It’s Actual Life. No, It’s Drama. No, It’s Both (The New York Times)

By DENNIS LIM

JEAN-LUC GODARD once observed that every fictional film is a documentary of its actors. Jacques Rivette finessed the aphorism, proposing that every film is a documentary of its own making, not only a record for posterity of the people in it but also a window into the culture that produced it.

In a very literal sense, all films have documentary aspects: once the camera is turned on, whatever is captured, no matter how staged, contains a trace of reality, an element of chance. The inverse is true as well: no documentary, whatever its claims to objective reportage, is ever devoid of manipulation, since a controlling hand is evident in even the most routine matters of camera placement and shot selection.

While these are truisms, obvious enough to anyone who has given these issues more than passing consideration, they have long been easy to forget in a film culture that conditions us to think of fiction and documentary as distinct forms. One of the most striking developments in recent world cinema is the emergence of films that resist precisely those categories, that could be said to blur or thwart or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead a productive liminal zone in between.

One such film, “Our Beloved Month of August,” by the director Miguel Gomes, is at once a musical, a travelogue, a quasi-incestuous family melodrama, an ethnographic portrait of Portuguese folk traditions and an account of its own chaotic production. As he tells it, Mr. Gomes ventured into rural central Portugal a few years ago to make a fictional film against the backdrop of the region’s summer music festivals.

When the shoot ran into trouble, he and his crew began to document the people and places around them, as well as their own difficulties. (Mr. Gomes appears in the film, and his brick of a screenplay is deployed as a sight gag.) The finished film, which runs from Sept. 3 through 11 at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan as part of a Gomes retrospective, is not just unclassifiable, but also unstable from moment to moment: a documentary about the creation of a fiction, which overtakes the proceedings at points only to recede again.

Mr. Gomes breaks down categories in the service of an expansive, kaleidoscopic experience. But hybrid works can also occupy the minimalist end of the spectrum — as with “The Anchorage,” a film by C. W. Winter and Anders Edstrom, which opens Sept. 17, also at Anthology.

Pairing textured cinematography with intricate sound design, it observes a few days in the life of a middle-aged woman on a remote island in the Stockholm archipelago. She walks in the woods and swims in the sea; her daughter visits; a hunter passes by; the weather changes. The woman is played by Ulla Edstrom, Mr. Edstrom’s mother and a part-time resident of that Baltic island. Alert to everyday moments and the subtleties of the natural world, “The Anchorage” is an immersive depiction of a solitary, self-sufficient life, one that the actor to an extent shares with her character.

Cinephiles are by now accustomed to this kind of categorical confusion. The well-regarded Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, the subject of a recent DVD boxed set by the Criterion Collection, has spent years working in the Lisbon slum of Fontainhas, collaborating with its residents on films that are contemplative, highly stylized reflections of their actual lives.

Another festival regular, Ulrich Seidl of Austria, makes even more provocative use of hybrid forms. His unflinching documentaries, like “Animal Love,” about obsessive pet owners, incorporate staged scenes; his equally discomfiting fictional films use both nonprofessional actors and pungently real locations, which in his latest film, “Import/Export,” include an Internet-pornography sweatshop and a geriatric ward.

The tendency to mingle fiction and nonfiction can also be seen among emerging filmmakers. Pedro González-Rubio’s “Alamar,” a modest art-house hit this summer, is a sensuous record of an idyllic father-son fishing trip in the Mexican Caribbean: the stars are a real-life father and son, and the trip was conceived for the purpose of the film. Oscar Ruiz Navia’s “Crab Trap” is an atmospheric story of a drifter in a coastal Colombian village, invested less in narrative progression than in exploring a physical and psychological landscape. (It will be shown at the Latinbeat series at the Walter Reade Theater next month.)

In “You Are All Captains,” a debut feature shown at Cannes this year, the French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe uses his own experience teaching filmmaking to children in Tangiers, Morocco, to spark a playful rumination on the creative process and his outsider status.

These films are too disparate to amount to a movement, and it’s worth nothing that the underlying impulse is hardly new. The attraction to the real is hard-wired into a medium that began when the Lumière brothers took their camera out into the thick of daily life to make their “actuality films,” of a train entering a station or of workers leaving a factory.

In the 1940s, D. W. Griffith, lamenting the airlessness of studio-bound films, declared, “What’s missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” It was an urge to confront reality that inspired Italy’s postwar neo-realists and the cinéma-vérité pioneers of the 1960s.

What’s striking about the present moment is just how widespread the taste for reality is among the major figures in world cinema, from the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, who is known for a kind of hall-of-mirrors neo-realism, to the recent Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul of Thailand, whose films combine surrealism and documentary realism.

Jia Zhangke, the leading Chinese filmmaker of his generation, has worked in fiction and nonfiction, sometimes combining the two and invariably using the metaphorically charged spaces of the new China as ready-made film sets.

For the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, whose four features have all screened at Cannes, fictional frameworks are mere pretexts to shoot with specific people in specific places: the pampas, the jungles, the frozen wilds of Tierra del Fuego. His first film, “La Libertad” (2000), is based on months of observing a lone woodcutter’s daily routine.

The critic Robert Koehler, writing in Cinema Scope magazine, used the phrase “the cinema of in-betweenness” to describe films like “The Anchorage.” Many of these new hybrid films are in line with the artistic sensibility that the writer David Shields outlined in his recent polemic, “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,” which deals mainly with literature but also invokes Werner Herzog, the poet laureate of the subjective documentary, and Sacha Baron Cohen, whose spasms of prankster performance art double as documentaries of bigotry.

The notion of a doc-fiction hybrid is so vast that it can encompass any number of permutations. But the most rewarding hybrid films are validations of the creative uncertainty principle. They bespeak if not a love of the world then at least a curiosity about it. They understand that the introduction of fact does not necessarily make fiction more real but possibly more strange. Inventing impure forms to match impure content, they can open up subtly new ways of seeing and thinking about movies. Most of all, they are expressions of what Mr. Alonso surely recognized when he titled his groundbreaking film “La Libertad”: freedom.

Dennis Hopper, 74, Hollywood Rebel, Dies (The New York Times)

By EDWARD WYATT

Dennis Hopper, who was part of a new generation of Hollywood rebels in portrayals of drug-addled misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” and then went on to great success as a prolific character actor, died on Saturday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 74.

The cause was complications from metastasized prostate cancer, according to a statement issued by Alex Hitz, a family friend.

Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include no fewer than six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.

Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use.

During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said had been first diagnosed a decade ago.

Mr. Hopper was hospitalized in Los Angeles in January, at which time he also filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, with whom he had a young daughter. Mr. Hopper issued a news release citing “irreconcilable differences” for the filing.

“I wish Victoria the best but only want to spend these difficult days surrounded by my children and close friends,” he said in the release.

Mr. Hopper first won praise in Hollywood as a teenager in 1955 for his portrayal of an epileptic on the NBC series “Medic” and for a small part in the film “Rebel Without a Cause,” which starred James Dean, who was a friend of his.

Mr. Hopper confirmed his status as a rising star as the son of a wealthy rancher and his wife, played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, in “Giant” (1956), the epic western with Dean.

In those years, he was linked romantically with Natalie Wood and Joanne Woodward.

Yet that success brought with it a growing hubris, and in 1958 Mr. Hopper found himself in a battle of wills with the director Henry Hathaway on the set of “From Hell to Texas.”

The story has several versions; the most common is that his refusal to play a scene in the manner that the director requested resulted in Mr. Hopper’s stubbornly performing more than 80 takes before he finally followed orders.

Upon wrapping the scene, Mr. Hopper later recalled, Mr. Hathaway told him that his career in Hollywood was finished.

He soon left for New York, where he studied with Lee Strasberg for several years, performed onstage and acted in more than 100 episodes of television shows.

It was not until after his marriage in 1961 to Brooke Hayward — who, as the daughter of Leland Hayward, a producer and agent, and Margaret Sullavan, the actress, was part of Hollywood royalty — that Mr. Hopper was regularly offered film roles again.

He wrangled small parts in big studio films like “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965) — directed by his former nemesis Henry Hathaway — as well as “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Hang ’Em High” (1968).

And he grew close to his wife’s childhood friend Peter Fonda, who, with Mr. Hopper and a few others, began mulling over a film whose story line followed traditional western themes but substituted motorcycles for horses.

That film, “Easy Rider,” which Mr. Hopper wrote with Mr. Fonda and Terry Southern and directed, followed a pair of truth-seeking bikers (Mr. Fonda and Mr. Hopper) on a cross-country journey to New Orleans.

It won the prize for best first film at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival (though it faced only one competitor, as the critic Vincent Canby pointed out in a tepid 1969 review in The New York Times).

Mr. Hopper also shared an Oscar nomination for writing the film, while a nomination for best supporting actor went to a little-known Jack Nicholson.

“Easy Rider” introduced much of its audience, if not Mr. Hopper, to cocaine, and the film’s success accelerated a period of intense drug and alcohol use that Mr. Hopper later said nearly killed him and turned him into a professional pariah.

Given nearly $1 million by Universal for a follow-up project, he retreated with a cadre of hippies to Peru to shoot “The Last Movie,” a hallucinogenic film about the making of a movie. It won a top prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but it failed with critics and at the box office.

Mr. Hopper edited the film while living at Los Gallos, a 22-room adobe house in Taos, N.M., that he rechristened the Mud Palace and envisioned as a counterculture Hollywood.

It was there that his drug-induced paranoia took full flower, including a period in which he posted armed guards on the roof.

“I was terribly naïve in those days,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be. And there was a time when I had a lot of energy to display how crazy that was.”

Mr. Hopper was seen mostly in small film parts until he returned to prominence with his performance in “Apocalypse Now” (1979).

In a 1993 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Hopper credited Marlon Brando, a star of the film, with the idea of having him portray a freewheeling photojournalist, rather than the smaller role of a C.I.A. officer, in which he was originally cast.

But Mr. Hopper’s after-hours style continued to affect his work; in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” a documentary about the making of that film, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is seen lamenting that Mr. Hopper cannot seem to learn his lines.

After becoming sober in the 1980s, Mr. Hopper began taking on roles in several films a year, becoming one of the most recognizable character actors of the day.

He earned a second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as the alcoholic father of a troubled high school basketball star in “Hoosiers” (1986), and he honed his portrayal of unhinged villains in films like “Blue Velvet” (also in 1986), “Speed” (1994) and “Waterworld” (1995), as well as in the first season of the television series “24” (2002).

Mr. Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in a 1961 fire that burned scores of homes, including his, in the Los Angeles enclave Bel Air.

Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography.

His intimate and unguarded images of celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Andy Warhol and Jane Fonda were the subject of gallery shows and were collected in a book, “1712 North Crescent Heights.” The book, whose title was his address in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, was edited by Marin Hopper, his daughter by Ms. Hayward.

He also built an extensive collection of works by artists he knew, including Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Julian Schnabel.

Born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kan., and raised on a nearby farm, Dennis Lee Hopper moved with his family to San Diego in the late 1940s.

He studied at the Old Globe Theater there while in high school, then signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to Los Angeles.

Mr. Hopper’s five marriages included one of eight days in 1970 to the singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. He is survived by four children, all of the Los Angeles area: Marin Hopper; Ruthanna Hopper, his daughter by Daria Halprin, his third wife; a son, Henry Lee Hopper, whose mother is Katherine LaNasa; and Galen, his daughter by Ms. Duffy.

On March 26, surrounded by friends like Mr. Nicholson and David Lynch, the director of “Blue Velvet,” Mr. Hopper received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Looking frail, he began his brief acceptance speech by sardonically thanking the paparazzi for supposedly distracting him and causing him to lose his balance and fall the day before. He continued, “Everyone here today that I’ve invited — and obviously some that I haven’t invited — have enriched my life tremendously.”

‘Tournée’: Burlesque on Tour and Broken Dreams (The New York Times)

By JOAN DUPONT

CANNES — Their names are Mimi Le Meaux, Dirty Martini, Roky Roulette and Kitten on the Keys, and they are the stars of “Tournée” (On Tour), Mathieu Amalric’s comedy about a troupe of burlesque strippers lost in the French provinces.

Mr. Amalric, 44, was discovered by Arnaud Desplechin, who cast him in “La sentinelle” (1992) two decades ago; he belongs to a vast cinema family, and never stops acting. He won a César for his title role in “Le scaphandre et le papillon” (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), adapted from Jean-Dominique Bauby’s autobiography, which Mr. Bauby wrote after emerging from a catastrophic stroke a victim of “locked-in” syndrome, unable to move or speak. He was the villain opposite Daniel Craig in “Quantum of Solace.”

A slight, rumpled and intense man, he talks in spurts, as if puffing on the ghost of a cigarette. In this film, which is in competition this year at the Cannes Film Festival, he plays Joachim Zand, a producer who has promised Paris to his troupe. “Tournée,” with dialogue in English and French, travels from Le Havre to Nantes and La Rochelle, from gaudy hotel lobbies with canned music to desolate sand dunes, where the producer and his motley crew get bogged down.

“The movie is inspired by Colette’s memoir, ‘L’Envers du music-hall,’ about her adventures on tour,” Mr. Amalric said. “Colette was no feminist and we didn’t want to do a period piece, but I think that she went on stage looking for a kind of freedom.”

“Tournée” is the kind of comedy that makes you wince, as it reveals the women’s backstage lives, their humiliations and hidden stories. And in this rocky road movie, Mr. Amalric has created a nightmare part for himself as Joachim. A big-time TV producer, he has left his life in Paris and when he returns to seek old allies who promised a theater for his company to perform, he is greeted with contempt. You never discover why or what happened.

“As a big shot producer, he must have trod on a lot of feet and feelings,” the director said.
Mr. Amalric started in movies at 17, working for the producer Paulo Branco.

“My cinema Papa. I knew the great producers of the day — Paul Rassam, Claude Berri, and put pieces of them in Joachim and his friends. Only when I edited the film, did I see the violence in Joachim, how desperate he is.” He shudders.

Joachim is kicked off the stage and out of the theater by his best friend, played by François Bégaudeau, and by another old ally, played by the iconic producer Pierre Grimblat. “I’ve known Pierre forever, we’re even related, but we never figured out how,” he said.

Mr. Amalric, whose first feature, “Mange ta soupe” (1997), about a stifling family, unabashedly his own, had a rich childhood. His parents were journalists and he grew up in a house of books. His father, Jacques Amalric, Le Monde’s correspondent in Washington and then Moscow, took the family to America when Mathieu was five. His mother, Nicole Zand, is a literary critic.

“I named my character Joachim Zand in tribute to her family, wiped out in the Holocaust,” he said.

He went to nursery school in Washington, spoke English, and fell in love with the United States. “I go to New York whenever I can. I adored Moscow too.”

The Georgian director Otar Iosseliani, a friend of his parents, cast him in “Les favoris de la lune” (1984), his first part. “Otar gave me my love of filmmaking.”

Mr. Amalric lives on the run, film to film, in high gear. “It’s fabulous, this acting business.” He is in such demand that “Tournée” took years to make. “We started in 2002, but then I acted in some movies — ‘Kings and Queens,’ ‘Quantum of Solace,’ ‘Munich,’ ‘Conte de Noël.’ When we got the idea of the Frenchman who dreamed of America coming home to France, and the women on tour, dreaming of Paris, we knew we were on the right track. We avoided making the self-infatuated kind of French movie. When people say, ‘It doesn’t look like a French film,’ it’s supposed to be a big compliment.”

And yet, this is a film made on French soil and also about the world of French filmmakers. When Joachim is thrown out of the theater by his best friend, Mr. Amalric says he was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s correspondence with François Truffaut. “Their fights sounded as stupid as my characters do; things like, ‘Your last movie, La nuit américaine, stank — can you lend me some dough?’ But it was a strong relationship. And these things happen; one day, you don’t even know what you’ve said — and you’ve lost your best friend for life. Talented people are terrible, they eat up those around them because, well, they have a job to do.”

Mr. Amalric labored over his script. “When you write, you have to know what happened before, how Joachim separated from his wife, how he found the girls. You have to know everything; otherwise your actors can’t play. That’s what a script is about.I wrote it with Philippe Di Folco and Marcelo Novais Teles.”

When you comment that in the final scenes, shot on the dunes of Île d’Oléron and in an abandoned hotel, the film feels very Fellini-esque, he smiles.

“Fellini said that writing a script is detective work, and the day you shoot, you write it down for good,” he said.

“It was a very happy shoot; the girls partied all night. And they’re excited about the festival. It’s the opposite of what happens in our movie. In the story, they were promised Paris, and got nothing. But in this story, they were promised nothing, and they’re all at Cannes, on the red carpet with Pierre Grimblat, my mother and the crew — there are about 40 of us.”

Footage Restored to Fritz Lang's ‘Metropolis’ (The New York Times)

By LARRY ROHTER

For fans and scholars of the silent-film era, the search for a copy of the original version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has become a sort of holy grail. One of the most celebrated movies in cinema history, “Metropolis” had not been viewed at its full length — roughly two and a half hours — since shortly after its premiere in Berlin in 1927, when it was withdrawn from circulation and about an hour of its footage was amputated and presumed destroyed.

But on Friday Film Forum in Manhattan will begin showing what is being billed as “The Complete Metropolis,” with a DVD scheduled to follow later this year, after screenings in theaters around the country. So an 80-year quest that ranged over three continents seems finally to be over, thanks in large part to the curiosity and perseverance of one man, an Argentine film archivist named Fernando Peña.

The newly found footage, about 25 minutes in length and first exhibited in February at the Berlin Film Festival, is grainy and thus easily distinguished from an earlier, partly restored version, released in 2001, into which it has been inserted. But for the first time, Lang’s vision of a technologically advanced, socially stratified urban dystopia, which has influenced contemporary films like “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” seems complete and comprehensible.

“ ‘Metropolis’ is the most iconic silent picture of its day, mainly because of the visual ambition and virtuosity of the film itself,” said Noah Isenberg, editor of “Weimar Cinema,” a book about early German films, and a professor of film and literary studies at the New School. “But until now, we didn’t have the full story. These additions are really essential to understanding the full arc of the narrative.”

Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.

Mr. Peña discovered a full-length copy of “Metropolis” in 2008 in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. He had first heard stories 20 years earlier that a two-and-a-half-hour print had somehow found its way to Argentina and was wandering from one government institution to another, but his efforts to gain access to the film cans had always been frustrated by an indifferent bureaucracy.

Since the 1930s, the full-length version of “Metropolis” had been part of a large private archive assembled by a prominent Argentine film critic, Manuel Peña Rodríguez, who would lend titles to local film clubs. At his death around 1970, the collection was donated to the Argentine version of the National Endowment of the Arts, which handed it off to the Museo del Cine in 1992.

Over the years, Mr. Peña had shared his frustrations at not being given access to the film with Paula Félix-Didier, another film archivist and, during the 1990s, his wife. When she became head of the Museo del Cine in 2008, she said, “I called Fernando and said, ‘Just come, let’s do it.’ So he came, we looked for the cans, and there they were, cataloged and up on a shelf.”

That a copy of the original print of “Metropolis” even existed in Buenos Aires was the result of another piece of serendipity. An Argentine film distributor, Adolfo Wilson, happened to be in Berlin when the film had its premiere, liked what he saw so much that he immediately purchased rights, and returned to Argentina with the reels in his luggage.

“If he had gone two months later, he would have come back with a different version,” Mr. Peña said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires. Initially, the F. W. Murnau Foundation, a German film-preservation group named after the great silent-era director, which holds the rights to Lang’s silent films, did not respond when the Argentines notified it of the discovery. So Mr. Peña made a DVD and while on a business trip to Madrid took it to a prominent film scholar there, Luciano Berriatúa, who watched the film with him, enraptured, and immediately phoned the Germans to tell them, Mr. Peña recalled, “It’s the real thing.”

Restoring the Argentine reels required the latest in digital technology. In the early 1970s, the original 35-millimeter nitrate print was taken to a laboratory in Buenos Aires to be reduced to a 16-millimeter negative. But the lab technicians were careless, Ms. Félix-Didier said, “so they didn’t clean the film, and as a result there are all these artifacts, like dust and hair and scratches, on the 16-millimeter print” from which the Germans had to work. Because of damage to the reels, a couple of scenes have also had to be supplemented with intertitles.

Some of the newly inserted material consists of brief reaction shots, just a few seconds long, which establish or accentuate a character’s mood. But there are also several much longer scenes, including one lasting more than seven minutes, that restore subplots completely eliminated from the Paramount version.

For example, the “Thin Man,” who in the standard version appears to be a glorified butler to the city’s all-powerful founder, turns out instead to be a much more sinister figure, a combination of spy and detective. The founder’s personal assistant, who is fired in an early scene, also plays a greater role, helping the founder’s idealistic son navigate his way through the proletarian underworld.

The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”

Even as the full-length version of “Metropolis” plays in Germany and the United States, the Argentine archivists continue to examine the Museo del Cine collection in Buenos Aires. Just last month, Ms. Félix-Didier said, a print was found of a Soviet-era silent film long thought to have been lost: Yevgeny Chervyakov’s 1928 “My Son.”

In addition, the Museo del Cine has discovered what the Library of Congress says are the only surviving copies of three American films: a 1916 William S. Hart western called “The Aryan”; a 1928 drama called “The Crimson City,” with Myrna Loy and Anna May Wong; and a melodrama from 1921 called “The Gilded Lily” and starring Mae Murray.

“This is great news,” said Stephen Leggett, program coordinator of the library’s National Film Preservation Board.

Mr. Peña said: “I’m glad I persisted. We still haven’t been through everything, so new discoveries could keep appearing.”

The New York Times - Summer Movie Special

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A Critic’s Place, Thumb and All (The New York Times)

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By A. O. SCOTT

TWO weeks ago I went to Atlanta to give a talk at a conference devoted, in part, to “The Future of Criticism.” The gist of my remarks was that there is one. This was a contrarian, and perhaps also somewhat self-serving, position to take. After all, the countervailing evidence is hard to avoid.

Variety, the leaky flagship of entertainment reporting, had recently let go of its senior film and theater reviewers, Todd McCarthy and David Rooney, further thinning the ranks of critics employed by daily and weekly newspapers and magazines of all kinds over the past few years. (Even so, it is at least possible to picture us forming ranks — the surviving full-time classical music, dance and even literary critics might have trouble filling out a bridge game.)

The loss of print jobs is only one aspect of a dire overall picture. A senior figure in the critical firmament — Richard Schickel, long of Time magazine — told a panel last month that the whole enterprise of film criticism was pretty much worthless and always had been.

Not everyone would go that far, but the film world is rife with lamentation and accusation, echoing from the filmmaker Kevin Smith’s Twitter piece to the pages of New York’s combative free newspapers. Maybe criticism mattered once, but the conventional wisdom insists that it doesn’t any more. There used to be James Agee, and now there is Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten movies routinely make huge sums of money in spite of the demurral of critics. Where once reasoned debate and knowledgeable evaluation flourished, there are now social networking and marketing algorithms and a nattering gaggle of bloggers.

Or — to turn the picture on its head — a remnant of over-entitled old-media graybeards are fighting a rear-guard action against the democratic forces of the Internet, clinging to threadbare cultural authority in the face of their own obsolescence. Everyone’s a critic! Or maybe no one is.

“The news is really very sad,” sings Abbey Lincoln in a song aptly called “The World Is Falling Down.” “The time is late. The fruit is bad.” That’s the general mood, but down in Atlanta, I was having none of it. Hold the eulogies! Stop the funeral! All appearances to the contrary, I insisted, criticism is alive and well.

That was before my own brush with the grim reaper.

Shortly after my visit to Atlanta, I was in Chicago, sitting in a small office at the local ABC affiliate station. Next to me was Michael Phillips, film critic at The Chicago Tribune and, since last September, my co-host on “At the Movies,” the long-running movie-review program started by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on Chicago public television in the 1970s and syndicated by Disney for the past quarter-century. Across from us was the Disney executive who had hired us and who had flown in from Burbank to tell us that the show had been canceled. After the current season is over in mid-August, “At the Movies” will be a memory.

The news, which occasioned an outpouring of grief on the Internet — as well as some confusion among once-loyal viewers who had no idea that the program was still on the air —did not come as a great surprise. From almost the moment we signed on, Mr. Phillips and I were aware of the faint ticking of a doomsday clock. Along with the production staff in Chicago, we had spent most of the winter fretting about ratings and doing what we could to raise the show’s profile.

But in the current media ecosystem, a half-hour syndicated weekly broadcast looks like a freak of nature — or, as a Disney lawyer put it, indiscreetly but accurately, during my initial contract negotiations, a dinosaur. When the studio first picked up the show, syndication was a gold mine.

Nowadays specialized programming catering to the esoteric pursuits of enthusiasts survives on cable, or sometimes on public broadcasting, and the larger viewing public is fractured, fickle and increasingly likely to satisfy its tastes online. “At the Movies,” dwelling in odd time slots in some markets and moving around in others, had a hard time finding or holding onto a big enough audience. But even if it had done better in the ratings, a 30-minute chunk of non-prime-time air was never going to be a very lucrative proposition. Which was what the Disney corporate statement confirming the cancellation meant when it called the program “unsustainable,” a word more commonly used to describe destructive farming or fishing practices. We were a very small fish or maybe a cash crop planted in dry, degraded soil.

I’m sorry “At the Movies” is over. I had a good time doing it and wish it could have kept going, but I have no scores to settle, no blame to assign, no might-have-beens to explore. Maybe if Mr. Phillips and I had agreed less or fought more, we could have replicated the combative, thin-line-between-love-and-hate dynamic that had characterized the Siskel-Ebert partnership. Maybe if we had stuck closer to the old format, or discarded it entirely, or been better looking, or liked “The Blind Side” ...

Or maybe not. As the eulogies for “At the Movies” flow into the larger threnody lamenting the death of criticism, it is worth remembering that the program, now inscribed on the honor roll of the dead, was once implicated in the murder.

Movie criticism on television? Movie criticism with thumbs? You can’t be serious! That was more or less the message of an impassioned, anxious essay by Richard Corliss, published in Film Comment in 1990 (and reprinted, with characteristically impish generosity, by Roger Ebert in an anthology of his own work). The article was called “All Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?,” and Mr. Corliss’s point was that sound bites, video clips and glib quantification threatened to dumb down the critical enterprise and to dilute the impact of thoughtful analysis and good writing.

Twenty years ago, the agent of that decline was a kind of television program — two guys trading opinions on the movies of the week — that now, in its twilight, looks exalted and heroic. The threat Mr. Corliss identified has migrated to the Internet, where self-credentialed commenters snark and snipe and where the simple binary code of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down voting that Mr. Siskel and Mr. Ebert trademarked has been supplanted by the crunched numbers of the Metacritic score.

So was “At the Movies” — which was also called “Sneak Previews,” “Siskel and Ebert,” “Ebert and Roeper” and other names during its long, storied run — the start of a slippery downward slope or the summit of the critical art? Neither, of course. The circumstances in which the art of criticism is practiced are always changing, but the state of the art is remarkably constant.

Which is to say that, from a certain angle, the future of criticism is always bleak and the present always a riot of ill-informed opinion and boisterous disputation. Some gloomy soul will always wish it otherwise and conjure an idealized picture of decorum and good sense. Early in the last century, T. S. Eliot wrote that “upon giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.”

A hundred years before Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge thundered that “till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment.”

Both Coleridge and Eliot, who were writing about print, sound uncannily like ranters against the Internet and television. And, like present-day old-media scourges of the blogosphere, they had a point. But they were also projecting an impossible and self-undermining wish, because it is only through the confusion and noise of the public sphere that criticism has advanced, discovering its principles and best practices, preserving tradition and embracing the new.

I don’t go back into the archive of Siskel and Ebert’s reviews to find out how they voted, or for consumer advice, but rather to hear the two of them argue. And in our own brief tenure in their chairs, Mr. Phillips and I found argument to be the biggest challenge and the greatest satisfaction.

“One minute for the cross-talk, guys,” the producer would say, using the show’s term of art for the back-and-forth that follows the scripted reviews. How can you do a movie justice in 60 seconds? You can’t, of course — or in 800 words of print or in a blog post — but you can start a conversation, advance or rebut an argument, and give people who share your interest something to talk about.

And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been. It is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model. Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.

So I’ve come full circle. The future of criticism is the same as it ever was. Miserable, and full of possibility. The world is always falling down. The news is always very sad. The time is always late.

But the fruit is always ripe.

Paul Westerberg on Alex Chilton (The New York Times)

Beyond the Box Tops

By PAUL WESTERBERG

Minneapolis

HOW does one react to the death of one’s mentor? My mind instantly slammed down the inner trouble-door that guards against all thought, emotion, sadness. Survival mode. Rock guitar players are all dead men walking. It’s only a matter of time, I tell myself as I finger my calluses. Those who fail to click with the world and society at large find safe haven in music — to sing, write songs, create, perform. Each an active art in itself that offers no promise of success, let alone happiness.

Yet success shone early on Alex Chilton, as the 16-year-old soulful singer of the hit-making Box Tops. Possessing more talent than necessary, he tired as a very young man of playing the game — touring, performing at state fairs, etc. So he returned home to Memphis. Focusing on his pop writing and his rock guitar skills, he formed the group Big Star with Chris Bell. Now he had creative control, and his versatility shone bright. Beautiful melodies, heart-wrenching lyrics: “I’m in Love with a Girl,” “September Gurls.”

On Big Star’s masterpiece third album, Alex sang my favorite song of his, “Nighttime” — a haunting and gorgeous ballad that I will forever associate with my floor-sleeping days in New York. Strangely, the desperation in the line “I hate it here, get me out of here” made me, of all things, happy. He went on to produce more artistic, challenging records. One equipped with the take-it-or-leave-it — no, excuse me, with the take-it-like-I-make-it — title “Like Flies on Sherbert.” The man had a sense of humor, believe me.

It was some years back, the last time I saw Alex Chilton. We miraculously bumped into each other one autumn evening in New York, he in a Memphis Minnie T-shirt, with take-out Thai, en route to his hotel. He invited me along to watch the World Series on TV, and I immediately discarded whatever flimsy obligation I may have had. We watched baseball, talked and laughed, especially about his current residence — he was living in, get this, a tent in Tennessee.

Because we were musicians, our talk inevitably turned toward women, and Al, ever the Southern gentleman, was having a hard time between bites communicating to me the difficulty in ... you see, the difficulty in (me taking my last swig that didn’t end up on the wall, as I boldly supplied the punch line) “... in asking a young lady if she’d like to come back to your tent?” We both darn near died there in a fit of laughter.

Yeah, December boys got it bad, as “September Gurls” notes. The great Alex Chilton is gone — folk troubadour, blues shouter, master singer, songwriter and guitarist. Someone should write a tune about him. Then again, nah, that would be impossible. Or just plain stupid.

Paul Westerberg, a musician, was the lead singer of the Replacements.

Predicting Winners by Hunch and History (The New York Times)

By JANET ROBERTS

WITH the Academy Awards almost upon us, Friday is most likely your last chance to get in on that office Oscar pool. Knowing you’d love nothing more than to get a leg up over the guy in the next cubicle, we here at The New York Times have done a bit of number crunching to inform your last-minute choices. That is, if you believe in the predictive power of the precursor awards, that seemingly never-ending parade of accolades from all sorts of official-sounding groups.

We examined more than 75 years of awards-show history, comparing Academy Award winners in six major categories with the recipients of Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild of America, Producers Guild of America and National Board of Review awards. Here’s what history says about your Oscar ballot. (For more details, you can explore our interactive graphic: nytimes.com/movies)

BEST LEADING ACTOR Put your money on Jeff Bridges. His performance as a washed-up country singer in “Crazy Heart” garnered the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe awards, a situation that’s resulted in an Oscar for eight of nine other actors. (Only Russell Crowe, for “A Beautiful Mind,” didn’t go on to Oscar glory.) Two of Mr. Bridges’s competitors — George Clooney (“Up in the Air”) and Morgan Freeman (“Invictus”) — won National Board of Review honors and no others, typically the kiss of death for an actor’s Oscar chances. And only 11 times in 66 years has the Academy given the Oscar to an actor who did not win another major award. That’s bad news for the remaining nominees, Colin Firth (“A Single Man”) and Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker”).

BEST LEADING ACTRESS We’ve studied Meryl Streep’s Oscar mojo, and unless she can stir some Julia Child magic into the tea leaves, it looks as if it’s Sandra Bullock’s year. With the SAG and Golden Globe awards for best actress Ms. Bullock joins nine other women who went into the Academy Awards with those honors for best actress. Seven won.

Ms. Streep, nominated 15 times previously for an Academy Award only won when she garnered two major precursor awards. (She won Oscars for her roles in “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Sophie’s Choice.”) This year she captured only one: the Golden Globe for best comedic actress, a position that’s brought Oscar magic only 17 percent of the time.

Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) goes into Oscar night with only National Board of Review honors, a nonstarter in all award categories. Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”) and Helen Mirren (“The Last Station”) won none of the major precursor awards for best actress. The academy has honored an actress shut out in such awards only 13 times in the 66 years that there have been parallel prizes.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR The past suggests this is Christoph Waltz’s year, for his portrayal of a villainous Nazi colonel in “Inglourious Basterds.” He is the sixth actor to go into the Academy Awards with both a Golden Globe and SAG trophy for best supporting actor. Four of his five predecessors won the Oscar.

The only other Oscar nominee to win a major precursor award is Woody Harrelson (“The Messenger”), but his came from the National Board of Review, a nice feather but a bad omen.

That said, this is one where you could bet on a long shot. Thirty-nine percent of the Oscars for best supporting actor have gone to men who won none of the other major awards, like this year’s nominees Matt Damon (“Invictus”), Christopher Plummer (“The Last Station”) and Stanley Tucci (“The Lovely Bones”).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Mo’Nique, a first-time Oscar contender nominated for her role as the cruel and neglectful mother in “Precious,” has history on her side. Eight other women have headed into the Academy Awards, as she will, having already won the Golden Globe and SAG trophies. All but two won.

But there is room for a surprise winner in this category, the most unpredictable of the acting awards. Though history suggests that Anna Kendrick’s chances are dimmed by the National Board of Review award she won, the other three nominees, with no precursor honors in hand, have a better shot. Almost half of the Academy Awards went to actresses in their position. So when you’re filling out your Oscar ballot, take a look at Penélope Cruz (“Nine”), Vera Farmiga (“Up in the Air”) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (“Crazy Heart”).

BEST DIRECTOR Thanks to the predictive nature of the Directors Guild Awards, the year’s best odds across all six major categories belong to the guild’s pick, Kathryn Bigelow, for “The Hurt Locker.” Since 1951 the guild winner for best director has gone on to win the Oscar 9 times out of 10. Enough said.

BEST PICTURE The biggest category of them all has the murkiest history for predicting a winner. Four of the nominated films (“Avatar,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Up in the Air” and “Inglourious Basterds”) have won precursor awards; the only other year in the past two decades that had such disagreement was 1993, when “Unforgiven” became the wild-card winner. It had nabbed none of the precursor awards, which went to four different films.

That year, however, Clint Eastwood won the Oscar for directing “Unforgiven,” along with the Directors Guild and Golden Globe accolades. Ms. Bigelow’s Directors Guild award for “The Hurt Locker” may well be the strongest predictor of this year’s best picture. The movie that won for best director has also taken home the best picture Oscar all but eight times in the last 50 years. (The last director-anointed film to lose out on a best picture Oscar was “Brokeback Mountain,” which lost to “Crash” in 2006.)

Among the other contenders, “Avatar” won the Golden Globe for best dramatic picture. Flipping a coin might predict its chances better than the Globe does, however, as slightly fewer than half of the 45 other films winning only that award won the Oscar.

“Inglourious Basterds” took the Screen Actors Guild award for best cast. Five previous films have gone into the Academy Awards with the SAG alone, and only one (“Crash”) won.

“Up in the Air” received the National Board of Review’s best film award; 55 other movies won the National Board of Review alone, and only six won the Oscar. Nor is box-office dominance any guarantee of a victory. (Sorry, “Avatar.”) In the last 20 years the nominee with the top gross box-office revenue at the time of the Academy Awards won best picture only five times.

What about the chances of the six nominated movies that reaped none of the precursor awards? Well, the producers shouldn’t spend too much time working on their acceptance speeches. Such films have won the Oscar 29 percent of the time.

‘Bourne’ Team Takes a Chance With Iraq War (The New York Times)

February 28, 2010

By ROBERT MACKEY

NO one doubts that “Green Zone” comes with what Adam Fogelson, the chairman of Universal Pictures, calls an action movie “pedigree.” The film, which opens across the country on March 12, stars Matt Damon and reunites him with Paul Greengrass, the director who brought a propulsive visual style to “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.” And television ads and trailers promise plenty of suspense, firepower and, of course, fighting in close quarters.

But while “Green Zone” looks and moves much like a Bourne sequel, it also comes with a significant strike against it as a commercial proposition: It’s a movie about the Iraq war, a subject that has proven to be a recipe for box-office disappointment. Set in Baghdad in the chaotic early days of the American occupation, “Green Zone” dramatizes the fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction and climaxes on the first night of full-blown insurgency in Iraq. And the film isn’t shy about its politics. “Green Zone” is not an apolitical view of soldiers struggling to survive a grinding war, but a conspiracy thriller that directly addresses the possibility that the war might have been a huge scam, and a botched one at that.

Mr. Greengrass filmed “Green Zone” in Morocco, Spain and England in 2008, and was essentially done editing and scoring the film six months ago. That Universal is releasing it now has led to speculation that it is nervous about recouping its $100 million investment. Speaking on the phone from the Vancouver Olympics last week, Mr. Fogelson said that the studio could have released the film late last year, but doing so might have created the impression that the studio was hoping for Academy Award nominations. “We believe that this is a piece of entertainment, and we want the audience to view it as such,” he said.

Even so, Universal is clearly grappling with the contradictions inherent in presenting a popcorn film about a war that is still going on. “There’s no science as to when the right moment to do this is,” Mr. Fogelson said. But, he added, “this film would benefit from more time,” and said that the further away from the worst days of the fighting the film was released, the more comfortable people would be with the idea of enjoying a thrill ride with such serious undertones.

Mr. Greengrass, a burly, professorial 54-year-old, decided soon after “The Bourne Supremacy” came out in 2004 that he wanted to find some way to address the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war, what he called “the twin drivers of our lives right now and for the foreseeable future.” “United 93,” a docudrama about the downing of the fourth plane hijacked that day by Islamist terrorists, was his first response. “Green Zone” is Mr. Greengrass’s conscious attempt at marrying “United 93” with the “Bourne” movies — a sort of “Bourne in Baghdad.”

“There was a Bourne audience who loved what Matt and I did — something about the attack, the tone, the style, the contemporaneousness of it, the urgency of it,” he said. (Mr. Greengrass said he injected “ripped-from-the-headlines” elements, like waterboarding and rendition, into those films.) “And obviously, at the heart, they loved — you know, forget me — they loved seeing Matt being physical but very morally driven. It spoke to, I think, moral renewal, which I think is what Bourne’s all about.”

Mr. Greengrass, who said he’s well aware that “people don’t come to the movies on a Saturday night in large numbers for a lecture, or a sermon, or to hear my views on anything, frankly,” explained that he wanted to tell a story about the invasion of Iraq because there was something “incredibly disruptive and turbulent about that decision,” adding: “It stretched all sorts of bonds, it overstretched sinews. It felt desperately, desperately rending and uncomfortable, as if some great disturbance, toxicity, discomfort was the result.”

He added: “This hugely difficult process by which we ended up going to war there, only then to find that the reason that we went to war was not true, left a huge legacy I think — a legacy of fear, paranoia and mistrust. And so that really was where I wanted to put ‘Green Zone.’ Can I create a thriller with the ride, and the drive and the urgency and the economic clarity of Bourne-type storytelling — can Matt and I do that — and invite the Bourne audience back to the sort of inciting moment of what begat Bourne world?”

In a sense the British-born Mr. Greengrass is returning to his roots by diving into political controversy. He began his career as an investigative journalist and, after he made the transition to filmmaking, honed his frenetic visual style making small-scale dramas that recreated real events. On films like “Bloody Sunday,” which re-created the 1972 outbreak of violence during a Catholic civil-rights march in Northern Ireland and used the careening camerawork that has come to be his signature, he said, he was learning to “express the ragged reality of how interacting human beings look and feel when under stress.”

Mr. Greengrass, who said he feels a kinship with David Simon (“The Wire”), another former journalist creating dramas based on close observation of real life, explained that intensive research informed the version of Baghdad he presents in “Green Zone.” Working with Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “L.A. Confidential,” his team spoke with former soldiers who were involved in the fruitless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Both the director and the screenwriter described the book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post, as important to their work making the backdrop against which their thriller unfolds feel as authentic as possible.

Mr. Helgeland said that before he wrote the film, “I tracked down and reread all of Judith Miller’s early reports from Iraq.” Ms. Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times who was criticized after the invasion for articles that seemed to help the Bush administration make its case, was embedded with one of the Pentagon’s teams searching for weapons of mass destruction in 2003, when “Green Zone” is set. Mr. Damon’s character, Captain Roy Miller, is the leader of one of those teams and at one stage in the film he confronts a female reporter for a New York-based newspaper (in this case The Wall Street Journal) and asks her how she got her reporting so wrong.

The sense of urgency that imbues all of Mr. Greengrass’s films is present in “Green Zone,” and it’s clearly related to the unorthodox way he shoots them. On a snowy April morning in 2008, at a racecourse outside London standing in for Baghdad’s airport, two hand-held cameras rolled simultaneously, capturing Mr. Damon’s Miller and his team. Mr. Greengrass explained that his technique was to say to his camera operators and actors, ‘I’m going to direct this with you as if this is a live event.’ ”

“I hope that when it works,” he added, “you get this sense of extreme emotional intimacy and sort of performed truthfulness with an extreme sense of captured reality.”

Of course, despite how gifted the star, the director and the writer of “Green Zone” are at entertaining audiences, Hollywood studios are not known for persuading audiences to digest difficult truths along with their popcorn. Iraq-theme films like Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” and Brian De Palma’s “Redacted” flopped at the box office. Even “The Hurt Locker,” despite tremendous reviews and a best picture Oscar nomination, has taken in less than $13 million in the United States.

For reassurance Mr. Greengrass points to the great thrillers of the 1970s, which worked as popular entertainments even when they dealt with serious issues. “If you said, ‘Let’s do a film about heroin addiction and the heroin trade in New York in the ’70s,’ that would’ve automatically conjured up ‘Depressing, I don’t want to go there.’ But when you say, it’s ‘The French Connection’ and it features great characters, a compelling story unfolding at pace, with action, then you go, ‘Yeah.’ ”

Mr. Greengrass admits that he’s still not quite sure if his bold experiment will come off, but he said he is eager to find out. “The central proposition that I began with will only really be answered when the movie opens,” he said. “You know, will that audience come to this film and find it every bit as cinematically rewarding as ‘Bourne’? Will they take that step? I think they will, actually, but I don’t know.”

Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World (The New York Times)

By LARRY ROHTER

INSTEAD of Wonderland, it’s Underland. Instead of Alice as a bored but clever child, we get Alice as a 19-year-old rebel and warrior, dispatching the monstrous Jabberwocky with a magic sword. Disney’s second rendering of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy, in other words, is a world apart from both its 1951 cartoon version and the original Victorian-era text.

Directed by Tim Burton, “Alice in Wonderland,” a 3-D blend of live action and animation that opens Friday, is meant as a contemporary, subversive take on a cherished story. With the 20-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, who had a breakout role in the first season of HBO’s “In Treatment,” as Alice, it begins with an unwanted marriage proposal before veering off into Underland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen await.

Since “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” were first published nearly 150 years ago, Alice’s tale has been retold in many versions and many media, including as a musical, anime, video game and more than a score of film and television adaptations. But for Mr. Burton the very abundance and familiarity of the material “in the subconscious and in the culture” was an incentive — not a deterrent — to take it on.

“I’ve seen mostly everything, but there’s never been a version for me that particularly works, that I especially like or that blows me away,” he said this month in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “It always ends up seeming like a clueless little girl wandering around with a bunch of weirdos. And the fact that there was no one definitive version was helpful. It’s not like the Disney cartoon was the greatest. So I didn’t feel that pressure to match or surpass.”

Linda Woolverton, the film’s screenwriter, had a similar attitude. She said that when she began her script, she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” As she put it, “I was thinking more in terms of an action-adventure film with a female protagonist” than a Victorian maiden.

“I do feel it’s really important to depict strong-willed, empowered women,” she added, “because women and girls need role models, which is what art and characters are. Girls who are empowered have an opportunity to make their own choices, difficult choices, and set out on their own road.”

That emphasis on self-esteem and moral uplift has long been characteristic of Ms. Woolverton’s work — and of Disney itself. Originally a writer for children’s television programs like “Ewoks” and “Teen Wolf” and also the author of a pair of novels for young adults, she wrote the screenplays of “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” and also contributed to “Mulan,” all for Disney.

Thus the river of tears that a confused Alice cries in Carroll’s original text upon arrival in Wonderland has been written out of the story. “I couldn’t have her break down like that,” Ms. Woolverton said. Similarly, a drawing by John Tenniel, the illustrator who worked with Carroll, showing a boy fighting the dragonlike Jabberwock, as it was first called, was transformed into an image depicting Alice in action.

This “sisters are doin’ it for themselves” reading of Alice also comes with a coda, one that seems inspired more by Joseph Conrad than by Carroll. Refusing to marry, Alice instead decides to prove her mettle by shipping out to a trading post her father’s company plans to open in a China that, under force of British arms, has just been compelled to legalize the opium trade, cede Hong Kong and allow its citizens to be sent abroad as indentured servants.

“We’re not that concerned about being historically accurate in a film like this,” said Richard D. Zanuck, one of the movie’s producers. “It’s a piece of entertainment where you have a heroine off to another adventure at the end, and unless I’m wrong, people of all nationalities will just enjoy it as an entertainment and not try to interpret it.”

Disney’s “Alice” follows closely on the heels of a Pynchonesque Syfy channel version in which Alice is a martial arts instructor who comes to the rescue of her boyfriend, who has been abducted by the White Rabbit conspiracy and taken to a Wonderland that has been turned into a casino.

Carroll scholars say that new readings like that and Mr. Burton’s film are to be expected, given that Alice and her story are so malleable. “The books are a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which people project their own ideas,” said Jenny Woolf, author of “The Mystery of Lewis Carroll,” a biography published this month. “They are like a verbal cartoon, full of characters who are vivid but little more than sketches.”

In the 1960s that led to psychedelic readings of Alice, exemplified by Jefferson Airplane’s hit song “White Rabbit” and by a much-praised 1966 BBC production, directed by Jonathan Miller and with music by Ravi Shankar, that has just been released as a DVD. In the 1970s a pornographic “Alice” was also filmed, and more recently there was “American Magee’s Alice,” a video game set that features a revenge-minded Alice confined to an insane asylum, with a second installment possibly due in 2011.

“What is really interesting about the recent versions is that they are all a little violent,” said Jan Susina, author of “The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature” and a specialist in Victorian culture who teaches at Illinois State University, noting that the goth-and-gore singer Marilyn Manson also has a film project in the works in which he plans to play Carroll. “Since each generation and culture puts its own gloss on the story, that suggests something about our culture.”

Rated PG, this second Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland” has some dark and ominous undertones, both in its look and its story line, that were absent in the cartoon version. Even before Alice becomes a combatant in a Manichean struggle between good and evil, dressed in armor and drinking her vanquished foe’s blood to return to her natural state, she walks across a moat filled with heads to infiltrate the Red Queen’s castle.

“You know, the original piece was considered very dark and is scary for a lot of children who are reading it,” Mr. Zanuck said. “If we had made it for a G rating, we would have wrecked the original story. But you’ll notice that there’s no sense of blood or gore at all, even when she chops off the dragon’s head at the end, and that there’s a magical feeling to it.”

Though Mr. Burton has made many films with fantasy elements, dating back to “Beetlejuice” (1988) and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), “Alice” is the first of his films made for 3-D. But in contrast to the current blockbuster “Avatar,” which was filmed with 3-D cameras, Mr. Burton used 2-D cameras during the shoot and then converted the footage to 3-D in the postproduction phase.

James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” has criticized that choice, which can on occasion produce images that seem flatter or not quite as crisp as the technique used in “Avatar.” Without mentioning Mr. Cameron by name, Mr. Burton defended his decision.

“People can take whatever sides they want, but I did it the way I thought was best for this project,” he said. “We didn’t want this to be a movie that took 10 years, and when I saw the difference and looked at the time frame we had to do this movie, it didn’t make sense to do it” with 3-D cameras.

Mr. Burton also said that he sees his version of “Alice in Wonderland” as primarily a lark, surreal and comedic but essentially benign. “I kind of went out of my way to not make it too dark,” he said, adding that his attitude was “Let’s not veer off into that; let it be what it is.”

Over the years the impact of “Alice in Wonderland” has been felt in other works of children’s literature that have also been turned into movies, ranging from “The Wizard of Oz” to C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” So it is hardly a surprise that references to those worlds seem to pop up in the made-for-2010 version.

“I’m influenced by all of that, from Greek myths all through Narnia and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” Ms. Woolverton said. “Ultimately it comes down to good and evil in this world, a sense that there are people who represent the positive and those who have fallen into a dark, more evil value system. That is something that goes to Bruno Bettelheim. But I also think that if you’re going to tell a tale that goes to a dark place, you have to bring your audience out again.”

"The Ghost Writer", de Roman Polanski (críticas)

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Manohla Dargis

The darkly brooding sky that hangs over much of “The Ghost Writer,” the latest from Roman Polanski, suggests that all is grim and gray and perhaps even for naught. But this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict. The world has gone mad of course — this is a Polanski film — so all we can do is puzzle through the madness, dodging the traps with our ironic detachment and tongue lightly in cheek.

The Ghost of the title, never named in the film, is played by Ewan McGregor at his ingénue best. A writer for hire — his oeuvre is summed up by the vulgar wit of his latest effort, about a magician, “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered” — the Ghost is tapped for cleanup duties. The initial ghostwriter behind the unfinished memoirs of a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (a superb Pierce Brosnan), has washed up dead on an American beach. The publisher wants a completed book and presumptive best seller, and Lang, an increasingly divisive figure at home and abroad, needs the kind of tidying up that such a media event might provide. The Ghost, an agreeable, convenient blank slate (no family, no history), seems the man for the job.

And what nasty work it proves to be! Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski, the film opens under a menacing cloak of darkness that rarely rises. An abandoned car in the first shot leads to the first ghostwriter’s beached body being lashed by ocean waters in Martha’s Vineyard, a macabre setup that in turn leads to the Ghost receiving a thrashing in London, as he’s insulted (by an editor who thinks he’s wrong for the job); bullied (by the publisher who wants a fast turnaround); and punched (by a mugger who snatches a manuscript, mistaking it for Lang’s). By the time the Ghost meets Lang, who’s holed up at Martha’s Vineyard, he is as jumpy as the rest of us. (The film was largely shot in Germany.)

Mr. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications. Among the most initially confusing is Lang, a professional charmer whose beaming smiles, with their sinister undercurrent, and fits of rage convey depths that the Ghost soon begins to plumb, an endeavor that takes the shape of an investigation. This amateur sleuthing leads to unsurprising trouble, including with Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), a brainy beauty whose relationship with her husband holds its own secrets and is transparently meant to invoke that between Cherie Booth and Tony Blair.

The parallels with Mr. Blair and Lang spice up the story, especially as references to Iraq, torture and the Central Intelligence Agency are folded into the mix and placard-waving protesters gather outside Lang’s hideaway. Fingers are pointed, though sometimes it seems not only at Lang but also at Mr. Polanski, who is under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting word on whether he will be sent back to Los Angeles to face sentencing for having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Certainly the shots of Lang’s detractors, with their furiously distorted faces and accusatory placards (“guilty,” “wanted”), gives the film an extra-cinematic tang, though as with so much here, it’s also evident that Mr. Polanski is having his fun.

And he’s delivering this pulpy fun at such a high level that “The Ghost Writer” is irresistible, no matter how obvious the twists. Everything — including Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its mocking, light notes and urgent rhythms suggestive of Bernard Herrmann — works to sustain a mood, establish an atmosphere and confirm an authorial intelligence that distinguishes this film from the chaff. Unlike many modern Hollywood and Hollywood-style thrillers, which seek to wrest tension from a frenzy of cutting and a confusion of camera angles, Mr. Polanski creates suspense inside the frame through dynamic angles and through the discrete, choreographed movements of the camera and actors. He makes especially effective use of the enormous windows in Lang’s house through which the sky and ocean beckon and threaten.

It’s easy to speculate that Mr. Polanski was attracted to the theme of rewriting one’s life history. Reading a work of art through the lens of biography is seductive, particularly when an artist ventures into the explicitly personal, as he did in “The Pianist,” his 2002 film about a musician who, like him, survived the Holocaust. But such interpretations can flatten poetry into prose and also serve as strategies to neuter artists, whose works of imagination are “revealed” as nothing more than banal facts. This isn’t to deny the personal in art, only an insistence on the elusiveness of creation. Mr. Polanski’s ventures into the horrific in films like “Repulsion” might have something to do with his history, but they are also a matter of affinities, inspirations, attitudes, competencies, tastes, pleasures.

In this respect “The Ghost Writer” seems to be as much about Mr. Polanski’s life as, well, that of Tony Blair, which only means that there are amusing points of convergence. Tracing the lines between fact and fiction makes for a dandy parlor game, one that Mr. Polanski obviously wants us to play, at least for a while, because such resonances have their rewards. They thicken the texture of the work, even if they don’t define it. Such thickening might seem especially critical with material as thin as “The Ghost Writer,” but these are the tools of a director working with every element at his disposal, including a colorful miscellany of emoting, popping, memorable faces (notably those of Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Eli Wallach and David Rintoul).

It would be easy to overstate the appeal of “The Ghost Writer” just as, I imagine, it will be easy for some to dismiss it. But the pleasures of a well-directed movie should never be underestimated. The image of Mr. Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances. And the way, when Lang chats with the Ghost — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose. Mr. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish.

“The Ghost Writer” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Adult words and deeds.

THE GHOST WRITER

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Roman Polanski; written by Mr. Polanski and Robert Harris, based on the novel by Mr. Harris; director of photography, Pawel Edelman; edited by Herve de Luze; production designer, Albrecht Konrad; music by Alexandre Desplat; produced by Mr. Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde and Timothy Burrill; released by Summit Entertainment. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Ewan McGregor (the Ghost), Kim Cattrall (Amelia Bly), Olivia Williams (Ruth Lang), Pierce Brosnan (Adam Lang), Timothy Hutton (Sidney Kroll), Tom Wilkinson (Paul Emmett), Robert Pugh (Richard Rycart), James Belushi (John Maddox), David Rintoul (Stranger) and Eli Wallach (Old Man).

VILLAGE VOICE By Nicolas Rapold

It's hard not to picture Polanski under house arrest in Gstaad editing his diverting new thriller, in which a former British prime minister dodges extradition while having his memoirs rewritten. Then again, when your life is like a mash-up of the History Channel's entire catalog of shock programming, autobiography will probably influence your fictions, and Polanski seems inspired as he maintains implausible momentum with a cloudy premise. Ewan McGregor diffidently plays the so-called ghost to exiled politician Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), living in cushioned seclusion off the gray New England coast. The writer is hacking through the bombast left by his (dead) predecessor when Lang's past war-on-terrorism overstepping raises Blair-style static. Saved by often delightfully bitchy British dialogue, the movie sees McGregor's (arbitrarily written) semi-naif stumbling onto conspiracies and dueling with Lang's wife and mistress (Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall, both sharp). What actually happens is less important than the barest glimmers of that old Polanski magic: ambient paranoia (aided by the Cul-de-Sac–y land's-end setting) and uneven power struggles (one involving a very crafty Tom Wilkinson as an old Lang associate). The wrap-up is one strange, ah-fuggit mess, on top of Google-powered plot moves, but Polanski's work therapy could have been a lot worse.