My Trip To Movieland: "The Reader" And What I Learned
In Advanced Hitler Studies

This past weekend my wife and I took the opportunity to walk to Richmond's newest cinema -- it's first of its kind here in 37 years -- the 17-screen Movieland at Boulevard Square operated by the Bowtie Cinema partnership. The event is unique for the Holy City. Such a large scale project built not to satisfy some civic edifice complex but a good old-fashioned private sector entrepreneurial entertainment center for wide public enjoyment. The cinemaplex is fit into what was originally a locomotive factory established in the 1880s.

As we strolled at a brisk pace out our street toward the Boulevard we witnessed a line wrapped around the block of the grand Byrd Theatre for the 9:30 showing of Valkyrie. Here was a second-run, second-rate film in its second week and still drawing a a crowd to the one-screen 1928 neighborhood movie palace. Nazis are big box office. Well, and World War II in general. And the Byrd was constructed at the cusp of the sound era in film according to specifications for a typical neighborhood theater of the silent era -- Wurlitzer theater organ included. Yet another example of Richmond's "behindedness" emerging to our eventual benefit.

But as we strolled in the unseasonable and pleasant evening air, I considered the film we'd seen, and the one we were about to.

Hilter Au Cinéma

The cinematic Hitler provides interesting history and one, I'm sure, has supplied fodder for at least one graduate school dissertation. We've come some distance from 1969's The Battle of Britain, when actor Rolf Stiefel demanded that his portrayal of Hitler be filmed from behind or at a distance. He didn't want his later career compromised by audiences associating his as "that Hitler actor." Of course, I think if anybody who knows him these days it is because you cannot see his full-on Fuehrer.

TBOB also included the best Goering portrayal by Hein Reiss until eclipsed by that of Brian Cox in the television film Nuremberg. They are Goerings at two different times: the vainglorious over-grown brat of 1941 who becomes the charming and bullying sardonic noose-cheater of 1946.

But Valkyrie threw me, for several reasons. Cruise's profile sorta resembles Stauffenberg, but put an eyepatch or Aaron Eckhart and he would've done a far better job. Not that it's Cruise's fault, but Cruise was too much Cruise for the film. I couldn't get past the associations. When Stauffenberg returns to Berlin and with General Beck is working the phones to ignite the coup by calling various military districts, all I could think of was that scene in Jerry Maguire when the ousted sports agent is frantically making cell phone calls to prevent clients from getting poached by his nemesis in the office. There's even a woman in the Valkyrie steno pool making moo eyes at him, like she's getting ready to say, "You had me at High Treason."

Branagh Confusions

There's all this high-priced British acting talent playing Germans, too, that befuddled me, especially with Cruise thrown in the middle of them, with his flat Midwest American voice. Then Kenneth Branagh playing conspirator Hening von Tresckow, who, with a switch of uniform, portrayed a chillingly matter-of-fact Reinhard Heydrich in HBO's 2001 Conspiracy.

Can't Germans play Nazis convincingly? They sure managed in Downfall.

And Valkyrie had at least one cast member in common with that film, and in both cases, playing a "good German."

Christian Berkel in Downfall portrayed physician Ernst Schenck employed by the SS who in fact wants to save lives, not extinguish them. In Valkyrie, he's similarly persuasive as Colonel Albrech von Quirnheim. And apparently he was also in a film I've not seen, Black Book, playing not so nice Nazi guy.

Still, Valkyrie had some nice touches in it: the sub-motif of Stauffenberg's baleful glass eye popping up in strange places -- a bit dropped in just twice I think, there needed to be a third. Then a deft touch where a guard at Hitler's "The Wolf's Lair" headquarters in Rastenburg, a stifling, bug-infested place, kills a mosquito on his wrist with a cigarette.

When Stauffenberg must go up to the Berghof to get Hitler's signature on documents, that place's interior is just like the pictures I've seen, quite well done, down to the crazy steps that lead into the main seating area, that would've caused somebody to trip if they were unaware and not facing them. But the contrived assortment of Nazi higher ups reminded me of a Tony Soprano sit-down.

And Valkyrie's Hitler looked more like Saddam Hussein with a forelock. None of the inner circle really look like their counterparts -- no film I've seen ever has gotten their Keitel or Jodl right. But we've come some distance from Patton wherein the Nazi military high command looks like it's holed up in a redressed set "evil genius" central from a contemporary James Bond movie.

The short scenes before the "People's Tribunal" presided over by the crazy Roland Freisler are on the mark. Freisler's epitaph should've been included in the crawls at the end: he was apparently killed during a bombing raid on Berlin when a beam of the courtroom fell on him, though this story is disputed. However he bought it, Freisler's demise saved the life of another "July Plotter," Fabian von Schlabrendorff. I bring this up, because in Valkyrie, Schlabrendorff's idea of rigging a bottle of cognac to explode in Hitler's airplane is conflated with Branagh/Tresckow.

So Amie and I stroll arm-and-arm up the Boulevard, past alluring balcony parties and at least one fellow strumming his guitar on the front porch. Richmond as she approaches spring is one of the most beautiful places. Alas that the Boulevard no longer has its alleés of linden trees.

Movieland's E-Ticket Ride
In front of Stronghill Dining Company, young lovelies in shoulder-baring summer dresses were yammering away on cell phones and smoking. (What is it with people under 30 voluntarily huffing down cigarettes? I don't get it. Sex and the City is in an artifact in reruns — at least the qualities of the show these ladies were emulating. Even Carrie quit eventually.)

I thought, too, of my March 2007 magazine piece about Scott's Addition and the poised-for-revival neighborhood of midcentury architectural finds and industrial and warehouse buildings. Stronghill is one example of that burgeoning life, and Movieland, which, though not in the Addition proper, is diagonally across from the old Lighthouse Diner (left, via Dementi Studios), now a discount medical-supplies store and minus the distinctive lighthouse cupola. When things improve, some entrepreneur is going to swoop down on that place and offer the owners many ducats to relocate, hopefully for the clientele, nearby.

I signed up for the E-ticket ride at Movieland; I wanted the whole schmear, the pizza, the beer (Stella — they'd already gone through the Sam Adams) and the ambiance. What was impressive was the diversity of the crowds. All kinds of folks were there (we even spotted arts maven Pam Reynolds!), which was unusual for an entertainment venue in Richmond, where the crowds can tend to be one thing or another.

For the record, the pizza was ... not so good, but it's a movie theater, not a restaurant, and I wasn't expecting much; still, my immediate need was satisfied.

We were there to see The Reader, and a fine film it is, though I was disoriented by some of the casting. The great Bruno Ganz (left), who went from being one of the kindly angels in 1987's Wings of Desire to playing Hitler in 2004's Downfall — the indelible representation of the dictator, making Anthony Hopkins' and Alec Guinness' turns in the role look like cartoons. That's one of the negative aspects of playing a character well — you're forever associated with it. In The Reader, Ganz appears as a weary, kind-eyed law professor taking his advanced-seminar class to observe a war-crimes trial. I just half-expected him to explode in a rage then grumble, "Wo ist Wenck? Wo ist Steiner?"

And who should also show up in The Reader but Alexandra Maria Lara, the actress from Downfall who played Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary. (And nobody looks cuter than Lara [left] in a big helmet, except, maybe, Juliet Binoche in The English Patient. )

But here she plays the daughter of a massacre survivor who points out the women guards who allowed it to happen. I experienced cinematic whiplash.



But one of the biggest cultural neck-snappers was seeing Ralph Feinnes who played the despicable, pot-bellied concentration camp commandant Amon Goth of Schinlder's List here as the conflicted lawyer who is haunted, even tormented, by the memories of a life-altering affair he experienced as a youth, in The Reader. Feinnes has played some notable roles since then; in Quiz Show and The English Patient, and picked up an Academy Award. But his Goth was so banal and terrifying -- and pretty. Which is why they call it, "Acting!"






We sat too far forward in the theater. We're kind of used to the Byrd, I guess. We got a great view, a crystalline picture and incredible sound. But I found myself looking up from my rocking seat, and so I left a little sore.

Apostrophe

Wandering the corridors and looking at the coming attractions, I have to say, it's not the theater's fault that some really lousy movies seem headed our way — do we really need another Friday the 13th, or Halloween, or a remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3?

Of course, we need another Star Trek. At least I think so.

Anyway, the pleasant amble home reminded me again of our city's European qualites, and how downright cosmopolitan, given that I can now walk from my front door to a 17-screeen cinema.

But we need to work on a movie tram. For the days when we don't feel like walking.Except the amble helps me work thorugh my movie mashup confusions.

The Little Sparrow Sings

"I almost begrudge 'The Sparrow' for having been so colossal (she was only 1m40 tall). Nobody can measure up to her. She is the French singer - for whom the world is still searching a for heiress in vain. But Piaf was more than just Piaf, she came after a period which had engendered Cocteaus, Sartres, Chagalls... And she herself gave birth to Montands, Aznavours, Becauds... Piaf was France. A France without marketing, promotion, a hit parade...simply talent and, above all, passion." -- Jude Quinten, Edith Piaf Fans Facebook

Greetings, billion-eyed audience, yes; this past weekend we--me, and partner-in-art-for-life Amie Oliver--attended a few offerings of the VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre.

La Vie en Rose, the Piaf bio-pic (original: La Mom, wasn't on the official schedule, but put on the marquee with knowledge.) And my goodness, what a film. I tell you, after seeing such grim and depressing fare as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, I was in an odd way heartened and heart-broken by seeing an artist self-destruct before my very eyes. Oh, we know the world itself is doomed; but when it is reduced to a real person whose talent couldn't overcome her physiological issues (including crippling arthritis and liver cancer), then, well, that's a whole different story. That's somebody we know.

Say what you will about Marion Cotillard and the aide of prosthetics--this woman was astonishing. Lip synching is lip synching though; and I think: well, Sissy Spacek sang for Coal Miner's Daughter -- but she had a voice performance background; Jessica Lange was lip synched for Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams. And we can go on. None of them were Edith Piaf.

The cast was excellent, but I have a special place for tall, gangly girls, and Sylvie Testud, who played Piaf's quasi-half-sister-lesbian protector--who couldn't save Piaf from herself, was just superb and a brilliant counter balance to the dynamic petite Piaf/Cotillard--and Cotillard isn't as tiny.

The film's approach to the biopic was quite good, arresting, and I've thought of this method in thinking how a film about Edgar Allan Poe should go. The film is non-linear and more about memories and stream of consciousness. You set this up against The Aviator, for example, and as good as that was, it comes off a bit anemic. And I love me some Scorsese, but, that's how I see it. A Beautiful Mind had a bit more to work with, I think. Whatever the case, to get a movie made of your life means you had to...live through quite a life, and sometimes not a good one, or a long one.

At the end of Piaf's professional career, her body was so afflicted by arthritis, that she had to be placed on stage at the microphone. The curtain opened to reveal her standing there. She sang like her life depended on it. And, it did.

Other films we viewed included Volker Schlondorff's Ulzhan, featuring the amazing Ayanat Ksenbai alongside a friend of the French Film Festival, Philippe Torreton. This is not Borat's Kazakhstan. Oh, no. This is post-Soviet industrial wasteland mixed with tribal culture and Vegas. And given the spate of glum films here, though this story is also terse and dour, at least there's some hope that life is worth living, or, at least you have the choice to be loved or not.

We were also able to see Ensemble, c'est tout that had the benefit of
Audrey Tautou, who should need no introduction. Some serious themes of, well, what we should do with our lives since we have them, and how to confront the inevitable end, how art and aesthetics mediate these differences, are presented here with grace and humor.


Laurent Stocker all but steals the show as an actor without a theater, or a museum docent without a museum, who instead curates the remains of his family fortune and with drama recites the tale. If the film were U.S., his character would be gay, but he isn't here--just lonely and theatrical.

Audrey Tautou's character cuts her hair in a fit of distress into a Amélie bob.

More to come, but to bed.

You Can't See What's Coming
Grim films for the times


There Will Be Blood, image (left) by Francois Duhamel, via allmoviephoto.com ; No Country For Old Men, via I Watch Stuff.com: "Javier Bardem dressed as Johnny Cash meets He-Man."

For those members of the billion-eyed audience who a)haven't yet seen either of the two acclaimed films pictured above, I wouldn't read any further, however, b) if you live in the vicinity of Richmond, Va., and want to see both, they are on one astonishing double bill at the Byrd Theatre here, and I'd advise you to go.

I'm late to these dual cinematic experiences. Me and the partner-in-art-for-life greet with little enthusiasm the prospect of an excursion to a suburban octoplex for a film fix. The Westhampton Theatre, a 1930s Colonial Revival former one-screen cinema which we like quite a bit, is about a 45-minute walk, or less, if you can get lucky with a bus. What I'm saying is, we don't go to the movies, we wait for them to come to us, though not always delivered via a fiber-optic line.

Attending the Byrd is better than cable. For two bucks you get an organ concert, a light show, Dolby digital sound and a huge screen. So we don't see everything but what we do see is more special as a result of a Byrd screening.

These two films will remain with me a long while.

There Will Be Blood in another era could've been the subject for John Huston or Howard Hawks but in 2007, Paul Thomas Anderson dedicated his film of greed and arrogance, deception and delusion to the late great Robert Altman.

A theme of the film is how the pursuit of oil has wrecked the world. Anderson makes it splendid to view, and the in all parts, the film excels, which is why they gave it Academy Awards. The undulating soundtrack, by Jonny Greenwood, is perfect in complement, and Robert Elswit's cinematography is astounding.

The twining of religion and capitalism is encapsulated here. The last line, "I'm finished," is delivered when the oil tycoon is sitting next to the bloody body of a (false) preacher he's beaten to death. The sanguine tide oozing out of the busted body and across the wood floor of the bowling alley isn't quite "The Blood of the Lamb" but is as close as one gets in this tale. "I am finished" -- the material has thrashed the spiritual, which really was a degenerated form of vainglory, and the minister couldn't save even himself. This is Daniel Plainview's world, and we just live in it. The spirit--if it exists--is debauched in the yammerings of organized religion. Religion is a prop for justifying almost any heinous act undertaken by the corporation/nation state, and a prod for those who know how to use people's superstitions against them.

The blood also resembles the seeping oil that has built a fortune for Plainview, but in amassing the millions, he's lost everything else that moors him to civilization. The only thing remaining of him is untempered and unchecked ambition. He is the Corporation so lifted up in the era of which Upton Sinclair wrote (and whose novel, Oil! upon which the film is, with great leeway, based).

The last sentence summarizes the magnate's murderous rage, the possibility that his own life is now over because of what he's done. There's also perhaps a trace of irony, that last utterance of Christ on the Cross as recorded in the Gospel of John, "It is finished!"

The statement hit me at a different level, too. I'm seeing the recent headlines of 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq and the fifth year of that splendid little war passing by with an unreal speech given by its prime motivator and also an audio tape of the ostensible creator and reason for the circulating circulating on the media. (Or at least, we're told it's his voice...)

Organized religion is used to gin up anger toward the foreign nations that hold most of the oil, and also a mechanism to coddle and control the cultures that both produce petroleum and gobble down the stuff. The sad state of affairs is as tangled in hypocrisy as a bag of snakes. I'm reminded of Jean Genet's The Balcony, in which the denizens of a brothel live out their fantasies by posing as society's pillars. A revolution erupts, a prostitute becomes its leader, and the real judges and bishops are killed. Thus, the fakers are pushed out for the roiling crowds to see, to show that everything is still under control.

The rapacious avariciousness of small men in high places has always used the perversion of faith to get what they want --that isn't new. Materialism has triumphed in our culture to the detriment of what I'd refer to as the spiritual, (absent the perversion of the religious). That isn't stop-the-presses, either. But that oil has damaged the natural world and distorted the affairs of humanity is a more poignant truth now than ever. Plainview has gained all, but has lost all. He is finished. And he's taking us with him.

The Coen Brothers present an absurd world, a broken place where the good, swift and the clever are all swept away by the juggernaut of implacable death. Irrational capacities are the Coen's bailiwick. They are in their particular and peculiar noir mode here where they've poured elements of their Blood Simple and Fargo into the Cormac McCarthy novel , with a gentle helping of She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and a smidgin of A Touch of Evil, and served a piping hot dish of angst.

The means of protecting those who dwell in the world and seek to get along and not harm anybody is eclipsed by the element that seeks to crush the well-meaning with despair and death. I was reminded, though, of Sam Raimi's adaptation of A Simple Plan, wherein basic schmoes get in above their heads and terrible events result.

The implacable killer and the befuddlement of the protectors of civilized mediation is a critique of our time. True, every generation thinks the past was better, and the present wretched, but ...what is to be done? With 2 million people in jail, and the War On Drugs and War On Terror without any end in sight, and low level bureaucratic contractors hunting up personal information of presidential candidates (Surprise! We're getting spied upon by our government!), law enforcement is just another kind of warfare against the populace that, unable to protect them, has instead turned them all into the condemned. No one is exempt or safe. There is instead anxiety, and all that is done by the characters in the world of No Country, is based out of or springs from fear.

The most innocent of all the story's characters, the film's single true moral character, Carla Jean Moss is sacrificed to the twisted principles of the killer who roams the movie like a Terminator robot. He's half man and half machine, with his pneumatic weapon. [For a more extensive and well-written analysis, see the source of the image, The House Next Door blog].

Carla dies because she calls the monster on his rationale for death dealing. She won't play his existensial coin toss game because she doesn't believe in his values. She is killed on the same day she's buried her mother; having lost her husband to this creature, and Carla would rather not live in a world where this hideousness roams unchecked. Carla shows him himself.

Except--to say that Anton Chigurh is a monster lets us off the hook. He is flesh and bone and irrational and demented. If history--and the morning papers-- tell us anything about the crimes and errors of humanity, Chigurh is a freak, and one of us, though we wouldn't want to stand next to him in an elevator. He is Thanatos, too; coming for us all, whenever that slide projector in the pineal gland throws up the title card that says END.

Happy Easter.

Black Out in Richmond
High winds blow out our power, send us to the movies.

Well, billion-eyed audience, many of you reading this in the Lower 48 are dealing with several feet of snow and icy winds. Here, we are flake-free, and sunny, but yesterda howling gusts clocking in at close to 50 mph overtaxed our power system and put some 43,000 people in the dark.

Amie needed wifi to tend to some bid'ness, so I was sent out to find some, and lucked out at Karsen's where I've wanted to go since the place opened. We were accommodated at the bar, plugged in, and drank fulfilling draught Guinness and ate on gourmet mac and cheese and spinach appetizers. Amie was reminded of the time we spent her birthday stranded in a London airport trying to return to Paris.

Then we went to the Byrd Theater see the much touted Charlie Wilson's War, written by my fave Aaron Sorkin, and featuring Tom Hanks and a Texas accent. And there was Julia Roberts, too, who betrayed her big guffaw laugh just once. Problem when Stars try to become Characters. Somehow I can believe her better as Erin Brockovich; a past and quite successful role which made Roberts, playing an ultra-conservative Texas socialite sneering, "Sluts!" at Charlie's partying entourage even more...textured.

Hanks, at certain angles, through no fault of his own, resembles Amie's brother Mark and that pulled us out of the movie's convention. Still, I found him agreeable company. However, a scene of Amy Adams marching in high heels up a corridor, auburn pony tail swishing, was worth seeing and put me in another kind of convention.


I also got a little West Wing rush, with Sorkin's Restoration comedy in- one-door-and-out-the other scene wherein Charlie Wilson is both trying to get weapons to Afghanis battling the Soviets through CIA operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and determining with his staff how he can get himself out of a scandal involving a stripper and cocaine charges.

Wilson's office is run by a Greek chorus of muses that careen through the film like Charlie's quadriga -- the point, I think. They include Amy Adams (center, in the image from allmoviephoto.com) This scene was excellent and demonstrated Sorkin's live theater roots.

There's also Sorkin classic walking-and-talking while in the corridors of power scenes. The great Mike Nichols directed; but, I left the theater feeling Charlie Wilson was a bit perfunctory. The brisk, tight scenes just didn't add up for me as a pleasing whole. The film looked a bit and felt like a 1980s made-for-television movie, and seeing a dark-haired Dan Rather and newscast clips of the time completed the sense.

The ending of the film, where Wilson tries then to gin up funds for repairing Afghan infrastructure, and a quote from him saying how the U.S. "fucked up the end game" leaves the audience thinking: oh, that's why there was Osama bin Laden. The movie has gotten critiqued from both political sides as propaganda. Fact is, with a character like Wilson, nuance and ambiguity was part of his political life and personality. Of course, as Amie pointed out to me, at about the same time, Oliver North was running a secret government out of the White House basement to combat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Sigh. Much work to be done here on Colonial Avenue. Later, dudes.

Hey Y'aa-aalll: It's First Friday


Yes, billion-eyed audience, if you've visited here often, you know what this image means: these two ladies, of opposing expressions but exuberant attitudes, shown here during a long ago opening at the defunct Three Miles Gallery which is now Tarrant's restaurant -- it's First Friday in Richmond.

The Weather Channel says' "Soon It's Gonna Rain" so, ladies, carry a bumbershoot and slip on a pair of cute but functional galoshes.

The printmakers (Southern Graphics Council) are coming to town, thus there's a number of galleries dedicated to one of the oldest, and newest, art forms. Check out Transmission's exhibition of the Women of Studio 23, and visit the gallery with the most appropriate name this month, Ghostprint.

Now, further uptown, actually in Uptown, as this strip of Ruchmun' styles itself, at the Red Door Gallery is work by five artists, including Amie Oliver, my partner-in-art, in an exhibition called Sugar and Spice. You have until the end of the month to see the work of these unique makers and creators.

Another Oliver, Rebecca Goldberg Oliver, has new paintings up at Gallery6. She's an Art Cheerleader, you know, and they won a Muse award last night at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Gooooo- Art!


Another friend of the Blue Racccoon was celebrated in the Marble Hall; developer Tom Robinson, whose Vacant Spaces = Artful Spaces program makes waiting for the bus in midtown even more of an an aesthetic experience, and also provides attention for empty and neglected interwar storefronts. He's a caution, that Tom, as they used to say.


By the way, for those of you who've anxious about the second printing of True Richmond Stories, it'll be in the finer regional book shops as of March 28. If your Little Shop Around The Corner doesn't carry it by April, demand that the slender volume be stocked. Or -- you can go to Amazon.com.

Last night I spoke with a book group hosted by Katie at the "Dooley Mansion" and had a splended time. They didn't mind my three-cornered hat.

In other unrelated news, Charlie
Wilson's War has arrived at the
Byrd Theatre. We're going.