Dan Garodnick

Jessica Lappin

Apple is drawing the Council’s 51 members in prom attire in a series called NYC High for the blog ANIMAL New York. So far, ANIMAL New York posted Council members in districts one through eight.

Each drawing is accompanied by a small score card that lists the neighborhoods they represent and several facts about their time on the Council.

“Politics is kind of like high school, with factions and gossip and people always trying to hold on to or increase their popularity,” Apple told ANIMAL.

Apple contributed to a similar project in which artists drew Chicago’s 50 aldermen.

Here are Apple’s drawings of the two East Side Council members, Dan Garodnick and Jessica Lappin.

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The Hollywood precedent for one great director remaking another’s work starts with Fritz Lang refashioning both Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and La Bête Humaine into, respectively, Scarlet Street and Human Desire—turning art into entertainment. Now Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ debut film Blood Simple into A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, turning pop into art.

Zhang keeps the basic story of an illicit couple attempting to escape the woman’s brutish husband—a transgression that looms into greed and murder. But in changing the Coens’ contemporary tale into a period meditation, Zhang elevates the moral reckoning as if retelling a classic cautionary Chinese folk tale. This doesn’t contradict Zhang’s own lushly moralistic, openly political films. In fact, the adulterous plot closely resembles Zhang’s 1988 Ju Dou, which was already quite similar to The Postman Always Rings Twice. But like the Coens, Zhang has grown into greater filmmaking. He achieves a mix of tones that always felt unstable in Blood Simple but comes naturally to Zhang’s elaborate showmanship in Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower.

After breaking-down the Coens’ plot to its almost comical essence, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop reveals its dark existential joke. What looked like snark becomes unironic amusement, as in a kitchen scene where noodle-twirling expands into a larger, awesome, pizza-like spinning demonstration, nearly an Olympic-event spectacle. Each character’s paranoia, cowardice or viciousness exaggerates them like commedia dell’arte figures. Humor is prompted by modern acting—pouts, grimaces, sass—in a period setting. Zhang portrays neo-noir folly as operatic farce. His visual style goes to Expressionist extremes to illustrate a world of moral chaos: cobalt skies, vermillion earth and eerie striations in mountains.

From one great director to another, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop pays tribute to the Coens by improving their earlier immature work. Zhang reinterprets the Coens’ least humorous film as extravagant deadpan. He articulates a deep, cosmic understanding of fate and reveals the inherent complexity that the Coens would articulate only in later, more dazzling and mature films.

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A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Runtime: 95 min

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Takers has a Brother vibe that only partly has to do with most of its dapper bank robber cast being African American. Co-producing rap artists and stars, Tip “T.I.” Harris and Chris Brown, make vivid use of the crime movie genre’s social significance, which lackadaisical film commentators have mostly ignored. Takers accents the genre’s bonhomie: its exercise of the same working-class frustrations young black artists articulated in hip-hop music and music videos under the influence of ’70s blaxploitation movies. But Takers is not a cultish parody like Machete from Robert Rodriguez. It is—to redeem a police blotter phrase—a Saturday Night Special, excitingly executed.

A scene from Takers.

The story of a mixed (black and white) Los Angeles heist crew is in a grand entertainment tradition: They stage an audacious skyscraper escape then lay low, only to get seduced into a hasty new job by an estranged ex-con colleague (T.I.). The risks taken involve the hazards of trust, sentiment and bravado more than greed, but also reflect class and economic dissatisfaction, going back to the genre’s roots, its honor-testing origins. Takers’ ads mention Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat, but I prefer a richer comparison: The Wild Bunch, for Sam Peckinpah’s vision of the self-destructive way socially maladjusted men embrace outlawry.

John Luessenhop’s direction and Armen Minasian’s editing are closer to Peckinpah’s lucid, aestheticized morality than Mann’s gloss. The spectacle does not overwhelm the personalities, and each man—Idris Elba, Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen, Matt Dillon, Jay Rodriguez, Michael Ealy plus T.I. and Brown—carries at least a sketch of family bonds or masculine empathy. Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s participation proves the filmmakers’ serious ambitions, which proceed from critic Robert Warshow’s once-famous thesis “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), which explained: “The gangster is a man of the city… not the real city but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.” No longer an alienated figure, the gangster outlaw reflecting black urban experience has come to represent a desperate response to the fact of the city’s anonymity and death. That’s also been the essence of serious and braggadocious hip-hop and the tragic late-20th-century sensibility that Peckinpah beautifully realized.

All this is implicit in Takers’ flashy, dangerous lawbreaking. Its hip-hop bunch sustain camaraderie through shared awareness of the city’s implicit anonymity and death. Fans who can distinguish between mania and connoisseurship will appreciate this even in Paul Walker’s manly stride. Materialism means less to the Takers than obligation to family and friends—as in Elba and Dillon’s brother/father subplots that one montage fleetly interweaves. The bunch’s new heist revives antagonism between Ealy and T.I., personified in Zoe Saldana’s switched romantic loyalties. Their sexual and ethical tensions recall how Peckinpah portrayed William Holden and Robert Ryan’s.

Through Luessenhop and the screenwriting team’s connoisseurship and skills, Takers refines a genre that has been hollowed-out by the cold repetitions of such cliché movies as Soderbergh’s Oceans franchise and the cheap ambiguities of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, American Gangsters and Brooklyn’s Finest. Those films are lugubrious product compared to Takers. Even when doing action movie conventions (a dizzying hotel shoot-out with haunting voice-overs), Luessenhop at least does them swiftly.

His light, clear style creates a Testosteronarama: This cast of studly has-beens and romantic wannabes outclasses the pathetic Expendables and are almost as dazzling as RocknRolla. Dillon’s finest performance in years sets the tone of aggrieved morality, defining a man’s aggression as dedication (Ryan in The Wild Bunch was no more moving). And Chris Brown gets a showcase chase scene that is one of action cinema’s all-time greatest. He runs for his life, passing through escalating levels of urban achievement, vaulting through danger, challenging fate. It should define his career like Jim Brown’s 50-yard dash in The Dirty Dozen.

Luessenhop can’t top that climax, but his shift to mournful mode effectively confronts death—Peckinpah’s grave leveler. The pile-up seems overloaded, rather shortchanging the significance of Ghost, T.I.’s duplicitous character—perhaps a pretentious idea yet he’s a figure whose dazzling arrogance deserves better. Better is what Takers scrupulously provides action-movie devotees usually suckered into cheering greed and swagger unrelated to their personal experience. The Brother vibe is epitomized in the image of the crew strutting past an exploding news helicopter. Turning that cliché into an image of multi-racial male bonding makes Takers a true thriller, superior to big-budget action films like Salt and Heat that exploit the urban audience while ignoring it.

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Takers
Directed by John Luessenhop
Runtime: 107 min.

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By Mark Peikert

What a difference a few months and two new cast members make. When I saw Trevor Nunn’s production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music last December, I was blown away by both Catherine Zeta-Jones—who ended up winning a Tony Award for her performance as actress Desirée Armfeldt—and Alexander Hanson, as her married former lover Fredrik. The rest of this elegiac musical about lust and love, set in turn-of-the-last-century Sweden, felt serviceable at best, and egregious at worst. Having just seen the show with Bernadette Peters stepping in for Zeta-Jones and Elaine Stritch replacing Angela Lansbury, I still maintain that the revival is less than sparkling, but for different reasons.

Alexander Hanson (left), Bernadette Peters and Aaron Lazar in A Little Night Music at the Walter Kerr Theater.

Take Ramona Mallory, for instance. The actress plays Fredrik’s virginal, much-younger wife, and when I saw the show last year I wrote that her giggly delivery “is rather like watching Taylor Swift take the Broadway stage.” Now, her performance has either been freed from the shadow of Zeta-Jones or blossomed into something fuller, because Mallory is consistently one of the evening’s bright spots.

Everyone else remains more or less the same (Leigh Ann Larkin is still excruciating as Anne’s maid Petra, uncertain of whether she should play the character with a Midwestern or Cockney accent), but the flaws in Nunn’s production are highlighted the second time around. The monochromatic set and glacial pace leave one impatient; this is, after all, a show about a famous actress, so why are the costumes all in white, black and shades of gray? And despite Desirée’s repeated references to the “farce” of a weekend in the country with her lover (Aaron Lazar), his wife (Erin Davie), Fredrik and Anne, Nunn has directed the show as if it were a languid Noel Coward comedy.

As for Peters, she’s a much-missed theatrical icon who gives an assured, sometimes very funny performance, but just as often slips into self-parody, drawling her lines in an over-the-top Bernadette Peters impression. Erasing memories of Zeta-Jones’ misguided, hammy rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” Peters looks both fabulous and relaxed, which must come as a relief to her after her last Broadway stage appearance as Mama Rose in Gypsy seven years ago.

Which leaves us with Stritch, who turns the role of Desirée’s aged former courtesan mother inside out. Gone is Lansbury’s doddering, imperious interpretation, replaced instead with Stritch’s innate good, common sense. Stritch eschews all semblance of calculating charisma, making Madame Armfeldt into a woman who seems relieved to have abandoned the pretence of kindness and flattery. Instead, she’s sharp, aggressive and angry, her company manners planed away by the years. Speak-singing the song “Liaisons,” Stritch nails the comedy and the bitter regret at the way things have turned out, both for the world and for herself. By turns wistful, giddy and furious, the song becomes a tour de force of personality over the ravages of time, a testament to the survival skills of both the character and the actress. Sure, Stritch is giving us a modified version of herself, but isn’t that what becomes a legend the most?
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Open run, Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St., 212-239-6200; $52–$137.

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By Reid Spagna

Born in Pittsburgh, Peter Ackerman received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Yale and attended The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco to study acting. Among other works he is the co-author of Ice Age and Ice Age 3.

The writer met his wife when she starred in his play, Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight. The couple settled down on West End Avenue and has two sons.

Most recently, he is the author of The Lonely Phone Booth, his newly released children’s book.

Peter Ackerman

The story portrays one of four remaining phone booths in Manhattan, located on the northwest corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street. An analog victim in a digital world, the booth loses its grasp on the neighborhood as “shiny silver objects” capture the ears of passing pedestrians.

Currently working on an animated feature for Universal Pictures, Ackerman recently took time to discuss The Lonely Phone Booth, his writing career and the changing culture of New York City.

Our Town: Why did you choose the 100th Street phone booth to be the subject of your book?

Peter Ackerman: The story came about a couple of years ago when my younger son was three. We were walking by the booth, and he said, “Why is that phone in a box?” I realized that he had no idea; it seemed very funny to me.

What implicit messages did you aim to express with The Lonely Phone Booth?

Everything has value. Even though things are changing, it doesn’t mean that something we used to use is valueless. The phone booth is a metaphor for a human being. An older person can’t do everything that he or she used to do, but it doesn’t mean that they are valueless.

What is your most memorable phone booth experience?

In college, my girlfriend spent the semester in France. I would go to a particular phone booth and she would call me collect and I’d accept the charges. We got away with this a few times, but one time, the operator broke in and said, “I know what you’re doing!” I was very panicked, and hung up the phone. It was a very dramatic moment.

What is the cultural significance of old phone booths?

There is a neighborhood feel to it. I’ve seen people in phone booths laughing, crying and yelling. You don’t exactly hear what they are saying, as they are enclosed in the booth, but in a weird way, you imagine all sorts of things about them.

You co-wrote Ice Age and Ice Age 3. How do you find a balance between entertaining children and adults, in both your book and the Ice Age films?

If you know that kids and adults are going to see something, you need to have themes that are simple and clear. I tend to write about things that are interesting to me, but I don’t try to talk down to kids.

Do your sons have any input in your children’s works?

When the book was still in gallery form, I read the book to my son’s class at P.S. 87 and made some changes to it based on certain words they couldn’t understand and the jokes that they thought were and weren’t funny.

What has writing The Lonely Phone Booth taught you? Does it make you notice new things about the city?

I feel alert to everything that is around me in the neighborhood. The truth is, I must have passed that phone booth a billion times with my kids, and I hadn’t thought about it. Then my son noticed how unusual it was, so I take more notice of things, great and small.

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Why make a genre movie—any movie, really—without inspiration? Neil Marshall, the director of the horror film The Descent, now comes up with another late genre entry: his imagination evident in the redundant antiquity battle tale’s title, Centurion. Shadowed by Zack Snyder’s fascinating 300, Marshall adds nothing new to the basic plot, least of all the kind of genre delight Snyder evidenced and not the revisionist intelligence behind Walter Hill’s 1979 neo-gladiator movie The Warriors.

OK, Centurion isn’t a slog like Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. There’s almost authenticity in this vision of Euro history, especially through Sam McCurdy’s dense cinematography layering darkness and mist—the overloaded atmosphere creates an almost original look. But everything else is hackneyed: even Michael Fassbender packing on pecs, abs and scowl to play Quintus Dias, the Roman soldier in 117 A.D. assigned to fight the Picts, the vicious primitive Celtic tribe.

Committed to exploitation-movie horror, Marshall heaps on the battle scenes, piling up carcasses as Dias defends his commander General Titus Virilus (Dominic West, whose doomed role gives him the chance to out-emote Fassbender) and leads his Ninth Legion army back home. These good actors don’t perfect warrior iconography like Gerard Butler in 300, partly because they’re less feverishly imagined. The script limits them to gruff Brit locutions and anachronistic vernacular (“Put the fucking knife down!”). Dias’ primary foe is a mute feral female, Etain (Olga Kurylenko), a vengeful, painted-face warrior. Action flicks have no cooler device than a woman scorned. Etain’s just a wraith with weaponry. “Her soul is an empty vessel, only Roman blood can fill it.” But Marshall hasn’t learned his Walter Hill lesson to make a woman as compelling as a man. Etain is merely relentless.

That’s also how Marshall directs the redundant action scenes. Whether battlefield skirmishes or forest ambushes, they’re all the same unmeasured mayhem. New rule: Only one decapitation per ancient action movie. It used to be a sign of the boldest battle film to show a head rolling off a soldier’s neck, through the air and across the screen. After Marshall and his F/X team throw in the second decapitation (with more to come), they’re not special anymore. This could be an offshoot of video-game excess, or it could just mean that Neil Marshall is mindless.

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Killer Instinct, the first of the two-part French gangster film Mesrine, finally opens in the U.S. following a highly praised home turf reception. But it also has the misfortune of coming right after the Anthology Film Archives’ compelling William Lustig program of crime movies and what Variety calls “actioners,” where zero-prestige works by Larry Cohen, Henri Verneuil and Giuliano Montaldo raised the B-movie crime film to insightful or, at least, pleasurable and personally-expressive heights. Mesrine doesn’t measure up.

Vincent Cassel, a French Adrien Brody.

From its opening epigraph (“All films are part fiction. No film can recreate the complexity of a human life”), this biopic of the Algerian War veteran Jacques Mesrine—who became a publicity-seeking thief, kidnapper and murderer throughout the 1960s and ’70s—never makes the necessary connection between social outlawry and political rebellion like the films Lustig tastily programmed. Screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri uses the same specious political/racial parallels as in his script for A Prophet, the fraudulent, bleeding-heart, Muslim-immigrant jailhouse import. Dafri’s screenwriting specialty combines “actioner” and “guilter.”

Dafri botches the balance of genre excitement and social observation that are the key to Larry Cohen’s creative genius—not just in the psychological complexity of The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, but particularly in his movies of the Blaxploitation era—like Black Caesar, Bone and Hell Up In Harlem—that understood the connection between testosterone aggression and corporate ambition. Dafri’s thesis that Mesrine’s criminal spirit was formed by his experience in the Algerian occupation, destroying his moral boundaries then warping his sense of justice and citizenship, becomes a facile dramatic ploy—a mere excuse for sensationalism.

Because Dafri aims speciously higher, imitating big-budget gangster epics The Godfather and GoodFellas—which have problematically entered history as nationalist narratives—he never zeroes in on his protagonist’s compulsions as Cohen’s astute classics did. The main difference between Black Caesar and The Godfather (both 1972) lay in Cohen understanding the political moment, while Coppola aimed to mythify the country. Heroizing Mesrine cynically represents Dafri’s vision of France’s corruption. (“De Galle killed us,” complains a vet-turned-crook.) Yet this sociological pretense—the essential folly of the gangster epic—is morally unprincipled. Dafri and director Jean-François Richet seek the audience’s enjoyment of Mesrine’s heinous exploits—neither Cohen’s economic explanation nor the repulsion that Coppola eventually arrived at for Michael Corleone.

Vincent Cassel, a French Adrien Brody, struts through the role of Mesrine as a peculiarly French, racist-bred, anti-Algerian thug. Resentful of his class, the state and his meek father, an embittered snake hisses beneath Mesrine’s insolent grin. It’s an actorly combination of bravado and romanticism similar to Tom Hardy’s more complexly imagined criminal biopic Bronson. However, Gerard Depardieu as Mesrine’s treacherous, openly racist mentor creates more believable menace.

Richet indulges a mug’s fetish, using a gallery of macho portraits (Deano Clavet, Gerard Lanvin, Gille Lelouche, Roy Dupuis) to depict Mesrine’s associates. When Mesrine escapes justice, goes to Canada and joins the Quebec separatist movement to commit more crimes under cover of political imperative (which Dafri does not articulate), the film shifts into an inadvertently comic crime-spree. A kidnapping episode that recalls The Honeymoon Killers is so beside the point of Mesrine’s Gallic impudence it exposes Dafri and Richet’s basic lack of seriousness.

In Part Two, subtitled Public Enemy No. 1, Mesrine keeps its epic length, yet gradually loses its cinematic ambition to a mode of mindless TV excitation. The amount of gunplay is so excessive (lots of car windshields shattering) it verges on Michael Mannerisms—which in their flimsiness are essentially TV aesthetics. It’s possible that audiences have gotten used to this (from the Miami Vice and Crime Story series to the HBO gimmick of broadcasting The Sopranos in letterbox format), but Mesrine’s episodic style
never deepens.

Only the minimal characterizations of Mesrine’s various women (Cécile de France, Elena Anaya, Ludivine Sagnier) departs from gangster drama clichés—specifiying their disposable role in the thug-hero’s life. The sequence where Mesrine puts in a gun in his wife’s mouth and threatens her (“I’ll always choose my friends over you”) shows the heartlessness The Sopranos sentimentalized. It’s the only moment to admit Mesrine’s psychopathology. Richet and Dafri mostly settle for a grandiose idealization of a rebel’s rise and fall.

Mesrine summarizes his own legacy: “There are no heroes in crime, only men who choose to live outside the law.” Yet the film’s mythologizing flashback structure isn’t revealing or scrutinizing like the similar framework of John Boorman’s more efficient crime biopic The General. Instead, due to TV-quality repetitiveness and pseudo-political claptrap, Mesrine’s attempt to rival Hollywood crime movies’ magnum force—either through B-movie precision or A-movie elaborateness—fails.

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There is a conceit among some young creators of silent films, trying on the genre as a prelude to their big sound feature. They think that silents should look old, faded, out of focus and scratchy. But the new digital restorations that premiered in Bologna last month of the first films by the Lumière brothers demonstrate the astonishing clarity of the earliest motion picture film stock.

Jackie Earle Haley as Judge Leander Perry in a scene from Louis.

Now comes Louis, a silent feature written and directed by Dan Pritzker that actually was made yesterday—give or take. It seems to glow right through the screen and reclaim the power of classic film. Visually stunning—and accompanied by a jubilant soundtrack—Louis imagines a fantasy version of New Orleans in 1907, and follows the exploits of 6-year-old Louis Armstrong in the days just before he begins his long, brilliant career. The absence of dialogue and sound effects means that the music has to do double duty as underscoring and to replace conversation. So inviting Wynton Marsalis and the pianist Cecile Licad to score the film was nothing short of inspired.

The film is set in the tenements, back alleys, cemeteries and bawdy parlors of Storyville, where a variety of scantily-clad ladies rub noses (and other body parts) with gentlemen and politicians. One of the latter turns out to be a very nasty judge, who will stop at nothing to win his bid for the governor’s office. Louis, played by a wide-eyed Anthony Coleman in his screen debut, gets mixed up in the schemes of this character, played with zest by Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen, Nightmare on Elm Street) as an homage to Chaplin, although Charlie’s debut on the silver screen did not come until 1914. One of the fantasy sequences involves Haley falling into the clockwork mechanism of a giant voting machine, a nod to Chaplin’s Modern Times.

Pritzker is a professional musician himself (he also happens to be heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune and has a net worth in the billions, according to Forbes), and he shot Louis as a sidebar to a sound film he conceived about Buddy Bolden, another New Orleans trumpet player who figures in the tale,  often called the father of jazz.

“Louis came about when I was writing a screenplay about Buddy Bolden, the first jazz trumpeter of New Orleans, and I took my mom to see Chaplin’s City Lights with the Chicago Symphony performing the score. It was without a doubt the best movie experience I ever had,” Pritzker explains.

Marsalis and Licad have contributed in equal measure to the underscoring. “The idea of accompanying a silent film telling a mythical tale of a young Louis Armstrong was appealing to me,” Marsalis says. “Of course, calling it a silent film is a misnomer. There will be plenty of music, and jazz is like a conversation between the players so there’ll be no shortage of dialogue. I look forward to playing with Cecile. The contrast between Gottschalk’s music and jazz can be a revelation to those unfamiliar with Gottschalk’s music and jazz.”

Louis screens Aug. 30, Apollo Theatre, 253 W. 125th St.; 8, $38.50-$53.50. For more information, visit www.louisthemovie.com.

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The late Eric Rohmer is not known for his audacity—but he should be. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s complete retrospective of the director’s quietly masterful career, “The Sign of Rohmer” (Aug. 18-Sept. 3), confirms his daring. This is an irresistible opportunity to see his experimental musical The Tree, The Mayor and the Mediatheque, plus the erotic, psychological WWII drama Triple Agent (both previously unreleased in the U.S.) and his final exquisite classical myth The Romance of Astrea and Celedon.

A perfect example of Rohmer’s emphasis on people talking, relating and living is Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (not seen since 1987, showing Aug. 21). This multiple-story film—one of his most charming—describes Aesop’s Fable-style the friendship of two young women. It stands for Rohmer’s entire anecdotal approach and refines movies to their essence, not to dialogue but the live, imaginative moment.

Rohmer’s audacity doesn’t stress each episode’s moral (that was merely a device for his famous “Six Moral Tales” series that were really about faith). His understated depiction of how Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) and Reinette (Joëlle Miquel)—two skirt-vs.-slacks jeunnes filles—avoid daily crisis creates cinema about the phenomenon of existence. The simplest incident becomes the most momentous occasion, as in each story’s title: “The Blue Hour,” “The Waiter,” “The Begger, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler” and “Selling the Painting.” Together they structure an observable arc turning nature to art.

Four Adventures belongs to that epiphanal period following Rohmer’s Summer (Le Rayon Vert) and Rendezvous in Paris of especially pared-down comical inquiries. Casually focused on characters discovering themselves through witnessing profound phenomenon—the quotidian felt as an adventure—Rohmer watches the two new friends’ developing intimacy. In this remarkably rich story, time (the world) seems to stop. When the girls awaken to watch a quiet dawn, Rohmer devotes cinema to contemplation: excitable Renette urges Mirabelle to wait for the blue hour of twilight. This moment is “hushed as if a secret was about to be revealed”—to use a phrase from silent-film master Josef von Sternberg.

Rohmer’s peaceful cinema stands out in our era of F/X noise and distraction. The country girl painter instructs the city girl ethnology student: “We need nature, not vice versa.” This is not “Eat Pray Ecology,” but a brave reintroduction of sophistication to the basic elements of nature and self-knowledge. Rohmer’s spare narrative encompasses Grimm and Perrault (as Mirabelle cites) plus La Fontaine as well as the 20th-century painters Felix Labisse and Paul Deveaux, where the natural, erotic and surreal blend.

This austere elegance is, at last, what mumblecore’s practitioners and hypesters need to learn: Rohmer wasn’t a hipster narcissist but an intent observer of life and language styles: The Catholic suburbs of My Night at Maud’s; the summer resorts of Claire’s Knee and Pauline at the Beach; the tempting Parisian chic of Love, the Afternoon; the maritime customs of A Summer’s Tale; and the farming culture Reinette appreciates. Rohmer’s aesthetic skill ranged from intense dialogue to close-up details of the girls’ shoes as they meaningfully dance until midnight. Mumblecore has not yet achieved this excellence. Rohmer’s mastery was a matter of his artistic certitude and originality. Now recognized as one of the French New Wave’s worthy pioneers, he chose to keep boldly still in face of Godard and Truffaut’s paroxysms.

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The Sign of Rohmer
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Aug. 18-Sept. 3

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“Fratricide” is the word used in Amir Bar-Lev’s doc The Tillman Story to describe the 4/22/04 incident in which Pvt. George Tillman was killed while on duty in Afghanistan. It is a sign of Bar-Lev’s political bias that his film favors that moralizing term over the military designation “friendly fire” to describe gunfire discharged by allies and colleagues. Bar-Lev wants the tragic implications of a taboo act and is not above structuring this investigation into exactly how Tillman became a celebrated casualty of the Afghan campaign into lurid melodrama. The Tillman Story is really about the chicanery of the U.S. Military—first in covering up the facts, then presenting a version to the media who used it to promote the war to the public. The Tillman Story is another example of how contemporary journalism and documentary-making have lost credibility.

Soldiers in the sand.

Bar-Lev starts from a slanted assessment of military duty, based on the partisan dispute that an unjust war invalidates a soldier’s commitment. The film’s premise is that Tillman’s decision to give up a lucrative NFL career and join the military after 9/11 was unfathomable and then dishonored by the military’s self-protective behavior. Wrought-up in the Tillman family’s disillusionment and confusion, Bar-Lev can’t separate institutional critique from anti-war protest—and doesn’t want to.

The Tillman Story exemplifies the folly in new advocacy documentary. It forfeits scrutiny and understanding for spleen. From Josh Brolin’s narration (intended to evoke his role as George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s W. and the shame liberals wanted to infer from it) to the frequent complaints about media complicity, Bar-Lev confuses the point of his disapproval. He shifts from the Tillman family’s investigations, aided by an activist blogger, to superificial allegations about lazy reporting that took the “Silver Star narrative” of Tilman’s supposed bravery—“carried by all major networks, abridged, relied upon, told over and over again”—and then indicts the military chain of command, all the way up to the White House.

We are decades past the 1979 primetime network TV movie titled Friendly Fire starring Carol Burnett, which introduced that phrase into American homes during the Vietnam era. A fact-based drama strikingly similar to the Tillman tragedy, it grappled with the difficulty of comprehending that concept—which included parsing the meaning of war democracy and duty. Instead, Bar-Lev indulges a Michael Moore-level cynicism. This doc injects negative emotional values into a story of why solders fight, what they risk and how they are remembered. Preston Sturges examined those issues in the 1944 Hail the Conquering Hero, but without the demoralizing cynicism of Bush-era media. It’s not the military that has changed but filmmaking standards.

At one point, Tillman’s friends from the platoon—Russell Baer and Jason Parsons—contradict their own motives (“I wanted to serve myself, get money for college, blow things up,” ones says) and Bar-Lev uses their anguish to obnoxiously indicate foul play or some envious homo-triangle envy. One crucial flaw takes a soldier’s testimony—“I wanted to stay in the firefight”—and continously misrepeats it as, “I wanted to be in the firefight.”

The Tillman Story devours itself as it goes along, becoming an example of the futility that Tillman’s parents, siblings, wife and friends eventually suffer. “The questioning had run its course,” Tillman’s mom, Dannie, sighs after sitting through dissatisfying Congressional hearings. “I don’t think there’s much else that can be done.” But, yes, there is: This is a propaganda film that exploits war without explaining the experience. Bar-Lev himself seems unsure if the real subject is men, war, government or media.
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The Tillman Story
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev
Runtime: 94 min.

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