Why am I telling you absolutely, positively not to miss a movie about the incomprehensible realm of Italian politics, one that had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical release earlier this year? Because writer-director Paolo Sorrentino's "Il Divo" (winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes last year) knocked my socks off, that's why. It's one of the only films I've seen all year -- along with another hard-to-explain foreign docudrama, Nicolas Winding Refn's "Bronson" -- that's exciting to watch all the way through and feels like a cinematic and technical breakthrough.
To tell the story of Giulio Andreotti, the sphinxlike, hunchbacked seven-time prime minister who dominated Rome's political scene for more than 30 years (played by Toni Servillo with creepy, mesmerizing grace), Sorrentino breaks every rule in the biopic book, before shoving the book into a burning Maserati and rolling it off a cliff. His subtitle is "La spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti," and I don't think you need an Italian dictionary to understand that adjective. Most obviously, "Il Divo" brings some of the cinematic showmanship of Coppola and Scorsese back to their ancestral homeland: This is an explosive action movie about a sedentary politician, a libidinally charged movie about a sexless, toadlike man, and a dark, symbolic thriller about the purportedly dry world of political machinations.
Don't know much of anything about Andreotti or Italy, and don't especially care? I assure you that doesn't matter. This is a movie about the mysteries of power; it could be about a pope or a prince or a president, and you don't have to grasp every nuance or every topical reference. Sorrentino supplies enough context for his daring onslaught of Freud-by-way-of-Fellini-by-way-of-David Fincher set pieces to make sense -- and, anyway, the point of "Il Divo" is that very little about Andreotti's career or 20th-century Italy makes sense.
Nearly every shot in this vibrant, overcrowded film is a gamble; nearly every soundtrack choice is puzzling, chilling and thrilling; nearly every scene is charged with dark hilarity, stylized and stretched to the breaking point. Through it all shuffles Servillo, playing the pious little gnome plagued with chronic headaches who proved so difficult for reformers and socialists to vanquish. Was Andreotti, as many Italian leftists believe, the frontman for a secret neofascist-Vatican-Mafia cabal that stood behind his Christian Democratic Party? Or was he as he presented himself, a modest, shrewd and pragmatic survivor whose rivals and enemies (be they journalists, bankers, communists or generals) kept, coincidentally, turning up dead?
Sorrentino's breathtaking, profoundly agnostic film never tries to offer Oliver Stone-grade certainties. As presented here, political power is a malleable and mysterious thing, closer to questions of philosophy or metaphysics than to moral absolutes about truth and lies, honesty and corruption. If anything, "Il Divo" suggests that the "Prince of Darkness" himself (still alive at 90, and serving in the Italian senate) cannot answer the most troubling questions about his life and career. In a lifetime of cryptic utterances, this Andreotti quote, used in the film, may be the ultimate: "If you really want to keep a secret, you must not confide even in yourself."
Though Michael Chabon's fixation with DC comics, bisexuality and pink Polo shirts is not exactly "manly," his life -- as evidenced by an endearing new collection of short essays -- has been a picture of modern American manhood. Whereas his last book, "Maps and Legends," mounted a scholarly defense of the genre fiction that formed his literary tastes, "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son" charts the landscapes of his childhood and adulthood in a frank, visceral style. To read it is to understand the open line of communication Chabon keeps with his younger self; he seems to recall exactly what it was like to be a kid. Yet, as a father of four and the husband of novelist Ayelet Waldman (a former columnist for Salon), Chabon displays a deep investment in his role as a family man. He has an instinct for good old-fashioned moral righteousness in the face of trouble and temptation.
The funniest of these essays depict the author's metamorphosis from a latent misogynist who takes himself too seriously into a serious man with feminist sympathies. "Cosmodemonic" is a brief portrait of the artist as "a little shit" -- his 22-year-old head full of Henry Miller, recklessly lusting after his female classmates at the University of California at Irvine's MFA program. "The Miller hero -- my hero -- does what he wants, when he wants, whether it makes sense or not," Chabon writes. This pose is crushed after two years of exposure to "the hard-earned skepticism of grown women" in his workshops. Two decades on, in "William and I," we see Chabon protesting the high standards of motherhood compared to the meager demands of being a good dad. And, as if to complete the transformation, "I Feel Good About My Murse" has the 45-year-old Mike proudly shouldering a suede man purse. "I seem every day to give a little less of a fuck what people think or say about me," he confides.
Another of the book's consistent motifs is the disappearance of childhood. With vivid access to his own, Chabon is able to contrast the ways in which his kids' imaginations are imposed upon and pre-imagined by, for example, the "authoritarian nature of the new Lego" and "the orthodoxy of 'Toy Story.'" To Chabon's mind, these products lack the open-endedness of "crap" entertainment like the short-lived "Planet of the Apes" TV show of his youth, into whose shaky plotlines a child could more easily project himself. Still, he trusts in the innovative potential of the child psyche: "Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of things we give them and the things they derive from the peculiar wiring of their own heads." As a manual to Chabon's own peculiar wiring, "Manhood for Amateurs" makes for an insightful and highly entertaining guide.
The way the folks at Conservapedia see it, nothing is safe from lefty meddling. Hell, they even have to rewrite the Bible, with its hippie Jesus and Marxist critiques of wealth and greed! Thankfully, a new album reminds us that wingnuts don't have a monopoly on biblical revisionism. The Mountain Goats' sole songwriter (and sometimes sole member), John Darnielle, may be what fan Stephen Colbert called an "arty liberal type," but the prolific indie-folk band has nonetheless turned its attention to the Scriptures on "The Life of the World to Come."
Darnielle claims he’s always been fascinated by religious texts, but up until now more secular fixations have dominated his music: Ruptured relationships, literary heroes and his own difficult childhood are among the most common subjects of nearly two decades’ worth of studiously lo-fi Mountain Goats songs. And, as a die-hard black metal fan who, last year, published a short novel based on Black Sabbath’s "Master of Reality," Darnielle may seem a particularly unlikely candidate to explore the spiritual.
It makes sense, then, that "The Life of the World to Come" isn't a straight take on the Bible. You'll find no retellings of Moses' escape from Egypt or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount here. Darnielle, who is quick to assure fans that he hasn't undergone some kind of radical conversion, is merely enamored with biblical language and imagery. Sometimes he borrows lines or words from the text: Gently upbeat "Romans 10:9" plucks from its source material the exhortation to "Believe in your heart, and confess with your lips," but its conclusion -- "Surely you will be saved one day" -- sounds shakier, more uncertain that salvation is even possible. Often, the connection between Bible and ballad is less obvious. On the whispery guitar track "Samuel 15:23," Darnielle transforms a diatribe against rebellion and arrogance into the fantastical tale of a crystal healer.
The Mountain Goats are best known for raucous yet deeply bleak singalongs (a favorite of the band’s cultish fans is "No Children," whose shouted chorus climaxes with the words, "I hope you die! I hope we both die!"), but on "The Life of the World to Come" they make hushed piano dirges equally absorbing. And even though the songs sound more restrained than usual, they remain obsessed with perennial Mountain Goats themes of illness, death, redemption and escape. As it turns out, the non-believing songwriter and the text that launched two ancient religions have more in common than meets the eye. That's what makes "The Life of the World to Come" a much-needed reminder, to us godless liberals, of the Bible's beauty and power -- even if we only love it as literature.
Once upon a time, the film projector was the teaching tool of the future. Schools all over the country purchased the temperamental, whirring machines, prompting a flood of educational shorts that offered instruction on everything from personal hygiene to sandwich making.
Kino International has just released the best of the bunch on two DVDs, titled “How to Be a Man” (1949-1970) and “How to Be a Woman" (1948-1982), and many are as cringe-worthy as you might expect. In the hilariously hyperbolic cautionary tale "Car Theft," two teens go from stealing a hat to stealing a car to running over a toddler in about 11 minutes. In "Girls Are Better Than Ever," a nutritional video sponsored by the Milk Council, a voice-over describes a young, healthy-looking blond woman who is “worth looking at.” In "Dance, Little Children," which explores a small Midwestern town's syphilis outbreak, a narrator whose creepy intensity wouldn't be out of place in a horror film asks, “Who is to blame if young people respond to what an anxiety-ridden world seems to be telling them?” as the camera zooms in on the posterior of a girl dancing the jitterbug.
But a surprising number of the featured shorts stand the test of time. "Fears of Children," in which a 5-year-old boy is coddled by his mother and pressured by his father, ought to be required viewing for every parent. "Improve Your Personality," despite its egregious name, explains how we can change the way people affect us by improving our own understanding and empathy.
As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”
Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. "Let’s Make a Sandwich" isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it's an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational.
Even among the misfits of Greendale Community College, Abed stands out. As Danny Pudi plays him on NBC’s blissfully warped “Community,” Abed is overeager, socially awkward and almost always inappropriate. He has, as one character tells him, “a disorder” he might want to look up. More explicitly, it would appear Abed has Asperger’s, a condition better known to smirking denizens of Greendale as “assburgers.”
In just three episodes, Abed has evolved from a potentially cruel punch line into a nuanced, fascinating and, thank heaven, still hilarious character, one who observes that documentaries are “like real movies but with ugly people.” His frequent cluelessness is a rich source of comedy, but he keeps the upper hand by being the source of the joke instead of the butt of it.
Last week, Abed, spurred by a classmate, took an introductory filmmaking class. His new obsession threatened to alienate everyone in his life, particularly his conservative, immigrant father. But in a witty scene with just the right amount of pathos, Abed showed his dad his short film -- a weird, dark little take on his mother’s abandonment. He had, movingly, found a way of expressing himself. And then he said something offensive.
The pleasure of Pudi’s performance is the way he lets Abed be as utterly exasperating as he is bright and talented. He’s not the huggable romantic hero of “Adam”; he’s just another goofus in the ensemble. Watch Pudi rap in Spanish or try his hand (and foot) at crunking, and behold the joy of an actor being funny without making fun.
No one defies categorization like Meshell Ndegeocello. Her eighth album, "Devil's Halo," veers wildly between genres, alternating slow R&B grooves with quiet folks songs and meandering jazz-pop, but the mellow depth of Ndegeocello's voice and the sonic boom of her bass lines tie this jumbled gift together with a big, velvet bow.
Ndegeocello has always had the dangerous charisma of a gorgeous depressive: You're drawn in, only to find that everything is darker and heavier than you expected it to be. "Let Me Love You Down" takes an early, sex-obsessed Prince groove, knocks out the treble entirely and slows the whole thing down to an almost hypnotic crawl. The off-kilter percussive "White Girl" wobbles between anger and lovelorn flights of fantasy, tumbling into ambient, daydreamy canyons and then climbing out again. There's a little Kate Bush in the unexpected rhythms, digital effects and spoken lines of "Mass Transit," which reminds us that "At the end of the day, no one wants to be alone." "Slaughter" is spaced-out bliss that solidifies into enraged rock 'n' roll; "I'll make you suffer," Ndegeocello sings, sounding like a mix of Sade and the Marquis de Sade.
Even the friendly, quiet Sunday morning strumming of "Blood on the Curb" comes unraveled with the line "I wanna kill you all." From anyone else, this album would be a big messy pile of one-offs, but Ndegeocello's rich, consistent voice is always there to pull us in, even as she's throwing us off her scent once again. Like a world-weary muse, Ndegeocello taps into something rich and melancholy at the sludgy bottom of our hearts, then steps back and watches, amused, as we're undone by her latest trail of mournful oddities.
No matter what your political orientation, if you believe -- or ever did believe -- in the potential betterment of humanity, then you've got something to learn from the strange and tragic story of Leon Trotsky. It's a tale of pride and power and political failure, of genius turned to the service of dogged, dogmatic conviction, of a supremely intelligent man who destroyed others in the name of a cause that then destroyed him. It was a story that finally reached its end in 1940, in a legendary encounter with an assassin armed with a mountaineer's pickax, as Stanford professor Bertrand Patenaude illustrates in "Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary," his gripping, cinematic new book about the last years of the Ukrainian Jew who was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. (Whatever your feelings about Trotsky, the story of his murder by Ramón Mercader, the suave Stalinist agent who had wormed his way into the heavily guarded Trotsky compound outside Mexico City, may give you sleepless nights.)
The one true intellectual among 20th-century revolutionaries, Trotsky has been the subject of numerous biographies, including the one he wrote himself ("My Life") and Isaac Deutscher's overly worshipful but still definitive three-volume treatment. Patenaude is not exactly competing with those, although at this point in history his book will provide a completely adequate summary of Trotsky's life and achievements for most general readers. (As Patenaude observes, if you're inclined to read Trotsky's own work, his masterpiece remains the epic-scale "History of the Russian Revolution.") Instead, he paints a distinctive portrait of a human Trotsky, in exile and in disgrace, and hence at his most sympathetic. Trotsky feeds bunnies and chickens at his house in Coyoacán, sleeps with Frida Kahlo and feuds with her husband, Diego Rivera, and launches all-too-accurate broadsides against his nemesis Joseph Stalin, which would be widely and shamefully ignored or resisted by many Western leftists.
At the same time, Patenaude argues that Trotsky's political, philosophical and personal failures were profound and inescapable. In this telling of the tragedy, our hero's tragic flaw is a mixture of incurable optimism and stubbornness. Trotsky became V.I. Lenin's principal lieutenant just before the October Revolution of 1917 and was without doubt its greatest rhetorician and orator, as well as the founder and commander of the Red Army. But as Patenaude reminds us, it was Trotsky, a lifelong believer in social democracy as a mass movement, who had warned a few years earlier that the political philosophy Lenin dubbed "democratic centralism" was dangerous: "The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies," he wrote in 1912, "and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction."
All the what-ifs, in Patenaude's view -- what if Trotsky had out-maneuvered Stalin, after Lenin's death? What if Trotsky had acknowledged the revolution's crimes and turned away from orthodox Marxism? -- are irrelevant, because Trotsky could never have done those things. His genius lay in language, not politics. (It sounds like he'd have made a great TV personality.) I'm not quite sure about this. Trotsky did allow himself momentary room for doubt, writing just before the end of his life that should worldwide proletarian revolution not arrive with World War II, "nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program ... ended as a Utopia." Even with all the blood on his hands and all his misguided certainty about Marxian "dialectical materialism," Trotsky still stands out as a vital, monumental figure somewhat larger than his context. As philosopher John Dewey wrote to his fiancee after watching Trotsky speak, "'Truth, justice, humanity' and all the rest ... are receding into the background before the bare overpowering interest of the man and what he has to say."
Autumn Movie Preview
Time Out: What's Playing on Doug's Tiny Screen
The New Depression (or "Brother, can you spare a dime?"