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This is highly entertaining fare, though it is sadly not too serious in the realm of politics. In some ways, it's a "serious" cartoon-like action thriller but with plot threads that are hard to decipher and filled with utterly implausible happenings.

Perhaps it's best to think about "The Blood of Jesus" as a great piece of "naïve" art. The technique is primitive, but its content reveals to us the deep spirituality of the people portrayed--a kind of ethnographic study against a background of two contrasting (but maybe not so contrasting) musical forms: Negro Spirituals and swinging jive and blues.

The story plays out like a children's fairy tale, with the forces of righteousness and sinfulness given human form--and I must confess that,as an atheist, I sure dug the pleasures to be found at the night club more than the baptismal dunking in the river. Nonetheless, the feelings of rapture conveyed by the choir were so powerful that it had me and my atonal wife singing along with them and saying to myself: "Sinner Repent!." Ultimately deeply moving and strongly recommended.

I can only imagine the impact this movie must have had on American audiences in 1942--the deep feelings of sympathy it aroused for the British people who were suffering under the incessant Nazi bombings. I'm guessing that it was this movie that made my mother say that her favorite male movie star was Walter Pidgeon (something I could never figure out till I saw "Mrs. Miniver" and realized how much she must have cried seeing it and knowing that my dad would soon be shipped out to England).

But in retrospect, the movie needs to be seen also in the context of war-time propaganda and its impact on British and American viewers. The biggest surprise in the movie is surely not that "Lady Beldon" renounces her claim to the village's rose of the year and shows her common cause with "the people". Rather, it was the designation of the Brit who was to be the symbol for all of Britain's war dead. From out of the blue, it turned out to be Lady Beldon's grand- daughter (and a more ethereal, tender and vulnerable creature couldn't have been chosen for the role than Teresa Wright).

The obvious choice, and the one everyone in the movie theater must have anticipated, was the Minivers' son as fighter-pilot destined to die in the Battle of Britain (and he almost certainly would have died if he had existed in real life--there were very few fighter pilots who survived from the beginning of war to the end). But the death of a beautiful, young woman, symbol of all the "innocent civilians" to die in the war, surely had a greater impact on the movie-goers. In a sense, it prepared Americans and Brits to understand and accept the logic of Total War, where there are no "innocent civilians".

And so it's a strange and sad irony that "Mrs. Miniver" plays a part (a small part, admittedly) in laying the groundwork for the legitimation of the firestorm in Dresden (1945) that killed in a few hours 25,000 Germans, more than half of all the Britons killed over the years of the Nazi bombing of Britain. Just one chapter in the story of the war-time bombing of civilians in the 20th century and beyond.

While Herzog provides his usual share of directorial novelties (including a "re-enactment" of Dieter's trek through the Laotian jungle with his captors--but not carried to the extent of re- enacting the tortures he went through), it's hard to see why this miraculous death-avoiding trek of Dieter's is any more worthy of a documentary than, say, a survivor's story of a Wehrmacht soldier walking his way back to Germany from the Russian front. In both instances, it's a tale of an individual surviving death at every turn--and not a tale of the slaughterhouse that dealt death to millions of people over the course of a war.

And while a Wehrmacht soldier's tale of survival might well include war crimes committed against civilians, Dieter's tale can hardly avoid that part of the tale--with the difference that the crimes committed by the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were never reported for the most part, whereas we have vivid technicolor imagery (incorporated into Herzog's film as well) of the horrors inflicted on the people of Vietnam.

Herzog's usage of historical footage of US bombing runs may indeed convey a deeply unsettling sensation of the contrast between the "glorious" technicolor pyrotechnics and the imaged horror felt by the people living the experience on the ground--and, I suppose, that's to Herzog's credit. But, in the end, this tale of an American pilot's escape from a POW camp--a tale that so defies credibility that it must be true--ends up endowing the protagonist with a hero's status. It's true enough that Dieter refuses the label "hero" (because "only the dead can be heroes"), but he also evidences not one iota of remorse for his participation in the war.

And this is the problem: A hero must be someone who embodies and realizes in his deeds the noblest virtues and values of our culture. Being a willing combatant in a war initiated by the US and that led to the deaths of between a million and a half and 4 million people for no good reason is not the stuff of heroes.

Once upon a time the colored folks were all smiles and jolly. Well, not really but what the hell, even if a caricature it was a reflection of a part, if only a part, of their reality. (Most objectionable to me was the religiosity bordering on crude superstition--but there too you gotta go with the fantasy side of this thing.) We laughed a lot and really got a kick out of the songs and singing (especially the great renditions given by Ethel Waters-- who even did a jitterbug number), as well as the over-the- top acting by "Rochester" and Rex Ingram.

Offensive to Black folks today? Sure, if they are totally invested in "presentism" (condemning people of the past with the standards of behavior we hold today). What would they want? To see more Black characters with a Ph.D. in hand? The manner of speech and social conditions in the movie depicted the life of the bulk of the Black masses at the time.

What's missing, of course, is the presence of Whites and signs of the oppressive power exercised by Whites over them--not a single White person to be seen anywhere. This is, after all, a comedic fantasy--a Black fantasy that perhaps expressed a not-so-repressed vision of paradise for Blacks, in which they would be free of White folks and be able to sort out their lives by themselves and for themselves.

This film has a pretty heavy religious overtone (film begins with a dedication to "Allah") that seems to have been blurred and missed by the American audience who loved it--taken as they were with the sorrowful tale of a sensitive blind boy. It's really the story of Job told in an Islamic setting. The commandment that comes from on high is to acknowledge and submit to your lot in life--in the case of the father: to devote himself to his son and his well-being, despite the heavy burden that that imposes on him. There's also the message that, along life's way, we must always be attentive to the needs of others (as exemplified, in a positive way, by the blind boy's rescue of "animalitos" in distress; and, in a negative way, by the father's lack of attention to the turtle on its back and in distress). And the failure of the father to submit to the lot of Job means that he must suffer God's wrath and further punishment. "God's will be done", as they say.

Not a bad message coming from Islam in one sense: One should shoulder one's responsibilities towards others who are needy; but, do we need the threat of divine punishment to recognize this duty we all have to "do the right thing?" After all, a humanist doesn't need to read the Koran to know that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

For my taste, just too easy a play for and manipulation of our feelings with the use of a blind kid.

In this heart-wrenching comedy directed by Italian cinema giant Dino Risi, Silvio Magnozzi's "difficult life" follows the trajectory of Italy from the proud moments of the Resistance movement's struggle against Nazi occupation to post-war domination by wealth and privilege. Magnozzi, a writer and journalist played by Alberto Sordi, does not give up the dream of an alternate future to capitalism and the extreme inequalities it engenders. He meets Elena, the love of his life, while he is fighting the Nazis; but after the war she is torn between his dreams and the petty social- climbing schemes of her mother. So while Magnozzi refuses to sell out, choosing to defy the fat cats and to write truthfully, Elena waivers.

The film is often classified with the New Italian Comedy, a genre that emerged from the hard-hitting political narratives of Italian Neo-realism and retained their critical edge while softening it with humor. "A Difficult Life" has a bitter tone compared to most of the films of the period; even in many very funny scenes the anger and defiance are never dispelled, and Magnozzi pays a heavy price for his heroism.

Sordi's performance is brilliant (Italians refer to him as "Albertone", perhaps best translated as "Albert the Great"). In his portrayal of the clown as hero, every gesture is meaningful and touching. Lea Massari, one of the great Italian divas of the period, also has a stand-out performance--and the supporting cast (including Claudio Gora as the boorish multi-millionaire) never misses a beat. The period details— from the newsreel footage to the flashy cars, beach parties, and fur coats of the post-war boom-- are handled expertly. A must-see for any lover of Italian cinema. '

So the ending is pretty much the classic one you'd expect from Hollywood (even if it ain't a Hollywood production). After all, who in her right mind would abandon her chance to live in the land of plenty versus a dreary, down-at-the-heels Irish village filled with petty-minded people? To his credit, the screenwriter kept the tension of the choice sustained, and did not present the alternative Irish lover with any obvious flaws--which would have made the choice self-evident. Indeed, for much of the visit interlude, "Eilis" seemed genuinely taken with "Jimmy Farrell"--and I have to admit that my wife and I were rooting for her to choose him--though we knew full well that "America" had to win out in the end (and we knew that because there are no "accidental encounters" in a "Hollywood" script: how else to account for the insertion of the scene at city hall with the "chance encounter" with a young woman from Eilis' town--who then "happens" to be related to Miss Kelly, the grocer?).

Wallace Stegner once remarked that America is divided between the "boomers" and the "stickers". The former are always prepared to move on to more promising territory (the next great "boom" in the roller- coaster economy), regardless of ties to family and place. The "stickers" are those who, despite tough times and a "hard-scrabble" life, try to make the best of it and stick it out because of the importance of place and kith and kin.

It would have been nice if just once we gave some credit to the "stickers" and had Eilis hanging in there with family, friends, and the town and the seashore she loved (despite all the flaws). That would have been too much to hope for, especially given the "inconvenience" of her marriage to "Tony". Nonetheless, I'd have opted for a toss-up that would have let the audience decide. After all, a civil marriage is not recognized by the Catholic Church as binding, so divorce is not out of the question for Eilis.

So here's an alternative ending: Eilis writes to Tony to say that she's fallen in love with another man and that she'd like Tony to agree to a divorce. Tony refuses to give her a divorce, and insists that she come back to Brooklyn to contest it in person, believing that he will succeed in making her fall back in love with him. As she wanders out to the Irish seashore and looks out over the sea, she contemplates her choices,.....FIN

None of the above takes away from the deeply moving and affecting performance of Saoirse Ronan, who had me tearful for much of the movie. And the movie does raise the interesting question as to whether a woman can love two men equally at the same time.

The key to this film lies, in part, in understanding the meaning of the title. "The Last Sentence" is an ambiguous translation of the Swedish because a "last sentence" might refer to the last words a man writes. Instead, "sentence" here means the "judgment" one passes on a man who has died--a judgment that endures longer than the judgments that were passed on a man while he was alive.

And this citation of the "Hávamál" (an Old Norse 13th-century poem) has a special resonance in light of a toast proposed by Torgny Segerstedt early in the film: Segerstedt remarks something to the effect that we have a sacred duty to tell the truth in public matters, but no such duty in our private affairs.

Jan Troell has thus given us a portrait of Torgny Segerstedt as a man who fiercely refused to say anything other than the truth about Hitler and Nazism, but who, at the same time, was incapable of acting in a truthful and caring fashion in his private life--a man who seemingly had a deeper attachment to his dogs than to any of the people who deeply loved him.

And Troell has perhaps highlighted the shortcomings in Segerstedt's personal relationships precisely because he wants the viewer to sense this tension in the final judgment we place on the life of a man. Do Segerstedt's attempts to stir the conscience of the Swedes through his writings on the horrors of Nazism cancel out whatever negative judgment we might pass on his conduct as a father, husband or lover?

Maybe Troell poses just such a question because he himself may sense that he's nearing the end of his own life. And so what Troell wants, perhaps, is for us to realize that we are all faced with the question of the measure of a person's life and the final judgment to be passed on that life: what weight to give to the life one has lived in public, visible to all, or to the life that one has lived in the shadows (filled with love and affection or not) of one's private life?

This documentary gives us a lot of hand-wringing and conscience-searching about "doing the right thing" towards the thousands of southern Vietnamese who had collaborated with the American war effort. We are made to feel the gut-wrenching decisions made by Americans as to who would be evacuated and who would be left behind to face retaliation for their collaboration with the enemy. And, in the end, we are meant to feel re-assured that Americans are good people at heart, who "truly cared" about the fate of the inhabitants of southern Vietnam. But this story of the human tragedy that unfolded over a few days in late April 1975 is a deceptive snapshot of the big picture.

Vietnam had been a united country for centuries before the defeat of the French in 1954 (France had occupied Vietnam as a colony of the French Empire since 1887). The Geneva Accords of 1954, which ended domination by the French, specified a temporary division of the country into a north and south--with the provision that elections would be held within 2 years to reunify the country. But Pres. Eisenhower admitted, "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader." And so the US and its puppet regime in the south saw to it that no elections were held.

The so-called Republic of South Vietnam was a corrupt regime that had virtually no legitimacy, even in the south. It was comprised of elites drawn from the very small Catholic minority (6-8%), collaborationists with the previous French colonial regime, high-ranking military officers, wealthy landowners, and the businessmen, large and small, who had contractual dealings with the US. Its narrow base of support in the population meant that sooner or later the US would have to intervene militarily in a massive way in order to prop it up--which is what Pres. Johnson ordered, beginning in 1963.

And so, for more than 10 years the US ravaged Vietnam to keep it from "going Communist". There are still people in the US who think we should have gone further in the carnage and devastation of that small country in order to "win the war" and "save Vietnam from the Communists"--though one wonders how many people would have been left to save and what would have been left of Vietnam as a habitable place if we had unleashed the full destructive force of the US military. As it was, nearly 3 million Vietnamese were killed, hundreds of thousands wounded and maimed for life, entire cities laid to waste, and a countryside left infested with toxic agents and land mines.

Once the US discovered that the Vietnam War was destroying morale and discipline among its own troops (who, finding themselves surrounded on all sides by "the enemy", lashed out by committing scores of war crimes against the civilian population of Vietnam--see the My Lai massacre as an example), even the war hawks of the Nixon administration realized it was time for an "exit strategy". But shortly after the US pull-out, the morale of the army of the so-called Republic of South Vietnam dropped through the floor--and that should have come as no surprise since most of its soldiers had either been press-ganged into service or were there just to collect their paycheck. That army simply disintegrated in the face of Vietnamese who knew what they were fighting for: to liberate their country from a foreign invader.

So now we can return to the meaning of those last days in April 1975. All of that hand-wringing and conscience-searching--a truly sincere desire on the part of Americans to "do the right thing" towards the Vietnamese whose lives we had compromised--falls terribly short of the mark. What is lacking is a recognition that we as Americans were responsible for that horror--and not just during the "last days in Vietnam". Both the director and the people she interviewed seemed oblivious to the fact that what happened in those last days was the playing-out of the final scene of more than 10 years of incalculable suffering and hardship we had inflicted on the people of Vietnam.

There's a paradox or dissonance that lies at the core of this film: on the one hand, Didier is passionately in love with America's bluegrass music; but, on the other, that very same music is imbued with a religious fervor and vision of the world that he rejects equally passionately. Throughout the film we see him refusing to accept any interpretation of the happenings in the natural world (whether coming from his wife or his daughter) that has the odor of religiosity--only a non-sentimental, scientific explanation will satisfy him. And at the same time we see him singing with soulfulness the lyrics of songs sung by Bill Monroe and the Carter family, all of whom were deeply religious folks and whose songs expressed that religious devotion.

It's no coincidence that this dissonance is framed by a story of great personal loss and tragedy. The explanation given by science for why we suffer such loss is pale and offers little-to-no solace to the bereaved. This doesn't mean we must accept the tales religion tells us about such loss: "Such is God's inscrutable will and we can look forward to a day when we will be reunited again" (the family circle will be unbroken again).

When people are "wild with grief" and hunger emotionally for the kind of comfort only "the eternal" can bring (Thornton Wilder), our vocabulary shifts from rational, scientific discourse to the holy, a discourse better suited to what is ineffable in the human experience.

And so we see Didier turn to the religious vocabulary of discourse found in bluegrass lyrics as a kind of salve for his afflicted spirit--without, for all that, the suggestion that he has laid aside modern science.

Much blather about "bravery", "heroism", "valor", etc. ad infinitum, in the discussion of this movie, but the fact of the matter is that none of these qualities comes into play when your back is against the wall and you have to fight for your life or die. After all, were the fighting men given a choice as to whether they might prefer to retreat into Natal and spare themselves a pointless battle and slaughter? If they'd said, "I think I'd prefer to take a pass on this battle," they would have been summarily shot (indeed, one soldier was shot for exercising his good judgment and attempting to clear out). Or did they have the option, once they viewed the overwhelming Zulu forces arrayed against them, to surrender? Changes are, again, they would have been executed, in this case by their captors. Real heroism et al. comes into play when you willingly put yourself into harm's way, and that ain't the case here. These were simply individuals fighting for their lives.

And they were fighting a battle that was stupid and useless. Rorke's Drift was located on the border between the Zulu Empire and Natal, and the Zulus had no territorial ambitions vis-a'-vis Natal. As it happens, the Brits chose to withdraw their forces from Zululand after the debacle of their first invasion. Six months later they returned to Zululand and conquered the Zulus and "pacified" their territory.

So, in the end, the hundreds of Zulu lives lost and the 2 score Anglo lives lost were lost for nothing. This isn't a matter of hindsight--it's a matter of the kind of stupidity and pig-headedness commonplace in warfare at the level of military command. And so instead of celebrating Lt. Chard for his "bravery" and "heroic stance", we should see him more in the light of "we were waist-deep in the big muddy and the damned fool said to push on."

P.S.: A BBC investigative report into the battle found that Lt. Chard was described by his fellow officers as "a most useless officer fit for nothing."

In this film, Visconti not only brought a lavish attention to historical detail, but he also put forward the ideologically challenging idea that human erotic passions (in particular, Alida Valli's grand passion) could take center stage and even upstage the unfolding of Il Risorgimento, the series of wars that Italians celebrate as laying the foundation for the creation of the Italian State. The scenes showing a demoralized Italian (read: "piemontese") army, in retreat (Custoza, 1866) in the face of yet another Austrian counter-offensive, were too much for the censors: as a vindication of Italian honor, they insisted that the film include the execution of Mahler. But Visconti was clearly in the camp of those who rejected military events, victorious or otherwise, as the cornerstone of Italian national identity. Forget the Veneto, and make love instead, seemed to be the hidden message.

The director presents a fable or allegory of the condition of Russia, pointing above all to the devastating vestiges of serfdom, an institution that was ended 150 years ago (at the same historical moment as slavery in the U.S.) but continues to shape the mentalities of the masses rendering them greedy, violent, lazy, cunning, underhanded, and superstitious (for their "piety" and "faith" have nothing in common with a code of morals, only with the practice of magic). Drink is their main source of entertainment, and their affect and entire way of being remain primitive. They are loyal at most to their clan and to the local "band of brothers," but show no signs of civic-mindedness or a connection to a larger collectivity (community, class, nation, profession, etc.--all of which are essentially absent as social forces) They resist the dominant strata by means of the "resistance of the weak"--outward silence and acquiescence combined with subterfuges and covert acts of violence. This wretched subaltern class has a matching dominant class: greedy, hedonistic, lazy, and lacking in compassion. Because of the long-term effects of serfdom, Russia has failed to produce hegemonic classes, neither a hegemonic bourgeoisie nor a hegemonic proletariat. A social formation based on serfdom as the central relation of production cannot produce legitimate ruling classes or modern forms of consciousness and action. (written by R.Garner)

Taking his cue from a citation of George Steiner to the effect that it is not history that we remember ("was eigenlich geschehen ist"), but the images of that past time, Marker has taken liberties with the official images of the Soviet era to construct a montage that takes pot shots at the rift between the official images of the USSR and the reality. Easy enough to do, but this hardly illuminates the historical truth about the circumstances under which an attempt was made to fulfill the dreams of Bolsheviks like Medvedkin--namely to raise, in little more than a blink of the eye, the cultural and material standard of living of the degraded and oppressed peasantry and proletariat of Czarist Russia. In a sense, his homage to Medvedkin ends up demeaning the utopian spirit of the latter and reduces, perhaps unwittingly, Medvedkin's endeavors to something foolhardy and ingenuous at best.

I'd often wondered why the progressive intellectuals of the '50s had such disdain for the writings of Spillane. But after viewing this film and Ralph Meeker's performance as Mike Hammer (my first exposure to Spillane and his "good guy"), I've come to understand the reason why. This is a brutish detective whose first response to a challenge is violent excess; there's none of the subtlety of character that you find in the private dicks of Chandler and Hammett; it's shoot first and ask questions later, and you'd better follow that dictum or you'll be wiped out yourself. Mike Hammer is a character who fits in perfectly with the notion of the US as a gunslinger patrolling the world for bad guys. You'd better keep your finger on the trigger, be prepared to launch an all-out attack on short notice into whatever venue the enemy has crept, and forget the rule book they taught you in Sunday School 'cause it's a no-holds-barred war on the "bad guys", and THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

I found this documentary immensely moving, because it captured beautifully the way in which the West Point class of '67 was blindsided by the Vietnam War and by the terrible toll that war took on its participants, both in body and in soul. I was stunned at first by how the documentary was so candid about that disastrous war, recounting the disillusionment (not to say a sense of betrayal) of the cadets turned war combatants. And yet, in the end, it pulled back from the brink it needed to push over if it really wanted to get at the truth of the matter. (And perhaps it's asking too much of a documentary that is part of a project that is described as "an oral history of West Point".) For the truth of the matter is that none of the wars undertaken by the US since WWII can really be described as wars to "defend our liberties". None of the countries we've invaded (Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, & Afghanistan) could in any sense be considered a threat to our freedom. And here's where the documentary came up short: It couldn't quite bring itself to make clear that all that loss of life (more than 120,000 American lives lost and hundreds of thousands of lives dismembered physically and mentally--as well as the death dealt to 4 to 6 million non-Americans) was pointless and to no good purpose.

Instead, in the final third of the documentary we are told that our soldiers who fought in Vietnam (but the same rhetoric is used to describe our soldiers in all the other wars since 1950) were "heroes" and "noble warriors". There can be no disputing the men's physical courage, nor should we fail to commiserate with them for the bodily suffering and mental anguish they endured. But that is not enough to qualify them as "heroes" and "noble warriors". If it were, we would not find it unseemly for the Germans and the Japanese to honor their fallen soldiers of WWII as "heroes". To qualify as a "hero" or a "noble warrior", one must be acting on behalf of a just and good cause. And none of those post-WWII wars truly qualifies. They were fought for petty political gain by insecure Presidents (Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan) or out of convictions stemming from ideological and geo-political misconceptions (Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq). Furthermore, the US soldiers who invaded countries which had never fired a shot at the US were bound to find themselves in a war where the line between the civilian population and enemy combatants was blurred--a formula for the commission of atrocities and war crimes on a massive scale.

And so, in the end, our poor soldiers were not "heroes" but victims swallowed up by the designs of the powerful. One does not "honor" victims, one grieves for their needless suffering.

One of those films that falls in the category of "a celebration of life" (films falling into this category are a sure bet for serious Oscar consideration for Best Foreign Film). This film annoyed me a bit because it seemed to suggest that happiness is to be found simply by cultivating our relationships to one another and keeping connected. But there's also a big wide world out there, beyond our little Dutch village, and it plays a huge role in our chances of finding some measure of happiness--and it's something we ignore at our peril. Best feature of this feminist fable was its immanentism: an absolute refusal to accept the notion that there is any reality beyond the sentient existence we experience as we pass through life--so that all we can know and enjoy and hope for is contained in the endless cycle of Birth, Love, and Death.

This film captured perfectly that quality of American life which we choose to hide from ourselves, but which surprises none of us all that much when it manifests itself: The desire to grab a gun, break loose, hit the road, and then just let things play out as they come along. There are many more people in our midst like this than we care to admit, and many, many more who are no more than a hair's breath away from taking that fateful first step. And we are fascinated by this tale precisely because most Americans sense within themselves (more often than they care to acknowledge) that desire to drop everything, clear out and start afresh. This film is the dark side of that impulse.

I found this film remarkable for its ability to stir feelings of sympathy for a kind of character who seems utterly brutish and unredeemable. Jacky is a brute, the kind of man who all too often resorts to abominable acts of violence when he's aroused. And yet, thanks to the portrait of Jacky drawn by the director and by the actor, we cannot help but feel great sorrow for him. Yes, Jacky does terrible, terrible things over the course of the film, but by the end I was sobbing for him. Maybe it's simply "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner", but whatever that emotion was I felt at the film's end it was something that revealed to me (and one would hope to all who see this film) a terrifying and redemptive bond of common humanity.

It's no coincidence that Kiarostami chose Italy as his filming location (apart from an unobjectionable desire to spend some time in Tuscany): It's another replay of the themes of Pirandello, and, in particular, the ones we find in Pirandello's plays such as "Six Characters in Search of an Author,", "Cosi' e'(se vi pare)" ("That's the way it is--if you think so"), and "Il giuoco delle parti" ("The 'Let's play a role' Game"). In all of these works we get a vision of life which suggests that life itself is just one big game of role-switching, with all that that suggests about the illusiveness of reality. Nothing is as it seems, and we begin to suspect that it's a fruitless endeavor to seek out that "true" or "authentic" self which undergirds all the "certified copies" in play throughout our lives. And just as in Pirandello's plays, so too with Kiarostami we get the dramatic denouement: What is initially playful repartee gradually takes on the look of a high-stakes game and eventually careens wildly out of control.

This movie couldn't be more salient and relevant to our times. The "John Doe Clubs" had the appearance of embodying the disgruntled sentiments of the "Little Man", just like the "Tea Party Movement" today (which one quipster rightly has called "an exercise in mass false consciousness"). These movements of the "little man" have a long history in the US and Europe (in the US, the "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s & Father Coughlin of the 1930s, in France, the "Poujadistes", in Italy the "Qualunquisti"); and all of them end up diverting attention away from the real enemies of little people, the fat cats at the top--in Capra's movie wonderfully incarnated in Edward Arnold's character, D.B.Norton (the real-life counterparts today to D.B. Norton, and who've done a fab job of manipulating "the little people", are the Koch brothers). Capra rightly sensed that the little man's rage at being buffeted about by forces bigger than himself was exploited by the fascist movements of Europe to create right-wing mass parties which, in the end, served to protect the privileges of the wealthiest social classes from revolutionary egalitarian movements.

If you're not Italian, chances are you're not going to get this. Without a grasp of the historical, political, and geo-linguistic contexts, most non-Italian audiences are unable to appreciate it. The film will just seem vile and crude (mainly because of the language), and with nothing to recommend it beyond a random comedic bit by Benigni. So here's an attempt to make it palatable and even enjoyable:

First, a note on the language. The film is set in the area near Prato (neighboring city of Florence) where Benigni grew up. The Italian that is spoken there is the direct descendant of Dante's Italian—in fact, modern Italian is an elaboration of the dialect that was spoken in Tuscany. In general, Italians outside of Tuscany enjoy hearing the particular "vernacular" that is spoken in the region (particularly around Florence), because it seems richer and more colorful than the rather flat-sounding, standardized Italian spoken by everyone else. And one of the things that makes it so colorful is its profanity. Tuscans use profanity in a way that almost "de-profanes" it—converting it into an art form that rivals the most sublime oratorical rhetoric. So when Benigni launches into a seemingly endless stream of profanities (the Italian word is "turpiloquio"—take "colloquy", drop the "col" and add the first syllable of "turpitude", and you get the idea), he's performing a centuries-old Tuscan ritual. As he goes on and on with his "bestemmie", his recitation begins to sound more and more like a reading of a canto from Dante's "Inferno". The sounds are no longer so much offensive as they are the verbal expression of a soothing trance. And, indeed, "Cioni Mario" has recourse to their magical cathartic power whenever he feels more at a loss and more adrift than usual in a world that he and his pals define as "la miseria" (a wretchedness that is not just material but also moral and cultural).

The historical context is provincial Italy of the mid-1970s. Gone are the incandescent years of strikes and student occupations that energized the Italy of the late '60s, and the kind of agitated existence that characterized the years of the great economic boom. Italy has begun to settle into a kind of pallid and stale self-complacency that was to spawn (as a reaction against it) the Red Brigades on the left and (much later as the epitome of it) Berlusconi on the right. For some reason, the DVD of this film drops the first 5 minute, in which Giuseppe Bertolucci, the film's director, plays a passerby looking over the posters promoting the latest porno flicks to hit the little town where "Cioni Mario" and his pals live. They symbolize the stultifying, mindless existence that much of provincial Italy was living in this interlude.

As for the political context, it's important to know that this part of Italy was situated in the "Red Belt" where the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was supported by a large majority of Tuscans. The photo pinned to a scarecrow and so admired by "Cioni Mario" is that of Enrico Berlinguer, elected as secretary general of the party in 1973 and who shortly afterward announced the party's "historic compromise" designed to integrate the party into the mainstream of Italian political life. Berlinguer as scarecrow symbolizes the ambiguous status of the party and its new strategy: committed at one and the same time to working within the system and to a "revolutionary" transformation of the system. The so-called "debate on the equality of women" that takes place at the PCI's community center is one of the more hilarious moments of the film, and shows how the party's rank & file is hardly in a position to grasp the subtleties of the party's new strategy. Note how the audience all gets up to leave as soon as the bingo game hour has come to an end and the "cultural hour" is announced. And the moronic level of "debate" contrasts mightily with the center's name: Majakovsky, an iconic literary figure of revolutionary Russia. Equally hilarious I found to be Cioni's simple-minded explication of Berlinguer's role in the Revolution. To understand how laughable this is, I'll re-translate some of the language: "All that Berlinguer has to do is to give us the green light…just show up unannounced at the TV station, 9 o'clock in the evening, with everyone in front of the screen, and say 'Good evening, comrades,…..go!" The Italian word is "via" and it's the same word that's used to start a race, as in "on your mark, get set, go!"

But this criticism of fuzzy thinking within the ranks the PCI does not imply that Benigni was not and is not a committed leftist--and his warm embrace of Berlinguer at a political meeting in the '70s is a well-known moment in recent Italian political history.

Addendum: I've added in the message boards for this film the Italian text of Bozzone's poetic ode to "losers" and Cioni's notion of Berlinguer's role in the "Revolution".

You might expect this film to be another comedic romp with Toto' in the lead. I didn't find that much humor in it actually. It was much more of a critique of the mean-spiritedness (meschinita') that had gripped much of Italy in the post-war period leading up to the "boom". Not one single likable character apart from Toto' himself, and all of them absorbed in their petty maneuverings. The highlight of the baseness of the characters was, of course, the revelation that some had taken advantage of the round-up of Roman Jews in 1944 to grab their property--and then 10 years later refused to surrender it to the survivors.

There's this much to be said for this movie from the ranks of Italy's new young directors and actors: The quality of the acting was at least one notch above the usual fare, which almost never transcends the clichéd facial expressions and intonations we expect to find in TV dramas and sit-coms. This new generation of actors and directors was raised on US television imports ("telefilms") and Latin-American soaps, and it definitely shows in the uninspired and uninspiring quality of their work. And one gets the impression that 90% of them come from Parioli, a very well-to-do neighborhood of Rome, that would be the rough equivalent of coming from Santa Monica, Lake Forest IL, or Westport Conn—all those perfectly groomed faces coming from families of the Italian haute bourgeoisie with unlimited funds to advance their children's "acting career." If it weren't for Elio Germano as Accio (as well as Luca Zingaretti as Accio's fascist mentor and Anna Bonaiuto as his wife), this movie would probably fall into the same category of banalized film-making with all the rest.

But Germano's performance is not enough to salvage a film that fails to rise above a rating of "mediocrity +". Certainly it was an interesting idea to situate the action in Latina, a city built from scratch by Mussolini's fascist regime after it had drained the surrounding swamp land (the "bonifica" that was one of Fascism's highly touted achievements). All of the city's architecture was inspired by fascist "monumental" design.

Regrettably, Luchetti has done little of interest to exploit this setting for his family drama other than to bring up the same old cliché of opposing extremisms (the thuggery of the neo-fascist right vs. the banditry and targeted terrorism of the extra-parliamentary left). And the drama of the conflict between these two extremisms is used altogether too much to drive the plot forward. Some Italian commentators disliked this film because it seemed to go over the same old ground in the same old way—when it was time, presumably, to move on to new subjects. But the problem was not that it rehashed Italian history—the problem was the "hash." Bellocchio, after all, did a wonderful job of re-interpreting to Italians the experience of the Red Brigades in his "Buongiorno,Notte".

But here the audience is simply given a choice between fascist hooliganism and a lunatic left, when actually the situation in Italy in the 60s and 70s was much more complicated and nuanced. Millions of Italians belonged to parties and movements that were seriously committed to a progressive transformation of Italy that did not involve knee-cappings and assassinations. And so Luchetti ends up confirming (perhaps despite himself) the American/Berlusconiano vision of the world: "Forget about ideology—it's all about individual freedom and authenticity in your personal relationships." And finally we can see the effects of Berlusconi's TV stations and their ilk also in the movie's script. After 20, I stopped counting how many times the characters said, "Ma Che Cazzo Dici?"("What the f#%k are you saying?"). It is a measure of the moronization of the Italian public under the sway of Berlusconi and Berlusconian media that the scriptwriters think that they can get a laugh out of an Italian audience with this phrase each and every time it is said—and sadly they're probably right.