ian Fleming, the Wachowski Brothers and Sigmund Freud as its spiritual advisors.

“I think we’ve put a lot of different things into the pot with this one,” Nolan said this week during a break from the editing bay.

“I grew up watching James Bond films and loving those and watching spy movies with their globetrotting sensibility.... We get to do that here, not just geographically but also in time and dimensions of reality as well. We get to make a movie that’s expansive, I suppose you’d say, in four dimensions.”

The Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. release is shaping up as one of the most intriguing releases of 2010. Leonardo DiCaprio leads a cast that includes Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Ken Watanabe.

The film was produced by Emma Thomas, who is Nolan's wife as well as his career partner. She said that "Inception" is a story that requires a huge canvas. The pair didn't set out looking for a way to top their Batman epic in scope, that's just where Nolan's "Inception" script took them.

“It’s something that we had been talking about on and off for seven or eight years," Thomas said. "Coming off of the ‘The Dark Knight,’ the only thing we really knew is that we wanted to do something more personal. It seemed like the right time to do this. The fact that it’s really just an enormous movie -- that wasn’t ever really a factor in the decision. This story lends itself to a movie of this size."

A key part of the premise is corporate espionage by way of dream invasion, but motives and even reality are slippery in a film that toys with perception as its travels through time and space. The crew covered a lot of territory too, filming in six countries.

“This is the biggest challenge I’ve taken on to this point,” said Nolan, who may return to Gotham City for his next feature. “We’re trying to tell a story on a massive scale, a true blockbuster scale – the biggest I’ve ever been involved with. We tried to make a very large-scale film with ‘The Dark Knight’ and with this one we wanted to push that even further.”

-- Geoff Boucher

Eric Rohmer, An Appreciation (Los Angeles Times)

By Glenn Kenny
January 12, 2010

Despite being almost universally acknowledged as a master of film, the French director Eric Rohmer, who came to prominence as a member of the so-called New Wave of the late '50s and early '60s (although he was about 10 years older than many of its most famous members, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut among them) arguably stands as one of the most misunderstood of great directors.

Rohmer, who died Monday in Paris at age 89, came to international prominence with the films he made under the rubric "Six Moral Tales" between 1962 and 1972. Comprising two shorts and four features, these quiet but sometimes devastatingly ironic stories of intelligent upper-middle-class types wrestling with love and morality, particularly the likes of 1969's "My Night At Maud's" and 1972's "Love in the Afternoon," found avid followings in a then-burgeoning art-house market.

But the pictures, often praised for being driven by intelligent, erudite and cutting dialogue ("In the Company of Men" director Neil LaBute has acknowledged Rohmer's influence), also had their detractors. One of the most famous was a fictional character: detective Harry Moseby in the 1975 Arthur Penn thriller "Night Moves," played by Gene Hackman in one of his best roles. Invited to see "Maud," Moseby demurs, saying, "I saw an Eric Rohmer movie once. It was like watching paint dry."

Moseby could have watched more carefully. Anybody cognizant of this unfair rap might be surprised to learn that during his tenure as a critic and editor at the famed film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, Rohmer enthusiastically championed such ostensibly "visual" filmmakers as Otto Preminger (master of the long-take traveling shot), the cartoon-influenced Frank Tashlin, and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock.

The influence of such filmmakers is actually felt in all of Rohmer's pictures but subtly. The will-he-or-won't-he-commit-infidelity plot of "Love in the Afternoon" (first released in the U.S. as "Chloe in the Afternoon") is like Billy Wilder's "The Seven Year Itch" played for potential tragedy rather than broad comedy and has moments of suspense that are clearly Hitchcock-inflected. (The picture also has the distinction of having been remade by Chris Rock, under the title "I Think I Love My Wife.") Responding in an open letter to a critic who slagged his tales as being overly literary, Rohmer wrote, "What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either. . . . After all, I do not say, I show."

In that same piece, Rohmer also wrote, "My characters' discourse is not necessarily my film's discourse." Rohmer's people were, for the most part, in their 20s and early 30s (he once said that he found the problems of young people more interesting than those of the middle-aged). It almost follows, then, that his characters, while in the main almost hyper-articulate, are also incredibly self-deluding. The British critic Gilbert Adair exaggerates only a bit when, considering for the most part Rohmer's work in the '80s, he avers that "Rohmer's characters are . . . among the most foolish, ineffectual and pathetic milquetoasts ever to have graced a cinema screen" and that the "celebrated talk" of his films is "sheer, unadulterated twaddle."

Take, for instance, the character of Marion in Rohmer's "Pauline at the Beach" (1983), one of his most entertaining pictures. Played by the gorgeous then-ingénue Arielle Dombasle, she is quite the object of desire, but when she insists in the middle of a seemingly endless speech to no one in particular that men have tried to commit suicide over her, the viewer suspects that it's not so much her beauty as it is her blathering that could motivate just about anyone in earshot, male or female, to open a vein. That Marion, who boasts to the film's 13-year-old title character of her expertise on all things amorous, soon thereafter falls into the arms of a lunkish gigolo, makes her blithe idiocy as subtly poignant as it is overtly laughable.

The entirety of Rohmer's work is strewn with such gorgeously felicitous touches. And despite his bedrock consistency, this is a director who never stood still. For his 2001 historical film, "The Lady and the Duke," a tragedy of love and honor set in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Rohmer shot in digital video and used meticulously designed CGI backdrops to simulate period detail and give his film a painterly look. He was at the time nearly 80 and completely embracing of a new technology.

For his final film, 2007's "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon," a gender-bending comedy set in a fairy- and druid-populated fifth century (or so) he adopted a style so completely unadorned that some critics scornfully described it as amateurish. Hardly feeling the need to explain himself, he announced that it was likely his final film, and it turned out to be. Misunderstood to the very end: As it happens, "Astrea and Celadon" is one of his most droll, graceful and wise films.

calendar@latimes.com

"The White Ribbon", de Michael Haneke (críticas)

By A.O. Scott/The New York Times

The last shot of Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” is haunting not because it sums up the unnerving, at times horrifying series of events that have filled up the previous 2 hours 25 minutes, but rather because it seems to unfold as if none of them have taken place. Taken alone, the film’s final image might conjure a mood of gentle, pastoral nostalgia. Here, in glowing, understated black and white, we glimpse part of a world that used to be. The camera sits inside an austerely beautiful village church that is illuminated by winter morning sunlight, its pews filling with congregants whose dark clothes and weathered faces bespeak hardy old virtues of work, faith and family.

By now we know otherwise. The only comfort offered by “The White Ribbon,” a chronicle of small-town German life on the eve of World War I, is that the social order it depicts has vanished from the earth. Good riddance to the good old days! But at the same time, Mr. Haneke may intend that sense of distance, of pastness, to be illusory, so that the strangeness of these people and their doings is shadowed by an uncomfortable sense of recognition. We fool ourselves if we think bygones are bygones. We’re on a guilt trip down memory lane. And though the road twists and turns and reveals some pretty scenery, in the end we arrive in a familiar place, to be lectured and scolded by a filmmaker whose rich craft disguises the poverty of his ideas.

Our guide is the village schoolteacher, played on screen in his relative youth (by Christian Friedel) as an earnest, chubby-faced bumbler and in voice-over narration (by Ernst Jacobi) as a ruminative old man. This teacher, who like most of the adult characters in the film is not referred to by name, is by far the most benign — if also the most ineffectual — authority figure in a place that turns out to be a veritable theme park of patriarchal abuses.

The wholesome facade of this hamlet, with its tidy brick houses and wind-swept wheat fields, where residents tip their hats and address one another with unfailing formality, masks a carnival of cruelty. Children are beaten and molested. Women are silenced and humiliated. Workplace accidents claim the lives of innocent farmwives. Horses and house pets are maimed, cabbages are wantonly decapitated and the only force more fearsome than the brutality of fathers is the innocence of children.

Mr. Haneke, born in 1942 and perhaps the most lauded living European filmmaker with a surname other than Dardenne, traffics in shock and terror, but in a cerebral, systematic way. His films rarely foreshadow their jolts or speed up their plots to generate suspense, but rather proceed, with almost meditative calm, to weave a cocoon of dread around intimations of mystery and implications of violence.

“The White Ribbon,” which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and the top European Film Award this year, is a rare foray out of the clamor and anomie of modern urban Europe that is Mr. Haneke’s favored setting. The film also marks his return to his native German after a decade of mainly French-language films. In it, he uses the sharp elegance of Christian Berger’s monochrome cinematography (achieved by shooting in color, then draining it away), the grammatical precision of old-fashioned speech and the pageantry of period drama to lull and also to inflame the audience’s expectations. The effect is something like a ghost story, the horror of which is at once elusive and pervasive. What is happening here? Why is it happening?

The answer to the first question: a lot of weird stuff. The town doctor (Rainer Bock) is injured when his horse trips over a wire strung across his gate, apparently for just that sinister purpose. That apparently inexplicable crime is followed by others, including the abduction and beating of one small child and the near blinding of another. There are whispers and denunciations, and visits from the police, but no solutions are forthcoming.

Instead, as suspicions multiply, we are led on a tour of several households, which taken together offer a sociological composite portrait of guilt and repression. The schoolteacher, whose courtship of a milky-fresh young woman named Eva (Leonie Benesch) provides hints of tender comedy, traffics mainly in rumors and surmises while the camera assumes a position of omniscience. (Unless, that is, it is the vehicle for the narrator’s retroactive speculation or self-protecting deceit, which is not unthinkable.)

In due course we enter the homes of the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), the town’s principal employer and landowner; the doctor, a widower with two children and an interesting relationship with the midwife (Susanne Lothar); the steward (Josef Bierbichler); a tenant farmer (Branko Samarovski); and, perhaps most important, the pastor (Burghart Klaussner).

Each of these men, with the partial exception of the poor farmer, represents a different face of power. And each one, accordingly, manifests his own special brand of awfulness, mistreating those close to him with methods appropriate to his station. The Baron is cold and sarcastic with his wife (Ursina Lardi). The steward beats his children in a state of volcanic rage, while the pastor does the same in a mood of pious sorrow.

Monstrous as these daddies are, their children may be worse. A gaggle of towheaded darlings walks through the film, their mild smiles so sinister that they might have wandered in from the 1960 British science-fiction horror chestnut “Village of the Damned.” Anyone who has seen Mr. Haneke’s “Cache” or his twin versions of “Funny Games” will be aware that he does not believe in the blamelessness of youth. Quite the contrary: children, in his world, carry the sins of their parents in concentrated, highly toxic form, and are also capable of a pure, motiveless, experimental evil.

What will become of these particular blond children, who are either demons or victims, driven to mischief by severe paternal discipline or so intrinsically bad that no punishment could suffice? Do the math: it’s 1914. In 20 or 30 years, what do you suppose these children will be up to? Our narrator, well into old age, tells us that he is revisiting the strange events in the village to “clarify things that happened in our country” afterward.

But “The White Ribbon” does the opposite, mystifying the historical phenomenon it purports to investigate. Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse. Or maybe by the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings. “The White Ribbon” is a whodunit that offers a philosophically and aesthetically unsatisfying answer: everyone. Which is also to say: no one.

The teacher may be Mr. Haneke’s obvious surrogate: an intellectual whose pursuit of the truth is enabled by his inability to change anything. But really the filmmaker is closer to the pastor, his chosen emblem of blindness and hypocrisy. After caning his children for a minor infraction, the pastor makes his oldest son (Leonard Proxauf) and daughter (Maria-Victoria Dragus) wear white ribbons, which serve both as emblems of shame and reminders of the purity of soul they are in danger of sacrificing. “The White Ribbon” is offered to its grateful, masochistic audience in a similarly punitive and yet oddly forgiving spirit, as a reminder of just how awful we are and how much worse we used to be.

“The White Ribbon” is rated R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, violence, repression.

The White Ribbon

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke; director of photography, Christian Berger; edited by Monika Willi; produced by Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Menegoz and Andrea Occhipinti; released by Sony Pictures Classics. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.

WITH: Ulrich Tukur (the Baron), Susanne Lothar (the Midwife), Christian Friedel (the Schoolteacher), Burghart Klaussner (the Pastor), Leonie Benesch (Eva), Josef Bierbichler (the Steward), Rainer Bock (the Doctor), Ernst Jacobi (the Narrator), Ursina Lardi (Marie-Louise, the Baroness), Fion Mutert (Sigmund), Branko Samarovski (the Farmer), Leonard Proxauf (Martin),Maria- Victoria Dragus (Klara) and Michael Kranz (the Tutor).

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By Betsy Sharkey/Los Angeles Times

We don't go to Michael Haneke films for comfort, but to gaze through a glass darkly. That vision -- tense, provocative and unnerving -- is on full display in "The White Ribbon," which could be considered a culmination of this difficult director's brilliant career.

Set in an ordinary German village on the eve of World War I, the film looks at the children who would survive that war and grow into the generation that would bend to Hitler's sway. Shot in black and white, which serves as both a statement and a style, Germany's foreign language Oscar entry has rightfully been collecting critical acclaim since it took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Here the dramatic interplay of innocence, evil and human behavior so often on Haneke's radar has been joined by themes of guilt and responsibility. He's woven all this into a mysterious, often eerie parable that attempts to explain the seeds of Nazism. That the setting is a seemingly idyllic farming community is not accidental.

But accidents are very much at the heart of "The White Ribbon." As the narrator of this tale explains as the film begins, there were a series of strange events years ago in his village that "could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country."

Ernst Jacobi, our narrator here, affects a grandfatherly, almost apologetic tone that could lead you to believe that he will fill in all the missing pieces for us. Don't be fooled. This is a film that requires concentration -- a don't blink, don't breathe approach will serve the viewer well.

The world we're dropped into by cinematographer Christian Berger, whose work with Haneke includes two of the director's better known films, "Caché" and "The Piano Teacher," is both beautiful and harsh. The farmland with its rolling fields of wheat stands in lush contrast to the families in the region, hard folk tied to a rigid Protestant vision of morality where pleasures are few, forgiveness is slow in coming and retribution rules the day.

"The White Ribbon" is told from the point of view of the village schoolteacher, with Christian Friedel playing him as a young man on-screen and Jacobi's voice his latter-day, much wiser and reflective self. The story is framed by the family life of all those who make up the region, a perfect socio-economic mix of the Baron, the Pastor, the Steward, the Doctor, the Farmer and the Schoolteacher.

It all begins when the village doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown after his horse runs into a trip wire set on the road to his home. After school that day, the village children gather at the doctor's house. When someone spots them outside, innocent faces smile and explain that they're just there to see after their classmate Anna (Roxane Duran), the doctor's teenage daughter.

But their politeness is eerie; the way they move through the village in groups suddenly seems sinister. Haneke is just starting to sow the seeds of mistrust, and like any good provocateur, he soon has us suspecting everyone in town of secret schemes and dark deeds.

Next, the farmer's wife is killed, the Baron's son is beaten, an infant catches a worrisome fever, and on it goes. There are no suspects and there are few clues, though the governing principle seems to be punishment.

While the accidents drive the action, they are also there to give context to the most significant question posed by "The White Ribbon": What is it about someone's childhood that creates the adults they become? Haneke, who wrote the screenplay with veteran writer Jean-Claude Carrière ("Cyrano de Bergerac," "Valmont") consulting, puts the responsibility on both parents and society as a whole, rather than any genetic predisposition, which leads you back to the question of who is minding the children.

In "White Ribbon," Haneke is, and it is to the children he always returns -- building scenes in such a way that you wonder are they responsible? Is it all or just a few? Planned or happenstance? And hovering over it all -- if it is the children, then why?

Before we can condemn them, the director begins opening the doors to their homes and the texture of their lives: the indifference in one household, the denial in another; for others, it's neglect, or brutality. Harshness and humiliation seem the guiding principals of parenting here.

The schoolteacher, an excellent Friedel, represents kindness in this unkind land, thinking the best of everyone until he no longer can. His courtship of another gentle soul, Eva (Leonie Benesch), a nanny in the Baron's employ, also provides needed relief from the film's somewhat unrelenting grimness. Meanwhile, the overbearing Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) represents the church's role in creating an environment of fear and retribution.

The pastor's ritualistic and sadistic punishment of his teenagers -- Klara and Martin, very powerfully played by Maria-Victoria Dragus and Leonard Proxauf -- gives the film its name: the white ribbon they must wear to remind them that purity is their goal and that thus far they've failed. Of course, there are beatings, and self-righteous tirades too. Their crime? They were late for dinner.

That the story plays out in black and white makes things easier in a way -- the images have the beauty of old photos. That look, coupled with the faces (the director reportedly saw more than 7,000 children to try to capture the era), gives the film the feel of an artifact, a historical document.

History hovers over "White Ribbon" with the force of impending doom. These children will inherit this world of sin and sorrow, and the consequences will be catastrophic. Whatever responsibility we might feel for future generations after seeing a cautionary tale like this one, well that's just one of the questions Haneke leaves us to figure out.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

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By J. Hoberman/Village Voice

The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke's first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called "the German problem" while dodging the filmmaker's own likeability issues, it's his best ever.

A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt Protestant, still-feudal village somewhere in the uptight depths of Northern Germany, The White Ribbon—which won a deserved Palme d'Or at last May's Cannes-fest of Cruelty—is as cold and creepy and secretly cheesy as any of Haneke's earlier films, if not quite as lofty. Instead of sermonizing, Haneke sets himself to honest craftsmanship. Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator hinting at a weighty historical thesis: It's Village of the Damned as re-imagined by Thomas Mann after studying August Sander's photographs of German types while perusing Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism.

The White Ribbon's original title identifies the movie as "A German Children's Story" and, recounted by the village schoolteacher 40 or 50 years later, this dark fable has a mock legendary aspect. The tale may not reflect "the truth in every detail," the elderly teacher-narrator announces. Much is known only by hearsay and "a lot of it remains obscure to me even today." Many questions are unanswerable, he admits, and yet "the strange events that occurred in our village . . . may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country." No need to speculate on what those goings-on might be.

The first strange event occurs seconds into the action, when the irascible village doctor is thrown by his horse, having tripped on a mysterious wire strung across his habitual path. Thereafter, this quiet town, comfortably nestled into its peaceful landscape yet seething with hidden resentments, is subjected to an escalating series of inexplicable accidents and unsolved incidents of terror, most of which are discussed after the fact, but never shown. Some are precipitated by the angry son of a tenant farmer after his mother is fatally injured in a barn collapse while working for the local baron; other events, foretold by dreams and portents, appear connected to a pack of angelic-looking little towheads, led by the pastor's eldest daughter and seemingly possessed of a group mind. In the meantime, the narrator—or, rather, his youthful avatar—shyly woos the equally bashful nanny who watches over the baron's children.

This circumspect courtship may be the one purely innocent activity in a movie unfolding beneath a rubric of innocent purity. Nothing is ever truly revealed, least of all who commissioned the most heinous crimes. With one exception, the only wrongs shown onscreen are committed against the village children—who are regularly subjected to corporal punishment, among other abuses. (There is to be no laffing at these funny games!) In a scene that could have been lifted straight from Reich's Mass Psychology, the implacable pastor, a poster boy for vindictive divinity, ties his eldest son's hands to prevent even the possibility of nocturnal masturbation; the widowed doctor meanwhile engages in unmentionable practices with his 14-year-old daughter. (Notable for its obdurate, unsmiling, and down-right mean-spirited fathers, the town is populated by case studies from The Authoritarian Personality; it might be re-christened Patriarchalischenplatz or just plain Schweinhundtstadt.)

In a sense, Haneke is strictly bound by his own white ribbon. Although based on an original screenplay, the movie strongly resembles his adaptations of Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth. The odd quality of seeming to faithfully follow an acknowledged literary classic is heightened by Haneke's deliberate, almost parodic, classical filmmaking. The camera is quiet; the compositions are studied and seldom in close-up. The black-and-white images are etched on the screen with precise hyperreal clarity. (Christian Berger's impeccable cinematography was cited as the year's best by the New York Film Critics Circle.) Only rarely is the ominous stillness disturbed, as with the sudden eruption of deftly choreographed collective activity that is the town's harvest festival and, not coincidentally, leads to the single instance of revolt against Herr Baron.

History has the same brusque impact. Just as the baroness prepares to leave her unpleasant husband, citing not only his own insensitivity but the intolerable "malice, envy, apathy, [and] brutality" of his town, the steward rushes in with news that Archduke Ferdinand of Austria has been assassinated in Sarajevo. End of story, almost. All police investigations are halted; everything is subsumed by the expectation of war, if not the 30-year nightmare about to convulse Europe. The final shot finds the townspeople gathered in church, perhaps for the last time. In any case, the narrator maintains that he never saw any of them again.

No one's idea of a cinematic cuddle-bunny, Haneke is as much strategist as filmmaker and more pedagogue than visionary. The White Ribbon is certainly the most beautiful movie he has made—a sort of triumphantly willed Meisterwerk. His use of narrative uncertainty, resembling those in the unsolved mystery at the heart of Caché, may be standard-issue, but there's no denying The White Ribbon's seriousness and unity. The severe, withholding culture that Haneke critiques is precisely mirrored by his methods. The White Ribbon keeps the viewer in a state of perpetual uncertainty, but it's more than clear how things will end.

J. Hoberman will be on leave for the next two months