David Denby makes an interesting point in his review of Iron Man (here, for how ever long it is posted) and it’s been bothering me ever since. He seems to have struck at the heart of what’s wrong with most comic book adaptations, and perhaps only an art mongering intellectual type who probably never read comics as a kid could have noticed it. He notes that Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark, is great only when unarmored. When he dons steel, we can no longer see his face, and the film loses its main attraction. Worse, when he faces off at the end against villain Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), “they disappear into their armor and battle like two oversized beetles.”

I realize now that this anonymity of battling bruisers that makes up the last 40 minutes of most big budget comic book adaptations has been what’s bored me about them. Yet these sequences are probably the most faithful elements adapted from the comics, at least in spirit. As a kid, I found the Marvel battle sequences dynamic and cinematic; as cinema I find them a bore, with nothing really at stake as two masked, mostly CGI figures swing at each other to standstills.

And I had high hopes for the adaptation of Iron Man, because from the trailer the film appeared to be one of the closest, more accurate adaptations of the original comic, unlike with most of the other Marvel men who have come to the screen. And the first half of Iron Man is accurate, as proven by a refresher course in the series provided by Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, (Del Rey, 224 pages, $19.95, ISBN 978-0345506153), a tie-in book about the character by Portland, Oregon movie reviewer, novelist, and comic book writer Andy Mangels. Mr. Mangels was also the editor of a fetish magazine called In Uniform, and Tony Stark’s encasing but self-sustaining garb is probably the ultimate uniform. But Stark’s sartorial splendor is much better read about in the comic than seen on the screen, where it and its wearer are reduced to animated cartoon characters thanks to the CGI.

Mangels’s book is an excellent survey of the Iron Man mythos, from the character’s introduction in Tales of Suspense issue No. 39 in December of 1962, through the numerous transformations in artists, villains, and the uniforms (they get sleeker), and even including Stark’s bout with alcoholism, a characteristic “tragic flaw” with which Marvel’s masters liked to humanize their superheroes. Mangel’s book benefits from frank interview snippets with Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, who established the character in the first story, though not with input from the late Don Heck and Jack Kirby, who drew the comics (along with Steve Ditko for a phase), and whose own writing skills were crucial to the creation of this and other Marvel figures, as Mangels shows (for example, Lieber says he would give Heck a script with a beginning and end and Heck would fill in the middle).

Another nice thing about Mangels’s book is that it is a movie tie in that doesn’t tie into the movie, which goes barely mentioned and wholly unillustrated. The book is not an excuse to praise the artistry of the film. Though Mangels does some sociological scene setting, one wishes that he had gone in for more in the way of sociological or thematic analysis (what does Iron Man’s prophylactic encasement mean), but the author’s depth of knowledge of comic books makes up for this absence in its vastness. He seems to know everything about the 70-year history of the format and is able to trace antecedents to Iron Man in earlier publications. I wouldn’t say skip the movie and read the book, for after all, the first half of Iron Man is fairly good for what it is, but Mangels’s book offers a salutary compendium that shows just how little of the comic books ever really make it into the movies.

Not to get all sociological on you, but I’ve noticed a few trends in movie content of late. The least significant, and most boring, is the college-set comedy-drama, a sub-set that includes the “ironically” titled Smart People, with Juno star Ellen Page, The Visitor , the sluggish, airless new drama from the director of The Station Agent , and Starting Out in the Evening .

But a more interesting new trend is the “quarantine” movie. This is a film that posits the arrival of some aggressive and murderous agent or a grave disease that necessitates the isolation of a building, town, or country. The recent, derivative action film Doomsday kicked off the trend, with its premise that Scotland is the sealed off land of disease spreaders, within whose walls no one knows what goes on. And there is even a comedy variation, in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay , the sequel to the popular (on DVD, anyway) pot comedy, although the humor is more cloacal than cannabis oriented, and the boys only spend about five minutes of screen time actually in Guantanamo Bay.

A forthcoming thriller is even called Quarantine and concerns an apartment building in Los Angeles sealed off by the CDC with firemen and a news crew trapped inside (this film comes out in October). Finally, there is the A&E channel remake of Michael Crichton’s tale, The Andromeda Strain, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, starring Benjamin Bratt and Christa Miller, and to be aired in late May. The four hour mini series updates the Crichton novel (filmed once before) with some X-Files governmental paranoia, but is sluggish and talky, though the production values are high for a TV show. It lacks the suspense of the similar Outbreak. ; Blindness, meanwhile, has a high pedigree: from a novel by Jose Saramago , and directed by Fernando Meirelles, it stars indie standbys Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Mark Ruffalo as residents of a location afflicted by an epidemic of blindness that leads to a vast quarantine (it comes out in September).

Why the sudden interest in enforced confinement? The subject is easy to trace as a cinematic trope, at least back to recent zombie movies such as 28 Weeks Later and Land of the Dead and more obscure recent movies such as Right At Your Door . On the higher ideological level, perhaps the theme is born of post 9/11 anxieties, in which Americans suddenly feel isolated, no longer jet-setters but lepers and pariahs on the global stage. Or maybe the theme speaks to a fear of being reduced to Medieval living, as the economy tanks and a feral society seems just around the corner.

Perhaps the theme is born of guilt. The American imperial juggernaut is out of control, and the people are either indifferent to it or helpless to stop it. A guilt-induced wish to simply withdraw into a shell may be reflected in these films, with the uneasiness of such isolation reflected in the fact that such tales are rooted in the horror and sci-fi genres.

A funny thing happened while I was watching Shine a Light.

I got bored.

This was an unexpected reaction to the latest film by our “greatest living director,” surely a sobriquet that must be retired in the face the rising careers of Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher and of a film that spends a good deal of its iMax screen time showing the wiggling of a 64-year old man’s anorectic buttocks in your face.

But how did our greatest living director and the world’s greatest rock and roll band manage to bore us? Martin Scorsese lover of music, editor of Woodstock, maker of numerous other films about music including the Band’s farewell concern movie; The Rolling Stones, whose longevity is testimony to their energy and persistence, and to the iconic frieze of their early catchy and moody hits, whose subject matter was so often not top 40 material. In the end, the only interesting parts of the film are the very beginning (quasi b&w documentary footage measuring the chaos of organizing the shoot) and the very end (a patented Scorsese POV “rabbit warren” take of someone leaving the stage and passing though a multitude of sycophants, including Scorsese twice), both seemingly faked.

Everything seems to work right on the film. Much money was spent. Many lights were rigged. The cameramen, led by Robert Richardson, manage to create an intimacy on stage, and we feel we are there, just a few inches from Charlie Watts. There is even a pissy moment between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards during a song (though someone else had to point it out to me). The film may in fact be educational to budding rock musicians who can alternatve studies of this film with cached episodes of Rock Star.

But given this technical coup and the prestige of everyone involved, why was I so bored after about the third song?

I think that there are two reasons. Scorsese didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the Rolling Stones beyond what we already know, which is that he loves their ’60s movies and often uses “Gimme Shelter” as a signature song. Sure, he intersperses old interview excepts of the band, making statements than that are “ironical” now in light of their success and septuagenarian progress, but those moments turn out to be kitschy and obvious.

The other problem is the Rolling Stones themselves. When all is said and done, it’s just a rock and roll band. They get up, do 18 songs and walk off. Sure, there’s some smoke and flashing lights, limp gestures towards the sort of arena rock that hypnotizes the young, but the songs are discreet units, a mix of old hits, played slightly different to relieve the band’s boredom with them, and execrable covers or newer songs that sound like strained efforts to come up with a tune, of any kind, now. Instead of on the stage of the Beacon playing for their contemporary, Bill Clinton, and the group of uniform metronomic young women, part staff and part scions of the elites who could afford the tickets, ringing the stage, the Stones should be off in a smokey road house bar somewhere out on 101, where Jagger’s chicken wing dancing and pointing and other terpsichorean ticks will still seem fresh.

The key flaw in the film is the play list. The songs aren’t organized in a particularly interesting or emotionally elevating manner (and the Stones are continually at a lost at how to end them), plus they bring on the occasional guest musician, such as the White Stripes guy who provides eye candy and little else, Christina Aguilera, a belter suited to a better genre of music, and Buddy Guy, trotted out so that the Stones can pay living homage to the music that influenced them.

I was also confused by the iMax presentation. I’ve only seen one previous iMax movie, at the local science museum, about polar explorations, and there the screen was the size of a dam; at the theater where I saw it, the “Regal” Bridgeport, it just seemed to be a regular sized screen with an especially loud soundtrack. Someone needs to write me and tell me what I am suppose to be getting out of the iMax experience.

But despite its high tech presentation, Scorsese’s film fails to the the one thing its title announces, shine a light on the phenomenon of the Rolling Stones.

Believe it or not, despite the inconsistent silence of this blog, I have indeed seen some recent films. As a group, however, they prove interesting only from the auteurist perspective.

Take Jumper for example. In its advertising, it touts the director Doug Liman, of The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, of which this film shares not an iota of their perhaps overrated talent. Jumper is about a guy who has the knack to teleport himself anywhere in the world, including the interior of bank vaults, which allows this teen to finance his self-education. It’s a somehow familiar premise, derived from the novel by Steven Gould, but rendered structurally inept in the script credited to David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls (only his third movie since his surprise, mysterious debut as the credited writer of Fight Club), and Simon Kinberg. There’s way too much backstory getting in the way of the plot, as Joe Bob might say, and there is a boring DaVinci Code - Nightwatch - Underworld component in which a cult of vicious Christians led by Samuel L. Jackson hunt down and kill all “jumpers” because “only God should have such power.” Nor is the teen-oriented love story worked out very well, with Rachel Bilson continually crabby in her demand for information from Hayden Christensen, continually mute to her on the subject of his power. And Christensen (who I kept thinking was going to be Ryan Phillippe or Justin Timberlake, probably because of that soft drink commercial where the singer is reeled in my sips on the fluid) is annoyingly passive for an action film hero, continually finding himself tied up or cornered by the bad guys.

As far as Liman’s work is concerned, it is clear now that The Bourne Ultimatum is the lesser of the three films in the series, and that from Smith on his films are descending into structural chaos, ultimately unsatisfying action films full of sound and flurry, but conveying nothing. In fact, the movie Jumper reminded me of most was the recent, execrable, lazy The Bucket List, with its similar jumping around among similar locations, though through the more conventional means of a Lear jet. Jumper leapt off the screens with the alacrity its main character employed to teleport himself out of danger. Unlikely as it seems, a Jumper 2 is in the works.

Doomsday is the third film from the interesting director Neil Marshall, whose previous Dog Soldiers and The Descent are stylish and original. As a Marshall film, it continues his concerns with professionals facing down implacable foes. As a movie movie, however, Doomsday is an anthology of maybe your favorite films, from Escape from New York to Road Warrior to 28 Days Later, and even The Lord of the Rings, vaguely, with Malcolm McDowell as an ersatz Gandalf or Saruman. The film comprises scenes of unabashed homage (if not downright theft), and the innovation of having a tough chick (played by the convincing Rhona Mitra) at the center is not so innovative after the many variations of Underworld and Resident Evil and their sequels.

Marshall’s Tarantino-esque magpie-ism may have been cleaning artistically but it calls into question what seemed the originality of his first two films. Dog Soldiers and The Descent remain valuable, however, for the force of their sheer filmmaking verve, a vigor weirdly diluted in the chaos of quotation that is Doomsday.

Drillbit Taylor is offered up (somewhat misleadingly) as a Judd Apatow comedy, which it is tangentially, as it comes from his producing hand, is written by Apatow crony Seth Rogen, and stars his wife, Leslie Mann. But this film, too, is an update of a sentimental ’80s favorite, My Bodyguard, which this film slyly acknowledges through a cameo by the earlier comedy’s bodyguard, Adam Baldwin. And in its use of a trio of teens who resemble the guys from Superbad, it comes across like an unofficial prequel to that movie.

Drillbit Taylor coasts on the charm of its bodyguard, Owen Wilson, who still has the power to carry a movie, and the intense interest some viewers will have in the subject of the bullying crisis, which the film takes to psychopathic extremes, almost suggesting that there is no real solution to the problem of bullying other than murder (which may be true). In any case, Drillbit Taylor is sadly not laugh-out-loud funny like that minor masterpiece Superbad but also isn’t as super bad as other reviewers have suggested.

88 Minutes is a film that sat on the shelf for a while (it is copyrighted 2007), and is one of those “real time” movies with a rather severe deadline for its hero: shrink-prof Al Pacino has been given 88 minutes to live by the proxy of a serial killer (Neal McDonough) he helped convict. Suspects and friends who help or hinder him in his short term quest include Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski , Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Benjamin McKenzie.

88 Minutes is an enjoyable little thriller with a terrific cast that is probably best suited for the small screen, where director Jon Avnet has his roots, and whose style he cannot throw off, despite making five features thus far. In its emphasis on the partnership of unlikely allies it is consistent with his earlier output but lacks the visual distinction or originality that the material invites.

Also from the shelf comes Chapter 27 (also 2007), a film with very little reason to be. For some reason writer and director J.P. Schaefer,whose first film credit this is, thought it would be interesting to explore the psychology of Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto), who shot John Lennon (unseen here) in 1980. It’s not. Watching a crazy person enact and interact with his internal terrors for 84 minutes is neither edifying nor kind to the memory of the slain Beatle.

It’s easy to see why Leto might be drawn to the project. It enabled him to pull a De Niro and alter his body image for the nonce (though the poster rather exaggerates the amount of Chapmanesque tonnage he put on). And for Lindsay Lohan, who plays a fictional Lennon groupie who shows Chapman the ropes outside the Dakota, and who is touching in the role (surprisingly so, probably, to her detractors, but not to those supporters who have stuck with her through the haze of distorting publicity), it was a convenient assignment: some seven scenes in locations agreeably close to her own Manhattan digs (though I suggest that LL not do another assassination-theme film at least for a little while). Chapman may be worthy of deep psychology exploration (and there is a competing film about him, released in 2006), but he is the killer of a cultural hero and the sneaking sympathy for him that the film reveals is offensive.

I was curious to see Vantage Point because it was the first “presidential assassination” film to come out in a long time (I can think of In the Line of Fire in ‘93, though the series Prison Break recently dwelt on the subject), partially because it seemed like an odd time to proffer the subject of a presidential killing, right in the middle of a disputations election campaign. The paranoid in me wonders if the media masters were trying to prime us for some candidate elimination, the way several assassination movies came out prior to the death of JFK. But Vantage Point proved to be more a thriller version of a “web of life” film, with the film (no president is killed) at first following the viewpoints of several witnesses of an incident in a public square in Spain, in serial order before backtracking to the next witness, whose segment adds more complexity, until the film settles into a Bourne-style chase film (it’s directed by Pete Travis, who comes from TV, as does credited writer Barry Levy). Then by coincidence I received the new Atlantic which briefly turned into a fan magazine, with a cover story on Britney Spears and the paparazzi, and a terrific essay by Ross Douthat on Hollywood elites’ obsession with ’70s paranoia films and the failure of the recent spate of Iraq films, a piece that seemed to directly address my worries, before going on to an intriguing explanation for the low box office temperature of Iraq dramas.

“The age of George W. Bush and the Iraq War meshes much more neatly with the industry’s ’70s nostalgia,” he writes. “Just not quite as neatly, perhaps, as Hollywood seems to think. As we’ve seen, the broad-brush similarities between the two decades have been used to impressive cinematic effect. But because the two decades don’t map precisely onto one another, the ’70s revival is more successful, both artistically and at the box office, when it’s intimated than when it’s made explicit. And the closer a movie hews to real-world events, the greater the strain of making the Vietnam-era mood fit the Iraq-era facts.”

Read the story, then hear the author interviewed.

Thinking today about the Oscars and the Coen Brothers I began reflecting on the Chigurh character in No Country for Old Men. I recall reading in one of the early reviews that Chigurh (who obviously comes from the Cormac McCarthy novel) is unique to the Coen Brothers’ filmography, a figure of malevolent evil that tilts the rest of the film, indeed their output, off balance. Or maybe I wrote that in this blog and no one else made such an observation. In any case, whenever a character or theme seems to appear out of nowhere it is enlightening to look at the filmmaker’s whole filmography and see if there are antecedents lurking in early shadows. And Chigurh turns out to be a purified, reduced, concentrated form of a character who has appeared in Coen films since their first feature,

I began by comparing Chigurh to, of all people, The Stranger (Sam Elliott) in The Big Lebowski. The cowboy isn’t evil, but he is omnipresent. He is the over-voice, the color commentator, (maybe even the shaper of fate like Bela Lugosi in Plan 9). In other words, he has the same preternatural knowledge of other people’s doings and motivations as a serial killer does in a 13 movie, and if Chigurh resembles anyone at root, it is Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal. And in fact the Coens have blended narrator and killer on occasion. PI Loren Visser (M. Emmett Walsh) in Blood Simple is both storyteller, prime mover, and malevolent force. Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls (”Tex” Cobb) is a simplified version of this foe, as is The Dane in Miller’s Crossing. Then there is the near-sub-human Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) in Fargo. Even the guy who beats up Steve Buscemi in Paris, je t’aime is a miniature version of Chigurh.

The Coen films that don’t seem to have this narrator/force of evil are The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou? (unless it is John Goodman’s Big Dan Teague), Intolerable Cruelty, <emThe Man Who Wasn’t There, and The Ladykillers (arguably their weakest films). Do they need this figure in one of its varieties to give themselves a solid through-line in tales that are otherwise wittily unpredictable?

The point, however, is that often the role of tale-teller and evil implacable force are combined into one person. Chigurh likes to improvise little bullying bet-oriented narratives with his victims’ lives haging in the balance. Charlie Meadows (Goodman again) is a storyteller as well, indeed a better storyteller than the high-priced, pretentious playwright whom the studios have summoned to Hollywood.

In fact, Barton Fink may remain the key Coen Brothers film, the gateway to all their concerns, such as language, social hierarchies, and the ability to weave tales. The film begins by showing the pulleys and curtains that lurk behind the surface of theatrical storytelling. It ends by showing the source of all storytelling, the head, completely detached and neutralized. Fink is contrasted with a famous writer whose secretary, it turns out, writes his novels for him. Storytelling, and then selling that story, appear to be the Coen Brothers’ big themes, and No Country for Old Men is another variation of their exploration of American loquacity and self-mythologizing. And the Coens’ use of the “avenger-narrator,” well, it really completes a film.

27, 000 Days (USA, 2007, Noon, Saturday, February 9) is a short film about a sick man remembering with regret his past. It’s like a blend of Tolstoy and Beckett, only essentially non-verbal, and it’s depressing as hell because filmmaker Naveen Singh doesn’t leaven his dire vision with humor, as does, say, Alain Resnais in Providence.

The Gates (USA, 2005, 3 PM, Saturday, February 9) is three movies one. The first is the remnants of a 1976 film in which director Albert Maysles chronicles the attempts of the installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to set up The Gates in Central Park. That attempt failed but now with co-director Antonio Ferrera, revisits the project as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg approves the project. The third and final section is a tone poem that salutes the finished project, shown in almost all lights, weathers, and degrees of local population. The film is a throwback to documentaries of the 60s, cinema verite, with no narration. The younger Christo looks a tad like Woody Allen, downtrodden by the contrariness of New York, his adopted home. Jeanne-Claude is prone, over the decades, to motherhood metaphors when talking to the media. But when it comes to The Gates themselves, the non-standard celebratory manner of Maysles, who has made several films about Christo, is winning.

I’m a little worried that Taxi to the Dark Side (USA, 2007, 5 PM, Saturday, February 9) is coming too late in the cycle of Iraq documentaries, when the choir has definitively been converted and when the subject appears to have dropped out of the national election conversation. Yet this documentary by Alex Gibney Enron is important, and well made, with a combination of archival and new footage. It takes as its focus the case of a young Afghan cab driver named Dilawar, seized by a team of roving Afghan soldiers, and sent to the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force Base, where he shortly died, his death ruled a homicide. Gibney expands from this story to explore the use of extreme interrogation techniques elsewhere and the Bush administration’s attempt to evade the political and legal complications of its approval. Taxi to the Dark Side is powerful, but also clear and filled with new information. If you miss it at the festival it will probably show up at the Cinema 21 or somewhere else.

Not By Chance (Brazil, 2007, 5:15 PM, Saturday, February 9) concentrates on all that presumably obsesses the Brazilians: traffic, apartment hunting, and coffee. Like Crash and Amores perros, Philippe Barcinski’s film follows a group of bourgeois citizens as their lives mildly intersect and they cope with tragedy. Enio (Leonardo Medeiros) is a traffic coordinator getting to know his daughter; Pedro (Rodrigo Santoro) is a pool table designer who ends up dating the coffee snob trader who moved into his now-dead girlfriend’s apartment. It’s Amores perros light: sure, there are a couple of “ironic” traffic tragedies, but in the end the film wants to uplift and inspire.

Something of an anti-Schindler, The Counterfeiters (Austria, 2007, 5:45 PM, Saturday, February 9) is a fascinating dramatization of the true account of a group of criminal and financier concentration camp prisoners gathered together at Sachsenhausen to British forge bank notes and American money. The main counterfeiter is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), whom we first see just after the war and then in 20-minutes of backstory before he is arrested. Director-writer Stefan Ruzowitzky puts his characters in an ethical thumbscrew, as the prisoners both enjoy privileges others are denied while helping the tyranny that put them there. The Counterfeiters is one of the best films in this year’s festival.

If Caramel (Lebanon, 2007, 8:30 PM, Saturday, February 9) starred Julia Roberts and were called Steel Magnolias the chances are that it would not be a festival selection, but because Nadine Labaki’s film, in which she also stars, uses amateur actors and has a “new wave” shooting style, the film’s essentially soap opera elements are at first disguised. Set mostly in a Beirut beauty parlor it follows the romantic and personal trials or several westernized women (although I didn’t catch why caramel was important enough to be a title, unless it was to evoke memories of Chocolat). The tale could have used a lot less iced tea and a lot more Ice-T, although, once you’ve made the commitment to absorbing the whole film, the last shot is very powerful.

I’ve introduced the 31st Portland International Film Festival in the lead review for the February Vancouver Voice, which will be posted on this website shortly, and for the rest of the festival I’ll post short reviews of the movies I’ve managed to see, beginning with the films slated for Friday, February 8, in each case giving the film’s first showtime — but check everything against the Northwest Film Center’s website, where changes and updates are posted.

We’re in a form of Michael Haneke country in The Edge of Heaven (Germany, 2007, 1 PM, Friday, February 8), which follows the intersecting lives of six people (four Turks, two Germans, including Hanna Schygulla) and is divided into three large parts. Like Crash it follows these people as they intersect across Germany and Turkey, it is essential that the plot not be spoiled (though the chapter titles do that already). The fifth feature by Fatih Akin, it’s a complex, gripping drama that unreels at a brisk pace, and on the basis of what I have seen so far it is already one of the best films in the festival.

Tuya’s Marriage (China, 2006, 6 PM, Friday, February 8) is another “perfect” film fest movie: a slow, deliberate account of Mongolian life with lots of careful detail about how the “other half” lives. Directed by Wang Quanan (Lunar Eclipse), this emotionally complicated film follows the day to day experiences of Tuya (Yu Nan) as she uninterestedly considers various candidates for marriage after a major life change (a back injury makes literal what she has been denying, her culturally imposed dependence). The films embraces the ordinary. A horse riding Tuya can’t just encounter a guy on a tractor for a hectoring chat, we must first see her in the distance for several seconds of “reality” as she clops along. We must be shown her making the complete trek to a shack carrying tea. Eventually there is a little bit of contrived suspense over a missing son, and then an active climax, but by then it is too late.

There is no narrative per se in You, the Living (Sweden and other countries, 2007, 7 PM, Friday, February 8). Instead there is a series of tableaux in which a static, usually distant camera, in the manner of Wes Anderson, observes a series of mostly non-sequential moments of frustration from daily life (it’s the new universal style; The Band’s Visit has something of this look, too). For example, a commuter train lets off a tremendous number of people, all of whom have to cross in front of the train. Impatient to get going, the train honks its horn, straggling commuters pause to let it go by, and the train proceeds to execute a snail’s pace forward momentum. A woman complains, often in song, that no one understands her; someone is fried in the electric chair for a magic routine gone bad. Director Roy Andersson offers a world of traffic jams, long waits, interrupted music rehearsals, and so forth that purport to capture what life is like for we, the living. Andersson appears to be making the same mistake that cinema verite filmmakers make, which is that reality is more likely to be captured honestly through simplicity and unobtrusiveness, despite several hundred years of theatrical history that show how drama, when done right of course, provides the true intimacy that makes films more real than real.

Alexandra (Russia, 2007, 8:30 PM, Friday, February 8) is a wry, methodical tale of a woman’s visit to her grandson’s military base in Chechnya. As a symbol of Mother Russia, Galina Vishnevskaya, an opera singer whom director Aleksandr Sokurov profiled in a previous documentary, is a stolid observer. We are meant to see the mechanical minutia of war — rifle cleaning, the humidity of a tank, the intrusiveness of a checkpoint — through her eyes, “making strange” the otherwise day to day life of an occupying force. Sokurov ( The Second Circle , Mother and Son ) shows no battles, only the longeurs of base life, and he wears his points on his sleeve, as he ponders Vishnevskaya pondering the baby faces of the soldiers she encounters. A break in the litany of military ironies comes when Vishnevskaya visits a market and forges a temporary, uneasy bond with a Chechnyan woman, her unironical mirror image. It’s an elegant (with help from the score by Andrei Sigle) if static movie (despite the constantly moving camera) that ends up feeling slighter than the portentous close ups of rifles and faces intend.

Then She Found Me (USA, 2007, 9 PM, Friday, February 8) is this year’s Away From Her, the last festival’s film in which an actress made her directing debut in a tapped down melodrama. It’s unlikely that this film, however, will carry on to win awards and Oscar nominations. Based on a novel by Elinor Lippman, the film is directed by Helen Hunt who also stars as a woman recently married whose husband (Matthew Broderick), also a teacher, leaves her in only a few weeks. While she is slowly falling for a harried father of two (Colin Firth), she is also tracked down by her biological mother (Bette Midler) who gave her up at birth. If the film didn’t have the imprimatur of being in the festival, it might comfortably fit into the string of Hallmark movie tear jerkers, for it is life affirming in all ways.

Introduction
As a fan and disciple of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 - 1968, Andrew Sarris’s standard anatomization of Hollywood directors, I return to it again and again for insight and succor. Unfortunately, the book has a cut off date of 1968, consequently containing no rankings and summaries for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, and scores of other directors who emerged since Sarris’s book came out.

Modestly, I hope to rectify that situation. Over the next several months, I propose to issue forth brand new director summaries and evaluations, geared for adaptability into Sarris’s template. With a slight refiguring of Sarris’s categories, these new director filmographies and summaries should slip easily into Sarris’s book, physically, though perhaps not aesthetically. In Sarris’s book, the titles were in plain text, with key films of a director’s oeuvre in italics; here all titles are in italics, with key films also in bold; I’m sure that Sarris would do it that way, too, if he were writing the book today. My slightly refined categories will be, in ranking order, Future Pantheon, The Near Side of Paradise, Lightly Likable, Working Stiffs, Cable Ready, Send in the Clowns, Foreign Trade, Producers as Auteurs, Actors Turned Directors, Strained Seriousness, More Less Than Meets the Eye, The Writers, Flashes in the Pan, and finally, Subjects for Further Research. Rankings are tentative, for the most part, because these are living directors whose full careers may eventually modify their final rankings. Fellow fans of American Cinema are encouraged to print out this dispatches and paste them into a scrapbook that can sit on the shelf next to Sarris’s book.

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Gregory Hoblit (1944 -)
Ranking: Cable Ready

Bay City Blues (1983 TV series one episode); Hill Street Blues (1981 - 1984 TV series eight episodes); Hooperman (1987 TV series); Law and Order (1986 - 1987 TV series three episodes); Roe vs. Wade (1989 TV movie); Equal Justice (1990, TV series one episode); Cop Rock (1990 TV series various episodes); Class of ‘61 (1993 TV movie); NYPD Blue (TV series nine episodes 1993 - 1994); Primal Fear (1996); Fallen (1998); Frequency (2000); Hart’s War (2002); NYPD 2096 (2004 TV movie); Fracture (2007); Untraceable (2008)

Gregory Hoblitt comes from the world of television, which is no longer the opprobrious status it used to be back in the 1960s, when one prestigious directors from the classical period went to die and young upstarts learned poor technique. Television slowly began to improve visually and dramatically back in the late 1970s and the two shows most closely with him, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue were innovative both in look and how they unfurled traditional cop melodramas. But Mr. Hoblit has not brought that spirit of innovation to the big screen, where his movies tend to resemble all the other mid-range Hollywood movies around them, techniques elucidated by David Bordwell in recent essays and blog entries, that include meaningless camera movements meant to enliven otherwise conventional or static scenes (compare the opening shots of Hart’s War to, oh, say, anything by Alain Resnais) .

Which isn’t to say that Mr. Hoblit isn’t attracted to the same theme from film to film. From his first true feature film, Primal Fear to the recent Fracture Hoblit’s tales, regardless of the writers, focus on the power struggle between a seemingly ordinary man and a malevolent if not superhuman force. The two legal mysteries pit Richard Gere against a young Edward Norton, and a youngish Ryan Gossling against a crafty Anthony Hopkins. In Fallen cop Denzel Washington confronts an executed serial killer with supernatural staying power (in a story that somewhat resembles Wes Craven’s Shock).

The lugubriously paced Hart’s War, based on a novel but something of a Night of the Generals knockoff, is a legal drama set in a WWII prisoner of war camp, which, after 17 minutes of back story, finally settles into a war of nerves between a bully (Cole Hauser) and an African-American pilot (Terrence Howard) that results in an apparent murder, and then between Bruce Willis as the unofficial camp leader and his attempts to dominate Colin Farrell as an ad hoc defense attorney, while Willis is at the same time jostling for power with the camp commandant, Marcel Lures (the film ends crazily with a series of extreme sacrifices all within five minutes). In this way the film is the apotheosis of Hoblit’s fascination with power struggles.

His most recent film, Untraceable highlights another dominating figure who effortlessly controls those around him, in this case a serial killer with mixed beliefs about the Internet and the media. Diane Lane plays Hoblit’s first female protagonist, an FBI agent in the cyber-crimes division. A derivative script and a reliance on standard issue visual techniques of the day unduly flattens out the suspense and helps render the film ideologically confusing. Nevertheless, Hoblit is that unusual entity, a metteur-en-scene with an identifiable thematic consistency.

The Nines would be utterly incomprehensible if it weren’t for an anonymous extra on the new DVD. Among a plethora of ultimately unhelpful supplements is a short film that writer and director John August made a few years earlier called God. This short stars Melissa McCarthy (Gilmore Girls) as a young housewife who has a deep gossipy telephone relationship with God, who calls her frequently. Essentially the short blends a high school girl telephone lifestyle with a humanizing view of God freed of theological baggage.

McCarthy pops up again in The Nines, playing three characters, one of them the girl from God. The Nines itself is divided into three successive stories. The first tale concerns a hot young TV crime show actor named Gary (Ryan Reynolds) who has a public meltdown and is confined by his agent and a publicist to a house owned by a writer who is off making a TV pilot. McCarthy plays the publicist, and apparently her character is the same one from God. How this confluence works ultimately is ambiguous, but in any case, on a meta level she is also protecting her pal God from realizing that he is just playing a game by living someone else’s lifestyle. The other two stories concern Gavin (Reynolds again) who is a gay TV writer trying to mount a new show and whose exploits are followed by a reality TV crew. The third and final episode is the pilot that Gavin is working on, featuring in its cast the same actors who appear in the other two tales. There are also various overlaps and connections among the three stories.

When an innovative screenwriter comes along they are almost always compared to Tarantino or to Charles Kaufman. The specter of the Tarantino influence loomed with August’s first filmed script, Go, which played with chronology in the Tarantino manner, but which was probably misleading as to August’s real interests as a filmmaker (he soon ended up a collaborator of Tim Burton’s). August is less a Tarantino than a Richard Kelly. Left to his own devices, August naturally gravitates to obscurantist metaphysical tales on multiple levels.

Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, everything in The Nines comes in threes. Besides the three stories, there are three main characters symbolic perhaps of different Jungian archetypes. Reynolds, regardless of his identity, is always God, who imagines different worlds and casts himself in a key role to see what being a human being is like (that’s a guess). McCarthy falls into the role of aide-du-camp. In the first tale she is a handler, in the second the writer’s best friend (whom he betrays in order to get his show accepted by the network, though it isn’t), and in the third she plays the wife character in the pilot. The third character is a trickster-Anima archetype played by Hope Davis, a seductive neighbor in the first, a double-crossing TV exec in the second, and a hiker in the pilot. Her role, much as one can understand it, is to lure God back to his Olympian heights and abandon these fake worlds he has created.

As a puzzle film The Nines is modestly entertaining, but one watches it as one does Donnie Darko, with little hope that its mysteries will be revealed. McCarthy appears in a coda, which suggests that she was really the main character all along, but it remains unclear if the God worlds she has visited are dreams she has had or real parallel universes she has visited, or what. By watching all the extras on the DVD one can piece together an interpretation like the one above, although there is no definitive answer offered up.

The Nines came out on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 (retailing for $24.95) and is packed with extras. The disc comes with two audio commentary tracks, the first with August and Reynolds, the second, recorded later, with August, McCarthy, and the film’s editor, Douglas Crise. After his work in a variety of films, from The Amityville Horror to Smokin’ Aces, Reynolds (who also started out in sitcoms — Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place), looks to have the potential of becoming another Tom Hanks, adept in comedy, drama, action, anything. He is attractive yet changeable, charismatic and generous to co-stars (whom he makes look better). He needs only a break-out hit to put him at People-level public consciousness, but one suspects on the basis of his yak track that Reynolds is terribly shy and awkward in an unscripted world, though that didn’t stop the similarly afflicted Robert DeNiro. The second track is cozier, but in the end offers mostly technical and background information. We do learn that much of the first two stories are autobiographical and in part based on his work on two failed TV shows, D.C. and Alaska, though August doesn’t admit to hitting a female executive as the Gavin character does (the only woman associated with August’s two shows is E. Monique Floyd). We also learn that August has a penchant for upside down cars, and can see that he is fond of characters stretching out on the floor or ground.

There are also nine deleted or extended scenes, with an optional commentary by August and Crise. Mostly the come from the first segment, and one of them expands Gary’s character by showing him opportunistically getting a blow job from a delivery boy. The last deleted is an alternative ending, though it is similar to the standing ending.

In addition there is a script to storyboard comparison, a brief “making of” that reveals more facets of the film’s mysteries, a short photo gallery, and the God short. Finally, there is a whole raft of trailers: a Blu-Ray promo, Dragon Wars, Southland Tales, Revolver, Resident Evil: Extinction, Boogeyman 2, Gabriel, Slipstream, Across the Universe, Romance and Cigarettes, Zombie Strippers, Black Water, We Own the Night, and one for the first season of Damages on DVD.