Reviews

Most English speakers are doubly disadvantaged when they watch French films. We don't understand the language, and we haven't had a strict French education, which ensures that most of the audience has been forced to get familiar with writers like Molière, la Fontaine, Beaumarchais, and Marivaux: all masters of a kind of dry, tart, ironic comedy we just don't have in English. 'The Chef's Wife' (the French title, which means 'We almost got to be friends,' is really on the mark) is in the main line of this tradition.

In a small but upscale country town, the wife of the chef at a fancy Michelin-starred restaurant is suffering mid-life career anxiety. She goes to a harried, fretful but dedicated occupational counselor for advice. So far so good; but both women are suffering from severe delusions about their real problems: the wife is an all-devouring co-dependent, the counselor (a divorcée) thinks she's a just-the-facts person, immune from emotional entanglements. Their collision, two black holes of need spiraling inward on each other, is the comic spine of the movie. At the focus of their orbits is the chef himself, a warm but uncommunicative man, who expresses his love in hors d'oeuvres and amuse-bouches, not in words.

The two women, played by veteran comédiennes with scores of films between them but working together for the first time, are utterly superb. The chef, played by an actor more usually seen with a pistol in his hand than a saucepan, is an ideal figure to engender deceptive fantasies. The rest of the cast, drawn from the seemingly bottomless well of superb French character actors, supports the principals with high honors. And the script, by actor/director Ann le Ny, is a sleek unobtrusive machine for producing awkward encounters and comic misunderstandings. This is French cinema with an accent aïgu: funny, even farcical, but never, never dumb.

The Secret World of Arietty evokes the artlessly magical atmosphere of the Golden Age of Ghibli animation. Its closest relative is My Neighbor Totoro. The viewer is invited to experience it through any number of lenses at once: child's eye, jaded adult eye, film fan's, film historian's. . . . It's simultaneously a pure evocation of Miyazaki's spirit and an astonishingly graceful homage to the master.

The most novel aspect of the film is one demanded by its source material. Nothing could displace the memories of Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton as Pod and Homily in the wonderful Working Title mini-series of the 1990s. But the fact is that no live-action version of Mary Norton's story can capture the ongoing delight of her tales, helping us imagine how the two worlds of the Borrowers and the "real" world look and feel to each other's respective inhabitants. (I hope it's not a spoiler to mention that water seems to behave quite differently in each.)

. . . most gender-confused major-studio American movie of all time. Maybe the writers felt guilty about being male civilians in wartime, maybe they were just homophobic or closet cases; the fact is that the cast-list of this film falls into three gender categories: macho men who nance around at the smallest excuse; nelly men (and I do mean nelly: the butchest item among them is Hollywood-fey icon Richard Haydn); and neuter (Ilka Chase). Oh, make that four categories; at this point in her career, Claudette Colbert deserves one of her own.

This is not a good movie; the comedy is lame, the drama lamer. But for anyone interested in Tinseltown's erratic progress toward self-knowledge in sexual matters, it is required viewing. It certainly confirms the long- time rumor that director Mitch Leisen was gay. And for gay males of a certain age it includes a precious (in both senses of the word) sequence in which one of those pectoral-less Charles Atlas-style "strongmen" flexes for Colbert's camera in (I'm not making this up) a leopard-pattern posing peplum, on a set featuring (I tell you I'm not making this up) a plaster "broken" Greek column that must have been borrowed for the day from Athletic Model Guild. (No that can't be right; Bob Mizer didn't set up AMG until '45. Do you suppose he snapped it up after Paramount was through with it? If so, it's even more historically significant.)

Point for further study: 30s and 40s male stars like Clark Gable, Johnny Weissmuller, and Fred Macmurray were all pretty flat-chested. When did Hollywood discover pectorals?

I can't blame "The Hour" for the way it's been sold, for all the positive comparisons not just to "Mad Men" but to "State of Play" and "The Wire." But even setting aside all the hyperbole, "The Hour" is pretty flimsy TV drama. With only six episodes, the entire first hour is pretty much wasted on set-up and atmosphere. The character relationships are stock issue, the writing colorless; the is editing nervous yet the pacing is slack. The art direction is fancy-on-the-cheap. I'll be watching episode two this week, but if the show continues as it began, I suspect that I will be missing for episode three.

I have resisted Greenaway's insistence on nudity for his performers almost from the beginning but he was right and I was wrong, because I was thinking in stage terms and he in visual-art terms. I misunderstood Helen Mirren exposing her amazing breasts in The Cook, Juliette Stevenson her steel-spring body in Drowning by Numbers, Joan Plowright's refusal to bare all in the same film, John Gielgud's courageous self-exposure in Propero's Books. When one performs for Greenaway, one crosses a threshold, one leaves the stage and enters the frame. I still do not know if he is a great artist but my opinion is irrelevant, he is a necessary one for our time. I salute him.

I guess you have to call this film a sequel; I can't imagine it making a grain of sense to anyone who hasn't seen the 2004 original. It's a sad effort; not just because it doesn't match its predecessor. Where B13 was bright and glossy despite the funk, the sequel looks dingy; where B13's cast was uniformly vivid and memorable (right down to the guy with a mouth full of panties) the sequel gives us anonymous bodies in motion, then halfway through deploys a mob of half-imagined, ethnic-stereotyped "good guys" who are given nothing much to do, dramatically or physically. Without Bibi Naseri (Tata), Tony D'Amario (K-2), and their gang, there's not one memorable face, let alone memorable character. Where in B13 David Belle looked fresh and omni-competent, you can see that five years has taken its toll on his looks and his skills. He's now old enough to play a complex character with a face to match, but all he's asked to do is play sidekick to co-star Cyril Raffaelli, who barely gets enough screen time to make an impact. The film runs just a quarter-hour longer than B13 (101 minutes) but seems twice as long and half as much fun. Only thing notable about it: the WORST English subtitles (clearly translated from Chinese) since the heyday of the Shaw Brothers.

The DVD of B13-Ultimatum is boxed with the original. If you already have that, don't buy this one, just rent it.

I haven't read every single review of B13 on this site, so maybe I'm repeating something. OK, it's worth repeating: B13 is not just one of the seminal action movies of this decade, it's also saturated with genial anger and hot politics. Almost everybody in the movie is "ethnic" or supposed to be: the only "white" characters besides Leito and Damien are feckless bureaucrats or white-color criminals or both. If you've visited the so-called "cités" which surround Paris (and France's other big cities) you've been to Banlieue 13. The only big difference between film and reality is that life in the film is gritty, short, and fun, while life in the real French burbs is just squalid and vicious. The movie, wild as it is, serves not just to pump up the adrenalin of the average viewer but to wave a flag of empowerment for the taupe, ecru, maroon, beige, brown and black people who have to live in the monstrous ruins that surround "the City of Light."