Deborah Lipp

The Last Picture Show (1971) 9/10
In the bleak Texas town of Anarene, in 1952, a group of high school seniors (Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd) face adulthood as they observe the compromises and sorrows of the adults around them.

You can look at The Last Picture Show and see the impossibility of desire. No one is happy for long. Love is unfulfilled. Sex is unsatisfying. Happiness is always a memory, and never exists in the present moment. But that doesn’t really tell the story. What tells the story is that desire is grabbed at, happiness is chased after, dissatisfaction is rejected with cold fury.

When The Last Picture Show ends, you wonder how well you know the people of Anarene. Some you think you know well: Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), who is kind and wistful and stern, a kind of town mentor; Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman), whose loneliness has reduced her to a brittle and delicate condition, but who is still able to reach out with grace and longing. Others are more opaque; Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) is wistful and observant, and tries to be a good person. But he is fundamentally passive, acted upon rather than acting, both the love he receives and the grief he endures happen while he just watches.

Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) is perhaps the most interesting, and the most opaque. The “only pretty girl” in high school, she is sure, absolutely sure, that she should be able to parlay her beauty into a good life. She just doesn’t know how. Her mother, Lois (Ellen Burstyn), assures her she should set aside love and lust in order to gain a good husband from a wealthy family. But then again, Lois isn’t that sure; that’s what she did, and she’s not happy.

There are moments of intense passion in The Last Picture Show, but none of them are during the frequent sex scenes. The sex is perfunctory, flat. Women clench their eyes shut or say “hurry up.” Men grab and thrust without art, without preliminaries. Clothes are taken off as matter-of-factly as brushing your teeth. The passion is in a first kiss, a memory, a greeting, a fight; moments come upon unawares. Sonny’s friendship with mute and “simple” Billy is passionate; when Sonny hurts Billy, his apology is more deeply felt than almost anything else he says or does in the movie.

The Last Picture Show has the honesty and emptiness of a snapshot. Here I am, looking off into the distance I’ll never reach.

Westworld (1973) 8/10
In the resort of Delos, vacationers can live out their fantasies in Roman World, Medieval World, or West World (sometimes called Western World). It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or gets killed.

What is it that maintains Westworld‘s cult status? Neither Richard Benjamin (whom I never could stand) nor James Brolin have much star appeal as the embattled tourists. Yul Brynner is always sexy and sort of chilling, and it’s images of him, as the robotic gunslinger gone wild, that are most iconic.

But I’d argue that the real appeal is Westworld itself, or, more particularly, Delos. The movie spends most of its 88 minutes hovering just this side of soft porn, showing little and suggesting everything. And I do mean everything. ‘Come to Roman World and participate in a real Roman orgy!’ promise the ads. Come to ‘Western World, kill as many people as you want, and then romp in the whorehouse.’ ‘Come to Medieval World, and have your way with a serving wench.’ The ads for Delos entice the real audience as much as they entice the fictional one.

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Jon Stewart: Funnier behind a news desk. Bring back Steve Martin.

Did you notice that everyone stood very far away from Isaac Mizrhai? Every interview I saw was all about the women commanding maximum personal space.

Lauren Bacall: Staggering drunk. Who knew?

Dolly Parton! Oh. My. Goddess. It’s not the hideous plastic surgery, I think, so much as that everyone has the same hideous plastic surgery. The same huge floating lips. The same bulging yet shapely eyes. The same unnaturally carved cheekbones. Add that to her pre-existing wildly improbable figure and…I dunno, was she singing or something? My ears were ringing.

Joaquin Phoenix: Still in character.

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Murderball (2005) 9/10
Quad rugby (“murderball”) players are followed from the World Championships in 2002 to the Paralympics Games of 2004. Quad rugby, or wheelchair rugby, is played by quadriplegics in specially-adapted and reinforced chairs. (Documentary)

In the movies, people in wheelchairs are a finite number of things. They are tragic, uplifting, inspiring, angry, brave, hopeful, or heartwarming. In Murderball, they’re guys. (Women in wheelchairs are seen only peripherally in the film.) Specifically, they’re guys on a sports team. In fact, if you want to generalize, they’re more typical of what you may think about athletes than of what you may think about the disabled. They’re interested in playing hard, proving themselves, partying, and picking up girls. They pull pranks, they roughhouse, they boast. They’re guys.

In a way, I realized, this is an obvious and overlooked aspect of quadriplegia. Many such injuries are acquired in typically macho ways: Extreme sports, bar fights, pranks gone wrong, drunk driving, war. We see the way that the injured have to rebuild their self-image, and nothing makes more sense than that they rebuild the macho part as well.

The basic story follows two men. Mark Zupan is one of the stars of the U.S. quad rugby team. One day he was out partying and fell asleep, drunk, in the back of his friend’s pickup truck. Later his friend, driving drunk, and with no idea Mark was in the back, crashed the truck. Zupan was thrown sixty feet and hung onto a tree in a canal for thirteen hours until someone heard his cries for help. We meet his girlfriend, we attend his high school reunion, and ultimately, we meet the driver of the pickup truck.

Joe Soares had childhood polio. He was a star of the U.S. team for years. When he was cut from the team (a coach says simply that age slowed him down) he sued, unsuccessfully, to get back on. Now he coaches the Canadian team and the rivalry between his former and current teams runs deep. We meet Joe’s wife and his son. The younger Soares is interested in music and academics, not sports, which creates tension between the two.

We also meet a recently injured man, Keith, who is first learning to face his injury. We follow him from the early days of rehab, through a meeting with Zupan at a presentation on quad rugby, where Keith is excited by the freedom and strength he feels in the rugby chair.

Murderball is a masterful film. The editing seamlessly carries you through a huge range of facets of the lives of these men. Just writing this up made me realize how very much I’d seen. We are educated about spinal cord injury, we traverse family relationships, sexuality, competition, guilt, friendship, family, remorse, anger, and play. The competitions are exciting, there’s humor, there’s even heartwarming stuff. We are allowed to draw conclusions without being pushed.

The meeting with Keith brought up the eternal question about documentaries; who are the documentarians, and what are they doing? Clearly, the filmmakers arranged for Zupan to make a presentation where Keith would be present, but how did they pick Keith in particular? How did they decide he would ultimately be excited about quad rugby? Did they follow several recently injured people in the hopes that one of them would be? These are the sort of questions I wish documentaries in general would answer.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) 10/10
Television journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Straithairn) and producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) go after Senator Joseph McCarthy.

There are lots and lots of movies “based on a true story.” For the past two years,three of the five Academy Award Best Picture nominees have been fact-based. These movies invariably embellish the truth. They give us back stories that don’t exist, or that are different from the real story in significant ways. Always, a dry story is warmed up, a political story is made somehow personal. Always, until Good Night, and Good Luck.

The story of Murrow’s battle against McCarthyism is stripped bare. We never meet Murrow’s wife, or hear him explain the inner demon that drives him. We never see our main characters at home, or having expository conversations. Only a couple played by Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson are given the least little bit of a personal life. Instead, we see the newsroom, the conversations, the editing, the interviews. Murrow’s speeches are virtually all derived from transcripts of what he actually said. To cap off this incredible veracity, McCarthy and some of the McCarthy hearings are real archival footage, not recreations.

Does this sound boring? It isn’t. George Clooney’s deft direction makes it compelling, edge of your seat stuff. Nor is it without opinon. I’ve heard complaints that Good Night, and Good Luck. is a hagiography, but Murrow and Friendly’s characters are not portrayed at all, only their actions. The movie has an opinion, a strong one, but it lets the events themselves tell the story. In fact, the lack of exposition is remarkable; no one explains HUAC (or even tells you what it stands for), or explains who McCarthy is or what he’s been up to. The audience just has to keep up.

What we’re left with is a story remarkably necessary for today; dramatic, thrilling, and inspiring. The direction is smart, and the acting is top-notch. The look of the piece; black and white, with lots of close-ups that study faces with intensity, is striking. It creates a period feel deftly, without mockery. The cast, including Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, and Ray Wise, has a great naturalism; no one looks like a movie star (except Clooney). Everyone seems to just melt into their characters, so that the juxtaposition of archival footage and acting is seamless.

I have to make special note of the remarkable use of music. Jazz singer Dianne Reeves plays a studio singer. The deft placement of her songs comments on the action. She’s terrific, using Clooney’s aunt‘s arrangements, and it’s almost like a musical the way that the songs speak to and about the story.

I can’t recommend GN&GL highly enough. As a mother, I’m so glad to have taken my son to see it. This is an educational movie in exactly the right way; neither condescending nor dry, it is to history lessons as cayenne pepper is to a dash of salt.

Brokeback Mountain (2005) 10/10

In 1963, ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) spend a summer sheepherding on Brokeback Mountain. There they begin a romance that endures for almost twenty years.

In the movies, love stories are generally either romantic comedies or tragedies. In a romantic comedy, what keeps the lovers apart is trivial and amusing. In a tragedy, what keeps the lovers apart is profoundly important. In fact, it is the whole point.

The reason I say this is because so many people are saying things like ‘Brokeback Mountain is a universal love story,’ or ‘It’s not that it’s gay, it’s that it’s love.’ Yeah right sure. This is called apologetics.

Brokeback Mountain is the story of star-crossed lovers. The fate that crosses them is that they are both men, without a place in the world to be who they are. Stories of impossible loves are not generic, in fact, their particularity is their entire reason for being. Whether it’s the Capulets and the Montagues or the Jets and the Sharks, lovers divided by society exist to tell us something about society.

Love itself is universal, and so we all relate to it as we watch a good story (and Brokeback is excellent) unfold. Thus we see the cultural, social, racial, or interpersonal issue that divides the lovers in a new light. That’s the power of fiction.

So make no mistake; Brokeback Mountain is a gay movie. It’s also one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. Ennis and Jack each struggles differently with the closet he is in. Jack wants to find a way out; he dreams of a world where he and Ennis can ranch together, in a word, he longs to be gay. Ennis despises who and what he is; he longs to be straight. The tragedy of the story is that neither man can fulfill his longing, they have only each other, only their “fishing trips,” the lives they live are empty.

The performances are stunning, particularly Heath Ledger, who holds his body tighter and tighter, closing himself up until you wonder that he can walk. Yet he seems about to burst. But Gyllenhaal’s BAFTA last night was well-deserved too.

Setting and scene are remarkable. Everything in the movie looks like a prison, except when the men are together in the mountains. Every home is too small, every hall too narrow, every angle too sharp. Then, when they’re together, the sky is huge, the world is open, and you can feel your own shoulders un-tense as at last there’s some space.

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I saw Brokeback Mountain last night. That’ll probably be next week’s Monday Movie Review. In the meantime, wow. Just wow. I’m floored.

It’s quite a horserace between Ledger and Hoffman. I couldn’t really say which performance is better, although if I was voting, I’d go for Hoffman. Still.