Deborah Lipp

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) 5/10
Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) explores the nature of history, truth, image, and showmanship through the vehicle of his famous “Wild West” show in this loosely-based on fact film. Directed by Robert Altman.

When he received his Lifetime Achievement Award, Robert Altman said that he didn’t really consider his movies as separate; as far as he was concerned he’d been making “one long film” throughout his career.

With that in mind, I have to ask myself why I love some of Altman’s movies and dislike others. If they are all one movie—or, more moderately, if they are all stylistically similar, with similar themes—what distinguishes the great from the good from the dull?

An Altman movie is marked by overlapping dialogue in a naturalistic style, and by a sprawling cast. In addition, each is set in a distinct place, and that place is as much the movie as the script and the characters. It makes sense, then, that some Altman films are named for locations—Nashville, Gosford Park—and some take place among a group isolated by their unique location—M*A*S*H, A Prairie Home Companion, Buffalo Bill and the Indians.

The best Altman films have strong locations that inform the characters, and strong characters that allow you to focus on them. In the chaos Altman so loves creating, only the best characters rise above the fray (best as in best-written; fully-realized, not necessarily “best” morally). In the weaker entries, characters are barely sketched before swimming back into the sea of dialogue noise, and the location is unfocused. People in Altman films are often lost; they don’t understand themselves, they are too sad or lonely or foolish to look around and see themselves for who they are. When the film is disjointed, that’s frustrating, when it works, it’s poignant and beautiful.

Not all Altman films are wholly bad or good. Short Cuts had amazing moments and muddy ones; Gosford Park was equal parts mud and dazzle. Buffalo Bill and the Indians has a few minutes here and there of dazzle (with Paul Newman and Will Sampson, that’s a given) but not enough for the price of admission (even for free).

Other than Buffalo Bill himself, the many characters in Buffalo Bill and the Indians are little more than sketches. Annie Oakley is one joke repeated ad infinitum. Sitting Bull is a foil. The entire thing swirls around Buffalo Bill’s ego and his weak, drunken meditations on the Meaning Of It All. But he is poor at meditation, and the sprawl of set and cast is never justified. Indeed, some of the other characters (ably played by the likes of Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster, and Kevin McCarthy) might have added considerable interest had any flesh been stuffed into their costumes.

Here’s an idea: Rent Nashville.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006) 10/10
An old-fashioned radio show has its last performance after a corporate buy-out of the station. Directed by Robert Altman.

This is, to an extent, an if-you-like-Altman movie. So many of his are. It’s probably available to you to walk out of the theater and say, “What was that about?” You shouldn’t do that, but you could.

What it’s about is radio, and people, and fragility, and connection, and the random hand of death, and change, and all sorts of things that people might experience in a few hours thrown together. A group of people who have been working together, as performers and backstage, for many years, on their last night. They love, they fight, they hope for more, they settle for less. Possibilities become manifest, and some things just aren’t meant to be.

The backdrop of all of this is a scaled-down version of Garrison Keillor’s famous radio show. In the fictional version, it is a local show heard only on a local station. The musicians aren’t famous; they’ll be singing at churches and county fairs when they go off the air. The crux of the movie is the backstage interactions.

Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are on-hand as Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson—the Johnson Sisters were once a foursome of children, now they are an aging duet, still doing the same songs. Their performances are flawless; Yolanda is fragile, always fluttering away from knowing what she’s saying at any moment, but grounded in her music (and Streep, it turns out, is a wonderful singer). Her sister is solid, supportive, and deeply connected to their past. She cares for Yolanda and harmonizes with her won weaker voice. Yolanda’s daughter (Lindsay Lohan, in a wonderfully natural performance) plays at being depressed and disdainful.

When we’re not watching backstage interactions, there’s the onstage performances (wonderful) to enjoy. There’s also Kevin Kline, who plays Guy Noir in slapstick fashion. On the radio, Guy Noir is a comedy bit; a take-off on radio mysteries of the 40s. In the movie, he’s a real detective who fancies himself written by Raymond Chandler while he closes his fingers into drawers and knocks over hat stands. Also on the scene is a mysterious woman in white (Virginia Madsen) who is more than she seems. Her mystical presence works surprisingly well in the mix.

The set design deserves its own paragraph. It’s amazing, the kind of thing I want to take home on DVD so I can study the details at 3x zoom. Dressing rooms are like a history of broadcast radio, as well as a personal history of each character.

The Altman movies that I love do a lot of different things, and then bring them all together. Nashville, The Player, and A Prairie Home Companion do this. The current movie mixes music, drama, comedy, allegory, and a whole bunch of folks. It’s a delightful stew and I’ll be happy to watch it again.

Fire (1996) 8/10
Sita (Nandita Das), a young Indian bride, comes to live with her husband, his brother and sister-in-law, and their mother. Soon the sisters-in-law find themselves drawn to each other.

I don’t know if writer/director Deepa Mehta, an Indian expatriate, knows country music at all, but when watching Fire I was repeatedly reminded of the song Angel From Montgomery:

If dreams were lightning
Thunder was desire
This old house would have burned down
A long time ago

The family in Fire lives in a house that would surely burn down.

Netflix has Fire categorized as “Gay and Lesbian,” and certainly it is the story of an affair between two women. But everyone in Fire is dealing with desire, repressed and expressed, and its consequences.

It is silence that rules the roost, as personified by the matriarch of the house, the elderly mother of the two husbands, who has been rendered mute by a stroke. Biji rings a bells, nods or shakes her head, but cannot speak, bearing silent witness to all that goes on in her home. And a lot is going on! Radha’s husband Ashok appears to be saintly, but his obsession with serving his guru extracts a price from his marriage. Sita’s husband Jatin has not given up the girlfriend he had before consenting to an arranged marriage. He barely looks at his frustrated bride. And the servant, Mundu, seethes with sexual frustration, and doesn’t mind expressing it in front of Biji, since she can’t complain.

Some movie fans wonder if Sita and Radha (Shabana Azmi) are lesbians, or are bisexuals, or are driven to each other simply out of loneliness. That may be beside the point, and beyond the scope of the film. Sita tells Radha that their language has no words for their love; the women are in a process of discovering their love and their identity, and are not really at the point yet of categorizing it.

More important is the constriction that runs their lives, and their efforts to free themselves of it. At one point Ashok tells Radha that his mother is ringing her bell. About to answer the call, as she always does, Radha looks at her husband and says “Why don’t you go?” “Of course!” he says, and goes to his mother. It had occurred to neither, before, that Radha was other than the servant, the one who responded, the one who fulfilled needs without expressing her own; but Sita and their affair has changed all that.

I don’t think that Fire is a brilliant movie. It introduces its family too quickly; it is rather hard to determine that Ashok and Jatin are brothers, for instance. Nandita Das is a mediocre actress, although Shabana Azmi makes up for it with a luminous performance. But the story is so powerful, with its silences so expressive, that I found myself captivated, regardless. There are still too few Indian movies that have naturalism and immediacy on their side, and the way that Fire slaps the face of tradition, both in India and in Indian film, is striking (no pun intended).

Okay, this has a lot to do with the way Hollywood processes faces. But Geez Pete!

Okay, you tell me: Are you 100% sure which is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and which is Cillian Murphy?

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) 6/10
When a “cure” for mutation is developed, the conflict between mutants who are trying to co-exist with humans—led by Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his X-Men—and mutants who feel they are at war with humans—led be Magneto (Ian McKellan) and his badasses—flares up. Meanwhile, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), believed dead at the end of X2 (but we knew better) is back but not very nice. So not nice, in fact, that she gets seriously sexy with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), which makes this movie worth the ticket price.

Here’s the thing: X-Men: The Last Stand is not a good movie. Just not. Director Brett Ratner is a hack. The movie stands still in a dozen spots where it should move, looks away in any number of places where it should zoom in, and meanders around as if hoping it will, perhaps by Brownian motion, be looking at the right thing at the right time. Furthermore, Ratner is unable to solve the problem of superpowers, relying instead on the point-and-stare model. Dark Phoenix is here, folks. Arguably the most talked-about character in comic history. And how do we know she’s here (other than that kiss)? She gets a new dress and she stares off into space. Seriously.

Here’s the other thing: It is beyond Ratner’s powers to ruin this series, at least not in one movie. » Read more..

The Station Agent (2003) 10/10
Fin (Peter Dinklage) is a train enthusiast and a dwarf. When his friend and employer (at a model train store) dies, he leaves Fin a piece of land in a small town that has a train depot on it. There, Fin’s solitude is disturbed by other lonely locals and he begins, initially against his will, to form relationships.

See, I’ve given it ten points, and I’ve described it, and now I just don’t know what to say. The Station Agent is such a lovely, gentle movie, that talking about it seems, to quote Patricia Clarkson’s character Olivia, “loud.”

I’ve written about The Station Agent before. Months after seeing it, it remains present for me, something that doesn’t always happen; I’m not always a good judge of how I will feel about a movie months or years in the future, but The Station Agent has established itself as a favorite. Having been away from television and theaters for a week, I thought I’d pull up an older review. While I was away, I spent time with two dear friends, sisters, who are dwarfs, so I was reminded of this movie.

Peter Dinklage is one of my favorite character actors. His expressiveness, his voice, his beautiful eyes, allow you to move past looking at his dwarfism, to looking at him. That his dwarfism is part of the story is unavoidable, but as Fin learns, dwarfism is just one of many things that can leave you lonely and a little lost. Grief is another, and Olivia is grieving. Just not fitting in is another, and Joe (Bobby Cannavale), the coffee-and-snack truck guy who parks opposite Fin’s station, is a Hispanic New Yorker with no ability to connect to his rural New Jersey customers. In Fin (who is from Hoboken), he senses an urban kindred, and pushes friendship on his reluctant neighbor.

As Fin, Joe, and Olivia form a trio full of silences and hesitations, they also begin to look out for one another in unexpected ways. As well, Fin’s train enthusiasm becomes the most interesting oddity about him, and people begin (in baby steps) to view him more as the ‘train guy’ than the ‘little guy.’

Early in the movie, we meet Fin’s “train chaser” friends, and I was struck by what big geeks they were. I was reminded of Ghost World, and its LP-collector geeks. One could go off on a tangent about geeks and geekiness. Trekkies and Trekkers take a lot of heat, but the truth is, any interest looks bizarre to the people who don’t have it, and oddity isn’t the worst thing. Maybe boredom is a much worse thing—the boredom experienced by people who don’t have intense interests. The Station Agent is very much about oddity; experienced from the inside and stared at from the outside. But mostly it’s about the necessity of friendship and connection.

All the President’s Men (1976) 10/10
Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) investigate the Watergate break-in and discover connections to the White House.

We live in a moment when we must be reminded of the importance of speaking truth to power. Further, we live in a time when the media (including Bob Woodward) behaves like the lap dog of the White House. In such a time, All the President’s Men is a powerful wake-up call.

But hey, it’s also a kickass good movie. » Read more..