The people vs. George Lucas

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Love-hate docu complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

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Documentary features can be entertaining ways to learn things one didn't know, or even realise one wanted to know. The People vs. George Lucas took 90 minutes to show me that a true force of film fans willingly exhibit a love-hate complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

They, and Alexandre Philippe's interesting film essay, initially appear to be making a lot of fuss about nothing really special. Bit by bit, though, the charges leveled at Lucas add up to a damning indictment of the commercial film industry (and its unstated dumbing-down of movie audiences).

1. Lucas's "special editions" of the initial trilogy re-wrote Hans Solo's character so that he wouldn't be seen cold-bloodily shooting an assassin. The fans' rage isn't directed at hypocritical PC squeamishness by Lucas's Hollywood associates.

2. The introduction of Jar Jar Binks as an unfunny (to the older fans) creature apparently designed for a new generation of kids expecting silly voices and fart jokes.

3. The prequel trilogy's diminution of "The Force" into a genetic disturbance.

4. Lucas's control-freakery and apparent deliberate slights for Star Wars fans.

5. The fundamental commercialism of an entertainment industry that either overpowered Lucas or encouraged him to exploit, preventing him ever making another creative film, instead devoting himself to a Darth Vader-like existence running his Star Wars empire.

The most damning evidence of the sixth charge is the Star Wars Christmas [aka Holiday in Wikipedia, probably for the usual modern pc reason] Special for TV in 1978, which Lucas subsequently attempted to deny and destroy. A quarter of the two-hour disaster reportedly comprises an un-subtitled setpiece of growling for Chewbacca and his newly-introduced family.

Although the documentary tries to present a balanced critique of aspects of Lucas's achievements and failings with Star Wars, the non-cooperation by his empire and Hollywood production associates leaves the field clear for the fervent fans' rants (most of which are fairly comical, including an early Simon Pegg send-up).

Clips from many of the fans' home-filmed parodies, satires, animations and denunciations (one re-working Misery to great effect) provide the heart of the documentary, and confirm its claim that Star Wars inspired a generation of film-goers. Lucas "raped their childhood", some fans assert, self-mockingly, even though his sins provoked a new art form of amateur cinematics.

The professionals do the best job though: an excerpt from South Park's condemnation of the Lucas-Spielberg re-launch (depicted as a two-man rape of Indiana Jones) offers the blackest comic commentary on the whole business.

Cameraman

Cameraman, a documentary overview of "The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff", appeared in 2010, the year after the Oscar-winning 94-year-old British cinematographer died. Directed by Craig McCall, who also edited and produced the tribute feature, it expands on McCall's previous short studies of Cardiff's use of cameras as an artistic medium, showing how much Cardiff was consciously inspired by artists as varied as Vermeer, Turner and the Impressionists.

The cross-references are truly illuminating, unlike the humdrum words of praise from Hollywood celebrities and some of the director-cameraman's living leading ladies. Cardiff's genius with colour composition, shadows and framing is confirmed though, most clearly in the one Oscar nomination of his that succeeded: for The Black Narcissus, in 1948 (also winning the Golden Globe that year). He gained other cinematography nods for Fanny (1962) and War and Peace (1957); in 2001 he was awarded the first Honorary Oscar given to a cameraman (who was commended as a "master of light and color").

Although he directed more than a dozen commercial features, he only had one major success. In 1961, Sons and Lovers earned an Oscar for its B&W cinematographer, Freddie Francis (another Brit), and eight more nominations, including one for Cardiff as director. He did collect a Golden Globe for it as best drama director, but Billy Wilder's comedy The Apartment was that year's Oscar-winner.

It would have been interesting to hear Cardiff talk about his two jobs' differences and their particular difficulties, and why he found it necessary to re-focus his career behind the camera after the British film industry collapsed. His life from clapper boy to Rocky II's cameraman covered seven decades, and he appeared to be a modest talent who chose to memorise funny moments on and off the sets rather than the "hypocrisy and hyperbole" that he found in Hollywood. The trouble with modesty is that it can make its subject seem inconsequential.

Obsession

Hitchcock made Vertigo in 1958, which inspired Paul Schrader to write and Brian de Palma to direct Obsession. Bernard Herrmann wrote original music for both films, earning a posthumous Oscar nomination for his characteristically melodramatic work on De Palma's 1976 mystery thriller.

Choristers mourn, horns wail and strings cascade while Cliff Robertson woos and plans to wed an Italian art restorer (Genevieve Bujold) who's a ringer for his dead American wife. She'd been presumed killed 15 years earlier in a car crash, along with their young daughter, following a failed kidnapping. Property developer Robertson met the young woman when he joined his long-time partner (John Lithgow, with a heavy Southern accent) on a business trip to Florence.

It's quickly apparent that there are no other lead characters, ensuring that the plot's simplistic surprise twists can be fully anticipated. Consequently leaving its audience's brain on hold, the film encourages deeper appreciation of its lush, shadowy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. An Oscar-winner for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a nominee four other times (most recently, at the 76, for The Black Dahlia), the veteran talent still maintains his long working association with Woody Allen.

Robertson, a long-time B-list actor born in 1923, was a surprise Oscar-winner for Charly (1968) - as a retarded man, one of the best ways to get recognised by schmaltzy AMPAS members. Maybe sensing that the competition was too strong, Roberston didn't attend the parade, for which he gained more votes than Alan Alda, Alan Bates, Tony Curtis and Peter O'Toole (who won the year's Golden Globe) as Lawrence of Arabia. He stopped working after his recent supporting role as Ben Parker in Spider-Man (2002).

Strange accents add little mysteries to the movie, mostly laughably, with a French-named (Brie) police inspector in New Orleans, Lithgow's Southern drawl and his character's declamation of Italian dialogue, and Bujold's dying mother's Italianate-English. De Palma was better served by his cinematographer and composer; he simplified the screenplay so much that Schrader virtually disowned it. Hitchcock was reportedly angered by the conceptual rip-off, which certainly lacked the depth of characterisation that made his psychological fantasy more credible.

People on Sunday

People on Sunday, a silent B&W German docudrama from 1930, was restored by the Netherlands, splicing pieces from reels surviving in its and other countries' archives. Criterion's DVD package, using its secondary Janus label, marketed the film both as a precursor of neo-realism and a historic showcase of the talents of a film-making cooperative of Berlin-based youngsters. Most were Jewish, and soon left Nazi Germany.

Its losses were Hollywood's multiple gain:

* the movie's concept creator Kurt (aka Curt) Siodmak, a former newspaper reporter, became a Hollywood horror-writing specialist, as for the original (1941) Wolf Man.

* his younger brother and the movie's main co-director Robert (The Killers) Siodmak, a prolific maker of film noir movies in the USA, who returned to Germany in the 1950s, winning a Golden Bear for The Rats.

* The Siodmaks' cousin, Seymour Nebenzal, the film's key producer (borrowing funds from his movie-producer father Heinrich). He later made Fritz Lang's M and Testament of Dr Mabuse, then movies in Paris, before fleeing to the USA, where his independent production company's many titles included Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman and Summer Storm, and Joseph Losey's re-make of M.

* Czech-born co-producer Edgar G Ulmer, who'd returned from the States (and returned there too, to become the director of Black Cat, Detour and Ukrainian-language and Yiddish niche movies in the USA).

[He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios.] [IMDb]

* co-writer Billy Wilder, multiple Oscar-winner for The Apartment (film, direction, co-writing), Sunset Blvd (co-writing), and The Lost Weekend (director, co-writer), with 14 other nominations. The former journalist's main chore for the film was holding the sun-reflector.

* cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, later aka Eugene Shufftan), who invented a self-named camera special effect and won an Oscar for The Hustler. The DVD package includes the charming Schufftan-directed 1929 B&W short comedy Ins Blaue Hinein (Into the Blue), with soundtrack added, telling another happy-go-lucky tale (of three men and a girl crashing a car and starting a dog-grooming business).

* assistant cameraman Fred Zinneman, Oscar-winning director of A Man for All Seasons, From Here to Eternity, and a documentary short (Benjy).

* assistant cameraman Ernst Kunstmann was invited to the USA with Schufftan, returning to work in Germany until the 1960s (including Triumph of the Will in 1935), dying at 97 in his home city of Potsdam.

The film's non-professional actors' fates were less illustrious. The four lead roles were played by:

* Erwin (Splettstoller), who only had two other acting credits, in Robert Siodmak movies in 1930-1. The wannabee comic actor died in a car accident (according to co-star Brigitte).

In the film, chubby, affable Erwin is a taxi-driver leaving his fashion model girl-friend oversleeping in bed, to go to the Wannsee lake beach on a pre-planned trip with his friend ...

* ... Wolf(gang von Waltershausen), who made one more film for Siodmak, and another with Siodmak and Wilder, returned to his family estate in southern Germany, per Brigitte.

En route to the beach, the two friends meet up with a girl Wolf had chatted up in the city on a weekday ...

* Christl (Ehlers), whose real-life Jewish family fled to Spain, then England and America, where she had one bit part before marrying an aircraft company owner; they died in a plane crash in 1960.

Joining her for the lake excursion is her blonde best friend, a salesgirl for the Electrola record-player and disc company ...

* Brigitte (Borchert) who only made this one film; in 2000 she and Curt Siodmak were interviewed for a 30-minute documentary commemorating the restoration, Weekend am Wannsee (part of the Criterion DVD); Siodmak, then 98, couldn't recall her name and didn't like the restoration. He looked and sounded mentally active but died that year. Brigitte died in 2011, aged 100.

At first sighting, the movie's most promising talent is clearly the cinematographer. Exciting angles, shadowed lighting, story-advancing close-ups, exceptional grid-work framing and high-speed photography from moving vehicles provide bewitching images of a happy-go-lucky laid-back Berlin on a Sunday, contrasted uncritically with the city's weekday bustle. In cinematographic albums with few signs of poverty and none of oppression, the Siodmaks' self-described "reportage" presents a self-content middle-class view of the pre-Depression capital city, in which the cameras nod somewhat jocularly in the direction of Soviet Russian expressionism and Eisenstein moments.

Nothing much happens, but it does so charmingly. Wolf, an experienced philanderer, fails to hit on Christl during the foursome's picnic, but succeeds in seducing Brigitte. The girls resume their friendship on a giant pedalo boat, wryly watching the men flirt with a couple of oarless female rowers. Wolf agrees to meeting Brigitte again the next Sunday, before Erwin reminds him they'd already planned to go to a soccer match.

The DVD company's judgment is valid: not a Criterion-calibre classic, the film's a preservation-worthy Janus product.

Tempest

It hasn't been a happy decade for Julie Taymor, the acclaimed American theatre and opera director whose Frida (2002) earned six Oscar nominations (and two wins, for make-up and for original music by her spouse Elliott Goldenthal).

Her triumphant Lion King stage show (1997), for which she designed more than 100 costumes and collected Tony Awards for them and for direction, was followed a decade later by her disastrous disaster-prone direction of, and sacking from, Broadway's Spider-Man musical in 2011.

In film, her adaptation and direction of Shakespeare's Titus [Andronicus] (1999), starring Anthony Hopkins, was critically respected but lost big money (a gross revenue of only 10 per cent of its US$20 million budget). Undeterred, in 2010 she then released her re-working of The Tempest. Its budget was similar, the critics howled, and its gross ticket sales were less than $350,000.

Its lead actor, Helen Mirren as gender-changed Prospera, was award-nominated, and its costumier, Sandy Powell, earned her ninth Oscar nomination. No one else in the star-studded production boosted their CV, and the, ahem, role-call of flat performances includes David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Tom Conti and Djimon Hounsou (Caliban, almost nude, naturally, sporting clownish make-up and middle-aged spreads). Russell Brand is atrociously unfunny as Trinculo, but at least he's playing at his standard level.

Even promising youngsters sound jaded and move wearily: Felicity Jones, as Miranda, and Reeve (Snow Falling on Cedars) Carney as Prince Ferdinand. Sadly for talented Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Criminal Justice), Taymor envisaged Ariel as a genitalia-free nude will'o'the'wisp with ugly make-up.

The film stock used seems to have been salvaged from pre-War vaults. The locations chosen in lava-strewn or wooded Hawaii were not picked for their cinematogenic quality. Most wrongly, Taymor paced out her production in stagy, theatrical terms. Compounding the tragedy of errors, she obtained sub-standard SFX and commissioned tedious or trifling music from her spouse. One small consolation for Shakespeare buffs: the DVD's English subtitles only omit or mis-write a few spoken word. A bigger one is the ten minutes or so cut from the film's official length before it went to DVD.

Is there a word for a movie that lacks depth, vision and visual flair? In the age of 3D, this is a failed 2D movie, so perhaps it can be best categorised as 1D. To be seen only for Mirren's eyes.

Tree of life

The "fragmented and non-linear narrative" (so called by Wikipedia) that is Terrence Malick's 2011 Cannes award-winner The Tree of Life, isn't necessarily off-putting per se. All depends on the movie's overall dramatic impact and the individual elements that create the mental images left with a viewer.

Are the actors portraying credible characters or token figures, does the cinematography advance meanings more than just the director's aesthetic desires, do fragments blend excitingly on-screen and in the viewer's mind?

Yes and no, of course, because Malick is incapable of creating a movie that isn't encrusted with glistening, provocative and unforgettable images. At times during this 140-minute display, one wants the movie to freeze, to let one savour the beauty of a composition, its lighting, its disturbing angle. On various occasions, Malick obliges by reducing the camera movement or action to almost nothing, creating a slide-show effect that's both beguiling and alienating.

The sparse plot only comes to narrative life during the film's middle hour. In a tree-lined middle-class district of Waco, Texas in the 1950s, a frustrated power plant executive (Brad Pitt) runs a God-fearing dog-loving old-fashioned household with a dutiful wife (Jessica Chastain, an excellent US TV actress in a breakthrough film performance). His three young sons include Jack (first-time actor Hunter McCracken, a teenage Sean Penn look-alike), who has become an angst-filled architect (Sean Penn, in a constantly wandering-around and wondering-aloud role as a man with unhappy childhood memories).

One of his brothers had died (we aren't told how or why) at the age of 19, as we were told dramatically early on, evoking enormous sorrow from his parents, as we saw extensively. Was it the brother whose hair started falling out in later scenes, with no narrative explanation or off-screen information? Was it the youngest brother, whose musical talent and looks carried the father's genes? Was Jack jealous of either of them, or merely a miserable soul?

During the very refined soap operatics of that central hour, Malick's cameras focus fairly and squarely on the family, at dinner, in its grassy yards, amid Jack's playful games with his brothers or adolescent viciousness with schoolmates. His father says and shows he loves all his sons (and expects their respectful kisses) in his rough, tough, Navy-trained ways, but his oppressive persona earns Jack's hatred. The father represents Nature, the off-screen mother's voice told us; she stands for Grace, the other half of humanity. Many other recollections, mostly from Jack, contain unrelated memories, pensive asides and mumbled thoughts.

Moment by moment, the interactions of the boy and his parents are revealed like a quilt pulled from the shadows with slow gestures and sudden yanks. Not fully revealed, frustratingly for those who seek narrative clarity. We also never learn whether Jack really had an Oedipal obsession for an ethereal mother who seemed to float, whether the father was embittered because he couldn't be a serious musician, when and how Jack left home, why he's shown apologising on the telephone to his presumably still-living father, what happened to the family when the father lost his job, whether the tree Jack and his father planted in the yard grew ... and those are just some of the unconnected loose ends, seen as dramatically inconsequential as various dogs that run around the family garden.

However, it looks as if Malick realised this finely-photographed family portrait presented an inadequate overview of humanity. The audience needed to be made aware, be in awe, of the writer-director's philosophical thoughts about love, God, Christianity, losing a job and failing to be a successful parent. The film starts with quotations from Job and detours for self-indulgently exquisite long works of cinema art depicting the creation and history of the universe and Earth, including the day when a dinosaur discovers the concept of mercy for smaller creatures.

The cinematography is astonishing: Mexican Emmanuel Lubezki has been Oscar-nominated four times and deserves to win this time. The sound effects are also subtle and striking, as is some of the original music (Frenchman Alexandre Desplat, another four-time Oscar nominee). But much of the music, especially the classical extracts (presumably reflecting the father's love of music), is over-emphatic, flabby with wailing choirs and ringing requiems.

The worst conceit of all is Malick's 20-minute closing section: it's an increasingly irritating succession of closing scenes, suggesting either that the director couldn't bear to eject any one of his magniloquent images or that he delights in tantalising his audience. At the really final fade to black, the audience sighs rather than gasps: Malick has proved he's a major cinematic talent, but he's done so with such self-conscious spiritual primness and visual pomposity that his messages are drowned in his media magic. Is his story an anti-Christian morality tale dressed up as a church-goer's cinematic sermon? How can we care when Malick doesn't care to show us why.

Cecil B.Demented

Few directors have been as faithful to their birthplaces as John Waters was to Baltimore. It was the home-town setting for several Barry Levinson films too (and TV's The Wire), but Waters really put the city on the cinematic map. In 2000, with Cecil B.Demented, the subversive writer-director made the Maryland capital a farcical exemplar of American movie-making mayhem as "The Hollywood of the East" and the proud location for sequels such as "Gump Again".

One of Waters' less appreciated comic fantasies, the DeMille pastiche earned only one award nomination, given to Melanie Griffith for the Worst Actress Razzie (luckily for her, it was the year Madonna made The Next Best Thing).

She's not that bad, and the opening scenes of her arrival in Baltimore as the star of a mainstream Hollywood drama at its premiere are enjoyable depictions of a bitchy foul-mouthed two-faced actress at work. After she's kidnapped by a gang of anarchic young film-lovers, led by Cecil B.Demented (dead-eyed Stephen Dorff), to be the lead actress in their reality "cinema terror" epic attacking the industry, the focal point shifts woefully.

Waters' screenplay bogs itself down in non-funny verbiage and antics, trying to give juicy cameo roles to a dozen actors (including Maggie Gyllenhaal) instructed to ham and camp as wildly as possible. Griffith does her best to play a professional mainstream actress swimming in a tide of amateur theatrics, directed forcefully by the obsessive Dorff character, who insists on sexual abstinence until the movie's completed.

His adopted name, and the names of other directors tattooed on the cast's bodies or scattered around the outre sets in a dilapidated movie theatre, cannot be seen as in-jokes. They are petty name-dropping examples of Waters' failure to create valid satire from a potentially rich concept: "We believe technique to be nothing more than failed style ... there are no rules in outlaw cinema". There is one rule, that Waters obeyed well at other times: amuse a mainstream audience even if you shock it, as he did with Hairspray, Pecker and Cry-Baby.

One appropriate casting touch is the use of Waters regular Patricia Hearst (the notorious victim of a real-life kidnapping) as one of the film crew's mums. Among the young cast, Andrew Grenier later found long-term employment on TV in Entourage, Lawrence Gilliard Jr appeared in The Wire for two years, Michael Shannon (and Gyllenhaal) enjoyed mainstream careers. Ricki Lake was another member of Waters' own entourage.

He made another unsuccessful film four years later, in 2004 (Dirty Shame), but has been visible more often this century in documentaries, providing first-person accounts of America's gay and cultural revolutions. He was one of their flag-bearers, ironically using good technique to display fun-filled messages much of the time. Not so well this time.

Letter to Elia

Martin Scorsese teamed up with Kent Jones in 2010 to write and direct an hour-long Elia Kazan retrospective and documentary essay for a packaged collection of the director's work. Its title, A Letter to Elia, hints at the loving respect, virtual hero-worship, Scorsese feels for the man whose movies inspired him as an avid pre-teen movie-goer.

Scorsese often reviews movie history, gives lectures, and is as confident in front of the screen as behind the cameras. The one-sided partnership with Jones is presumably based on friendship, as Jones had no other movie industry experience and is a former writer (1996-2001) for The Daily Show on Comedy Channel. He'd worked with Scorsese before on a documentary study of the Statue of Liberty, The Lady by the Sea (2004, for the History Channel, marking the statue's post-911 re-opening).

In 2007, Scorsese narrated Jones's documentary about Val Lewton, Man in the Shadows, a producer of low-budget horror movies (Cat People, Body Snatcher etc) for RKO. That was a 77-minute promotional commission for the Turner Classic Movies channel. It employed Montreal-born Greek-ethnic actor Elias Koteas to provide Newton's voice, and he took the same off-screen role for the Kazan essay, reading extracts from the controversial auteur's autobiography and lecture notes. The Actors Studio graduate later took an on-screen role for Scorsese's Shutter Island.

Scorsese is an unashamed propagandist for cinema as a work of art, a higher-brow publicist than Ebert or Maltin, and an auteur whose own creations' quality justifies his pontification and enthusiasm. Most of the praise, and movie clips, in this essay highlights the classic scenes Kazan composed for East of Eden, On the Waterfront and his semi-autobiographical America, America.

Key factors accounting for Scorsese's admiration for Kazan included the director's ability to evoke the reality, through location environments that movie-goers would recognise or feel they knew. Kazan also elicited exceptional performances from his actors, Scorsese feels, and created characters and scenes with which audiences could also identify. Kazan was part of a global mood change in cinema, alongside France's New Wave and other countries' development of Italy's neo-realism genre. More interestingly, Scorsese reveals how much he identified with Kazan's family life and his films' tormented characters. What isn't so easy to accept is Scorsese's perfunctory acknowledgments to the kills of other artists without whom Kazan could not have succeeded: writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, lighting and sound directors.

Clips from a Kazan interview in later life confirm his transformation from a grinning, cocky young Armenian immigrant into a gloomy soul despised by many Hollywood colleagues. He'd provided the names of eight former fellow Communists to McCarthy's UnAmerican Activities committee. Scorsese cannot ignore the controversy but he slides past it, and lets Kazan repeat the excuse that he'd been forced to choose what was the lesser of two evils for himself (and his career). Others didn't, and fled to Europe or used pseudonyms.

It sounds like special pleading for Scorsese to claim that Kazan's work gained an independent character and superior qualities after his act of self-serving betrayal. It's irritating to be given hints, not facts, about Kazan's ruthlessness in his native Armenia and as a refugee actor in New York. In the end, this is a promotional piece that feels an unworthy, unnecessary effort from Scorsese.

Another year

Mike Leigh can perhaps be compared to Woody Allen. The two veteran writer-director auteurs have been prolific commentators on family relationships. Allen concentrated on nervous intellectuals and New York Jewish sensitivities, Leigh on English working-class mores. Allen used star actors and personalities to dress up his dialogue, Leigh worked only with a repertory group of dedicated actors, improvising sketched scenes into portraits of repressed passions. Leigh's latest morality tale is an admirable cinematic miniature, Another Year. An admirable, but unlovable, display of Leigh's skill in capturing mean spirits and sad lives.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are a sweetly, happily-married late-middle-aged professional couple (civil engineer and psychiatric counsellor) with a well-adjusted sole child (Oliver Maltman) who's found a bubbly, steady girlfriend (Karina Fernandez). The older couple enjoy a simple loving relationship in humble semi-detached housing, potter around their vegetable allotment, cook ambitiously and are kind to friends and family members.

At four mealtimes during the course of a year, the constant and sometimes unwelcome presence is a hyper-tense needy secretary from Gerri's clinic, Mary (Leslie Manville). Her panic attacks over buying and trying to drive a second-hand car provide a comic storyline. The year's other major event is the death of Tom's sister-in-law and the family's trip up north to attend her funeral, console the miserable brother and cope with his alienated son. There's also a laid-back black female colleague of Gerri's and an over-the-hill university pal of Tom's who makes a messy pass for Mary, who's making messy friend-craving passes of her own to Tom's son and brother.

That's it, and it earned Leigh a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination in 2011. Why this particular slice of kitchen-sink posturing did so is a mystery. Its a microcosmic study of typical, almost cliched, working-class English misfits and the remarkably patient couple who let them moan and drift year by year through their own uneventful lives. The acting is immaculate, of its kind, particularly by Broadbent as an avuncular chuckler and Manville as a nervous wreck. The bonus is Imelda Staunton dead-pan cameo of a bitterly maudlin client of Gerri's.

Tom and Gerri are almost too good to be true characters, surely too sensible to have allowed their social annual round to be so hostage to other people's woes.

Two in the wave

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are the focal points of Two in the Wave, "the story of the friendship that changed cinema forever". In French, the 2010 documentary is entitled Deux de la vague, and only a film buff could have made such a Francocentric assertion about a pair of French directors.

Prolific Cahiers de Cinema writer Antoine de Baecque reviews the early collaboration and later fallout of two of his magazine's famed former staff, their key early movies, and their shared leading actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. The screenplay was written and narrated by de Baecque, directed by Emmanuel Laurent.

It is an unforgivably verbose and messy collage that takes almost half-an-hour to provide basic data about the two directors' family backgrounds and cinematic influences. The script, which seems to have set the aimless tone for the whole documentary, jumps around confusingly and purposelessly.

A dead-pan young French actress flips through clippings albums, a shadowy writer (possible de Baecque) looks at his computer, various faces make comments in archived material, and brief clips from some of the directors' movies pop up, rarely illustrating anything narrated in the commentary. That contains far too many irrelevant dates (of meetings) and passing names (producers, other directors) fails to note Truffaut's early death, and lurches into a very incomplete study of Leaud's work and feelings for the two feuding father-figures in his career.

There are frequent moments when a viewer is shown a factual or cinematic gem worth studying in more detail, only to have it trampled in the rush to the next non-consequentiality. So many promising documentary topics await focused attention: Andre Malraux's dominance in the Gaullist cultural machinery, his dismissal (and forced reinstatement) of the Cinematheque director Henri Langlois, ways in which the Nouvelle Vague presaged the May 1968 riots, the persona of Antoine Doinel (the semi-autobiographical boy in Truffaut's debut 400 Blows and a life-long role for Leaud), Marxism in movie-making, the then and now of other Young Turks in French cinema, the risk-taking independent producers.

Other possible topics could or should have been noted en passant, notably the love-hate complex that drives French auteurs to adore parts of Hollywood (from Welles and Hitchcock to Woody Allen) while despising its commercialism and insincerity. The narcissism of the two leading French directors and others, a form of cinematic nationalism and incest, is noted only briefly but uncritically, as is their snobbish intellectualism. Clearly, the subjects were too close to the hearts and archives of the writer and director for them to do justice to the medium or its pair of message maestros.

Enter the void

It isn't necessary to know about a movie director's spouse in order to appreciate the movie. Sometimes, though, especially with long films that outstay their welcome, such knowledge helps a viewer fill dire patches with musings that may be more amusing. Thus I'm idly curious how the Argentine-born Frenchman Gaspar Noe meet his kindred spirit and wife, Lucile Hadzihalilovic (from Bosnian immigrant parents), a film school graduate two years older than him.

Which parts of their first English-language movie, Enter the Void (2009) did she, as Noe's credited co-writer, draft? Did he collaborate on her 1996 writing-directing debut feature about child abuse, La bouche de Jean-Pierre? They go back a long way. She produced, co-edited and acted in his breakthrough 1991 short film, Carne, in which a butcher kills a man he wrongly accuses of raping his daughter.

They worked together on a set of sex-education short films in 1998 (hers was called Good boys use condoms, his was Sodomites). In the same year, she edited his feature-length follow-up on the vengeful butcher, Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone). Six years later, she was on her own, perhaps, directing her adaptation of a Wedekind story set in a disturbing girls' school (Innocence). By then, he'd already gained international fame and funds from his infamously violent take on misogyny, rape, homophobia and brutal vengeance, Irreversible (2002). They could now afford to develop a favourite project inspired by drug-tripping hallucinations.

A young North American drug dealer, initially a first-person character seen only in a mirror, is shot dead by Tokyo police during a drugs raid. His spirit wanders above the city to watch over the adored younger sister who'd joined him in Japan, working as a pole-dancer. For various reasons (its photogenic neon lights and harsh anti-drug laws), Tokyo was Noe's ideal location.

As in Irreversible, Noe takes us out at night a lot, into dark valleys and strobe-lit discos, neon-dazzled streets and interiors, scruffy corridors and lurid bedrooms. Couples have rough or indifferent sex, male and female genitalia are exhibited non-erotically, and unpleasant gay characters lounge around. In swathes of non-linear flashbacks, when Noe's hovering hand-held camera returns from cranes and helicopters to ground level, we follow the baby-faced young man's interactions with his sister, a wiser friend, and a young Caucasian client and his randy mother. The last two characters are played by professional actors (from the UK), as is the sister; other lead characters are first-timers with varying levels of screen talent.

Noe also flashes back frequently to show the infant siblings getting a lot of nude bathing experience with their voluptuous mother, who dies in a car crash with their father while the kids are traumatised in the back seat. Throughout, there are trippy CGI scenes recalling old kaleidoscopes, pinhole cameras recording blood vessels, and apparent tributes to Kubrik's spaced-out visions in 2001.

When that movie first appeared, trendy folks used to book front-row stalls seats, smoke grass and Wow! at magic scenes. Grass might help one better to get into the spirit of Noe's void, where the deliberately hazy blurriness of the camera film he chose to use probably looks better too. Even the front-credits are perversely offbeat, presented strobe-style at high speed together with mind-banging electronic musical noise. Other affectations thrust in an audience's face include brief cuts to black to simulate the young man's eyes blinking, florid CGI enhancement of cityscapes and sets, and a pair of much longer cuts to black during the final sequence illustrating the conception and birth of a baby.

That truly climactic ending's two black pauses are akin to cinematic coitus interruptus. They follow an exhausting set of overhead shots of couples copulating and licking noisily, some kinkily, in a love hotel's blurry bedrooms. The tip of a penis is shown (via a pinhole camera or CGI) preparing to ejaculate, as seen from within a woman's body, which may be that of the drug-addled sister, whose finally child emerges in a big blur, to have its umbilical cord cut and scream at its entry into the signposted void. Noe may have hoped it was his final tease, which is why there are no end-credits, which were flashily zipped through at the beginning. Our audiences will leave exhausted, debating who the father is, the obsessed Noes may have thought.

Painful, pretentious, occasionally pretty, most appropriately watched on DVD with a Fast Forward button, Enter the Void is unforgettable and only slightly forgivable cinema.

Bubble

Supposedly the first of six low-budget HD-video projects by director Steven Soderbergh, Bubble was released simultaneously in a few theatres and on cable TV in 2005; four days later, its DVD was issued. Shot on location in Ohio, using non-pro actors, the short (73-minute) feature movie is a murder mystery whose outline plot was written by Coleman Hough, an actress whose previous screenplay effort had been a relative disaster for Soderbergh (Full Frontal in 2002).

In a rundown town, a middle-aged woman crafts faces in a small factory making moulded baby dolls. A younger male colleague is a friend she drives to and from work. A younger woman, an unmarried mother, joins the company, and is found strangled to death. A detective talks to all concerned, and the murder solves itself. All the non-pro actors did good jobs and the technical work was fine; So What? is the cruel question.

A few decades ago, this would have been a very competent B feature or an above-average TV drama. Bubble reportedly cost US$1.6 million and its main fascination lies in trying to imagine why Soderbergh made it. He directed, photographed and edited it: was the Oscar-winning multi-millionaire seeking a hands-on reminder of his basic Sex, Lies, and Videotape origins in 1989?

Was he trying to create a production team that could provide new talents (even the previously-used Ms Hough) with training grounds? Did he think a B-feature production company was needed by the ever-hungry cable-TV industry? Let's see whether the other five HD-video movies are made.

Parking

Chung Mong-hong's Parking contains a remarkable trio of debut performances, as writer, director and cinematographer, by the young Taiwanese movie-maker. The 2008 showcase for his talents was screened at many film festivals, collecting awards in Taipei (Golden Horse for Best Art Direction, and Critics award) and Hong Kong (Best New Talent, and Audience Favourite).

At first sighting, many audiences may have dismissed it as an overly eager tribute to Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai and his key art director/editor (William Cheung) and cinematographer (Christopher Doyle). Wong usually wowed critics with scrappy scenarios soaked in artful lighting and colour effects. For Parking, Chung inter-wove five plots in the tale of an unhappily-married young man, whose car is trapped overnight in a Taipei street by double-parkers. Chung's art director adorned the sets with Doyle-style dabs and swathes of colour or moody shadows.

The man is on his way to his estranged wife for dinner and stops to buy cakes. Blocked from driving away from the run-down street, he seeks the double-parked car's owner and encounters a one-handed barber making fish-head soup, an old couple and their grand-daughter who think he's their executed son and father, a mainland Chinese prostitute and her vicious pimp, and a bankrupt Hong Kong tailor pursued by a gang of loan sharks.

It's just about feasible that such a motley and melodramatic crew of characters might all inhabit the few occupied units in neighbouring buildings. Some of the deliberately stagy conversations are not so easily acceptable; neither is the man's willingness to enter these strangers' lives and risk his life for them. Yet the allegorical ambitions (if not the meanings) of the movie are clear, prompting an audience to forgo reality judgments. The fine cast of actors dispel any lingering doubts: they present credibly interesting people living on knives' edges. If there's a link between the sub-plots, other than danger and death, it's motherhood; the characters provide enough oddball interest.

The pimp is played by Leon Dai, who gained the screenplay and directing Golden Horses the next year for his own creative debut, No Puedo Vivir ...; the tailor is a rich cameo role for Hong Kong's Chapman To; lead actor Chen Chang is a much-nominated actor who's worked in various Wong films.

Several loose ends are tied up in the finale, with a recited moral conclusion, that may have upset movie critics. Hong Kong audiences loved it, though, and Chung's second film (2010), Fourth Portrait, will be watched with high hopes.

Gold diggers

English. Feminist. Renaissance woman of arts, from dance and choreography to composing, playing and singing to theatre, TV, movie and opera direction to screenplay writer. In the movie history books for writing and directing the first feature-length movie premiered on cell-phones (Rage, 2009). Who else but Sally Potter.

Like many avant-garde directors, Potter has attracted some top acting talents for her movies, starting with Julie Christie in her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983). Tilda Swinton was the centrifugal force for Potter's main award-winning eccentricity, her adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1992). For The Man Who Cried (2000), she was joined by Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett and John Turturro, who all couldn't save it from critical maulings. Undeterred by Potter's below-par ratings in conventional features, Joan Allen signed up for Yes (2004). In 1996, Potter starred her dancing self in The Tango Lesson, alongside tango master Pablo Veron. Rage had Judi Dench and Jude Law among its interview heads.

The British and international film industries seem to admire Potter. I find it tempting to dismiss her as a Jill of all creative trades and mistress of none, so I will. That subjective judgment is also buttressed by her five shorts included on the British Film Institute's Gold Diggers DVD. Three of them are experimental scraps from her London Film-makers Coop period. Jerk (1969) is a few meaningless moments of high-speed B&W head shots; Play (1970) comprises split-screen colour/B&W overhead shots of children playing on a pavement, also purposelessly; Hors D'Oeuvres (1971) is totally ignored by her Wikipedia page, which may explain why I cannot recall seeing it, or have quickly repressed any memory of it. More professional, with a semi-narrative, The London Story (1986) had odd characters (a doorman, a cabinet minister, ice skater), an uncredited Potter and a dance routine for her in a red dress designed by Sandy Powell (an Oscar and BAFTA nominee for Orlando).

After dabbling successfully (getting a name for herself) in dance and theatre, Potter returned to film with Thriller (1979), a 30-minute scrapbook of dusty images of an attic stage set for La Boheme and oracular utterings of a black actress (Collette Laffont) who was one of two Mimis. It is reportedly a Marxist and anti-Freudian fable in addition to being feminist and indie, a winning blend in some cineaste circles.

Laffont's only other film role was in The Gold Diggers, in which she utters a lot more stilted and repetitive dialogue while helping Christie's persona (as a top model) find herself. Rose English also worked on both films (writing and acting), appeared on TV a few times in the 90s, and then vanished from IMDb listings. The movie's third co-writer was Lindsay Cooper, an occasional composer.

Potter employed a female cinematographer too for the B&W debut feature: Babette Mangolte, a Frenchwoman. Her long shots of Iceland scenery (standing in for the Yukon that's part of Christie's character's heritage) are beautiful, and one small pleasure to be gained from watching an otherwise pretentious non-narrative.

Life during wartime

None of the following are essential attributes for watching writer-director Todd Solondz's latest bitter-sweet satire, Life During Wartime, but it will surely help to be at least one of them: Jewish-American, family-fixated, gay, paedophile, movie buff, needing forgiveness.

Solondz is from New Jersey, as is the movie's very disturbed Jewish family. Some of them appeared in earlier Solondz blackly-comic brittle studies of middle-class American (especially Jewish-American) mores (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Storytelling, Palindromes).

First in focus is Joy, one of three sisters. She's the medicated wife of a black recidivist pervert she'd met through her work with convicts. Shirley Henderson was obviously asked to reprise her role as Harry Potter's Moaning Myrtle. The Scottish actress (Topsy-Turvy, Bridget Jones) gets to sing the title song and looks miscast, whereas Alison (West Wing regular, Hairspray monster-mother) Janney is almost type-cast as the over-anxious eldest sister whose husband was in prison for pedophilia (raping underage boys).

He'd sired three children, and heavyweight Belfast-born Ciaran (Rome, Eclipse) Hinds portrays him credibly as a self-aware sexual outlaw determined to reassure himself that his two sons have not inherited all his genes. One boy's at college, and straight, the other's preparing for his bar-mitzvah. They think their father's dead, and their mother has found happy new love with a divorced Jewish mensch (Michael Lerner also typecast).

The third sister is an award-winning Hollywood screen-writer, providing an edgy cameo role for a guest actor (Ally Sheedy). Charlotte Rampling glares angrily well as a bitter bitch who picks Hinds up (enabling the audience to see him as a man as well as a sexual monster). Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens has three juicy walk-on scenes as the ghost of the youngest sister's first suicidal lover.

This latest overview of middle-class angst sports more Jewish references than usual for Tolondz, and some seem to be strange pearls cast before an audience of swine. The screenplay is also designed to upset Republicans as well as religious and/or political conservatives. Oddly, because none of them would be seen watching a movie that offers sympathetic studies of pedophilia, child abuse, suicide and characters who end arguments with four-letter words.

The cinematography boasts a richly-hued shadowy quality, and some eye-catching sets (in artfully-lit hallways or ornamented streets) depicting the symbolically fake stylishness of Florida. Musical backgrounds occasionally are too noticeable, and there are bizarre jump cuts. Overall, though, Solondz has created a prime example of the fast-expanding Jewish-American genre, portraying the constricted, conflicted world he shares intellectually with Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and the Coen Brothers' Singular Man.

Not a feast, but a good buffet, for the eyes and brain.

Limits of control

Isaach Bankole was French cinema's "most promising actor" Cesar award-winner in 1987 and has worked for Jim Jarmusch four times. His latest role (2009) for the American director is as the linking device for the whole of The Limits of Control. In its US closing credits, the movie is also titled No Limits No Control, and that seems an apt non sequitor for a repetitive exercise in creating variations on a theme.

One favoured descriptive word for Jarmusch's film plots is "minimalist", which can sound unfairly pejorative. As far as variationism goes, Jarmusch serves up banquets. He's an indie director with many film festival accolades and an obvious appeal to indie-minded actors. They flock to him for cameo roles containing inconsequential dialogue for offbeat characters, who are presumably great fun to portray.

Over the years, Jarmusch collected a package of such vignettes and released it, successfully at film festivals and on DVD, as Coffee and Cigarettes. Several of its episodes are well-polished cinematic gems good enough to stand on their own as finely-acted short stories, unlike the inconsequential set pieces in the latest Jarmusch .

This time there's a key central figure, the Lone Man (De Bankole), who always orders two separate espressos, but none of the lead actors smoke, even though the movie's set in Spain (Madrid, Sevilla and inland scrub). Instead, they swap boxes of "Boxer" brand matches which contain small square of white paper with coded messages which Lone Man swallows with his coffees. He does smile and emote, but very rarely. Mostly, he stares enigmatically.

So does his audience, which quickly guesses that he's a hit man receiving a series of secret instructions from international stars such as Gael Garcia Bernal (a "Mexican" with lots of skin marks), Youki Kudoh (who ponders "Molecules" on a hi-speed train) and Paz De La Huerta ("Nude", except when she's wearing a transparent plastic raincoat). Other brief walk-on roles bring previous Jarmusch movies' cast members back -- Tilda Swinton in a dazzling all-white ensemble and John Hurt in his bearded, hatted British mode.

Many of the vignettes are signposted by paintings that Lone Man has stopped to admire in an art gallery (a violin, a shroud, a cityscape) or on his solo city walks (movie poster). They all lead, eventually but without logic, to him confronting be-wigged Bill Murray (another Jarmusch fan, starring to their mutual award-winning benefit in a more mainstream collection of vignettes, Broken Flowers). The whys or wherefores of the ending do not matter; what counts presumably is the sequence.

It is devilishly attractive, in large part because of Christopher Doyle's cinematography. The HK -based associate of Wong captures and frames lovely Spanish light effects, indoors and outside, so beguilingly sometimes that a viewer could suspect him of importing tanker-loads of red paint and dye to embellish a scene. The movie is also devilishly irritating.

The variations on the theme are tiring: each character strolls in for the ceremonial coffee meeting, delivers the same opening remark in Spanish, and expounds on a fixation of no meaning to the blank-faced black actor, speaking in a mixture of English and a native language (comically in the Creole vignette). Matchboxes exchanged, the characters stroll off. Their appearances stay in the memory, though. This movie is, simply, a perverse pleasure.

Tetro

Many reviewers have seen Tetro as a semi-autobiographical study of an artistic family by Francis Cord Coppola. His father was a composer, his mother an actress, and the two brothers in Tetro have a symphony orchestra conductor as their father. Like their writer-producer-director, the movie brothers are transplanted from the Mediterranean to America. So what, a moviegoer shrugs: is the movie worth seeing for itself rather than its cultural references?

It's a pretentious self-conscious work of B&W cinematic artistry, but they don't make many of them any more, and not like they used to, like this. Cobble-stoned Buenos Aires looks and feels a perfect setting for such a melodramatically old-fashioned tale of fraternal love and filial hatred. We are in a setting where Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Rossellini, Fellini and other icons lurk behind mirrors and shadows. There's even a manic upstairs neighbour and a drag artist who've wandered in from an Almodovar plot, and a cameo role for that director's often-used comic muse, Carmen Maura.

Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich is Bennie, a teenage American cruise ship busboy, travelling into the grimy heart of the city to track down his older brother, Tetro (Vincent Gallo), for the first time in a long time. Gallo is a bitter would-be writer with a middle-ageing Argentine lover (Spanish actress Maribel Verdu). Gallo frowns and growls in immaculately-lit close-ups, while Ehrenreich smiles prettily as if amused at being asked to channel a young DiCaprio.

In the first of many square-screen sudden colour flashbacks, Gallo's mother is shown to be an opera singer killed in a car crashed by Tetro. We'd already been told that, and what a son-of-bitch the boys' father was. Bennie had a different, later mother who's been in a coma for nine years, we're also told early on. There's a sweet uncle too, and it's hard to credit that any Spanish-blooded family would really be this Italianate.

When dialogue for such melodramatic devices is conducted in Spanish, the scenario's moody neuroses are almost credible. Not so comfortably in the English-language passages though, especially when Gallo is uttering Methodic punctuations or Verdu is obliged to get the plot moving with clearly enunciated explanations. Meanwhile, any doubts as to the emotions a moviegoer should be having are clarified by the musical soundtrack. It tinkles, tangos, sings arias and chatters in accordion tones whenever necessary.

Although the movie can be made to sound risible, it's actually a delight to watch, a cinematic time-warp experience. It worked better for me with the volume turned off and Spanish subtitles switched on. Maybe the movie would have been more effective as an homage to silent films.

Brief interviews with hideous men

Many movies are made simply because someone adored a play, book, event or personality passionately. Actor John Krasinski was clearly enamoured by the words and characters in a collection of short stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Its author, David Foster Wallace, may have been an acute observer of and listener to males with self-revelatory tales. But they do not add up to a cohesive screenplay.

The peg on which they are hung is a graduate student (Julianne Nicholson) coping with an unexplained abandonment by her boyfriend (Krasinski). She studies anthropology, a convenient excuse to interview a wide range of men and try to understand their mindsets. Instant problem : a good researcher will not guide or pass judgment on her subjects. Nicholson consequently comes across as a po-faced wooden figure who was lucky to have attracted the handsome and sensitive Krasinski.

His tale, the final one in the movie, is a credibly cute explanation of why he felt obliged to dump her. The preceding tales form a patchwork quilt of unconnected, over-written and mostly well-acted male monologues. Some contain dialogue their actors visibly relish, and the final credits should have added visual IDs to help moviegoers identify the cameo stars.

The best tale shows an airport passenger re-enacting his chance meeting with a deserted woman, and for a good ten minutes the acting, direction, editing and photography create a small gem. The worst set piece paraded a black washroom attendant being memorialised by his loving son, in language that self-consciously presented cliched images of a noble savage servant.

Dominic Cooper grabs the chance to shine his smile and have a good thespian cry, and another oddly-placed British accent (Max Minghella's perhaps) arrives in one of a pair of waiters commenting on male motives. Their role as a Graecoid chorus is a reminder of one of the director's probable inspirations, Woody Allen. Even more strangely, the least eloquent tale-teller is Nicholson's professor (Timothy Hutton).

Krasinski may have hoped that this movie would become his calling card in Hollywood. It shows that he can direct actors and technicians well, but if there's a next time, he'll need a producer who knows how to make a full-length movie.

Single man

On the surface, A Single Man is simply a glossy depiction of a day in the life, and death wish, of a gay university professor in California in 1962. He's a Brit, teaches Eng Lit, lost his longtime lover and is preparing to commit suicide. It's easy to guess why designer Tom Ford (Hardwick, Gucci, YSL, own label) chose the story for his directorial and movie production debut.

He re-worked a screenplay written by a Canadian lawyer, David Scearce, who had adapted the same-name Christopher Isherwood novel, with the permission of the late author's longtime male lover. According to Wikipedia, Ford is also in a long-term relationship. The Texas-born self-made fashion industry millionaire is an architecture graduate, as is the movie professor's dead lover.

A mainstream production of the movie would probably have changed the professor's nationality. It wouldn't have cast two little-known English actors as the professor's American love interests, and it wouldn't have been happy keeping the professor's alcoholic best friend as another Brit emigre. However, mainstream Hollywood would never have financed this movie. Ford could afford to stay faithful to the book and his cast justified his faith in them.

Colin Firth has been a stalwart, and almost deadpan, actor whose one moment of movie magic was a gift from the director who asked him to do a wet-shirt scene for a BBC TV production of Pride and Prejudice. That led Helen Fielding to make him the dream lover for her Bridget Jones comedy romances. Their movie versions rightly chose Firth to play himself, which he did charmingly despite being overshadowed by Hugh Grant's rival character.

As the Brit professor, he has a role that perfectly suits his subtly mannered acting style. His BAFTA Best Actor award recognised his achievement, even if Hollywood didn't want to deprive Jeff Bridges of his Oscar and Golden Globe. Julianne Moore shines too, crafting a convincing accent as a California-set Londoner and portraying a beautifully drunken poignancy that should prompt Steven Spielberg to sign her up asap for his long-mooted bio of Dusty Springfield.

Matthew Goode, as the professor's dead lover seen in flashbacks, conveys gay-toned straightness impeccably and has other, mainstream, starring roles to remind Hollywood that he is a straight talent. Nicholas Hoult is also known by casting directors as a cross-Atlantic import; his long career as a child actor included the co-starring role in About a Boy (well supporting another Brit, Hugh Grant). The chubby boy grew into a handsome blue-eyes-flashing provocateur.

Going his own well-funded independent way, Ford chose to employ a top Spanish male model who'd walked his fashion catwalks as a hustler for his movie. Ideally, as his cameo scene is one of the more self-consciously artfully-framed and dramatically-lit passages in the movie. As in many other scenes, Ford focuses lovingly, lustfully, almost leeringly, on facial features. Eye and mouth movements reveal a person's thoughts and hopes, and they are manna from a heavenly director for restrained actors such as Firth.

Anyone who wants to sense the moods of the 60s will feel them throughout the movie. We are also reminded, too frequently for modern mainstream movie-makers' consciences, how much of a role smoking played in that generation's lifestyles. And the importance of social niceties then.

The movie is not perfect. There are plotting incongruities, the actors seem too artificially posed at times, the attempted-suicide scenes are strangely comic interludes that demean the central figure, and the sensually adventurous character of the professor's supposedly confused student seems unreal, almost as if he were a wish-fulfillment fantasy. The ending has been called ironical, but it's really a cop-out.

I should now read Isherwood's book, to discover what plot details were changed, and I will re-watch the movie at least once. And then again, just to spend more time savouring the richness of the soundtrack. In the early stages, I wondered if its insistent tones were going to overwhelm the visual messages. Instead, more often, they embellished the images.

Me and Orson Welles

Me and Orson Welles is an oddity, as its title suggests. It covers a week in the coming of age of a teenage wannabe actor (Zac Efron) who lands a small part in Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production of Caesar. That renowned adaptation of Shakespeare's historical play became part of American theatrical history, and it inspired writer-director Richard Linklater to create this brightly-illuminated self-consciously stagy movie. Or did it?

Linklater isn't a Hollywood stereotype. The Texas-based movie-maker creates unique images, both in acted movies, notably Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and in animated versions of live films, such as A Scanner Darkly. Linklater may well have admired Welles as the ultimate movie industry outsider, but I suspect Christian Mckay was the real inspiration for this period piece.

Linklater saw the English actor at the 2004 Edinburgh Festival, giving a bravura one-man performance in Rosebud : The Lives of Orson Welles. When the director got the funding for his 2008 Welles movie, he reportedly insisted that the unknown Mckay was indispensable. He was; the financiers may have insisted already that the headline star, the "Me", was to be Zac Efron.

Efron is a Prince Charming of Hollywood. On the boards from the age of 11, he twinkled and dimpled on-screen too, from Disney TV to High School Musicals to Hairspray before he was 21. As "Me", he's Richard, a plump-faced 17-year-old who has to convince us that a level-headed stage beauty at least a decade older (Claire Danes) will desire and seduce him, that Welles would identify and care about the youngster's prodigious talents.

Ay, there's the rub. Efron is no embryonic Brad Pitt, who flexed his ingenue acting chops so beguilingly in Thelma and Louise. He's no match for Christian Slater in The Name of the Rose, and he isn't even comparable with young Tom Cruise. Making his tough task tougher, his character's dialogue is hardly credible, ranging from banal boastfulness to fake melodramatics. In one comically incredible scene, when he has to console a young authoress, he scratches the back of his neck. A lot. If it's a tribute to the young Brando, it isn't.

But Mckay as Welles works so well that poor Efron never had a chance to do anything but twinkle wanly. Mckay speaks, looks, breathes, bombasts, flourishes, confides and curses as we instantly sense that Welles himself would have done and been. The accent, vocal resonance and stage presence are spot on. This is beyond impersonation. It's a reincarnation.

For that alone, this film will be part of American movie history. Eddie Izzard and Robert Downey Jr each made Charlie Chaplin re-live on-screen. Mckay is better than them. His Welles will surely be an unrepeatable piece of acting craftsmanship.