On the Town

FLASH OF GENIUS
RUNNING TIME 119 minutes
WRITTEN BY Philip Railsback
DIRECTED BY Marc Abraham
STARRING Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Alan Alda, Dermot Mulroney

Equally sincere but without much entertainment value, Flash of Genius is another of those movies about honest, ordinary citizens fighting the powerful system of corporate corruption. This time little David is Dr. Robert Kearns, a professor of mechanical engineering in Detroit who invented the “intermittent” windshield wiper. The corporate Goliaths who stole and marketed his invention, cheated him out of his patents and falsely claimed the credit for his ideas were the Ford Motor Co.  read more »

BREAKFAST WITH SCOT
RUNNING TIME 90 minutes
WRITTEN BY Sean Reycraft
DIRECTED BY Laurie Lynd
STARRING Thomas Cavanagh, Ben Shenkman, Noah Bernett

Breakfast With Scot is being called the first gay family film, whatever that is. It certainly has “wholesome” scrawled all over it in pink. Tom Cavanagh, the toothy, bright-eyed charmer from the popular TV series Ed, stars as Eric McNally, a gay network sports announcer and ex-pro hockey player for the Maple Leafs, who keeps his private life a secret for fear of ruining his career and disillusioning his fans. (Traditionally, hockey is apparently ragingly homophobic.) So he and his life partner, Sam (Ben Shenkman), a sports lawyer, are not your stereotypical “out” couple.  read more »

BODY OF LIES
RUNNING TIME 128 minutes
WRITTEN BY William Monaham
DIRECTED BY Ridley Scott
STARRING Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong

Body of Lies is yet another in a long, tiresome line of loud, violent, nauseating and incoherent riffs on how mercenary and inhuman the spooks in the C.I.A. are, even to each other. Pointless and plotless, it’s nothing more than a series of gut-blasting near-death experiences, with Leonardo DiCaprio sporting a goatee for gonads. The idea is that a little facial fur might make him look a little less like a Boy Scout. Wrong. Action director Ridley Scott actually expects us to buy Leo as the toughest secret U.  read more »

The cabaret season is off to a slow start, but effervescent KT Sullivan’s sparkling Jerome Kern tribute at the Algonquin (through Oct. 11) is required homework for music lovers with superior taste. Her concert-ready soprano waxes obscure gems such as “The Land Where the Good Songs Go,” “Raggedy Ann” and “April Fooled Me” with pure Shinola, and her warm lower register underscores the romantic subtext of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics in “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” “In the Heart of the Dark” and “All the Things You Are”; it’s as though she’s singing just for you. Her trilling soprano is not an automatically appropriate vessel for “Ol’ Man River,” but she invests it with the sweet insouciant nostalgia of a Southern belle on foreign soil homesick for the Mississippi.  read more »

Blindness
Running Time 120 minutes
Written By Don McKellar 
Directed By Fernando Meirelles
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Gael García Bernal

In Blindness, a noxious, stomach-churning and deadly pretentious freak show by Fernando Meirelles, the talented Brazilian director of City of God and The Constant Gardener, the citizens of a big city are stricken by a plague that renders them sightless. A Japanese man goes blind in traffic. The same fate befalls the man who steals his car, as well as the eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who attends them both. Suddenly it’s happening all over town, as victims are quarantined in the cages of an abandoned mental institution.  read more »

Rachel Getting Married
Running Time 114 minutes
Written By Jenny Lumet
Directed By Jonathan Demme
Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Mather Zickel, Debra Winger

After dazzling tough film festival audiences in Venice and Toronto, Jonathan Demme’s pulsating new film Rachel Getting Married has arrived on the fall movie scene to remind me what real movies are still all about. Up to my eyeballs in draggy, shapeless amateur junk, I am genuinely thrilled to welcome a film this colorful, artistically realized and wonderfully alive. Steeped in the tradition of sound narrative form yet scrappy and unpredictable, acted and written with enormous style but with front and back doors open to experiment and surprise, it’s a film that challenges you to keep a jogger’s pace to keep up with it, then leaves you breathless.  read more »

The Lucky Ones
133 minutes
Written by Neil Burger and Dirk Wittenborn
Directed by Neil Burger
Starring Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña

Movies about the war in Iraq are box office poison. Perhaps wisely, writer-director Neil Burger’s new film, The Lucky Ones, is not about this unpopular war, but about the people who are fighting it. The action does not take place on the frontlines, but on the American home front, which turns out to be every bit as treacherous. The emotional scars and incendiary fallout are equally painful; it’s just a different kind of shrapnel.

The “lucky ones” are supposed to be the soldiers who come home in one piece.  read more »

Choke
89 minuted
Written and Directed by Clark Gregg
Starring Sam Rockwell, Kelly Macdonald, Anjelica Huston, Brad William Henke, Joel Grey

I don’t know what to tell you about a dismal bucket of nauseating swill called Choke, except to warn that if you spend hard-earned money to sit through it, you deserve to do exactly what the title implies. Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the loony Oregon-based author of such literary horrors as Fight Club and the nauseating Snuff, Choke sets out with only one mindless purpose—to outrage, alienate and confuse readers and viewers alike. Directed and adapted from an unreadable book by an actor named Clark Gregg, who has been watching entirely too many noxious Charlie Kaufman flicks, it pretends to be about the lost world of sex addicts, but it’s not really about anything except how to make a movie with no lasting value.  read more »

Nights In Rodanthe
98 minutes
Written by Ann Peacock and John Romano
Directed by George C. Wolfe
Starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Viola Davis, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni

While the rest of the world is having a noisy nervous breakdown, it’s good to know there are still a few folks at the movies selling feel-good fun and falling in love. Proving all is not grim and fatal, Nights in Rodanthe (an unfortunate title if ever there was one) is a classy tearjerker with butter-cream frosting, raised to the level of (maybe undeserved) artistry by the convincing sincerity and no-nonsense honesty of Diane Lane.  read more »

The Duchess
110 MINUTES
WRITTEN BY Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen
DIRECTED BY Saul Dibb
STARRING Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Charlotte Rampling, Hayley Atwell, Dominic Cooper

In true and dubious movie fashion, The Duchess transforms a serious, carefully researched biography of historical significance by best-selling British writer Amanda Foreman into a bucket of frothy banality overwhelmed by wigs, costumes, gilt-edged ceilings, sumptuous country manors and expensive period furniture as imagined by Sofia Coppola. It looks like outtakes from the nauseating bubble-gum fantasy Marie Antoinette.

The scandalous lady in the title is 18th-century socialite Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and if the movie has any longevity, it’s because she was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales.  read more »

Appaloosa
114 Minutes
WRITTEN BY Robert Knott and Ed Harris
DIRECTED BY Ed Harris
STARRING Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Spall

In most movie westerns, an appaloosa is a horse. But the title of his new revisionist oater, Ed Harris’ first outing in the director’s chair since Pollock, refers to a town where, as one wag at last week’s dull Toronto International Film Festival observed, “men are men and women are … Renée Zellweger.” It went over with a thud there, but in retrospect, considering all the pretentious bores surrounding it, it’s beginning to look good.  read more »

The annual Toronto International Film Festival, a.k.a. TIFF, is usually the barometer that tests the temperature of the coming movie year. But this year, the 33rd installment has tested a whole lot more: patience, I.Q.’s, trash resistance, and bladder control. Film festivals (and let’s face it, there’s one in every town) have good years and bad years. For Toronto, this is a bad one. Veterans who have been coming here for decades all agree. The fun days when fans and critics and movie moguls all stayed in the Sutton Place Hotel and turned the Bistro 990 across the street into their local commissary, trading anecdotes with John Cassevetes and hanging out with Clint Eastwood, are only memories, like first marriages.  read more »

ELEGY
RUNNING TIME 113 minutes
WRITTEN BY Nicholas Meyer
DIRECTED BY Isabel Coixet
STARRING Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Dennis Hopper

Elegy, a depressing but well-made adaptation of a Philip Roth novella by Spanish director Isabel Coixet, explores the changing landscape of love between a history professor (Ben Kingsley) and a Cuban student 30 years his junior (Penélope Cruz). Her beauty takes his breath away, but their affair is ruptured by his anxiety, jealousy, insecurity and imagination—all crippled by her absence when she leaves him. He allows himself to become a fool for love, without putting up any resistance, but convinces himself it’s just a matter of time before she finds someone younger, more desirable.  read more »

RED
RUNNING TIME 98 minutes
WRITTEN BY Stephen Susco
DIRECTED BY Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee
STARRING Brian Cox, Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, Noel Fisher, Kyle Gallner, Shiloh Fernandaz, Robert Englund

Dog lovers will adopt Red, but although the title belongs to a beloved Irish setter (or is it a rusty-colored Airedale?), the movie should appeal to people who like people, too. It is not about a dog. It’s about the dying values of truth, honesty and justice when bad things happen to good people and their pets. The brilliant actor Brian Cox—versatile, accomplished and always full of surprises—stars as Avery Ludlow, a quiet, reclusive old man in rural Oregon who owns a small general store and minds his own business.  read more »

SWING VOTE
Running Time 120 minutes
Written By Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern
Directed By Joshua Michael Stern
Starring Kevin Costner, Stanley Tucci, Nathan Lane, Dennis Hopper, Kelsey Grammer, Madeline Carroll

Say about it what you will, but in an election year, you can’t accuse Kevin Costner’s political satire Swing Vote of failing to keep up with current events. With an eye on the box office coffers and a finger on the nation’s nervous pulse, this romp with a conscience, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who co-wrote the edgy screenplay (with Jason Richman), features the new scruffy, self-deprecating and slightly graying Mr.  read more »

BOTTLE SHOCK
RUNNING TIME 110 minutes
WRITTEN By Jody Savin, Ross Schwartz, and Randall Miller
DIRECTED BY Randall Miller
STARRING Bill Pullman, Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Freddy Rodriguez, Rachael Taylor

Two things I can count on every August: Movies get lousier than they were all year, and I go on vacation. This time, it’s different. I’m still taking a month off, but there are some big surprises at the movies. Most of them are unexpected and underpublicized, some of them boast low budgets and high rewards, a few of them need to be added to your must-see list, and you can start with Bottle Shock, a marvelous, beautifully made, feel-good movie that is guaranteed to revive everyone’s flagging faith in American pride at home and abroad—something in these sorry, perilous times we’re desperately short of.  read more »

Tom Wopat
The Metropolitan Room
Until July 31

You’ll have more fun on the cabaret scene, where two seasoned pros have cooled off the month of July like a frozen mojito. Every Thursday night, when the curtain falls on the Broadway musical A Catered Affair, Tom Wopat shakes it down to the great new Metropolitan Room at 34 West 22 Street to knock the crowds right out of their sandals. This shaggy dog looks better at 56 than he did as a pup, cutting his baby teeth on the old TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, and you gotta laugh when he tells the audience, “If you like me, I’m Tom Wopat; if you don’t, I’m John Schneider.  read more »

Lucie Arnaz
Birdland

I once wrote that Lucie Arnaz was a chip off the old blockhead. I was talking about genes, of course, but at Birdland—where she’s been knocking them wall-eyed and packing them in tight as ACE bandages—the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is very much her own star. With power, passion, a dynamic vibrato for emphasis on the swing tunes and a lemon twist for tartness on the torch songs, she’s pretty much a one-woman phenomenon. The looks? Eat your hearts out, ladies. I’ve seen her eat, so I know she doesn’t live on Bibb lettuce, but I guess she walks 18 miles a day because she’s got the same sylphlike body and the same swanlike neck she had on her mom’s old comedy shows.  read more »

TAKE
RUNNING TIME 99 minute
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Charles Oliver
STARRING Minnie Driver, Jeremy Renner

Take is another in a meaningless parade of time-wasting marquee cloggers that have been coming at us this summer in sections. Directed and written by Charles Oliver, this bargain-basement crime melodrama about anguish, violence and redemption among the socially marginalized is a kind of Dick and Jane primer of how not to make a movie that will appeal to anyone with an attention span of more than 30 minutes.

Telling parallel stories simultaneously, it starts with Ana (Minnie Driver), a poor housewife with a small son who suffers from learning disabilities.  read more »

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes
WRITTEN BY Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
DIRECTED BY Julian Jarrold
STARRING Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Hayley Atwell

Here it is at last: the intelligent movie filmgoers have waited for all year. The film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited transforms one of the quintessential novels of the 20th century into one of the grandest, most enriching films of 2008. The 11-part 1981 miniseries was such a milestone in TV history that purists who watch the four-volume DVD set might squabble about the merits of reducing so much artistry into an almost two-and-a-half-hour film.  read more »

FELON
RUNNING TIME 104 minutes
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Ric Roman Waugh
STARRING Stephen Dorff, Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Harold Perrineau

Prison movies may not be everyone’s idea of escapist entertainment, but with nearly two million people overcrowding the U.S. penal system already and the numbers growing daily, it’s a problem worth addressing. Audiences are gruesomely fascinated by horror stories behind bars, and like the phenomenal TV series Oz, the stuff that happens in a tense, taut new movie called Felon is nothing less than electrifying.

The versatility and charisma of the dynamic, always surprising actor Stephen Dorff is the catalytic converter in this harrowing story of an innocent man caught up in America’s flawed legal system.  read more »

THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Some folks take metaphysical pleasure from the New Batman Philosophy According to Christopher Nolan: that good and evil lurk side by side in everyone, including Batman. But in my opinion, every Batman movie is about only one thing: action hero (the caped crusader with wings) vs. bad guys (everyone else). Writer-director Nolan’s Batman Begins, with its surreal and mystical mumbo jumbo about playboy Bruce Wayne’s beginnings, remains the worst Batman movie I’ve ever seen, although the comic-book addicts disagree.  read more »

MAMMA MIA!
RUNNING TIME 108 minutes
WRITTEN BY Catherine Johnson
DIRECTED BY Phyllida Lloyd
STARRING Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters

Amid the summer junk-movies that are already going down in history as artifacts, some folks will welcome, I suppose, the nauseating cornball music of the Swedish pop group ABBA which pounds its way through the monumentally inconsequential Mamma Mia! To me, the popularity of the jukebox blather of this gang of no-talents is only slightly less understandable than the war in Iraq. And the movie they’ve made of the bafflingly popular tourist attraction still playing on Broadway is only slightly more unbearable than finding myself the real-life star of all the Saw movies rolled into one.  read more »

DIMINISHED CAPACITY
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda).  read more »

August
Running time 88 minutes
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Directed by Austin Chick
Starring Josh Hartnett, Adam Scott, Naomie Harris, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rip Torn, Robin Tunney, David Bowie

Worse still, there’s a deadly, amateurish infection going around called August, with yet another novocained performance by zombified Josh Hartnett as a dot-com Internet star named Tom Sterling, who invents a company called Landshark with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott). Nobody knows what Landshark does, but when Tom explains it, he says: “That’s so third quarter ’99. You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is E. Pure E. Not E commerce.  read more »

TheWackness
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest.  read more »

Liz Callaway
Feinstein’s at Loews Regency
Through June 28

As usual, when it comes to value received for money spent, the music scene surpasses the movies. At Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, glorious jazz diva Ann Hampton Callaway’s younger, shorter and equally talented sister Liz is knocking their socks off. A veteran of Broadway show tunes and classy concert halls, she has chosen, for reasons of self-satisfaction only she can explain, to celebrate the pop tunes of the 1960s. She calls this cabaret whim “The Beat Goes On” and as Fats Domino used to chide at the Peppermint Lounge, “It do, babe, it sho’nuff do.  read more »

Expired
Running Time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Cecilia Miniucchi
Starring Samantha Morton, Jason Patric, Teri Garr

“Expired” is the word you see before they tow your car away. So it is little wonder that a new movie called Expired should be about—what else?—a meter maid. “I’m one of the most hated people in the world,” says Claire, a poor, hapless Santa Monica parking enforcement officer played with wistful, unhappy but eternally optimistic fervor by the quirky actress Samantha Morton. “People run from me like the plague. Insult me. Give me the finger. Verbally abuse me.  read more »

Finding Amanda
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Peter Tolan
Starring Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli

Finding Amanda is an inconsequential little low-budget throwaway with another stagnant, indifferent performance by the underwhelming but overexposed Matthew Broderick as a mediocre Hollywood TV writer named Taylor Peters. Taylor is so unreliable, indifferent and irresponsible that each episode of his sitcom is like a knee replacement. A severe case of writer’s block has reached the level of mental illness. He also suffers from a gambling addiction so serious that it has derailed his career and almost wrecked his marriage to the long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) he has lied to for years.  read more »

Wanted
Running Time 110 minutes
Written by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov
Starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp

Even in the summer garbage dump of bloated bilge aimed at computer hackers and sleepwalkers with I.Q.’s under 40, a bucket of swill called Wanted reaches the bottom of the waste heap. There are so many things wrong with this cabbage-headed comic book that I don’t know where to begin. I guess it doesn’t matter. Since none of it makes one word of sense, you can just jump in anywhere.

From what I understood of the alleged “plot,” it seems that 1,000 years ago a secret group of assassins called “The Fraternity” went around ridding the population of bad guys.  read more »

The Incredible Hulk
Running Time 114 minutes
Written by Zak Penn
Directed by Louis Leterrier
Starring Edward Norton, William Hurt and Liv Tyler

Five years have passed since the first big-screen Hulk wasted the reputation of director Ang Lee on a computer-generated comic strip nobody wanted to see. That film suffered punishing reviews and a devastating 70 percent drop-off in attendance in the second week, from which it never recovered. But you can’t keep an old, green, 10-ton Brussels sprout down for long. It’s too early to predict if The Incredible Hulk, the CGI sequel, will sink to that same level of box office infamy, but take it from me: You’ll have the DVD by Labor Day.  read more »

The Happening
Running Time 91 minutes
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo

There’s a moment in the boring, brain-dead new M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening when Mark Wahlberg turns to the camera, trying to suppress a grin, and asks, “Can this really be happening?” I ask the same question every week, but it just gets worse.

It’s not a good sign when a director casts Mr. Wahlberg, a ruddy rapper-turned-actor who looks like a choirboy selling crack in the apse, as a science teacher pondering the mystery of why honeybees are disappearing from coast to coast.  read more »

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
Running Time 101 minutes
Written by Ann Peacock
Directed by Patricia Rozema
Starring Abigail Breslin, Chris O’Donnell and Julia Ormond

Considering the surfeit of popular junk that is currently polluting the ozone, an enchanting little movie like Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is so sweet and sanitized it makes me feel almost guilty for liking it. But this vehicle for Abigail Breslin, the Oscar-nominated surprise sensation of the acclaimed Little Miss Sunshine, is not only a brisk, beautifully conceived period piece that spells entertainment with a capital E—it exalts the cheerful audience-participation innocence of those family films that used to star Margaret O’Brien, Dean Stockwell and Peggy Ann Garner.  read more »

Quid Pro Quo
Running Time 82 minutes
Written and Directed by Carlos Brooks
Starring Nick Stahl and Vera Farmiga

Look high and low, but you won’t find a weirder movie than Quid Pro Quo. In 1989, a high-speed car crash kills the parents of a boy named Isaac Knott, leaving him an orphaned paraplegic. Eighteen years later, confined to a wheelchair, he’s a 26-year-old investigative reporter who tells odd stories of life in New York City on public radio. (Same job Jodie Foster had in The Brave One, which should have been a warning. Must be a dangerous career choice, because this one also leads to trouble.) Tracking down a story about a man who pays a doctor to cut off his perfectly good leg, Isaac (played by the gifted Nick Stahl, from In the Bedroom) discovers a sordid underworld of fetish freaks who get off on amputations.  read more »

In two of the town’s swankiest cabaret rooms, the testosterone levels are soaring. Every Monday night at the Algonquin, Rue McClanahan (the feistiest of TV’s aging “Golden Girls”), in her directorial debut, guides her husband, Morrow Wilson, through a center ring salute to Noël Coward, in the aptly titled Noël Coward 101. He doesn’t resemble Noel, or sound like him, but his quips and pointed, well-chosen anecdotes about the renowned composer, songwriter, playwright, novelist, painter and performer aim darts at the funny bone and rarely miss their mark. (He called Peter O’Toole “Florence of Arabia.”) Suffering from a restless spirit that prevented him from committing to anyone or anything, and a cynicism that prevented him from finding inner peace, he was a man in a hurry—always lonely and full of poisonous wit. From the soignée sadness of “World Weary” to sage advice for pompous Mrs. Worthington to “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage,” Mr. Wilson builds each stanza into an even larger portrait of Coward, who could neither read nor write music, but created classics transcribed by friends. The voice is unsteady and there’s not much range, but Mr. Wilson has passion and wit and a refreshing lack of pretense that guarantees a high-flying good time. Clearly, this is a labor of love that really pays off. When Noël Coward’s party finally ended, there were fireworks. Morrow Wilson at the Algonquin creates a perfect depository for that kind of bombast to explode over again.

At Feinstein’s at the Regency, Tony Danza is like a pugilist who moves like Rocky and taps like a Rockette. Agile, fit and loaded with charm, he plays against image in spats and a straw hat; he offers songs and stories with dancing themes; he tells corny George Bush jokes, musician jokes, and dumb-blonde jokes, and talks about his age. Almost 60, he’s beyond Valpolicello and ready for Viagra. The show has variety. He sings close harmony with four musicians in a Four Seasons sock hop arrangement of “The Last Dance” and occasionally plays the ukulele, cornet and harmonica—all badly. But the thing about the guy is the way he always surprises you. He can bring back vaudeville with a sassy soft shoe, then blow a cool rendition of the jazz classic “Freddy the Freeloader” in a very reasonable approximation of Miles Davis. Tony Danza could bring back vaudeville, and boy do we need it now.

rreed@observer.com

Chris & Don. A Love Story
Running Time 90 minutes
Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara

Chris & Don. A Love Story is a poignant and thoughtful documentary about the astonishing and transforming love affair between the world-famous writer Christopher Isherwood and the highly regarded artist Don Bachardy. At a headline-grabbing time for same-sex relationships, heading for the altar, it seems more relevant than ever. And the couple it’s about are rather extraordinary even without the civics lesson.

Chris was a British novelist whose diaries and recollections of the Weimar era leading up to World War II, compiled in an acclaimed book called Berlin Stories, were the basis for both the play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret. He was already an established man of letters 30 years older than Don when he met the gawky, sexy, naïve 18-year-old on the beach at Malibu in 1952. A love at first sight that dared not speak its name aloud in the early ’50s lasted until Isherwood’s death, in 1986. It was a relationship that surpassed all doubts, worries and obstacles, and survived three decades of indignities, social homophobia and Hollywood gossip columns. At the end, it had also erased the parameters of togetherness. Chris and Don were as good as married, and they didn’t need to exchange vows, sign a piece of paper or hire a choir singing the “Ave Maria” to prove it. They were definitely ahead of their time.

Combing Isherwood’s diaries for guidance, co-directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara spent 10 years meticulously putting this film together. Out of so much sweat and dedication comes a deeply affecting love story of a passion that turned to trust. With fatherly devotion, Chris practically raised the sun-kissed California teen, and Don loved him like a father, mentor, educator, teacher and savior. They didn’t even own a dog because Chris was reluctant to share his affection with something other than Don. We trace his arrival in America in 1939, fleeing from the snow and grime of New York to the heat and rat-infested palm trees of Hollywood, where he continued to write like a camera taking pictures. “Someday this will have to be developed,” he said. He was spiritual enough to become a monk, but he was also too spirited (and horny) to give up boys. And Don talks about surrendering to the advances of a man who was almost 50 when they met, the intimacy of their lives and the thirst for knowledge that never wavered, with such blasé acceptance that it never seems decadent. The word “pedophilia” is not in his vocabulary.

And so, through his tutor-guru-guide, Don entered the world beyond the claustrophobic confines of working-class Los Angeles. He rubbed elbows with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Igor Stravinsky and Somerset Maugham; with Chris at his side, he saw the world. In Tangier, he smoked his first quality, mind-expanding Moroccan kief at 21 while visiting Paul Bowles. In Paris, he imitates the Hunchback in the shadow of Notre Dame. In Key West, he falls for Anna Magnani while she’s shooting The Rose Tattoo. Finally, when the time came for the young man who believed nobody liked him for himself to prove his worth, it was Chris who paid his way through art school and encouraged Don’s only talent. Drawing pen and ink sketches of the rich and celebrated, he discovered success and, consequently, his own manifesto.

There were problems, separations, and sexual experiments with other bodies that would have severed weaker unions, but the older man’s wisdom and the young man’s refusal to abandon the best thing that ever happened to him kept Chris and Don devoted for a lifetime. When Chris was dying of cancer at 82, it was Don’s turn to play the strength card. The son became the parent, the guardian, the nurse. Togetherness transcended even death.

Chris & Don. A Love Story does what a good documentary should. It informs the mind and broadens the horizon while never losing its entertainment value. Mr. Bachardy, now 74, has never lost his mischievous twinkle his ardor, or his intoxication with life. He is the life force behind the film, and throws himself into every scene with zest. He is not play-acting, but there’s an emotional rawness in his honest portrayal of himself that is affecting—whether he’s speechless with ecstasy meeting his idol, Montgomery Clift, or caring and gentle visiting his older brother, a broken toy in a nursing facility after years of mental breakdowns. I must confess there’s an unsettling melancholy at the heart of this movie. The sense of love and loss and grief and mourning left me profoundly depressed. Still, it’s positive and funny, too. What moved me was not so much how Chris and Don turned the hot-button age-difference controversy to their advantage, but how their love transformed a shy, insecure boy who didn’t feel he had much to offer the world into a man of pride and distinction with his own identity intact. Chris and Don proves there are all kinds of love in this lonely old world, and none of them are wrong.

rreed@observer.com

Sex and the City
Running Time 145 minutes
Written and Directed by Michael Patrick King
Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis

There’s nothing wrong with Sarah Jessica Parker that couldn’t be cured by wart-removal surgery. That growth on her face just gets bigger with every close-up, and in the full-length movie version of Sex and the City it’s so distracting you can’t concentrate on anything else. It’s not a beauty mark. I guess you can’t tell a co-producer anything, but listen up, girl. At this point, you would make a wonderful Halloween witch. Unfortunately, to fix all the things wrong with Sex and the City, you need more than a scalpel.  read more »