The Guttering Candle of Memory

In my memory Lee’s chicken was “Krispy” or, more specifically, “Krispy (Spicy)”. I just looked at their web site and it’s merely “Crispy Spicy”. How can they be missing the opportunity to use the wonderful American word “Krispy”? Unless, perhaps, that word is owned by another corporation. Krispy Kreme!?

Krispy Reality

Faithful readers may recall my paean last June to the wonders of Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. I was just back in Richmond VA and this time remembered to take a picture of one of the emporia of “Krispy” delight. Now back in San Francisco I was about to post the picture when I decided to see what kind of online presence Lee’s has. I had assumed it was a small Richmond chain so I was taken aback by a very slick corporate web site.

It turns out that Famous Recipes, INC. has hundreds of Lee’s outlets around the country (and in Trinidad!?). I admit I’m a little disappointed. The fantasy of the funky little local chain is much more attractive than the reality of a medium sized corporation but the Krispy chicken is just as good, even if it’s not a hidden treasure.

Waltz with Bashir

I, along with almost all the rest of the American movie audience, have avoided the recent, undoubtedly earnest, Hollywood efforts about the current war in Iraq or, more specifically, about our servicemen and women returning from there. I’m going to wait until we’ve actually gotten out of that hideous morass before I check to see whether someone can manage to produce an artistic response to it.

It’s been almost 27 years since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and that was enough time for Ari Folman to make an amazing work of art about that war.

“Waltz with Bashir” is a strange but wonderful hybrid. It’s an animated, autobiographical documentary filled with dreams and visions. Its mix of black humor and pop music is worthy of some of the more successful parts of “Apocalypse Now”.

The main character is Ari Folman and we see him as the 19-year-old Israeli Defense Force conscript he was then and as the middle-aged man he is now. A friend who served with him in Lebanon tells him about his own recurring dream of the war and Folman realizes that he has no memories of the war and just one dream about it -- a dream of bathing in the Mediterranean at night with two other soldiers, all naked but still armed with their assault rifles. They are looking back at Beirut and watching illumination rounds exploding over high-rise apartments.

The plot of the film is his search for his lost memories. He listens to a lot of fellow veterans’ stories before he recovers his own. I highly recommend this film.

Milk

In Gus Van Sant’s “Milk”, Sean Penn seems to have been possessed by the ghost of Harvey Milk. Early on I lost the sense of an actor playing an historical figure and just watched scenes from the life of that character. This is an amazing performance. An insightful friend pointed out that Penn seems like another person because he is being charming (Milk was famously charming). This is the first time Penn has given a charming performance since playing Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” in 1982.

“Milk” is a good movie but it is impossible to say just how good at this time since it has political reverberations way beyond its worth as a work of art. This is the film biography of the first openly Gay politician in California. Harvey Milk’s central message was that the way to achieve Gay civil rights was by Gay people coming out so that straight people would see them not as “the other”, but as their child, their neighbor, their coworker, etc. He campaigned for various offices for years before finally becoming a San Francisco Supervisor. He was assassinated less then a year later along with Mayor George Moscone.

His message has particular resonance now since the voters of California recently passed a ballot initiative, Prop 8, which robs Gay people of the right to marry, a civil right only recently given them by the State Supreme Court. We can assume that the yes votes for the initiative were from people who continue to see Gay people as “the other”.

I believe that Prop 8 will be overturned either in the courts or in the voting booth and I suspect that 10 years from now, “Milk” will be seen as a skillfully done biography of a fascinating historical figure, in a very interesting time and place, but I don’t think it will be seen as a great film.

The Wrestler

This is the least of the three films I mentioned in my post. The director,
Darren Aronofsky, mostly abandons the astonishing visual apocalypses he created in “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream” to tell the story of an aging wrestler at the end of his career. The one apocalyptic eruption is the bout that sends our hero, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, into a major health crisis. Since I hate spoilers I’ll merely say it’s how I imagine “The Passion of the Christ” (didn’t actually see that film) but with a staple gun added.

Many critics have pointed out the Mickey Rourke is physically perfect for the part of Randy since his face is bloated and distorted from decades of excess, from being broken in the boxing ring and from being badly reconstructed by plastic surgeons. However his body is still buff so you believe him as an athlete.

Rourke plays Randy as a nice guy who is also an enormous screwup and it is a wonderful performance. I have to give a nod to Mick LaSalle, the often insightful, sometimes annoying film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, who points out that if that’s who Mickey Rourke really is (nice guy/ screwup) then he does a great job of allowing us see that and if in reality he’s a monster then he does a great job of making us think he’s a nice guy.

Randy has destroyed his relationship with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) whom he loves and he is having a hard time establishing a relationship with a lap dancer (Marisa Tomei) whom he also loves. His only moments of transcendence are in the staged mayhem of the wrestling ring, even though this is very bad for his aging body. It’s finally a simple tale. There’s a scene with Tomei and Rourke right before the climax of the movie that seems tacked on and inauthentic. That’s unfortunate but does not keep this from being a good movie, worth seeing.

I’ve Loved You So Long

This is a French film by Philipe Claudel who also wrote it. Kristin Scott Thomas (who has lived in that country for a couple of decades and is bilingual) stars in it and she is astounding. She plays a woman who has just gotten out of prison after serving 15 years for murder. When we first see her she is sitting in a waiting room. She is a person from whom everything has been taken. She is still except for the act of smoking. She’s there but she’s been turned into a wraith.

Her younger sister is coming to take her into her home. The story of the film is the story of the older sister starting to get things back---coming back to life.

Fairly early in the film she allows a café Lothario to pick her up for an afternoon quickie. This is presumably the first heterosexual sex she’s had in 15 years. The director cuts straight from the café to the hotel room where they are already finished and the man is dressed. He comes out of the bathroom. She is sitting up in bed, staring into space. Bozo that he is, he smiles and says, “So, it was good?” She comes out of her reverie and replies, “No, not at all. But it doesn’t matter.” He’s crushed and slinks out. She gives the slightest hint of a smile. There’s still someone inside.

The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent. The film is both moving and funny. The only thing that keeps it from being great is that when all the details of the killing that sent her to prison are finally revealed, it comes perilously close to Douglas Sirk territory. Having said that, I already want to see the film over again, which is not how I feel about most things I see.

The Jewel and the Setting

19th Century writers were wonderfully unembarrassed to elaborate a metaphor. They could go on for pages. Here at the beginning of the 21st Century I’m hesitant to use one at all, but here goes.

I’ve recently seen three good films with great performances, real jewels, shining at their centers. They are “Milk”, “The Wrestler” and “I’ve Loved You So Long”. I’m going to make each review into its own post.