Forbes500

I'd been looking forward to seeing this movie for so long I was bound to be slightly disappointed. And indeed I was. But I loved parts of it all the same. Silvio Orlando's performance as a bankrupt producer, for one, was magnificent. I thought his three or four minutes in "Aprile" were the highlight of that movie, and in "The Son's Room" he practically stole the show. So I was delighted to see Moretti giving him a leading role. Throughout the movie, you can see on his face the effect of the blows and of the suffering that have been his lot, but despite it all he's good-hearted and optimistic and enthusiastic about his work. The depiction of his growing friendship with the young director played by Trinca is also moving and natural.

And while our Italian friends may be known worldwide for their cultivation of "il dolce farniente," "Il caimano" happens to be a celebration of the joys of work. Some of its finest scenes are simply depictions of Orlando's producer talking to the people he needs to talk to get his movie made. In "The Son's Room," too, some of the best scenes involved Moretti's therapist at work, talking to his patients (one of them played by Silvio Orlando, as it happens). And now that I think about it, some of the Italian books I've been reading lately (by Primo Levi and Laura Grimaldi) also celebrate work. Strange. And here I was thinking that the only people who loved work in Europe were the Germans ("Arbeit macht frei" and all that).

Mindful of the gruesome fate of the critic in the B-movie excerpt shown at the beginning of "The Crocodile," I'll remain silent, for the most part, about the things I didn't like as much. But I still can't help wondering why our Italian friends throw such hissy fits about this former prime minister of theirs. Did his companies launder millions in ill-gotten gains? Did he corrupt the judiciary and the police and muzzle his critics? Did he make a whole generation of Italians cynics? Who cares! That's what politicians are supposed to do, isn't it? At least his government had the guts to ban smoking in bars and restaurants, and for that alone he can steal all the millions he wants!

Whether mine or the movie's I'm not sure. In any case, when I saw this movie in Buenos Aires on its theatrical release, I was kind of disappointed. I'd seen _Caro Diario_ just a little earlier and thought that _Aprile_ lacked the freshness of the earlier movie. Plus, I found the stuff about Berlusconi and the elections kind of boring.

But after having seen most of Moretti's other movies, I took another look at _Aprile_ and realized that it's a wise and moving--if occasionally annoying--piece of work, after all. Certainly no less an achievement than _Caro Diario_ or _The Son's Room_. And if, like me, you've seen other Moretti movies, you realize that things that might seem incoherent on first viewing, such as musicals about dancing pastry chefs, are in fact long-time obsessions.

In his movies, Moretti's character is always surrounded by people: fellow leftists, old friends, family, parishioners, patients, and so on. But despite all these social ties, there's also a basic solitude that Moretti explores in his movies. I think that's why I like them.

Oh, and one more thing: he always makes Italy look gorgeous.

I came to Nanni Moretti from his wise and witty later movies _Caro Diario_ and _The Son's Room_. So in _La Messa_ I was surprised to see a bitter, angry, and quite selfish Moretti in the role of a suburban priest who seems--much like the psychoanalyst of _The Son's Room_--utterly incapable of helping those who put themselves in his care.

There's lots to like in this movie: the somewhat decrepit but nonetheless lovely settings around Rome, the nods to other great Italian movies (Moretti, in his cassock, playing soccer with the school kids, calls to mind Rossellini's _Rome, Open City_), the intense and largely convincing story. I found particularly compelling a courtroom confrontation involving a judge, a defendant, and Moretti's priest as a witness. I was, on the whole, moved by Moretti's take on the priest's dealings with his brothers-in-arms from what were presumably their days as leftist activists.

On a final note, people are always comparing Moretti to Woody Allen. I don't see why. Their movies have almost nothing in common. I have never seen Allen as anything more than a second-rate standup comic, or as a caricature. Moretti, on the other hand, is a human being.

It's really unbelievable that a movie as stupid as "The Pianist" can win major prizes and make the IMDb top fifty. (Whenever I catch myself thinking that big no-no, that there must be a Jewish conspiracy in the entertainment industry--as depicted in "The Protocols of the Morons of Sodom"--I must remind myself that plenty of awful gentile movies have also won Oscars and palmes d'or and whatnot.)

It's not so much that "The Pianist" is boring or unwatchable. In fact, it's entertaining enough as you watch it--those actors who look more like schoolboys from some prestigious English boarding school than starving Polish Jews, the mean Nazis, those duplicitous, red-cheeked Polacks. Among the many other stupid things about this movie that I've forgotten since I saw it is that everybody is always speaking in English. Now there must be hundreds of holocaust/evil-German movies out there and in most of them all the Germans and their victims speak English! Come on! It's just ridiculous. Let's have a little authenticity, Roman.

In short, if you've read Primo Levi's subtle and very readable memoirs about life in the camps in Poland, "The Pianist" will seem one-dimensional, banal, and even as evil as the occupation and persecution it purports to denounce.

Claire Denis's movies seem to fall into one of two categories: the violent and bloody or the quiet and intimate. "L'Intrus" definitely falls into the first category, but it's not so awful as "Trouble Every Day" or "J'ai pas sommeil."

Now, ever since I saw "Chocolat," I've made it a point to see every new movie Denis makes. And I have always been disappointed. "L'Intrus" was no exception. She has yet to make a movie as personal and as moving as her first one.

You get a lot of the Denis regulars: an older but still magnificent Béatrice Dalle who seems to be in the movie only to show off her full lips, the gap between her teeth, her ample cleavage, and a couple of nice coats; the black guy from "Trouble Every Day" and "J'ai pas sommeil," Grégoire Colin, and that Lithuanian or Russian girl. Michel Subor's character was interesting enough, but the camera lingered on him at such length that I got annoyed by that curly forelock of hair hanging over his forehead and was relieved when, somewhere in Korea, I think, he finally got it cut.

There was certainly some action--gruesome murders, a man's search for a son--and there may even have been a plot, but one viewing wasn't enough to figure it out, and two viewings are, I fear, out of the question. For one thing, the score was jarring and obtrusive (as in "Beau Travail"). For another, the seasons changed too abruptly, leaving you even more confused about what was going on. Oh, there were a few pretty shots, and if you liked "Friday Evening" with its shots of the folds in heavy drapes and bedsheets, you might appreciate the aesthetics of "L'Intrus." Otherwise, steer clear.

I saw this movie in French and it's possible I missed something crucial. But the dialogue in a Denis movie rarely amounts to more than five pages, double spaced and with ample margins. In "Chocolat" the silence is sublime; in "L'Intrus," it's just dull.

Didn't really have much of an opinion of Lynch until __The Straight Story__. I'd seen a few of his movies, liking some all right and not caring too much for others. But after being subjected to Farnsworth (to be fair, he wasn't too objectionable), Spacek (she has always made me want to puke), and cast (forgettable) in this piece of claptrap, I have sworn off Lynch for life.

The problem wasn't so much that the movie was boring--which it was--as that it was a bunch of Hollywood types patronizing the residents of middle America--ah, the salt of the earth! Small frame houses! Screen doors! John Deere caps! The geezers hanging out at the small-town café! Was there a friendly old waitress? Can't remember. But there almost certainly was.

And to top it off there's the stuttering Spacek whose children got taken away from her by the big bad government and we're supposed to feel sorry for her and maybe even cry--boo hoo hoo!--because it's all so sad!

Portraying small-town, middle-America life must be hard for the urban sophisticates who make movies. Even the best recent efforts--John Sayles's __Lone Star__, for example--struggle to get things just right. But __The Straight Story__ doesn't even seem to try. So there's no excuse for it.

"Felix and Lola" may not be quite as good as "Tandem," but I enjoyed it more than some of Leconte's other movies, "French-Fried Vacation," Le Parfum d'Yvonne," or "La Rue des plaisirs," I think it was called. It's clearly a movie along the lines of "The Girl on the Bridge."

Torreton and Gainsbourg were convincing in their leading roles, I thought, and there was the usual Leconte wit in evidence throughout the movie: witness Felix's story about the way he avoided addressing his aunt with you or your so as not to have to decide between "tu" or "vous."

There was joy, too, which is sort of strange, because hardly any of the characters ever laughs or even cracks much more than a sad-looking smile. But on several occasions I found myself smiling and laughing for them. Bravo, Patrice Leconte!

Another great movie from Patrice Leconte. About whom we fans of his can say,

like Michel Mortez, that it's been twenty--what am I saying?--twenty-five years that he's been making fine movies. And while Jean Rochefort's Mortez, with his airs of a "grand seigneur" is a fine character, I was more entranced by Jugnot's Rivetot, the wonderfully human Sancho Panza to Mortez's Don Quixote.

Leconte is an unusual writer and director: supremely intelligent, witty, cool, mature, he nonetheless has the ability to write roles for an actor like Jugnot, who seems at heart, and in the most endearing way, still to be a child. I don't know how Leconte manages this feat. All I can do is marvel.

Was kind of surprised how good this movie was. I can't recall exactly when I realized how much I was liking it, but it may have been during one of Castella's (the bald guy) English lessons with the actress/teacher Clara. Or maybe it was when I realized that the artists, those arbiters of taste, were really getting a good grilling. On second thought, I know when it was: when Castella cursed upon discovering the play he'd been dragged to was in verse!

The rest of the cast was great too, and I know Agnès Jaoui did everything from writing and directing to co-starring, but would it be too much to ask her also to give us an unreserved smile? Just one? Nice work all the same.