Joe's View

I didn’t think I would ever be subjected to a Hollywood special effect more tasteless than that notorious POV shot of the bomb hitting the battleship in Michael Bay’s 2001 “Pearl Harbor.”

Yes, anyone who has spent much of his or her life going to the movies grows used to callous violence — people graphically murdered to spice up lame horror movies, whole cities destroyed by King Kong, Godzilla and their spawn, etc. etc.

But there was something about the cool CGI, video game-style shot of a bomb about to kill hundreds of sailors that made me sick to my stomach (I was also embarrassed to have taken a group of World War II veterans to the opening day of “Pearl Harbor” to gather their reactions to the movie).

A moment that I assumed would be an all-time low was surpassed for me last week when I finally caught up with the 9/11 drama “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

The movie is an adaptation of an acclaimed novel by Jonathan Foer, but it has been given a Hollywood sheen that makes the depiction of the World Trade Center destruction a story point on a par with the sinking of the Titanic in the James Cameron film.

In a very ill-advised bit of casting, Tom Hanks plays a businessman who dies in the WTC, leaving behind a widow (Sandra Bullock) and precocious son (Thomas Horn).

“Extremely Close” opens with a stylized rendering of one of the people who fell — or jumped — from the top floors of the WTC when the raging fires pushed them to edge of the abyss. Later in the film, there is a nightmare sequence in which we see the Tom Hanks character plunging right at the camera in his fall from the building. It’s an appalling use of Hollywood technology that leaves you wondering what the actor was thinking when he shot it.

Much of the movie is devoted to the boy’s attempt to come to terms with his father’s sudden death, but we return to flashbacks of the wife getting a phone call from her trapped husband, and the six harrowing messages he leaves on the home phone.

9/11 is now more than a decade ago, so there is no good reason that filmmakers shouldn’t be able to deal with the topic without being faced with charges of gross emotional manipulation — indeed, the best film yet made about the events of that day, Paul Greengrass’ “United 93,” came out six years ago.

But using big stars like Hanks and Bullock for conventional tear-jerking purposes in a slick take on 9/11 would probably still feel wrong five or ten years from now.

In the space of just 13 issues, the Brooklyn-based, three-times-a-year journal n + 1 has become one of the most reliable sources of reporting on the things that really matter in contemporary America.

In a front section called The Intellectual Situation, anonymous journalists and commentators look at politics, sexual relations, the job market, technology and other recent developments in a sharp, common-sense-but-opinionated style that is a refreshing alternative to the so-called “objective” reporting in many newspapers.

In Issue 13, the front of the journal section is devoted to a series of interlocking reports on the Occupy Wall Street movement and its possible repercussions on the 2012 presidential election and the political activism of the current generation of college students and graduates, who are saddled with enormous college loans and face dismal job prospects.

The anonymous author of the section entitled “A Left Populism” boils much of our current situation down to one potent paragraph that bears repeating:

“Given the demoralization of the working class, corporate domination of politics and the media, Republican control of the House and blockade in the Senate, this (OWS) was always going to be a quixotic effort. And the movement’s very success — its thrilling capture of physical and discursive space — has revealed new obstacles, among them a casual resort to police brutality and a contempt for the right to assembly in municipalities throughout the country. On November 15, a New York City mayor with a $20 billion fortune — gained through providing proprietary data and analysis to the financial industry, and whose girlfriend sits on the board of the corporation that “owns” the public space in Zucotti Park — had the Occupy Wall Street encampment evicted, ransacking the People’s Library and smashing laptops in the process. Bloomberg’s conflicts of interest went almost unremarked, in keeping with the current state of American politics, and the park was restored to what the mayor deemed its true purpose: ‘passive recreation.’”

The same piece zeroes in on the challenge OWS faced when it put the middle and lower middle classes in the same percentile with the poverty-stricken:

“The problem with any 90 versus 10 (or 80 versus 20) framing of debate has to do with the distribution not of income but of class consciousness. Thirty-nine percent of Americans believed, in 2000, that they were already among the top 1 percent of earners or would be ‘soon.’ Soak the rich won’t work so long as many Americans still think (in spite of social mobility levels below those of Western Europe) that they will soon number among the soaked. If two-fifths of the population identifies with the wealthiest 1 percent, then explicitly going after the wealthiest 10 or 20 percent would be a sure way to alienate the majority.”

If you haven’t been reading n + 1, issue 13 would be a great place to start.

(For more information, go to www.nplusonemag.com)

Sigourney Weaver has stood apart from other film actressses — literally and figuratively — since she broke through with her sensational performance in the first “Alien” picture in 1979.

Weaver’s sheer size and implied physical force made her one of the great modern movie action heroes (a position she solidified with her Oscar-nominated work in James Cameron’s “Aliens” in 1986).

The things that made her such a refreshingly strong woman on screen worked against her when it came to more human-scaled roles. Although she did pop up in a few romantic movie dramas, Weaver didn’t get to show the vulnerability that made some of her stage work so memorable (she was a confused love-twisted delight in the first New York production of Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy”).

When Weaver received the rare honor of being nominated in both female Oscar acting categories in 1988, both roles were slightly scary Amazons — the half-crazed Dian Fossey in “Gorillas in the Mist” and the Wall Street bitch boss in “Working Girl.” The actress was terrific in both pictures, but the parts were cut from the same cloth as her most successful prior film work.

The smartest thing the folks behind the made-for-TV movie “Prayers for Bobby” did was to give Weaver the chance to play a strong woman who is brought down to earth by her own rigid beliefs.

I missed the movie when it debuted on Lifetime in early 2010, but I am very glad I watched the DVD that was released at the end of 2010. “Prayers for Bobby” suffers from the usual TV movie production deficiencies — the story feels too compressed, some of the technical values are substandard — but Weaver delivers an astonishing performance.

The movie is based on a book by Leroy Aarons that tells the true story of Mary Griffith, a devoutly Christian woman who is shocked to learn her favorite child, Bobby (Ryan Kelley) is struggling with a growing awareness that he is gay.

Mary is a bible literalist who believes her son will burn in hell if he acts on his impulses — she pushes him toward fundamentalist Christian “cures” as well as an anti-gay psychiatrist.

Bobby moves from California to Oregon to stay with a liberal cousin, but his mother’s anger (and lack of support) eats away at him and he ends up killing himself.

Weaver handles the early scenes very well, but it is in the second half of the movie that her performance becomes emotionally devastating as she shows us a woman grappling with her own guilt.

Seeing such a physically imposing person brought down by tragedy is scary and moving — Weaver takes us deep into Mary’s grief and guilt.

“Prayers for Bobby” then shows us something we rarely see in movies — or in life — a woman trying to shed the rigid life philosophy that destroyed someone she loved very much. Weaver commits herself so totally to Mary’s journey that she makes us believe that such an elemental personal change is possible.

Alex Gibney’s 2010 documentary, “Client 9,” covers some of the same territory as another  non-fiction film from the same year “Inside Job” — the strange personal behavior of the super-rich men on Wall Street who led us to the edge of the abyss two years ago — but the Gibney film is much more personal.

Gibney digs into the way that sex has become another expensive consumer good for men who have more money than they know what to do with (i.e. paying somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 for an hour with a top-of-the-line escort).

The documentary focuses on ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s downfall in the aftermath of the revelation that he was a frequent customer of a very expensive call-girl operation.

The irony here is that Spitzer was using the same escort service that supplied young women to the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street that he went after when he was New York’s attorney general (the platform he used to launch himself into the governor’s mansion).

Spitzer had divided his life up into so many different private and public compartments that he didn’t see the danger in trying to prosecute call girl rings at the same time that he was hiring escorts.

The ex-governor agreed to sit down with Gibney for a new interview and while it isn’t all that revealing, it does give Spitzer the chance to talk about his own self-destructive mix of hubris and horniness.

Spitzer explains why he used escorts and why the practice didn’t really threaten his marriage (from his point of view) — they were purely sexual hours that he never let become anything more than that.

Spitzer wasn’t interested in an affair or romance — he just wanted sex.

Spitzer’s friends and associates express shock about the politician’s “secret life” but it’s only a “secret” to those who don’t really stop and think about the special appeal of the world’s oldest profession to rich and powerful men.

What really killed Spitzer’s career was his hard-driving, self righteous prosecutorial style that made deadly enemies out of Wall Street men with the time and money to do some digging into the governor’s private life. The revelation didn’t fit Spitzer’s public image the way that Monicagate dovetailed with Bill Clinton’s reputation, so the governor had to resign.

“Client 9” is one of the very few films of any type — fictional or non-fictional — to explore today’s world of high-priced escorting in a detailed and fairly non-judgemental manner.

We get to know the lively and funny woman who co-ran the business and who got so far into the notion of providing the best women for the best clients that she was genuinely shocked when the FBI came after her. Who were the “victims” in this “crime”?

It is to the credit of “Client 9” that it allows us to grasp the logic of the madam and Spitzer’s favorite escort (if only during their interviews).

Hollywood got very nervous about movie violence in 1968 as a result of the terrible events of that year.

In 1967, “Bonnie and Clyde” was condemned in some quarters for glamorizing violence, so when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both killed in the spring of 1968 — and riots erupted in cities all over the country — the studios backed away from pictures that explored gun violence, in particular.

Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film, “Targets,” was picked up by Paramount Pictures for distribution in the summer of 1968 and then had most of its bookings cancelled because the film studied a mild-mannered young man who kills his family and then starts shooting at cars on a Los Angeles freeway.

In the early fall of 1968, 20th Century Fox had a similar case of nerves about the low-budget thriller, “Pretty Poison,” based on Stephen Geller’s novel “She Let Him Continue” about a relationship between a high school cheerleader and a seemingly harmless drifter that ends in a murderous crime spree.

Fox dumped the Tuesday Weld-Anthony Perkins vehicle into drive-ins and B-level theaters, but a group of New York film critics wrote enthusiastically about the movie (despite the absence of any press screenings), shamed the studio into giving the movie a re-release, and in the following months it became an art-house and college film society favorite.

The picture remains an unsettling mix of comedy and drama with what are probably the best film performances of Weld and Perkins, two quirky talents who never got the attention they deserved but have sizeable cult followings.

Writer Lorenzo Semple won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best screenplay, and would go on to such key 1970s films as “The Parallax View,”  but director Noel Black faded into obscurity.

Weld went on to a distinguished but rather peculiar career. She won a lot of attention for playing Joan Didion’s zonked-out anti-heroine in the 1972 movie version of “Play It As It Lays” and then earned her one and only Oscar nomination for playing Diane Keaton’s world-weary sister in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” in 1977.

The actress spent much of the 1980s and ’90s steadily employed in above average made for TV movies including an excellent one in 1980 with the godawful title “Mother and Daughter: The Loving War.” A TV movie romantic comedy that she did with Ellen Burstyn and Patrick Cassidy in 1986 — “Something in Common” — is also worth looking for.

Weld said in one interview she preferred working in television because it was quicker and easier than working on theatrical films.

The movies that Weld (or her people) turned down in the early years of her career — “Lolita,” “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” among them — would have put her on a very different Hollywood track.

Weld hasn’t made a movie since she did a terrific job opposite Kris Kristofferson in Ethan Hawke’s little-seen debut film, “Chelsea Walls” nine years ago. The two performers were perfectly cast as aging bohemians hanging on in the famous hotel on 23rd St. in Manhattan.

One of the most poignant pleasures of “Pretty Poison” is seeing this brilliant and quirky actress in one of her rare starring movie roles.

British writer-director Philip Ridley’s “Heartless” opened in 2010 to reviews that were not nearly as good as this beautiful and unsettling film deserved.

The movie did not receive national theatrical distribution but is available on cable from IFC On Demand and is must viewing for fans of offbeat horror.

Ridley is a major visual stylist and he takes us into contemporary London as viewed through the eyes of an emotionally damaged young man named Jamie Morgan (Jim Sturgess).

Jamie was born with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face and lost his beloved and supportive photographer dad at an early age. Jamie’s mom (played by Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen) does her best to bolster her son, but he is convinced that his face will make a “normal” relationship with a woman impossible.

Jamie retreats into his photography and memories of his father.

Ridley slowly makes it clear that the slightly off-kilter London we see is Jamie’s vision of the city rather than “reality.” The combination of this nightmarish urban vision and Jamie’s overactive imagination is reminiscent of “Taxi Driver” and its terribly isolated protagonist Travis Bickle.

Travis would have been a completely unsympathetic character without Robert DeNiro playing him, and the same thing is true of Jim Sturgess in the role of Jamie.

Ridley has said in interviews that he wouldn’t have done “Heartless” without Sturgess and it is easy to see why. The rising young British star (of “21” and “Across the Universe”) keeps us caring about Jamie even after we begin fearing that the violence he sees all around him is a mostly a projection of his own thoughts.

It’s unfortunate that a movie as original and as well-made as “Heartless” has had to sneak into this country via a cable on demand service.

If you harbor the common fantasy of one day running your own restaurant, you should first check out Roger Sherman’s DVD documentary, “The Restaurateur” (First Run Features).

Sherman started following one of Manhattan’s most successful restaurant operators, Danny Meyer, as he prepared to double his small empire in 1998 with the opening of two new eateries, Eleven Madison Park and Tabla.

The film shows us how difficult it is to design, build, staff and open a restaurant, even if the guy behind it is one of the most respected people in his business.

Meyer had made a name for himself in the mid-1980s with the creation of one of the city’s most beloved restaurants, Union Square Cafe.

Eight years after the restaurant was up and running, Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern which would quickly become even more highly regarded than USC.

Meyer tells us in the documentary that without new challenges any businessman is likely to lose his edge, so he decided in the late 1990s that the time had come to open a new place off Madison Square Park.

Union Square Cafe was part of the renaissance in Union Square during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the civic-minded Meyer thought that another city park about ten blocks north could use a similar shot in the arm.

Meyer fell in love with a huge space at the bottom of an old insurance company building on the eastern edge of the park, but quickly realized it was too big for one restaurant. So, he decided to open two very different restaurants almost simultaneously — the upscale brasserie Eleven Madison Park and Tabla which would bring Indian spices and cooking techniques to classic American dishes.

Sherman followed the huge construction job over the summer of 1998 — work that proved to be so complicated that the original Labor Day opening was eventually pushed to November.

“The Restaurateur” shows us all the nuts and bolts of getting a Danny Meyer restaurant on its feet, from staffing the kitchen to the hiring and training of his famously customer service-oriented wait staff.

The restaurants opened to good business and good reviews, but a long epilogue details the problems with the offbeat Tabla which after 12 years became the first Meyer operation to close. The failure of Tabla was balanced by the emergence of Eleven Madison Park as one of the city’s best restaurants  — it is one of only six dining establishments to receive four stars from The New York Times.  

Since the period documented in the film, the amazing restaurateur has scored hits with The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, opened the enormously popular Maialino in the restored Gramercy Park Hotel, and launched what might be his greatest success to date, the ever-expanding Shake Shack franchise.

It would be fun to have Sherman go back into the offices of Danny Meyer for a study of how the lowly hamburger — albeit beautifully prepared — seems to be dwarfing the fine dining empire this brilliant businessman has created over the past quarter century.

It was an honor to be asked to host the first “Critic’s Choice” night at the beautiful Bijou Theatre in downtown Bridgeport tonight at 6:30.

After looking through the new venue’s impressive catalog of digital prints of a wide variety of classics, I zeroed in on one of my all-time favorites, Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” which is not just a terrific movie in itself, but a landmark in the history of film.

Truffaut was one of a bunch of very demanding young film critics in Paris who decided on a whole new way of making movies — one that would be closer to life as it was being lived on the streets of Paris than a studio-shot fantasy, and one that would mix the best elements of Hollywood filmmaking with a new realism.

Truffaut and fellow critics Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol and a few others all started looking for backing around the same time — and helped each other with projects in development — but Francois was the first one out of the gate with his autobiographical masterpiece “The 400 Blows.”

Truffaut created a story that drew heavily on his own troubled youth and his fixation on films from an early age. He found a perfect acting stand-in in the form of Jean-Pierre Leaud who would go on to play the Truffaut figure in a series of pictures over the next 20 years.

Although Louis Malle could claim to have begun this exciting “New Wave” with his first two pictures — “Elevator to the Gallows” and “The Lovers,” both released the year before “The 400 Blows” — Malle came from a photography background rather than film criticism so he wasn’t really a part of the group that turned everything upside down in the early 1960s.

“The 400 Blows” was quickly followed by Godard’s 1960 debut film “Breathless” — co-scripted by Truffaut — and for the next decade these marvelous director-writers delivered one terrific picture after another.

Shooting on real locations rather than in studios, the New Wave pictures changed the look of movies. Truffaut and Godard also showcased a wonderfully real new group of stars, including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, who transformed the whole notion of what constituted screen glamour and charisma.

Truffaut and the others had an enormous influence on the young American writers and directors of the late 1960s, including screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman who were excited by the idea of using New Wave techniques and storytelling approaches in their screenplay for “Bonnie and Clyde.”

The duo first asked Truffaut to direct the film, he then passed it along to Godard, but the project finally ended up with Arthur Penn and the 1967 result had as revolutionary an impact on American filmmaking as “The 400 Blows” did on French cinema eight years earlier.

If you haven’t visited the beautifully restored Bijou Theater yet, tonight’s screening might be a perfect introduction.

(For more information, visit www.thebijoutheatre.com)