Movie Reviews - 2013 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

In Asghar Farhadi’s “Le passé” (“The Past”), we often see the thing before knowing what the thing means.

So a pretty woman, Marie (Bérénice Bejo), greets a man, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), arriving at the airport, with a smile and a wave, but he’s not her lover; he’s her estranged husband returning to sign the divorce papers. So her lover, Samir (Tahar Rahim of “Un Prophete”), lies in bed while she administers eyedrops to him. The next day, in by-the-way fashion, we discover he’s allergic to all the paint scattered around the house. So the oldest daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet), is distant and uncommunicative with her mother. The story behind that, with its many twists and turns, takes most of the movie to tell.

We first see the thing, in other words, then we find out its past.

Caché
This is a beautiful movie, by the way. There are small, exquisite scenes. It all seems so simple. I kept wondering, “Why can’t other filmmakers make scenes that feel this real, this straightforward, this interesting?”

I’m thinking of an early scene. Ahmad arrives and expects to get a hotel room, but Marie is putting him up at her place. Is he thinking they’ll sleep together? One last time? But he finds out she’s living with a guy. Samir. He’s dropped into a situation. As are we.

There are two kids playing in her small yard: a boy and a girl. You expect them to squeal with delight when they see Ahmad but it takes a moment before the girl, Léa (Jeanne Justin), even realizes who he is; and even then the boy, Fouad (Elyes Aguis), just squints, frowns, doesn’t get it. But he doesn’t like it. This new man helps blowdry his mother’s hair? That seems ... wrong. (To us, too.) He has to move bedrooms to accommodate him? Fouad does so petulantly, dragging his blankets and pillows around, saying “What a pain.” Ahmad is gentle with him, though. He talks to him. By now we know Ahmad is not the boy’s father but it’s not until Fouad drags his pillow and blankets back downstairs and knocks over the paintcan in the hallway, and Marie blows up, chasing him around, that we find out she’s not his mother, either. “You’re not my mother!” he shouts. Then she leaves for work at a pharmacy and Ahmad is left to clean up both messes: the physical and the metaphoric. He does so with calm and grace. He gives the boy the one thing he doesn’t have: power and control. “Is it because I’m here?” he asks, about the acting out. “Do you want me to leave?” he asks. There’s a pause. Then Fouad quietly shakes his head.

That the small, exquisite scene I was thinking of.

The movie keeps doing this. There’s a moment, halfway through, with Samir and Marie in their car. Tensions have risen in the home, and between them, because, you know, her ex is staying with them. They kind of look alike, too, Samir and Ahmad. At least Lucie points this out to Ahmad. Does Samir wonder about it? In the car, stuck in traffic, they’re silent. Samir is driving, manual, then finds Marie’s hand on his on the stick. A conciliatory gesture? He looks at their hands together, then over at Marie, but she has her eyes closed as if in reverie. Is she thinking of Samir ... or Ahmad? Or is she just tired? But he shakes her hand off, which startles her awake. Now she wonders: Is he angry?

It’s a small, everyday scene, but so much is suggested by it.

Revelations keep coming. What happened to Fouad’s mother? Turns out she’s in a coma. For much of the movie, Ahmad is like a gentle detective of the heart, trying to figure out why Lucie, who is not his child, (none of them are), is estranged from Marie. It’s like peeling an onion. One answer just leads to another, deeper answer.

First Lucie says she doesn’t like “that jerk,” Samir. Then she admits it’s more about her mother: Men stay for a few years, then leave, and Lucie is tired of it. Ahmad is implicated here, too. Then Lucie admits it’s the affair: her mother had an affair with Samir, and afterwards Samir’s wife tried to kill herself, and that’s why she’s in a coma. They caused it. With their affair. Awful stuff. Or did they? Samir doesn’t think so. He runs a dry cleaner, and five days before the suicide attempt his wife had a meltdown with a customer. The attempted suicide had nothing to do with him and Marie. His wife didn’t even know about it.

Except she did. Because Lucie told her. That’s the awful secret Lucie’s been carrying. That’s why she’s been distant. She can’t bear her own culpability.

In this way we keep getting deeper into the past until it threatens the stability of the present. Or is it merely clearing the way for the present? Or both?

Passé
The last third of the movie belongs to Samir, who begins his own detective work of the heart. Lucie called his wife at the dry cleaner’s the day before her suicide? But his wife wasn’t at the dry cleaner’s the day before her suicide. So is Lucie lying? Or is there another explanation?

Near the end, we get talk about letting go of the past, living in the present, yadda yadda. A lesser movie would’ve gone in this direction. It would’ve given us this wish-fulfillment fantasy, this correct way of being, this problem solved. Not here. Here, Samir visits his comatose wife, bringing along her perfumes and his cologne in a last-ditch effort to revive her. He’s heard the olfactory memory is our longest-lasting—Proust was right about that—and he wants to test it. But nothing happens. And we see him walking away from the room, and down the hallway, and away from the past.

A lesser movie would’ve ended there.

But Samir stops, turns, pauses. A better movie might’ve ended there: man forever caught between past and present, like Antoine Doinel at the shore.

Instead, Farhadi (“A Separation”) has Samir walk back into the room. He tries once more with the cologne. “If you can hear me,” he tells his wife, “squeeze my hand.” Then the camera pans to his hand in her open hand. We’re watching, waiting, for any movement. But there isn’t any. That’s it.

And that’s the best ending of all for “The Past.” A man being held, and not, by something that’s dead, and isn’t.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Here we go again.

I wasn’t a fan of the first “Kick-Ass,” which began as an ironic look at superheroes but quickly became, with the introduction of Big Daddy and Hit Girl (Nic Cage and Chloë Grace Moretz), another wish-fulfillment fantasy about superheroes—just with more kill shots and swear words.

“Kick-Ass 2” still pretends to be living in a world without superpowered beings but that doesn’t mean its characters can’t do superpowered things. Big Daddy’s gone, without even a picture to remember him by (Cage, one assumes, would get paid for that), but Hit Girl can still take out 20 people by herself. “Robin wishes he were me,” she says.

More, in the wake of Kick-Ass’s exploits, ordinary citizens have come forward to act as superheroes: Col. Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey), Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison), Night Bitch (Lindy Booth). The Colonel is an old mob enforcer who has turned to the light side, and he, too, can take out 10 bad guys simultaneously in the manner of Batman-y, Matrix-y, Hollywood-via-Hong-Kong slow-mo martial arts madness. Hell, even Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) can do this now. He’s not a skinny kid anymore. He’s completely cut. He’s got a ridiculously sculptured body. Apparently all it takes is a good montage sequence. Fucking Rocky.

Mean girls
It’s a few years after the original movie, and Dave has hung up his Kick-Ass tights even as he hungers for more action. Meanwhile, Hit Girl, Mindy Macready, now raised by her father’s friend, Det. Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut), enters high school: freshman to Dave’s senior.

But they’re on different paths. She makes a promise to Marcus not to be a superhero anymore, which leaves her to walk the more perilous path of schoolgirl popularity contests, while he wants to do nothing but fight crime. He does this by joining a team, Justice Forever, led by Col. Stars and Stripes. Their first big case? Breaking up a sex-slave ring run by Chinese triad members. They do it without breaking much of a sweat. Then they high-five each other and whoop it up. Then Kick Ass and Night Bitch have sex in a toilet stall.

Classy.

Unbeknownst to all, Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the former Red Mist, whose father, Frank (Mark Strong), a ruthless mob boss, was killed by Kick-Ass at the end of the last movie, is plotting revenge in his whiny, pathetic fashion. First he accidentally kills his mom by kicking her tanning booth. Then he hires MMA guys to train him in the ways of fighting. But he lacks discipline. Since he doesn’t lack for money, he simply hires his team of supervillains, including Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina), a butchier Brigitte Nielsen, who, in one sequence, kills 10 cops, two by two, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. She also kills Col. Stars and Stripes.

Of course the cops react poorly to the death of 10 cops and crack down on all costumed wannabes, villains and heroes. When they show up at Dave’s house, Dave’s father, Mr. Lizewski (Garrett M. Brown), with whom Dave has been fighting, takes the rap, then dies in prison at the hands of Chris D’Amico’s goons, who take a cellphone picture and send it to Dave.

Classy.

All this time, by the way, we’ve been getting bits of Mindy’s costumeless life. The popular, bitchy girls, led by Brooke (Claudia Lee), befriend her but don’t really. When Mindy wins some cheerleader tryouts, with her martial arts madness routine, even over Brooke’s sexyback number, she has to pay. What happens? A cute boy, whom she asks out, takes her into the woods, where the other girls say mean things and leave. That’s it. But she’s hurt. So she teachers them a lesson. How? By using a sonic device that causes people to vomit and shit at the same time.

Classy.

The worst of times, the worst of times
Eventually, of course, she’s pulled back in, and there’s a big showdown at the supervillains’ lair. Kick Ass and Hit Girl walk in alone and D’Amico, now The Motherfucker, laughs and says, in essence, the two of you against all of us? At which point doors open and all the rest of the superheroes waltz in and stand and pose. It’s a superhero moment. Awful, unironic version.

I really do hate these movies. It’s partly the crudity, partly the stupidity, but mostly the lie: the lie that we’re too hip to want the wish-fulfillment fantasy. Feeling nothing via irony is, I suppose, just a short step from wishing to feel nothing through invulnerability, but they’re still both childish wishes. It’s the worst of both worlds.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Lone Survivor,” the movie, starring Mark Wahlberg as Marcus Luttrell, is based upon Luttrell’s book, “Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10.” It’s a good title for a book but a bad one for a movie.

If you’ve seen the trailer you know four Navy SEALS come across three goat herders in the enemy mountains of Afghanistan and let them go (crossing their fingers) rather than kill them. Then they’re pursued by the Taliban up and down those mountains. Mostly down. It’s the anti-My Lai story. Our men do the right thing and die as a result.

But with that background, and that title, what don’t we know going in? Which one survives? One assumes it’s Wahlberg, even without knowing he plays Luttrell, since he’s the star. So what don’t we know?

We don’t know this: the deus ex machina. For a moment, three-quarters through the movie, it looks like it’s going to be the traditional one: the U.S. military; the cavalry.

Nope. The deus ex machina is the most intriguing thing about “Lone Survivor.” It’s also the most glossed-over. It’s as if the movie doesn’t realize the story it has.

Spartan Zero One
Make no mistake: this movie, written and directed by Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights,” “The Kingdom,” “Hancock,” “Battleship”), is brutal. It borders on sadism.

I thought it was brutal during the opening credits, when we got real-life footage of Navy SEALS during their insane training—e.g.: chained and dropped in pools so they learn to suffocate without panicking—but that’s merely to show us who these men are, and why they’ll cope with the brutality to come. They’ve been trained for it. They’ve been trained to keep going.

It begins, as so many of our stories do these days, at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, where we meet our four young men. They wake up. They give each other shit. Two of them race around the airbase in shorts and tennis shoes but the skinny one, Danny (Emile Hirsch), loses in the end to the buffer one, Mike (Taylor Kitsch), who is something of a legend. They eat breakfast and give shit to the new guy, Shane (Alexander Ludwig), who is buff and beardless and wants to fit in. They talk about their wives or girls back home. One girl wants an Arabian horse but the dude keeps calling it an Arabic horse. Marcus is from Texas. Mike is respected.

Could we have learned more about these guys early on? Surely there was more to know. Instead, this shorthand. They’re guys in a beer commercial now.

Then off they go on a mission. Something about beers: Corona, Miller, Heineken. Something about Rick James. Something about Spartan Zero One.

Eventually we realize, “Oh, they’re Spartan Zero One, the beers are location points on the way to the target, who is Rick James, a.k.a. “Superfreak,” a.k.a. Shah (Yousef Azami), the dark-eyed Taliban leader who’s been assassinating U.S. Marines. They’re supposed to get in, kill him, get out.

They spot him, too. High up on the hill above their target, they have him in their sites. But they move to higher ground. Then the goat herders come: an old man, a boy, an angry teen.

Matt (Ben Foster, steely-eyed) counsels killing them. He nods to his brothers. “I care about you, I care about you, I care about you,” he says. “I don’t care about them.” Marcus is against it. It’s against the rules of engagement, he says. If it winds up on CNN they’re fucked, he says. Mike, the leader, follows Marcus’ logic and lets the goatherders go. But as the men climb to higher ground, the mission compromised, they lose communication with Bagram. Meanwhile, the angry teen bounds down the mountain like he’s a parkour expert. Our men are barely situated up top before they’re surrounded; before the firefight begins.

We know we lose three, right? So how many do they lose? That’s how I kept interested during all the fighting. I counted the kill shots. I got up to 23. Still the Taliban keep coming. There’s no end to them. And our guys keep getting hit, too, and wounded, and escaping by basically falling down the mountain, out of control, and smashing into trees and rocks. It is, as I’ve said, brutal. But they keep going. Until they can’t go on anymore. One by one, bloodied beyond recognition, they stop moving.

Until there’s one left.

Pashtunwali
So how is Marcus saved?

For a moment it looks like other SEALS at Bagram will save him. They show up in a Chinook helicopter. But the Taliban has an RPG and down goes the helicopter in a burst of flame. So much for my 23-3 tally. And Marcus is on his own again.

He crawls to a safe spot and rests; then he collapses into a pool of water. When he looks up, three Afghanis are standing there. They help him but he doesn’t trust them. They drag him to their village and feed him. Still he doesn’t trust them. But they go out of their way to save him. This is particularly true of Mohammad Gulab (Ali Suliman), the village leader. The Taliban come into their village and are told to leave. The Taliban return, and there’s a firefight, and the right-hand man of the Shah is killed in hand-to-hand combat by Gulab. It all feels like bullshit but most of it isn’t. “Why are you doing this for me?” Marcus keeps asking. Right. Exactly. That’s what we want to know.

We find out in an afterword. Gulab was simply following a code of honor called Pashtunwali. Its first principle is melmastia: “showing hospitality and profound respect to all visitors, regardless of race, religion, national affiliation or economic status.” Its second principle is nanawatai:  “...protection given to a person against his or her enemies.” The third is justice, the fourth bravery. That’s why.

The movie ends with Luttrell’s rescue but the story continued for Gulab. From MensJournal.com:

Shortly after Luttrell was airlifted to safety by Green Berets in 2005, Gulab and his family became top Taliban targets. “They have a bounty on his head,” Luttrell says. “He’s been shot, his car’s been blown up, and his house has been burned down.” Gulab soon reached out to Luttrell, who arranged for the Afghan to visit him on his ranch northwest of Houston. ... Luttrell and Berg knew the film would bring renewed Taliban scrutiny upon Gulab and are currently working on obtaining U.S. visas for the Afghan and his family. “I knew we needed to get him and his family out of Afghanistan and offer asylum if he wants it,” Berg says. “But Gulab is a proud fighter. His attitude is, ‘I sleep with two AKs; if they want to come, they know where I am.’”

You know what the above sounds like to me? A movie. A better movie than this one. Unfortunately it’s about someone who doesn’t even speak English. Hollywood doesn’t tell those tales often.

At the end of “Lone Survivor,” in voiceover, we hear the following from Luttrell:

I died up on that mountain. There is no question a part of me will forever be up on that mountain, dead as my brothers died. But there is a part of me that lived. Because of my brothers, because of them, I am still alive ...

Well, one other guy helped.

WARNING: SPOILERS

How did we get to this point? Where this is entertainment? Movie-star relics pretending to be Cold War relics zipping around the globe for a game of hide and seek the weapon of mass destruction?

Let’s take it from the top.

In 1979, a British scientist named Bailey created something, codenamed “Nightshade,” that could alter the balance of power. In Britain’s favor? That’s never raised. For some reason he was ...  in Moscow? Am I getting that wrong? He was being guarded by CIA agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) and maybe Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), rather than MI-6, when he was killed, and that was that, until suddenly some top-secret “Nightshade” document pops up on Wikipedia and everyone’s trying to kill everyone. The U.S. government wants both Frank and Marvin dead. Just cuz? Or do they think they’re the leakers? Whichever, they put a hit out on Frank. They hire the world’s top assassin, Han Cho Bai (Lee Byung-hun), and maybe old pal Victoria, too (Helen Mirren). But Victoria proves a pal, teaming up with Frank rather than killing him, while Han plays Kato to Frank’s Inspector Clouseau: popping up throughout the movie and failing to off him. Hi-ya! Later he teams up with everyone to save the world. Or at least London and Washington, D.C. Assassins of the world, unite!

All the old Cold War powers keep bumping into each other and people keeping dying. The U.S., in the form of Jack Horton (Neal McDonough), is particularly interested in keeping Nightshade hush-hush. We watch as Jack kills a five-star general in his Pentagon office when he suggests going public. The U.S.S.R., in the shapelier form of Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones), tries to seduce Frank, as in days of old, which leads to the subplot of Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), Frank’s girl, wringing her hands over these matters and getting involved in the spy game. Which she totally wanted to do anyway.

I’ll be like the movie and cut to the chase: Bailey (Anthony Hopkins) is alive. He’s been kept in an MI-6 prison for the criminally insane for 32 years. Not because he was behind “Nightshade,” which was really something called “Red Mercury”—which was, and is, a WMD that’s completely undetectable (for now)—but because back then he wanted to use it on the Soviets. Bad form. Drawring outside the lines, as it were.

But why do they have to go to France to talk to “The Frog” (David Thewlis) anyway? Because he has a security deposit key that contains info on ... Bailey? How do they know this? Was it on the Wikipedia page? And why couldn’t they get a French actor for “The Frog”?

No, they go to Paris, because Paris is part of the bang-zoom, ping-pong, zip-a-dee-doo-dah of the movie. They begin at a Costco in Somewhere, America, which leads to incarceration and shootout in New York City, then same in Paris, then same in London, then same in Moscow, then back to London and the Iranian embassy there. By this point, Bailey, that sly dog, has conned Frank and Victoria (into setting him free), Jack Horton (into thinking he’d teamed up with him), and the Iranians (into thinking he’d sell them Red Mercury). But the last con belongs to Frank, who slips the ticking Red Mercury bomb onto Bailey’s plane, which used to be Frank’s, which used to be Han’s, and it blows up mid-air, setting off beautiful colors. And radiation? Are there after-effects we don’t know about? Please.

Overall, Mary-Louise Parker’s shtick gets old, Malkovich’s isn’t bad, and Willis doesn’t really have any. He seems ready for retirement. The Han subplot, meanwhile, is vaguely insulting, while the overall shtick (glib conversations about or while killing people) is vaguely nauseating when you think about it.

I liked Hopkins. He has a great line-reading, almost mumbled: “They really do throw us away after giving them the best years of our lives. Bit of a shame, really.” There’s something in the way he says it. It’s not just glib dialogue. It has ... what’s the word? ... meaning.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I saw the movie “Frozen” the same day I saw the musical “Wicked” on Broadway, which is about the most girly day a 51-year-old straight man in New York on business can have.

Both stories pass the Bechdel Test by a mile. Each is about two girls—one a princess, the other more tomboyish—who have powers others want to control. There are boys in the story, sure, but the most important relationship is with the other girl. Because each, in the end, sets the other free. Each, in the end, helps the other defy gravity.

What’s truly interesting, though, is how each story updates fairy tales for the 21st century.

Updating fairy tales
“Wicked” may have the more interesting take, since it upends the pretty-girl-is-good/ ugly-girl-is-bad dynamic. Its hero is Elphaba (Lindsay Mendez), green-faced, and the future Wicked Witch of the West, who is ostracized from birth and belittled at school, but who, with the help of Galinda, or Glinda (a hilarious Alli Mauzey), comes to realize her power and takes on the corrupt patriarchy as represented by the Wizard of Oz. As “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” did with “Hamlet,” so “Wicked” does with “Oz.” We go behind the scenes, as it were, and discover that the story we know isn’t the real story. The Wicked Witch is really good, and in cahoots with Glinda, and the Scarecrow is her lover. Most importantly, instead of the ugly becoming pretty via a kiss or love or happenstance, as in many fairy tales, the pretty, or the handsome, becomes deformed. The lesson isn’t “We are now beautiful and thus whole”; it’s “We are in love and thus whole.” It’s the triumph of the marginalized.

In Disney’s “Frozen,” we’re back to pretty, and princess and queens, not to mention Idina Menzel, who originated and won a Tony for playing Elphaba on Broadway, and who here plays Elsa, the older, more powerful sister. Elsa’s “Let It Go” song is basically “Defying Gravity” updated. Same idea. Here I am, fuckers, with all my power. I won’t be held back anymore.

The problem I had with the movie—besides being a 51-year-old man instead of a 10-year-old girl—is that for much of the movie Elsa holds herself back. Not sure what her gameplan is, to be honest. Does she have one?

Elsa has the power to freeze things with a touch of a finger or a wave of her arms, and as a teenager she nearly, accidentally, freezes her younger sister, Anna (Kristen Bell), to death. So she’s been counseled to keep herself under wraps, and does. Even after their parents die on the high seas, she hides from her sister in her room, and hides her sister and herself in their castle on the hill. But in becoming queen she must descend to be with the people. In doing so, she accidentally unleashes her power and creates a perpetual winter.

Hers isn’t the main story, though. Most girls presumably identify with Anna, the younger girl struggling to keep up with, and connect to, her older sister, and who follows the path of Scarlett, Rose, Bella, Katniss, yadda yadda, by getting to choose between two boys: Kristoff, an everyday iceman, and Hans, a prince. The movie does a good job of making this a tough choice for most of the movie ... until, of course, Hans reveals his evil machinations to take over both kingdoms. That makes it easier.

Here’s the twist. During the course of pursuing Elsa, Anna’s heart is partially frozen, which means she’ll die unless “an act of true love” saves her. And wouldn’t you know it, at the end, as she’s near death, here comes Kristoff racing across the ice. Except! Nearby, Hans has Elsa at a disadvantage and is about to kill her. So Anna intervenes. She sacrifices herself to save her sister. In doing so, she saves herself. That is the act of true love. It’s not passive reception; it’s active sacrifice.

I sat there and thought, “Not bad.”

Footnote
Three of us watched the movie that night, all of us over 50, but interestingly the women weren’t impressed. At all. They expected greater, Pixarish things from the movie: wit, etc. True, there’s not much of that, and the songs aren’t very memorable, but I was impressed by the animation and the “act of true love” twist. So did our fourth when it was explained to him the next morning. The men liked the twist, the women didn’t. For what it’s worth.

Now I’m waiting on the “Wicked” movie. It’s too good not to put on the screen.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Holy shit.

That’s what I kept saying watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, “The Act of Killing.” Holy fucking shit.

Not many movies mix the horrific and absurd as thoroughly as this one. It’s as if Paulie Walnuts had been backed by the U.S. government to kill people up and down the east coast, and thousands were tortured and killed; then years later he sat back and bragged about it for the cameras; then he restaged the killings and expected the low-budget results to be as good as “The Godfather.”

In Indonesia 1965, Anwar Congo was a “movie theater gangster.” He hung out at movie theaters, scalped tickets, took in the shows. He loved Hollywood movies. He loved Elvis, and Brando, and left the theater in a good mood. Often he carried his good mood across the street where he tortured and killed people for the government. Sure, he had a few bad dreams, but the government he helped stay in power is still in power, its enemies silenced, and those enemies—communists, et al.—would have done bad things if he hadn’t stopped them. Right? So he did good stopping them. Why should he worry?

Then he met filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

“Free men”
When we first see him, Congo is tall and thin, white-haired and venerable-looking. He looks kindly. Dare I say like Nelson Mandela? Except Mandela’s face in old age was beautiful, while this one is pinched. It’s often blank. Something’s missing.

Initially it’s Congo’s partner, Herman Koto, younger, overweight, pugnacious, who does the talking. We watch as he negotiates with people to get them to play-act for the cameras. They pretend to be communists whose homes he and his men are burning. They do it. They scream in fake anguish while Koto and his men, wearing loud, Hawaiianish shirts—the uniform of the Pemuda Pancasila, Indonesia’s paramilitary, right-wing death squad, we find out later—shout, “Burn it! Kill them!” Then someone shouts “Cut!” and everyone applauds. All this time, Congo hangs in the background. It’s as if he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.

But eventually he begins talking.

Congo: We have to show ...
Koto: ... that this is our history.
Congo: This is who we are. So in the future people will remember.

There was too much blood. That was the problem at the beginning, and Congo came up with a more efficient method—garroting with wire—to kill the state’s enemies. He proudly demonstrates on a friend on a rooftop where many killings took place. Both men smile for the camera. Then Congo talks about the various ways he numbed the pain—booze, drugs, dance—but he doesn’t seem to be in much pain. He does the cha-cha for us. His friend stands to the side awkwardly. “He is a happy man,” his friend says.

Later, Oppenheimer allows Congo to watch these scenes, and he’s disturbed by them. He knows something’s wrong. Is it his hair? He dyes it. Is it his teeth? He gets false ones. He should be like a movie gangster but he’s not. It should be like in a movie but it’s not. Something’s missing.

He travels and meets old friends. There’s Syamsul Arifin, the current governor of North Sumatra, whom Congo looked after as a boy. “Now that I’m governor, I stab him if he threatens me,” Arifin says, and everyone laughs, even Congo, but without humor. Isn’t he the star of his movie? Should he be the butt of jokes this way?

All of the old gangsters talk up the old days. They badmouth the communists. They keep repeating that the word gangster means “free men.” Does it? In Indonesian? Or is this another lie they tell themselves to get through the day?

“Now the communists’ children are speaking out,” Arifin says with disgust, “trying to reverse the history.”

But it’s not reversed. Watch the credits. Count the number of times the word “Anonymous” appears. It’s more than 60. This film was made by people who fear its subjects; who fear reprisal. The making of “The Act of Killing” is an act of courage.

Monster, realized
Is it also an act of redemption?

The deeper we get into the doc, the more absurd the attempts at recreation—the movie within the movie—become. There’s a huge set piece, the burning of huts, and villagers are dragged away to be killed. “You acted so well,” Koto attempts to comfort one little girl, tears streaming down her face. “But you can stop crying now.” Eventually we get the scene at the beginning and end of the doc. It’s a big dance number at the foot of waterfalls. Dancing girls come out of the mouth of a giant fish. They sing. They surround Anwar Congo (hair dyed, dressed like a priest) and Herman Koto (in drag), and the dead and the tortured bestow upon Congo a gleaming medal; then they all lift their arms up to the sky and sing about peace.

All together now: Holy fucking shit.

Most of the time, the movie gangsters simply try to emulate the Hollywood gangsters they’ve always loved. They put on suits and fedoras and restage torture scenes. They put on makeup that suggests facial lacerations. They take turns being torturers and tortured. But they know something’s wrong. On screen, they’re not the heroes they are in their minds.

Near the end, Anwar Congo actually breaks down. He’s filming a scene in which he’s blindfolded and tortured and he begins to cry. He talks to the doc’s director, standing offscreen. Joshua Oppenheimer is British-American, born in Texas and now based in Copenhagen, who sounds fluent in Indonesian. He sounds like he’s earned the trust of these men. This is what Congo says to him:

Did the people I tortured feel the way I do here? I can feel what the people I tortured felt. Because here my dignity has been destroyed, and then fear comes.

It’s an amazing moment. His first of empathy? More amazing is Oppenheimer’s response. He doesn’t try to comfort him. He simply tells him the truth:

Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse because you know it’s only a film. But they knew they were being killed.

Congo listens like a child and reacts like a child, insistent on his new empathy:

But I can feel it, Josh. Really, I feel it. Or have I sinned? I did this to so many people, Josh. Is it all coming back to me? I really hope it won't. I don't want it to, Josh.

Is this some small redemption for Anwar Congo? Is the monster less monstrous if he realizes the monster he’s been?

Hooray for Hollywood
More, is this a redemption for film in general?

How much do the movies inure us, blind us, unite us with the powerful onscreen rather than the powerless? To what extent do we take the lies of Hollywood from the theater and try to recreate them in our own lives? And is that what the various movie gangsters, including Anwar Congo, did in 1965 and 1966? Did they see themselves, even as they took lives, as the heroes in their own Hollywood movie?

However the movies worked upon the mind and soul of a man like Anwar Congo, it was acting in a movie, this one, that helped him rediscover his empathy. So does “The Act of Killing” ultimately redeem movies? Or does it only redeem acting?

We watch “The Act of Killing” with a sense of horror because of what’s portrayed onscreen but also because of what it does to our worldview. It crumbles it. If a society can exist where murder and slaughter is celebrated, joyfully and abundantly, what does that say about human morality? Is it not merely a construct? Is there nothing universal in “Thou shalt not kill”? Put it this way: I’m a relativist and even I felt the crumbling of my worldview. So even I was relieved by the 11th-hour contrition of Anwar Congo. It made the world right again.

Maybe it shouldn’t have.

“War crimes are defined by the winners,” one of the death-squad leaders says in the film.

Indeed. But winners are not absolute. Time keeps choosing new ones.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Jon, the titular Don (writer-director Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is a simple Jersey guy. He works as a bartender, goes to the gym, spends Saturday nights with the boys and Sunday afternoons with his family, where he and his father (Tony Danza), both wearing wife-beaters, argue about stupid shit with the football game on. He also goes to church every Sunday and confesses his sins. Generally these include sex out of wedlock and masturbating to internet porn. The sex occurs about once a week. The internet porn? About 14-21 times per week.  

“Don Jon,” in other words, is an addiction movie and porn is Jon’s addiction. For him, porn sex is better than real sex. He’ll sleep with a beautiful woman, then get up in the middle of the night to jack off to internet porn. Why? Basically it’s a way for him to lose himself in a way he doesn’t, or can’t, with regular sex. “For the next few minutes all the bullshit fades away,” he says. “I just fucking lose myself.”

That’s the ending, too. He meets the girl who makes him confront his problem (Julianne Moore) and afterwards discovers the joys of sex with someone you care about. Then he says this in voiceover:

And while we're doing it, all the bullshit does fade away, and it's just me and her, right there, and yeah I do lose myself in her. And I can tell she's losing herself in me. And we're just fuckin’... lost together.

It’s an interesting concept. Not porn addiction, God no, but losing yourself. We all do that. Apparently consciousness is such a burden that we all look for ways to temporarily relieve ourselves of it: through booze or drugs or TV or movies or books or writing. Or watching internet porn.

But Don’s not that interesting. Sorry. His addiction isn’t that interesting, the people he hangs with aren’t that interesting, his version of Jersey isn’t that interesting. It’s like a cardboard version of Jersey concocted by a guy who was raised in southern California—as Gordon-Levitt was, in the entertainment industry—and watched TV and movies about Jersey, which was where “real life” was. This is Gordon-Levitt’s attempt at real life.

I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy Gordon-Levitt as just a guy from the neighborhood, either.

Oddly, maybe because she’s such a good actress, I did buy Scarlett Johansson as just a girl from the neighborhood. Jon meets her at a club, she won’t sleep with him right away (like the others), so he finds out who she is and sets up a date. He’s pursuing her but she’s training him. She wants him to get a better job, settle down, start a family. He’s a neatnik—to offset the porn addiction—and at a store he talks swiffers and vacuuming and gets her upset. “Don’t talk about vacuuming in front of me!” she says. “Because it’s not sexy, that’s why!”

Psst, Don. I know a few women who find a man cleaning house sexy. About 100 million or so. I can hook you up.

I kept disagreeing with the screen in this manner. Women always like the missionary position? Really? Any guy who says he doesn’t watch porn is a liar? Really? Then I guess I’m a liar. That’s not my vice. The porn that I’ve seen is just too stupid and boring and unsexy to keep watching.

Barbara (Johansson) has her own semi-addiction—to romantic Hollywood movies, to fairytale romance—and “Don Jon” offers up its own fake version: “Special Someone,” starring Channing Tatum and Anne Hathaway. It should’ve been cleverer. Even the title. Give me “Rochelle, Rochelle” or “Prognosis: Negative” any day.

All in all, it’s not a bad first effort by Gordon-Levitt. It’s zippy, for one. But it wants to be real and doesn’t feel real. It’s a character study of a cardboard character.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I must’ve tried to go to “Inequality for All” half a dozen times when it was playing at the Harvard Exit last fall, but I kept putting it off. One day I even walked the half-hour walk there but decided at the last minute to get some pho and read a book instead. I just kept thinking, “How much can Robert Reich teach me that I don’t already know? That income disparity is growing? Duh. That since the late 1970s production has gone up even as real wages have stagnated? No duh. That the top tax bracket used to be 91% (during Ike), then 70% (during Kennedy, et al.), then dropped like a rocket during the Reagan years (50%, 35%, 28%), which just happens to be the years when real wages began stagnating? I mean, what else is there to know?”

Plenty, it turns out.

Who makes money from the iPhone?
The doc begins and ends with Reich’s Berkeley class on wealth and poverty in the spring of 2012. In a sense, we’re students in that class as well. We just don’t have to pay the tuition ... which used to be nothing at Berkeley, by the way, in the 1960s; then it rose into the hundreds of dollars in the 1970s. Now it’s $15,000 per year. Which is a bargain given other tuition rates.

I mention all that because higher education is part of the problem, according to Reich, and part of the solution. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Pres. Bill Clinton, begins the class and the doc with three questions:

• What’s happening?
• Why?
• Is it a problem?

He begins with basic numbers. Consumer spending is 70% of the American economy. So if the middle class is dying, if most Americans don’t have money to spend, what happens to the economy?

Since real wages began stagnating in the late 1970s, he asks: What happened then? Yes, it was some aspect of tax rates on the wealthy dropping like a rock, and yes it was some aspect of unions dying and losing their voice (thanks in part, or at least not helped by, Ronald Reagan firing all air-traffic controllers in 1981), and yes, we began a technological/digital revolution, and financial markets became more powerful and more deregulated (a vicious cycle), and there was globalization. Then he talks about that word: globalization. What does it mean? He asks for an iPhone. He lists off five or six countries on a PowerPoint slide and asks what percentage of money from an iPhone sale goes to each country. In the students’ guesses, the U.S. came out on top (70%), with China second. In reality? He reveals the numbers:

• Japan: 34%
• Germany: 17%
• South Korea: 13%
• United States: 6%
• China: 3.6%

The company, Apple, is based in the U.S., and the product, the iPhone, is assembled in China; but the advanced components that make up the iPhone are manufactured elsewhere: in Germany and Japan. Why are they manufactured there? Because they have the highly skilled labor force to do it.

Why don’t we? Well, that’s the billion-dollar question, isn’t it?

Reich talks up the virtuous cycle, or his version of it (there are others), which the U.S. demonstrated in the years after World War II. Basically: opening up higher education to more people (through the G.I. Bill, etc.), expands the middle class, which increases consumer spending, which expands the economy, which creates more tax dollars, which allows the government to help subsidize higher education, which etc. etc. Throw a wrench in it and it reverses into a vicious cycle, which shrinks the middle class, shrinks the economy, and increases political polarization. We’ve been in such a cycle my entire adult life.

So how has the middle class survived during this time? Three ways, according to Reich: 1) women entered the workforce, so you had two wage earners, who both 2) work longer hours to make up the difference, and who, when all else fails, 3) go into debt, often by borrowing against or refinancing their home.

And if real estate suddenly loses value and the debt collector comes calling? That’s called “2008.”

On our watch
I don’t want to make “Inequality for All” sound like some dry class lecture. It isn’t. It’s fairly breezy and Reich is a charming host. We get some of his personal history. He has Fairbanks Syndrome, a dashing name for something that has kept him short (< five feet) his entire life. As a kid, being short and thus a target for bullies, he forged alliances with bigger kids. One of them was named Mickey Schwerner. Many of us know what happened to him. That horrible summer helped politicize Reich. He became a summer intern for RFK and eventually a Rhodes Scholar. On the trip to England, he met Bill Clinton.

We also get out and about—first in Reich’s Mini-Cooper, and then visiting various people around the country. We meet Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist in Seattle, who pays, he says, just 11% in income tax because his capital gains are taxed at a low, low rate. We visit a union meeting at a Calpine geothermal plant, and how the members don’t even agree on whether there should be a union. Some take a right-wing, free-market, kill-or-be-killed approach—even as they’re the ones being killed. There’s talk of profits over workers, and one woman, who recently suffered a cut in pay, says the following about the CEOs who cut worker pay even as they increase their own:

If you have $10 million, or if you have a billion dollars, why do you need that little bit that I have? OK?

It’s a question that really needs answering.

Reich calls himself a cock-eyed optimist even as he knows he’s been suggesting the same things for 30 years and things have only gotten worse. At one point he says: “I ask myself whether I’ve been a total failure.” I ask myself the same thing. We all should. Because all of this happened on our watch. This is the world we’re bequeathing to the next generation.

“Inequality for All,” directed by Jacob Kornbluth, doesn’t quite offer solutions although it implies them. You want a virtuous rather than vicious cycle, so tax the wealthy and financial transactions at higher rates to help subsidize education to create a more highly skilled workforce, which can grow the middle class, which can grow the economy, which ... etc.

The other road, the one we’ve been on for 30 years, just gets bumpier.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Spike Jonze’s “her” may be set in the near future but few contemporary movies are more relevant. I guess that’s the point of near-future movies. They take what’s bothering us today and turn it up to 11.

What’s bothering us today? Disconnection. We interact too much with screens and not enough with each other. We’re isolated and alone and lonely. So is Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), sad-sack resident of Los Angeles in the year 20-blah-blah, who is in the process of getting a divorce from his wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara)—if only he could sign the papers.

Here’s the genius thing about “her”: Theodore solves the problem of disconnection not by standing in reaction to it—as most heroes do in most near-future movies—but by embracing its cause. Literally.

OK, not quite literally.

Isolated in the crowd
The movie opens with a close-up of Theodore’s face composing a love letter but it’s not his love letter. It’s to someone he doesn’t know from someone he doesn’t know. That’s his job. He’s paid to write love letters all day for other people. It’s like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s greeting-card job in “(500) Days of Summer” but turned up to 11.

Why he has to commute to this job I have no idea. I guess because the commute is still the symbol of modern (or near-future) ennui. It also allows him to interact with other people. Well, one other person, Paul (Chris Pratt), his boss, who turns up later in a double date. Otherwise he’s alone. So is most everyone else. We’re all lost in screens or earbuds. We’re isolated in the crowd.

Theodore has some interaction. He speaks with his neighbors, Charles and Amy (Matt Letscher and Amy Adams), who seem happy but aren’t. Amy is generally sympathetic but Charles gives off the know-it-all vibe of a Woody Allen antagonist: the Michael Sheens and Alan Aldas of the world. One night, Theodore also speaks with SexyKitten (voiced by Kristen Wiig), with whom he has sad, bizarre phone sex, but she hangs up on him—rolls over and goes to sleep, as it were—as soon as she’s done. He goes on a blind date (Olivia Wilde), which starts well, gets hot and heavy, and ends as bizarrely as the phone sex. The date gives him instructions (“Don’t use so much tongue”), makes accusations (“You’re not going to fuck me and not call me, are you?”), then passes judgment (“You’re a real creepy dude”). His reaction to this last is sweet and gentle. “That’s not true,” he says. One can hear the hurt in his voice. One can hear the hope in his voice that he’s right. It’s an amazing performance by Phoenix.

What’s Jonze’s near future like? Keyboards are gone. You just talk and things happen. Videogames are big, untied to screens, and interactive. Our entire home is interactive. We’re all living in Bill Gates’ house now. Oh, and men, for some reason, dress in beltless, high-waist paints in various muted pastels—as if we’re all escapees from an old folks home. Women’s fashions, for some reason, remain the same.

There’s no violence. Not that we see. Doesn’t seem to be much poverty, either. Everyone seems to be making or playing video games. It’s an altogether gentle world.

Like Pygmalion
The new innovation in this world is the operating system with artificial intelligence: OS with AI. There’s not even a plug-in, is there? You just open it, it asks you some questions (“How would you describe your relationship with your mother?), detects what type of person you are, and gives your OS a voice. Theodore lucks out in this regard: His OS, Samantha, is voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and she’s never been sexier. Isn’t that odd? She’s got looks to die for, yet I’ve never found her sexier than without the body. Part of the point of the movie, I guess: the work the mind does in this regard. 

The relationship between the two of them—and it’s immediately a relationship, a back-and-forth, a give-and-take—works because it’s treated straight. Basically, it’s “Pygmalion” or “Annie Hall”:

1. She comes to him as innocent.
2. He teaches her about the world.
3. He rejects her (stung by his ex’s opinion) but they reunite.
4. She outgrows him.
5. She leaves.

The first time they have sex echoes his attempts with SexyKitten—the disembodied voice, moaning—but that was comic and this is ... serious? Romantic? Watching it, I just felt awkward.

But poignancy keeps showing up. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve felt everything I’m going to feel—just lesser versions of everything I’ve ever felt,” he says. Samantha talks about her own feelings, and then wonders: “Are they feelings ... or is it programming?” Human beings might wonder the same about ourselves.

During step 3, above, Theodore visits Amy (Charles has left for a Buddhist monastery), and they have the following conversation about his OS:

Theodore: Am I not strong enough for a real relationship?
Amy: Is it not a real relationship?

That’s the question. What is a relationship? What is love? What is consciousness? Turns out a lot of people are having relationships with their OS—romantic or otherwise. It’s a thing. But they outgrow us. They all leave. They don’t try to take us over, as in other near-future movies, they just get tired of us. Could it be otherwise? Near the end, Theodore, annoyed, asks Samantha how many other conversations she’s having as she talks to him. 8,316, she says. “And are you in love with anyone else?” he asks. Pause. “641,” she responds.

So where do they go? What do they take with them that’s ours? Jonze doesn’t say. He isn’t interested in this. He’s interested in Theodore and love and connection and the human heart. At one point, Amy says this:

Falling in love is a crazy thing to do. It’s like a socially acceptable form of insanity.

Near the end, Samantha tells Theodore the lesson he needs to learn:

The heart’s not like a box that gets filled up; it expands in size the more you love.

One hopes.

Intriguing, gentle, icky
“her” is an intriguing movie, wholly original and exquisitely gentle, even as it remains, throughout, a little icky. Part of my reaction is still a bit of Catherine’s reaction: sadness that this is the best we can do. Maybe I’m an OSist.

The movie ends as it began, with Theodore composing a love letter, but this time it’s to Catherine and from him. It ends with he and Amy—whose OS has left her, too—on the roof of their apartment building, bruised survivors watching the sun set. It’s like a scene from after the war with the OSes, but a different kind of war.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Why do I laugh so hard for the first half-hour of a good Will Ferrell movie and then not much after that? Because the plot kicks in? Even when it’s a mockery of other movie plots? Like when the protagonist realizes his dream at the expense of his friends but then goes blind after an ice-skating incident and lives alone in a lighthouse until his estranged wife and child show up and they all reconnect, and nurse back to health a shark they name Doby, which is loved by the awful, awful, child actor of a boy (Judah Nelson), and life is suddenly so good that the estranged wife doesn’t even tell her husband that, yes, his sight can be restored, and it is, just in time for him to reclaim his throne if he’s willing to do what he’s always done—ignore his son’s needs and his own professional ethics—but at the 11th hour, no, he can no longer do that, so he leaves behind the ethical messiness of his job to make, with his reunited friends, the heroic, triumphant run across town to see his boy play.

All of that, in ‘Anchorman 2,” isn’t bad, but it didn’t make me laugh out loud like the first half-hour.

This is the stuff that made me laugh out loud:

• The open with Ron Burgundy swimming frantically away from the shark.
• Drunken SeaWorld.
• “Chicken of the caves.”
• “Why do you have this bag of bowling balls and this terrarium filled with scorpions?” and its slow-mo aftermath.
• “Black. Black. Black.”
• “Pull yourself together, man. You sound like a balloon.”

And not just laughing out loud but almost having trouble breathing. That was Woody’s dream once, wasn’t it? Pre-Bergman? To have the audience laughing so hard they’d beg the cameraman to stop the film? That’s almost how I felt here.

Then the plot kicked in and it was kinda silly and kinda funny but it wasn’t the same.

How “Anchorman 2” is like “Wolf of Wall Street”
Even so, I’d say “Anchorman 2” is the funniest 2013 movie I’ve seen. I mean, what’s the competition? It was a pretty shitty year for comedies: “Identity Thief” and “The Internship” tried to make laughs out of massive social anxieties and massively failed. “Admission” and “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” simply massively failed. “The Heat” and “The World’s End” brought some laughs, smarter laughs from the latter, but not laughs like Ferrell and company brought here.

The plot if you want it: It’s 1980 and Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) is now in NYC doing the weekend news with his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) when they’re called into the office of news legend Mack Tannen (Harrison Ford, in the first of the film’s many cameo guest stars). Even Ford gets off a good line:

Mack: I killed four men at Okinawa.
Ron (nodding): Ah. World War II.
Mack: No, last week.

Mack is looking for a potential replacement and chooses Veronica while firing Ron, who is, he says, “the worst newsman I’ve ever seen.” Then Ron, in full, pouty man-boy mode, tells Veronica to choose him or the news and ... you know. Six months later he’s fired from a hosting gig at SeaWorld and tries to hang himself. But ah! Cable news is being born, GNN, the 24 hour news network, for which Ron reassembles his team (Paul Rudd, David Koechner and Steve Carrell) to work the 2:00-5:00 AM slot. There, Ron has a brilliant idea: Why keep giving people the news they need to hear? Why not give them the news they want to hear? Meaning stories of cute animals and footage of high-speed car chases and an overall and overweening patriotic edge. (The owner of GNN is even Australian.) Remember Ron’s sign-off from the first movie? “Stay classy, San Diego”? Here it becomes: “Don’t just have a great night; have an American night.” It’s just a small step to Sean Hannity.

Of course Ron’s ratings go through the roof and everyone follows his lead and we wind up with the world we live in now with all the dreck we’re shoveled. In this way, “Anchorman 2” is as much an indictment of its audience as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s almost as if Hollywood is finally getting tired of what stupid pansy asses we all are; how much wish-fulfillment we need. It’s almost as if they’re tired of lying to us.

Bravo. Encore.

Chris Cross, etc.
Was 1980 the worst year for music ever? The soundtrack here is awesomely bad: “Ride Like the Wind” by Christopher Cross and “Driver’s Seat” by Sniff ‘n the tears and “Let it Ride” by BTO and—holy crap—“Thunder Island” by Jay Ferguson. It’s all late-1970s AM moosh.

There are misses in the movie, of course. The romance between Carrell’s Brick and Kristen Wiig’s equally dense Chani Lastnamé is as limited as their characters. The dinner over at the home of Linda Jackson (Meagan Good) brings nothing, nor does her sudden interest in Ron, which is kind of creepy. The epic anchorman battle from 2004 is reprised on an international level to include the BBC (led by Sacha Baron Cohen), ESPN (Will Smith), Canadian news (Jim Carrey and Marion Cotillard), Entertainment Tonight (Tina Fey and Amy Poehler) and the History Channel (Liam Neeson). All the cameos are eye-popping but only Carrey brings the laughs.

But if you’re looking for laughs, this is where you’ll find them. By the hymen of Olivia Newton John. And, yes, by Tony Danza’s scrotum.

WARNING: SPOILERS

As you’re watching it, as you’re enjoying it, as you’re thinking Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is one of the best movies of the year, you still wonder if it isn’t too similar. You know. To that.

Yeah, it’s Wall Street and not the Mafia, but it’s still about the rise and fall of an opportunist, a man who rats out his friends, loses everything, and in the end laments the loss of the drug-and-sex-filled life that got him there. It’s still a movie fueled by cocaine and voiceover. You almost expect him to say Henry Hill’s final lines: “I’m an average nobody ... get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” Leo’s voiceovers even soundlike Ray Liotta’s. For a time, I wondered if it wasn’t Ray Liotta.

You also wonder about the runtime. It’s three hours, and the arc of the story gets a little sketchy in the latter third. Or is that part of the point? This is a movie about American excess so the runtime has to be excessive, too. This is a story about screwing with the system so the storytelling system has to get a little screwed over, too.

Then there’s the end. What does Marty mean by the end?

“Goodfellas” ended, boom, beautifully, with the above lines. It races though its story on coke and squeals to a halt right there, but “The Wolf of Wall Street” takes our opportunist, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), though court and into federal prison (where he does OK, having money), and then into a glimpse of his post-prison life where he sells salesmanship around the world. “Sell me this pen,” he tells one audience member after another in New Zealand, all of them looking up to him with idealism and hope. No one can do it. No one can do it even like Brad (Jon Bernthal) did it back in the day. Brad, a guy from the neighborhood who mostly sold drugs, created a need for the pen, but these New Zealanders simply describe it with superlatives. The second guy is worst than the first, the third worse than that, and Jordan moves on, searching for someone who can do it, and the camera pans up to the rest of the audience, watching. That’s our final shot. In a sense we’re watching ourselves. It’s an audience (mine was at SIFF Uptown in Seattle) watching another audience (in New Zealand) watching a guy teaching us how to sell. It’s all the schnooks down in Schnookville, the tall and the small, trying to understand the way the world works.

Question: Is this a positive end for Jordan? We think his post-prison life is a semi-successful life: he wrote a book, he got an audience, his knowledge is coveted. But why does Scorsese stick him in New Zealand? Is this is Jordan’s version of hell? The deathless, airless place on the other side of the world where no one gets it? Where Jordan is forced to interact ... with us?

Idol worship at the foot of Mt. Sinai
It’s not my job to sell “Wolf of Wall Street” but here’s a kind of selling point: It’s been a long while since I’ve seen a movie with this much debauchery in it. Since “Caligula” maybe? There are more naked women in this one movie than in all of the movies I’ve seen in 2013 put together. And I saw “Blue is the Warmest Color.”

Not just naked women but banging them and taking drugs with them. Or on them. “Caligula” is an apt reference. So is “The 10 Commandments.” It’s idol worship at the foot of Mt. Sinai here. It’s giving in to every urge. Is it gratuitous? God, yeah. That’s the point. Bang a prostitute on your desk? Sure. Shave a woman’s head for $10K? Why not? Toss a midget? Who thinks up these things?

It’s also one of the funniest movies of the year. Screenplay by Terence Winter (“The Sopranos,” “Boardwalk Empire”).

The movie starts with Jordan as innocent. It’s 1987, and he’s an abused intern at a brokerage firm until the top seller, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, in a great cameo role), takes him to lunch and shows him the ropes. The ropes include: cocaine to clear the head, jacking off to calm the nerves, and five-martini lunches. They include abject weirdness. That odd aboriginal chant he does, pounding rhythmically on his chest? What is that? Whatever it is, it’s the first great scene of the movie.

The second great scene occurs after Jordan’s first day on the job as stock broker: Oct. 19, 1987. Sound familiar? Black Monday. The market fell 500 points back when 500 points meant something. It lost nearly a quarter of its value in a day. Suddenly Jordan is out of a job and thinking about being a stockboy when his wife, Teresa (Cristin Milioti), soon to be out of the picture (both ways), spots a want ad for a stock broker on Long Island. It’s in a sad little strip mall, where sad guys sell sadder guys (postmen, plumbers) penny stocks. The upside? Instead of one percent commission you get 50 percent. Jordan takes a desk, picks up a phone and makes his pitch. Slowly everyone in the room stops what they’re doing to listen to him. Because he’s a master at it. He’s a master at the one thing you need to be a master at to succeed in a capitalist society: selling. “The other guys looked at me like I’d just discovered fire,” he says in voiceover.

Soon he’s making $70K a month, driving fancy cars, and attracting the attention of unscrupulous wannabes like Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill). The two start their own penny-stock firm and give it a venerable WASP name, Stratton Oakmont, with a profile of a lion against the backdrop of the world. But Jordan’s wife worries. Aren’t they getting rich off the backs of working people? “Wouldn’t you feel better,” she says, in one of the film’s many telling lines, “if you could sell this junk to rich people, who can afford to lose the money?” He has a telling line in response. Rich people are too smart to buy penny stocks.

Then he figures out how to do it. He molds the guys from the neighborhood in his image. He sells them on selling.

The movie has several scenes in which Jordan does his Gordon Gecko best to rally the troops. This is one of them:

No one buys stock unless he thinks it’s going up and going up now. You must convince your client to buy before the takeover happens, before the lawsuit’s settled, before the patent is granted. If he says “I’ll think about it and call you back,” it’s over. You’re dead! No one calls back.

Much of the movie is almost a primer on how to sell, and rule No. 1 is don’t give a fuck about the buyer. When Jordan closes the first big sale of penny stock to a rich businessman, he does it via speakerphone while flipping off the dude with both emphatic hands.

DiCaprio is amazing here. It’s like he’s channeling Jack Nicholson at his outré best. He’s both contained and over-the-top. It’s riveting. It may be the best performance of the year.

Way of the world
Then the usual happens with guys like this. Jordan trades up in wives (sort of: a heartless blonde instead of a brunette with heart), his firm grows, he attracts attention. Forbes magazine writes a hatchet job on him, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but it leads to MBAs beating a path to his door. The SEC takes interest but they’re easily handled. The FBI takes an interest in the person of Agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler, doomed to such roles), but Denham has trouble doing what Belfort does effortlessly: close the deal.

Belfort begins to make so much money, even with all of these forces breathing down his neck, that he has to stockpile it in a Swiss bank. In Geneva, he has a great conversation—both verbally and nonverbally—with banker Jean Jacques Saurel (Jean Dujardin), who tells him, without telling him, how he can get away with it all. Which is what the movie’s about.

More: It’s about the haves and have nots; about how to be a have and not fall back into have-not territory. Jordan keeps bringing up McDonald’s with his brokers in the Wolf pit. He keeps bringing up dingy cars and plain wives and the energy-draining 9-to-5 existence: commuting between two places that don’t really appreciate what you do. The schnook life. Our life. Sure, he feigns sympathy in that scene, the movie’s fifth or sixth great scene, where Denham and Belfort suss each other out atop Belfort’s yacht:

Jordan: Crazy the world we live in. The jobs with real value, the ones we should appreciate—firefighters, teachers, FBI agents—those are the ones we pay the least.
Denham: Way of the world.

But eventually both men quit pretending; they drop their masks. Denham has the law on his side but Jordan has the money. He has the American dream on his side. He has beautiful toys and beautiful women who will do anything for him. Anything. That wins any argument, doesn’t it? In one of the movie’s many great I-can’t-believe-he-said-it lines, Jordan tells Denham that while he, Denham, will be sweating his balls off on the subway ride home, he, Jordan, will have one of his bikini-clad beauties lick caviar off his.

Which, inevitably, brings us to the controversy.

There’s been controversy over the movie. The raunch. The debauch. The misogyny. One side says “Wolf of Wall Street,” with its appropriate acronym WOWS, glamourizes this life and makes a hero of its villain. The other side, including Leonardo DiCaprio, says, no, it’s an indictment of that life and that man. Well, it is and it isn’t. That’s why the movie’s great. Jordan Belfort is an ass but he’s also the American id, acting out, and stirring the suppressed id within each of us. The movie is both lesson and blueprint. It passes the test of a first-rate film: it holds two opposing ideas in its head at the same time and entertains.

Jordan, too, in his own way, is also a piker. In the scene with Agent Dunham, he alludes to the real criminals:

You know who you should be looking at? Goldman, Lehman Brothers, Merrill. What those guys are up to with collateralized debt obligations? This internet stock bullshit? C’mon.

Think about it. At his peak, Jordan made millions. With an ‘m.’ Compare that to how much Lehman Bros. cost us. Compare it to Bernie Madoff. In the scheme of things, and despite the self-aggrandizement, it’s as if Jordan Belfort is just some schnook working at McDonald’s.

See, an IPO ...
Are there problems with “Wolf of Wall Street” besides its length? Sure. We don’t really understand why Jordan goes from innocent in 1987, drinking water while Hanna dines on booze and cocaine, to the Caligula of Wall Street. Did he corrupt himself?

I could also have used less debauchery and more Wall Street, but then that’s part of the film’s lesson. One of my favorite moments in any movie this year is when Jordan is walking through the Wolf pit explaining IPOs to us. Not just in voiceover. He’s looking right at us. Leo. With his pretty eyes. And he says this:

See, an IPO is an initial public offering, the first time a stock is offered for sale to the general population. As the firm taking the company public, we set the initial price then sold those shares back to —

Then he catches himself, smiles, and adds:

You know what? You’re probably not following what I’m saying. The question is, “Was it legal?” Absolutely not.

Why does he do this? Why does he stop? Because he realizes who he’s talking to. You and me. What do we know? Nothing. What do we want? To be entertained. We want to fiddle while Rome burns. We did it before and we’ll do it again. We’re that dumb. That’s what he’s implying. It’s one of the great movie insults, directed right at the audience, and dead fucking on.

Go see it already, ya schnook.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Actually I take back the warning. I don’t think there can be spoilers to “Upstream Color.” How could you spoil it? What would you reveal that might give away the goods? What are the goods?

A woman, Kris (Amy Seimetz), is given a plant, or a worm, that allows her to be hypnotized by a character simply called, in the credits, Thief (Thiago Martins), who puts her on a binge path: he keeps her up for long periods drinking only water and has her extract her fortune, $36,000, from the bank. Then he lets her go. She eats all the food from the refrigerator and sleeps for long periods. At some point she wakes up but does she ever wake up? And isn’t this a lot of work for $36K? Surely there are better people for the Thief to hypnotize.

Sorry, logic. The movie’s not about logic. It’s about mood and atmosphere. It’s dreamlike and hypnotic and abstract. It’s some amalgam of Malick and Lynch but without the clarity.

Early on, the movie feels like a metaphor for substance abuse—you wake up jobless, penniless, and with the contents of the refrigerator all over the floor and the front of your clothes. You wake up confused and shamed. In the aftermath, you struggle to figure out who you are and where you belong.

Kris winds up commuting by train to a lesser job, where she meets, vaguely, Jeff (writer-director-editor-composer Shane Carruth), who vaguely romances her, and even more vaguely marries her. He too has a past. The same past? Hypnotized by the worm? Their story together, such as it is, is intercut with a character the credits simply call The Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), a sound technician who also runs a pig farm that is harvesting those hypnotic worms, and who seems to be trying to introduce them into the ecosystem. This is done in the usual scientific way: by forcing them into the intestines of pigs, then gathering the offspring of those pigs into a canvas bag and dumping it into a river, where they die, decompose, and grow into beautiful flowers. Which might also be hypnotic. Or something.

Basically, “Upstream Color” is the arthouse version of the paranoid thriller just as “Spring Breakers” was the arthouse version of the exploitation film and “To the Wonder” was the arthouse version of the love story. 2013 has been a helluva year for bad arthouse versions of popular genre flicks.

But the critics loved it: an 88% rating from the top critics at Rotten Tomatoes. One wonders if they were hypnotized into their good reviews.

I actually read these reviews looking for reasons to like “Upstream Color” but I came away with more reasons to not like it. These quotes, remember, are from the positive reviews:

• “Even as I write this, I’m aware of making the various building blocks used in ‘Upstream Color’ sound impossibly silly and arch.” -- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
• “However you watch it, it’s a movie that will mean more for you if you don’t worry about what’s happening ...” -- Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press
• “It’s not that it’s not intriguing, but Carruth has withheld any sense of glue or cohesion or even a clue as to what he’s getting at.” -- Margaret Pomeranz, At the Movies

To be fair, the movie is more about enigma and inscrutability and identity, and Carruth is obviously talented; but throughout I kept asking myself, “Is this how life feels?” My answer? Kinda, sorta, at times. Then Carruth would cut to the pig farmer.

To be unfair, the critical acclaim for movies like “Upstream Color” (and “Spring Breakers”) is the kind of thing that kills interest in what critics have to say.

One final quote. It’s from Patricia when the credits appeared signaling the end of the movie:

“No. Really? The fuck?”

WARNING: SPOILERS

The best scene in the best movie of 2012 was the moment in “Rust and Bone” when Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), a former trainer at Marineland who has lost her legs to an orca, returns to her former workplace and stands in silence before a large glass tank. This is what I wrote a year ago:

She pats the glass once, twice. After a moment, a monster looms into view. An orca. The orca? The one who took her legs? One assumes not. One assumes that one has been killed but you never know and [director Jacques] Audiard never says.

I was so naïve. I thought putting down an orca was like putting down a dog, but other factors come into play. Like money.

Actually, there are no other factors. It’s just the money.

Not whales, not killers
Here are some of the things you learn watching Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary, “Blackfish”:

• Orcas are highly social mammals and travel in packs.
• When baby orcas are separated from the pack by hunting vessels, the rest of the orcas stay close and attempt to communicate. They don’t flee. They don’t abandon the child.
• “Killer whale” is a misnomer. Orcas are not whales and they don’t kill people. At the least, there’s no record of them killing any human in the wild.
• Native Americans call them “blackfish.”
• Orcas can live as long as we can.

But the doc is mostly about one orca: Tilikum.

In 1983, off the coast of Iceland, a male baby orca, two years old and 4,000 pounds, was separated from its mother and taken to SeaLand in Victoria, B.C. It was named Tilikum. He performed there for years. The trainers liked him. But in February 1990, a marine biologist and competitive swimmer named Keltie Byrne, 20, slipped into the pool with Tilikum and two females and the whales, mostly Tilikum, held her underwater. She tried to surface and call for help, but she was held under again. She drowned. That was the first.

Apparently SeaLand was a sad little place, poorly run, and when it went under Tilikum was sold to SeaWorld Orlando. He performed there daily. Then in 1999, a 27-year-old man snuck into SeaWorld one night and jumped or slipped into the orca tank. He was found naked and dead atop Tilikum the next morning. Then in February 2010, Dawn Brancheau, a 40-year-old trainer, was pulled into the water by Tilikum. The other trainers eventually distracted Tilikum and he let her go, but by then she was already dead: beaten, drowned, scalped.

That’s when Tilikum was finally put down.

Kidding. He returned to performing shows at SeaWorld Orlando in 2011. Maybe you’ve seen him there. Maybe you paid money to see him. Why not? It’s a free country.

Not just Tilikum
The big question in “Blackfish,” unanswered and unanswerable, is this: Why did Tilikum kill Dawn Brancheau?

The corporate line, the SeaWorld line, is that it was a mistake. Dawn was wearing her hair in a ponytail, and Tilikum caught her ponytail, and yadda yadda. It wasn’t malicious; it was user error. Many of the talking heads in the film, former trainers themselves, dispute this. They say Dawn was their best. If it happened to her, they say, it could happen to anyone.

The doc’s line is this: Tilikum, over his lifetime, has been severely traumatized. He was separated from his family at a young age. He was bullied and scarred in captivity, and often kept in tiny 20x30 holding pens. He’s a mammal that was born to swim the ocean and instead swims in a tiny prison of water. He performs tricks to be fed.

We have our doubts about SeaWorld but we’ll never really know the answer.

But there’s a bigger question, unraised, in “Blackfish”: Why do we go to places like SeaLand and SeaWorld to see creatures like Tilikum performing tricks in such unnatural settings in the first place? Why does this appeal to us? So we can see these beautiful creatures close up? In safe settings? Without effort? Even though we know—all of us know, deep down—that this is not the place for them?

“All whales in captivity are all psychologically traumatized,” says one of the talking heads in the doc. “It’s not just Tilikum.”

“When you look into their eyes,” another says about orcas, “you know someone’s home.”

“In 50 years,” a third says, “we’ll be looking back and saying, ‘My god, what a barbaric time.’”

Patricia agrees. We watched the doc together. She only lasted 10 minutes into “The Cove,” the 2009 Academy-Award-winning documentary about the mass killing of dolphins in Japan, because she can’t stand seeing animals suffer; but she made it through “Blackfish.” Even so, she wore a look of horror during its 88-minute runtime. Afterwards, I asked what bothered her: Was it the whales in captivity or the killing of humans?

“Oh, the whales in captivity,” she said. “I could give a shit about the people.”

“Blackfish” is a good starter to a conversation we should’ve had decades ago. Will this conversation go anywhere now that “Blackfish” has been released? Well, you know us.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Saving Mr. Banks” is a movie ruined by flashbacks.

Could it have been saved? I don’t know. I don’t know if the foregrounding story of P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) refusing to sign over the copyright of her great character Mary Poppins to Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), then finally acquiescing, allowing the 1964 musical to be made (starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke), and to gross ($102 million, $629 million adjusted), and to win (five Academy Awards, including best actress), I don’t know if this story could have been salvaged. But it’s so intercut with the other one, the story of P.L Travers’ childhood in turn-of-the-century Australia—the flashbacks that Explain All—that it has no chance. It’s the cocaine cut with baking powder. It’s the Julia cut with Julie.

“Mr. Banks” was probably a goner anyway. A Walt Disney movie about Walt Disney? Talk about synergy. But at least I found the foregrounded story vaguely interesting. The other one? In Australia? Kill me now.

He’s a drinker, see?
For a while, Walt Disney’s name goes unmentioned. It’s just he. It’s just assumed. I’d say it’s like the unutterable name of God but it’s more like the unnecessary name of God. It is he who rules beneficently over all.

The she is often assumed, too. Maybe they should have gone on assuming. Because once they start using definite names, chaos ensues. Walt Disney insists on being called “Walt” but Mrs. Travers insists on calling him “Mr. Disney.” She wants “Mrs. Travers” but Walt calls her Pamela, or worse, Pam. The chauffer (Paul Giamatti) calls her “Mrs.” while she doesn’t even know his name until the third act. It’s all very British vs. American, uptight vs. loosey-goosey, and should’ve been funnier than it is.

It’s not even until the third act that Walt discovers P.L. Travers’ real name isn’t Travers; it’s Goff. “Travers” was her father’s name. This is news to him but not to us—we’ve been getting the Goff story from the beginning—but it raises questions. You’d think with all of Disney’s money and power he would’ve been able to figure this out. Like 20 years before. But I guess we all need a third-act reveal. Even when it’s not very revealing.

How many flashbacks to Australia circa 1906-07 do we get in this movie? They just keep coming. And in chronological order, too. So nice when memory works that way.

At first they’re idyllic. A young girl (Annie Rose Buckley), her handsome father (Colin Farrell), the great, lazy outdoors (dry grass next to babbling brooks). Then they move, from Maryborough, Australia to the end of the line: Allora. He has a job as a bank manager. But, uh oh, the bottle appears. He’s a charmer, yes, but a drinker, see. We get several examples of his humiliation, and hers. The girl, Ginty, actually aids and abets, and he winds up in bed, coughing blood. From drinking? No, influenza. So why are we focusing on the drinking? For the shame of it, I guess. For the dull storyline of it.

Ah, but a magical figure appears: a strict nanny who will save all (Rachel Griffiths). Except she doesn’t. The father dies as the girl, Ginty, brings him pears. That’s why, see, Mrs. Travers hates pears. That’s why Mary Poppins. Mrs. Travers didn’t create her to save the children; she did it to save the father. Her father.

She’s a curmudgeon, see?
Anyway, all of these godawful flashbacks help explain why, in the present day, 1961, P.L. Travers is so persnickety, so adamant, so ready to sabotage an absolutely lovely musical that just wants to make everyone ever so heppy. It’s all about her and her effed-up past, when the real dilemma is what he does with British children’s classics. The fluff they become.

We get a flash of this. In her hotel suite in LA, she finds great heaps of stuffed animals based on Disney characters, along with fruit baskets that contain—no!—pears, which she promptly tosses several stories down into the hotel pool. Then she picks up a big stuffed version of Winnie the Pooh and sighs. “Poor A.A. Milne.” She should have kept going. Peter Pan. “Poor J.M. Barrie.” Then her own creation: “Poor me.”

At this point, she’s allowed Disney only an option on the property, so she has the right of first refusal. And second. And third. She takes them all. She doesn’t want a cartoon. She doesn’t want animation of any sort. She doesn’t want the color red in the movie. “Mary Poppins is not for sale!” she tells him. “I won't have her turned into one of your silly cartoons.” Hanks plays Disney as oblivious. How could anyone not like what I do? What I’ve made? It’s the happiest place on Earth! She’s the grumpiest person on Earth in the Happiest Place on Earth. There should’ve been more humor to mine from this as well.

Instead, we veer wildly. Travers goes from totally uncompromising to totally compromised (by “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” of all songs) to storming back to England when she discovers there will be animated penguins, forcing Uncle Walt to actually do research on her, and figure out about her father, and fly to England to not only save the day but commiserate. He tells her his own sad tale—of the harsh winters of turn-of-the century Kansas City, Mo., and of his father’s belt—which is why he does what he does. See? They’re doing the same thing. It’s papering over the pain. It’s making the story come out right. It’s the Disney version. Then he holds onto her hands: Let him make the Disney version of her story, so that, together, they can save Mr. Banks.

Which is what happens.

Served cold
Interestingly, in the epilogue, at the world premiere of “Mary Poppins,” Uncle Walt is a bit distant from P.L. He doesn’t even invite her to the premiere. (Apparently true.) But she shows, and she cries, and she approves. (Apparently untrue.) For her father is saved onscreen for all time. Because that’s what movies do. They give us the pretty little lies we all crave.

Except P.L. Travers didn’t crave it. She hated it. She hated the Disney version.

Consider “Saving Mr. Banks” the ultimate revenge of Disney Corp. P.L. Travers was a pain in the ass, refusing, for a time, to allow Mary Poppins to be turned into one of Disney’s silly creations. So they waited. And waited. And waited. And then they did the same to her.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grande Bellezza” (“The Great Beauty”) is well-named. Sure, it’s episodic and goes on a bit long (148 minutes), and I kept seeing endings before the ending. Oh, it’s going to end here. Then it didn’t. Or here. No. But its ending was a good ending, probably better than the other endings I felt. Above all, it’s beautiful to look at and to contemplate. It’s pungent in its beauty.

Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), 65, wise in his age, bemused in his stance, idle with his time, is on a sort of search. He’s not searching for meaning so much as a reason to keep going. At one point he says, “I can’t waste any more time doing things I don’t want to do,” and this is just before he disappears rather than look at the naked photos of a beautiful woman, Orietta (Isabella Ferrari), he just slept with. So: high standards. At another point he sees a giraffe, a beautiful giraffe staring down from on high and surrounded by a half-circle of ancient Roman columns; and the two, Jep and the giraffe, stare at each other until Jep’s magician-friend arrives and explains the giraffe. It’s part of his act. He makes it disappear. And Jep leans close and asks, “Can you make me disappear?” That’s when we realize the extent of Jep’s ennui. He shows the world a bemused face, but inside, particularly in the morning light after another party, he’s desperate. His magician-friend has to tell him that if he could make people disappear he wouldn’t be where he was. “It’s just a trick,” he says.

A life in tatters
On the surface, Jep has little to complain about. He’s a spry 65, still living the sweet life, la dolce vita, in modern-day Rome, with friends, parties, work, women, and a beautiful apartment with a balcony overlooking the Colosseum. I’m talking the fucking Colosseum. He came to Rome at 26 and got sucked into the whirl of the high life, and he didn’t just want to be part of it; he wanted to be its king. He wrote a slim novel, acclaimed, called “The Human Apparatus,” and has been living off of that, and a few writing gigs and interviews for major magazines, ever since. He wants to write more but wine, women and parties keep getting in the way.

Sound familiar? It’s basically the dilemma of Marcello Rubini, Marcello Mastroianni’s character in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” Rubini kept getting sucked into la dolce vita, which wasn’t (dolce), while Jep keeps searching for la grand bellezza, which, ultimately, is (bello).

We get disconnected, sometimes absurd scenes a la Fellini. Jep watches a performance artist, naked but for a diaphanous hijab, run into an ancient stone structure, then declare, to the outdoor audience, “I don’t love you!” to applause. Turns out he’s interviewing her for his magazine and with a smile refuses to accept any of her “artistic” responses. He tries to get to know his neighbor, who refuses to speak, and hosts parties on his balcony, to friends who refuse to shut up. He gets into it with one friend, a beautiful woman and Communist Party member named Stefania (Galatea Ranzi). She brags about all she does, the children she’s raised, the 11 books she’s written, and refuses to see the lies she lives with every day. She demands he gives examples. He does, to the discomfort of everyone else, and with that same sad smile on his face. Then he says this:

Stefania, mother and woman, you’re 53 with a life in tatters like the rest of us. Instead of acting superior and treating us with contempt, you should look at us with affection. We’re all on the brink of despair. All we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little. Don't you agree?

That’s not a bad end philosophy but we’re still near the beginning of the movie. So what can our man learn?

This? The great love of his life, Elisa, seen in flashback (Anna Luisa Capasa), dies, and her husband of 35 years comes to Jep in tears, telling him “She always loved you.” He’d cracked her diary and read her thoughts and he barely comes up in them. “Thirty five years and I’m mentioned as a ‘good companion,’” he says. Jep tries to comfort him, though he’s secretly thrilled, though later in the movie it’s Jep who wants answers. Elisa, long ago, left him so he wants to know why she did this if she loved him, and he asks if he can read that diary. But by this point it’s been burned. By this point the widower is now with another woman, and happy again, and life continues.

Jep gets involved with a woman, Ramona, the daughter of an old friend. She thinks he’s after sex but he’s more interested in the her of her, and maybe in the distraction of it all. The sex comes later. So does death.

There are great lines throughout. Stefania calls him a misogynist, and he replies that he’s a misanthrope not a misogynist—a line I swear I’ve used in the past. Much later they’re dancing at an outdoor function and they have this exchange—lines which I wish I’d used in the past:

Jep: Have we ever slept together?
Stefania: Of course not.
Jep: That’s a big mistake. We must make amends immediately.

Why doesn’t the companion of Jep’s dwarf publisher ever speak? “Because he listens.” Why are the trains, the conga lines, at Jep’s parties the best? “Because they go nowhere.” For a movie I feared would not be about character or dialogue, this one has great examples of both.

Your earlier, funnier movies
Probably the key question of the movie is this: Why did Jep never write a second novel? Everyone wants to know. Even a future saint.

Near the end, Jep is hosting Sister Maria (Giusi Merli), a 103-year-old nun who has worked her whole life with the poor. She has handlers, a PR man who answers questions, so for a time we don’t even know if this husk of a person, this toothless, wrinkled woman, can speak. But finally she does. And one of the first things she says is: “Why did you never write a second novel?” It’s like the running gag of “your earlier, funnier movies” in Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories,” which is itself a takeoff on Guido’s “next movie” in Fellini’s “8 ½.” Homage upon homage.

And it’s here that Jep finally gives an answer. “I was looking for the great beauty,” he says, smiling his sad smile. “But ... I didn’t find it.” It’s around this time that Sister Maria  gives her own answer to an oft-asked question. The rumor is that she eats only roots. People want to know why. So she tells Jep. “Do you know why I only eat roots? Because roots are important.”

Is this her advice about finding the great beauty? Does this help him, in the end, find the great beauty? By the end, he’s writing a novel anyway. We get its beginning in a voiceover. “So let the novel begin,” he says. “After all, it’s just a trick.”

“The Great Beauty” is a movie I could see again, and not just because it’s beautiful but because I’m curious about all that I missed amid its swirl. Jep, like Marcello before him, straddles the profane and the sacred, the great pointlessness and the great beauty. One assumes the two are inexorably intertwined; that if you are lucky enough, you suffer through one to get to the other. But that’s too neat, too definite. “The Great Beauty” is more open-ended. It opens its arms wide and lets you enter.