Joe's View

Emmy Rossum has been knocking around in movies for several years — she was the ingenue opposite Gerard Butler in “Phantom of the Opera” and was lost in the ensemble shuffle of “The Day After Tomorrow” — without making a very strong impression one way or the other.

That’s why it is so sad that the Philadelphia-shot indie, “Dare,” fell through the cracks after it debuted at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Rossum gives a terrific performance as a high school senior who is determined to become an actress.

Alexa is the most committed actress in her class, but is drawing on almost no life experience.

When a successful stage actor friend of her teacher comes to Philly, Alexa gets a wake-up call when the actor tears apart her scene work as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Alan Cumming plays the merciless actor who tells the girl to go out and start taking risks in her own life so that her acting won’t be just an academic exercise.

Alexa decides to see what might happen between her and Johnny (Zach Gilford), the surly fellow student who was pressured into playing Stanley by the teacher.

On the sidelines is Alexa’s best friend, Ben (Ashley Springer), who realizes he is attracted to Johnny as well.

Writer David Brind and director Adam Salky explore this situation with humor and taste (and more than a little eroticism).

Rossum anchors the film with one of the most believable coming-of-age performances in recent movies. She seems to grow up right in front of our eyes. Acting younger than your actual age is very tough and projecting believable “innocence” is even tougher, but Rossum does both things expertly.

The Image Entertainment DVD has above-average extras — including Rossum’s rather amazing screen test and the short film by Brind and Salky that inspired “Dare.” It’s fascinating to watch the way the key scene between Johnny and Ben (below) was played in the short — the unknown Philly actors who did the original film are very good, but Gilford and Springer take the scene to a higher level.

It’s hard to think of another arts documentary like “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance” — one that digs so deeply into the personal and financial challenges of keeping an arts organization alive over several decades, as funding sources dry up and artistic relationships buckle.

A standard “American Masters” approach to the late choreographer/artistic director Robert Joffrey (below) would probably focus almost entirely on the ballet company he created in New York City 50 years ago and the breakthrough work he went on to do with such key choreographers as Twyla Tharp.

The documentary doesn’t stint on the artistic end of the Joffrey Ballet, but it also presents the terrible day-to-day struggle to meet payroll, plan tours and compete with other companies for an ever-dwindling pot of funding.

Director Bob Hercules has made a fascinating movie that you don’t have to be a ballet fan to enjoy — it’s about the remarkable survival of a non-profit arts organization which was declared dead more than once.

Joffrey was determined to build an “American” ballet company in New York City — as opposed to what were then the two big Eurocentric Manhattan troupes, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.

With his artistic and personal partner Gerald Arpino, Joffrey brought modern dance styles and choreographers into the world of ballet at a time when that was something of a heresy.

As the 1960s became more politically and socially volatile, The Joffrey Ballet was able to reflect those changes in dance pieces set to rock music and with the sort of costuming and lighting that might have caused riots at NYCB or ABT.

In addition to facing moments when his funding simply dried up, Joffrey became a target of much critical vitriol for the chances he took. Younger audiences responded very positively to the new work, but traditionalists hated many of the contemporary pieces.

A major turning point came in 1973 when Joffrey brought in Twyla Tharp — who was then considered part of the downtown avant garde — to choreograph one of her first large-scale pieces “Deuce Coupe” (above), set to the music of The Beach Boys. (In the early performances, graffiti artists were brought in to create the backdrop during the performance on a giant scroll.)

Critics embraced Tharp’s piece and within a few years she was working at ABT with Baryshnikov on a total merging of ballet and modern dance in “Push Comes to Shove.”

“Joffrey: Mavericks of Dance” also explores the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis on the New York dance community, with Joffrey claimed by the disease in 1988.

Arpino picked up the baton, however, and kept the company going despite another financial crisis that ended with the Joffrey Ballet being forced to leave New York City and restart in Chicago.

“Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance” is receiving its U.S. premiere Saturday at theaters all over the country where moviegoers will be able to participate in a question-and-answer session after the film, simulcast live from Lincoln Center.

In Connecticut, the Bijou Theatre in Bridgeport will be hosting this event Saturday at 1:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.thebijoutheatre.com

Walker and Company is publishing a smart little book next month — “The Accidental Feminist” — in which the cultural critic M.G. Lord shows us how Elizabeth Taylor became an unlikely political barrier breaker both on screen in the roles she played and off-screen with her turbulent, unconventional personal life.

Lord makes a good case for Taylor as a pre-Women’s Liberation era movie star who laid some of the groundwork for the explosion of feminism in the 1970s.

Although many female stars of the 1930s and 1940s became feminist icons because of the power of their screen personalities — Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis foremost among them — during their peak years those two women faced the restrictions inherent in being studio contract players who frequently had to bow to the wills of their bosses.

The Hepburn and Davis images also suffer from movies in which their strength was mocked or turned against them — it’s painful to watch Hepburn making breakfast for Spencer Tracy near the end of “Woman of the Year” or seeing Davis as the neutered magazine writer in the ghastly “June Bride.”

Taylor was lucky to escape the clutches of MGM when she was still a very young actress — the studio system collapsed around her — and to emerge in the 1960s as one of the most powerful stars (male or female) in Hollywood.

As Lord points out, the actress suffered from the censors in such key roles as Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Gloria Wandrous in “Butterfield 8.” But Taylor became a major force in turning over the Motion Picture Code with the 1966 landmark “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which included language and sexual situations that were expressly forbidden until the actress and her director (Mike Nichols) used their clout to push the material through.

Some of the fun in Lord’s book comes from her quirky taste and judgement.

The author writes up a storm in favor of “The Sandpiper” (below), the mid-1960s soap opera in which Taylor plays a bohemian artist and Richard Burton is the married Episcopal minister who questions his own faith and morality after an affair with the artist.

For me, the movie has always been an entertaining bit of scenery-chewing camp — something in the same ballpark as “Valley of the Dolls” — but Lord pulls out all stops: “‘The Sandpiper’ with all its flaws, seemed a feminist ‘Citizen Kane.’”

As if that statement isn’t over the top enough, the author goes on to compare the Taylor character with Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.”

In the last third of the book, Lord shows how Taylor moved on to real political activism after her screen popularity dimmed in the 1970s and 1980s — becoming a major force in AIDS activism at a time when other celebrities (and the President of the United States) ignored the “gay plague.”

“From 1985 until her death, Taylor fought consciously — not accidentally — for social justice,” Lord writes.

“I believe her final role in life was influenced by the movies with feminist content that she had starred in as a younger woman. Actors both shape and are shaped by their parts. They bring aspects of themselves to their characters and they take aspects of their characters away.”

Add Chris Morgan Jones to the ever-growing list of fine writers who have found ways to reinvent the international espionage thriller long after the end of the Cold War.

Fans of the genre probably recall the reports of the demise of the John LeCarre/Len Deighton spy story after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

What would they write about after the end of the Soviet Union?

Of course, the tension between the United States and Russia has continued long after the so-called “war” ended and the introduction of capitalism there has only made the old rivalries more interesting.

“The Silent Oligarch” — which was published Monday by The Penguin Press — is a beautifully written thriller about how the power of money has been replacing the power of the state in the former Soviet Union, and how the West is no closer to understanding the way things work there than we ever were.

Jones follows two characters, Richard Lock, an English lawyer who has helped to make Konstantin Malin one of the richest men on earth, and Benjamin Webster, a former journalist who once covered the vast changes in Russia but now works for a London corporate intelligence firm.

Lock has helped to build Malin’s empire through a web of shell companies, and various forms of banking chicanery, but he is tiring of the strain of dealing with a very sinister business partner. He secretly longs for a way out of his relationship with Malin and a way back to his ex-wife and child in London.

Webster is a tarnished idealist who once lost a Russian journalist he loved when she knew too much and was murdered for that knowledge. Now happily married and a father, the man is nevertheless thrilled when his company is hired to bring down Malin (who might have been behind the killing of the journalist).

Jones cuts back and forth between these two characters, making it clear that they have more in common than they know. The suspense builds as Webster tries to convince Lock that there might be a way out of the deadly Malin’s clutches.

Jones knows whereof he speaks, with a background in business intelligence that — according to his bio — included working for Russian oligarchs, New York banks and Middle Eastern governments.

“The Silent Oligarch” is a smashing debut that will leave most readers anxious to follow Webster on his next assignment.

Billy Corben’s 2011 documentary, “Limelight,” has just arrived on DVD via Magnolia Home Entertainment, and it proves to be as gripping as any fictional film.

Corben traces the history of Canadian nightclub operator Peter Gatien who came to New York City in the 1980s and quickly became one of the most important figures in the post-Studio 54 scene.

Gatien ran the Tunnel, the Paladium, Club USA and one of the dominant clubs of the era, The Limelight, which was in a deconsecrated church on Sixth Avenue.

The entrepreneur lost an eye when he was young and for many years sported an eyepatch that gave him either a stylish or sinister appearance, depending on your attitude toward nightclub owners.

During his rise, Gatien’s looks were probably an asset — he seemed to represent the slight danger people have always looked for in New York after dark. But when the club operator became the target of city and federal drug investigations in his places of business, the eyepatch made the man’s alleged connections to the drug underworld seem likely to the readers of the tabloid newspapers that covered the endless investigations and trials.

To Billy Corben’s credit, “Limelight” isn’t just Gatien’s story. The movie is about the changing pop culture scene of the last 30 years — particularly, the shift in club music from disco to electronica to hip hop — and the drug culture that went along with the transitions.

Cocaine was the dominant drug of the disco era, with the cost of the drug limiting its use to glitzier people with money to burn.

Ecstacy became much more widespread in clubs in the 1980s because it was a legal psychiatric drug (at first) and much cheaper and easier to use than cocaine. As one of the interview subjects says in the film, when you pop Ecstacy in your mouth, no one knows if you’re taking an aspirin or about to suck on a Tic Tac.

The use of the drug became so widespread and the side effects so serious that, like LSD, it was eventually added to the list of illegal drugs like coke and pot.

Ambitious, publicity-seeking DAs in New York City knew that they could get much more press by going after a celebrity nightclub owner than the low level dealers who operated in his clubs. As more than one person notes in “Limelight,” Gatien was making so much money on entrance fees and booze at his clubs that he had no need to mess with illegal pills.

Things got worse for Gatien and his peers with the rise of Rudy Giuliani and the crusading-DA-turned-mayor’s crackdown on “vice” of all sorts in New York City.

When Gatien was found not guilty on drug charges, the angry feds moved on to the tax evasion charges that are always easy to level against restauranteurs and club owners who work and live in a world filled with lots of cash that might or might not be accurately reported to the IRS. Gatien eventually was forced out of business not by criminal charges but by the huge legal fees he spent defending himself year after year — he ran out of cash and was then deported back to Canada.

Some foreign movies leave you thinking that there are few real differences between countries and cultures, but then there are films like the Australian docudrama “Balibo” that keep you at a slight distance.

Set mostly in East Timor in 1975, the film is about the disappearance of five Australian television journalists who were covering the violent upheaval in the country after Portuguese rule ended and neighboring Indonesia invaded the newly independent country.

East Timor is only about 400 miles from Australia, so when the Indonesians began to kill untold thousands of people — estimates run as high as 150,000 — political activists pushed hard for the Australian government to do something about the horrendous situation.

The journalists were trying to send filmed reports of the horror back to viewers in their homeland when they disappeared in the town of Balibo and were presumed dead.

Another prominent journalist, Roger East (played in the film by Anthony LaPaglia, above right) went to East Timor to investigate, and he disappeared, too.

The movie’s obviously fictionalized depiction of what might have happened to these men is terrifying. We are placed in the position of being trapped by violent events that are rapidly spiraling into chaos, with no hope of escape.

“Balibo” gives us a ray of dramatic hope in the form of the young idealistic Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac, above left) who convinced East to come to his country and after many years eventually became one of its leaders (and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize).

The problem with “Balibo” is that this historic material is presented in a fragmented style that leaves the movie without a very coherent narrative. When you have flashbacks within flashbacks and no obvious protagonist in a movie about events that happened 37 years ago, on the other side of the world, it’s hard to stay connected.

Most of the film is devoted to the six white Australians who died while working in East Timor, leaving “Balibo” open to the same criticism that has been leveled against the Civil Rights Era dramas made in this country that have been about the problems faced by caucasian activists rather than the black people who were suffering the brunt of government-sanctioned racism.

We don’t find out about Jose Ramos-Horta’s historical importance to East Timor until the end of the film on a series of title cards.

What happened to the six journalists was awful, but to have their murders overshadow the deaths of tens of thousands of people in a country they were free to leave at any time seems insensitive.

Director Emil Chiaberi never appears on camera in his subtly subversive documentary “Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal” (RF Releasing) which could be one of the reasons why it has a lot more punch than most of the Michael Moore films.

Moore is a showman who muddies his own left wing agenda by making himself a very large target for his conservative critics — Moore’s personality and ego are impossible to avoid in his movies and both have become increasingly unattractive in the years since “Roger & Me” put him on the map (all of his subsequent films could have “& Me” tacked onto the title).

Chiaberi (below, left, with postal union steward Charlie Withers) stays behind the scenes and uses interview subjects and archival footage to trace the history of the “going postal” wave of post office employee killings that began in 1986. He then shows how violence in workplaces of all kinds has been growing.

“Murder by Proxy” suggests that it was the demand for unrealistic levels of productivity in post offices that led to the outbreaks of violence. Chiaberi and his interview subjects believe that in the “lean and mean” business environment of the new century — where fewer people are expected to do more work and have limited options for other employment — violence will continue to increase in the business world.

Attempts at production sabotage have become more common in workplaces, according to Chiaberi, including at potentially dangerous sites such as water treatment facilities and nuclear power plants. The film quotes experts as saying angry workers are more likely to cause catastrophic damage in these facilities than terrorists because they already have security clearances.

“Murder by Proxy” shows how the balance of power between workers and employers began to shift in the 1980s when the Reagan administration pulled off some of the most successful anti-union actions in modern history and job-slashing business leaders like Jack Welch became culture heroes.

Globalization cut back on the number of possible jobs for American workers, making it more difficult to leave an abusive employment situation.

Many of the postal workers interviewed in the film say that they weren’t surprised when their debt-ridden, stressed-out co-workers pushed-back violently. With no power to change their work conditions, these frustrated and depressed people became ticking time bombs. In one of the film’s most shocking sequences, survivors of one attack tell us that one of the supervisors who was murdered had it coming.

For more information on the movie, go to: www.murderbyproxyfilm.com

Jan Kounen’s smart and sexy 2010 bio-pic “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” opens with a tremendous flourish — a recreation of the legendary 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” which nearly caused the audience to riot.

Kounen shows us Nijinsky and his patron Sergei Diaghilev getting the Ballets Russes dancers ready to perform to Stravinsky’s powerful and difficult music and then the curtain going up on this revolutionary dance/musical event.

“The Rite of Spring” triggered chaos because it was so unlike anything audiences had heard up until that time. Stravinsky’s innovations would soon be embraced, however, to the degree that Walt Disney would include the piece in his controversial 1940 animated movie “Fantasia.”

The explosive premiere in Paris marked a temporary career setback for Stravinsky, but it was the night that also brought him a new and powerful patron in the form of Coco Chanel (the designer who revolutionized women’s clothing and the perfume business).

Chanel was transfixed by “The Rite of Spring” and the emotions that it generated in the audience members around her. She contacted Stravinsky — who was virtually penniless — and invited the composer and his wife and children to live at her country home just outside Paris.

What starts as the act of a truly committed patron of the arts turns into a torrid sexual affair that undermines the focus of both legends.

Kounen presents the relationship without judgement. We can see the electric connection between the two great artists (although in a fit of anger Stravinsky puts Chanel down by saying, “You’re not an artist, you’re a shopkeeper”). The personal toll of the relationship is made vivid by the performance of Elena Morozova as Stravinsky’s long-suffering wife Catherine.

Basically, the whole movie hinges on the performances of Mads Mikkelsen as the composer and Anna Mougalis as the fearlessly independent designer.

Since there is so little dialogue in the movie — and very little exposition as well — most of the story is told on the faces of the two actors. Mikkelsen and Mougalis are superb and one of sexiest movie couples of recent years.

“Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” contrasts two equally challenging lives in the arts — Chanel’s determination to live life independent of any permanent attachments to men, and Stravinsky’s attempt to juggle the creation of emotionally discordant music with a stable family life.

Unlike most bio-pics which tell us how we are supposed to feel about the characters from scene to scene, Kounen’s austere approach allows us to look at the characters rarther objectively, admiring the commitment to art but questioning the way Coco and Igor use the people around them.