Friday, December 29, 2006

The Top Ten Movies of 2006

Looking over the standouts of this year’s movie releases it occurs to me that this was a year in film that had a social, political, and cultural conscience. I would argue that all movies have at least an inkling of a political or social agenda, but this year it is particularly overt, with ambitious cultural films like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel that links Mexican, Moroccan, Japanese, and American life in one narrative thread, to a lighter (much lighter) film like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (directed by Larry Charles), a look at American culture that is so in-your-face that it is brilliantly embarrassing, and hilarious.



This year one of history’s greatest directors died, Robert Altman, who in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion, showed us a slice of Midwestern manner and life. Zhang Yimou gave us Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, that is premised on cultural clashes among language, physical space, and differences in human manner. Will Farrell even took a jab at Southern and rural Nascar culture in Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and we saw the creation of Dave Chappelle’s hip-hop concert, a virtual tour through black hip-hop culture set smack in the heart of Brooklyn, in Block Party (directed by Michel Gondry).



It was also a year of historical films. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center took us back to 9/11, for a look at the terrorist attacks of 5 years ago, and neither try to create context for the events; in the eyes of these two films September 11th is a picture of the day as it happened, but from new perspectives. Greengrass’s picture doesn’t sentimentalize the event in the same way as WTC, in fact it does not at all, which in my view is what makes United 93 as devastating and intriguing as it is. Nonetheless, Oliver Stone surprised us all when he took a break from his typical myth-laden revisionist history approach, which often descends into very entertaining conspiracy theory, and simply told a story with a gentle, albeit sentimental, voice.



In the same vein of anti-revisionist history was Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (and I suspect Letters from Iwo Jima despite not having seen it yet— it does not open in Chicago until January.) I carefully tread on this term “anti-revisionist” because the film does provide a new perspective on WWII, that of the soldiers who raised the flag on the mountain of Iwo Jima; but it seemed careful to retell the event as plainly as it could, to expose the audience to an historical period that is slowly (and quite literally) dying out of America’s collective conscience. Looking back on my notes from when I saw Flags in October, I felt that this was a picture of events previously unseen, it is history first seen. The film works more like a memoir of the soldiers than a secondary historical document, with flashbacks that take us to the carnage of the days on Iwo Jima that are not a part of our collective understanding of the war. The image we have, and indeed that of the American public immediately following the soldiers’ return to the States, is of bravery and glory. Surely the soldiers are brave, but there is no sense of glory for them as they recall the circumstances of that famous photo being snapped. It is the memories, the unseen history of the soldiers who pushed that flag up that are absent from historical record, and Eastwood gives them substance, with integrity and grace.



Amidst theses historical pictures were still more. The Queen took us to the inside quarters of the royal family in the days following Princess Diana’s death, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, though lacking in substance, comes close to redeeming itself in style as it reexamines the life of the French ruler. There were smaller independent pictures like 10 Items or Less that showed us the differences in social behavior between the wealthy in Los Angeles and its poor ethnic residents; it was a film made quietly with earnest dialogue, and subtle discoveries of the mundane. Children of Men flash forwards to a dystopia where human reproduction and civilization are on the brink of extinction. Always showing us pictures from the present, like newspaper clippings and pictures that reference today’s involvement in Iraq, for instance; Children gives us a vision of what our political actions now may yield in the future.



There are a handful of exceptions to this politically active and culturally aware year in film. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain gave us a dizzying and sublime picture of eternal love that peels back years of emotion in the efficiency of seconds; in its crisp framing of images that is the border to something even bigger, The Fountain is a film of frames-within-frames, of seamless infinity. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed brought us back to his classic street gang gore that he is famously known for. His aesthetic technique, I would argue, is unchanged since the days of GoodFellas (1990) (and perhaps even earlier), and yet his stories still intrigue. By the time of The Aviator (2004) I started to look at Scorsese’s style as old hat, but there is too much gravity to his films, particularly The Departed to dismiss it as anything less than great (a fact that is undoubtedly helped along by the outstanding performance of Leonardo DiCaprio).

And Pan’s Labyrinth (which I saw less than an hour before the time of these writings) is a gorgeous and gory landscape that blends fairy tale and reality into one dimension; it is all at once spooky and mystical, frightening and yet full of wonder.



But at the top of the list is Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. Though Mann’s picture takes us to exotic locales and shows us the workings of a culturally and ethnically diverse city like Miami, the film’s primary purpose is to reveal the dark side of undercover culture, which is much unlike the glossy pastels of Miami Vice the television series (where Mann is credited as producer and sometimes-writer). Mann proves his creative versatility with his expert use and inventive technique of digital technology; 2004’s Collateral showed us his first (and rather stunning) use of digital equipment, and this year he has out-maneuvered the men’s club of filmmakers around him with his subtle narrative, and his forward-thinking embrace of new technology. This year Mann proved himself as an evolving director that responds to the ever-changing world of filmmaking, without compromising the poetry of his characters and story, and the unspoken beauty of their motion.



I give you my top ten movies of 2006:

1. Miami Vice (Michael Mann)
2. Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood)
3. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón)
4. The Queen (Stephen Frears)
5. Volver (Pedro Almodóvar)
6. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)
7. Inside Man (Spike Lee)
8. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (Michel Gondry)
9. United 93 (Paul Greengrass)
10. The Departed (Martin Scorsese)


Honorable Mentions: A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman), Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams), Scoop (Woody Allen), Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Zhang Yimou), Off the Black (James Ponsoldt), The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola), Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles).

A few caveats: I could shed a tear that I haven’t seen David Lynch’s Inland Empire. As a huge fan of Lynch I know his latest epic would have a spot on my list, so you will have to grant me freedom to amend the top ten once Inland makes it to my city. Also, two other films that I had high hopes for but was unable to see are both Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais) and Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul). Additionally, with all of his generosity, Mike Lyon has sent me a copy of Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa), which I have yet to view. I will be watching it in the next week, and if it turns out to be as fantastic as it is rumored, watch out for yet another amendment to my top ten.

Check out the Top Ten listings at Rob Sweeney and Matt Singer's site (with special guest Alberto Zambenedetti), at Termite Art; Michael Anderson, Lisa Broad, and Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega over at Tativille; and Mike Lyon at Fourteen Seconds, for the full picture of the greatest films of 2006!

Happy New Year!

The Good German - 2006 - Film

Thursday, December 28, 2006

The Good Shepherd - 2006 - Film

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Babel - 2006 - Film

Monday, December 18, 2006

David Denby has a great review of this movie--check it out!

Children of Men - 2006 - Film

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Directed By: John Ford - 1976/2006 - TCM broadcast

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Barnyard - 2006 - DVD

Saturday, December 16, 2006



Read about the wrath of Barnyard at Cinema Blend.

There is a misconception among adults that children’s movies are unintelligent and that an animated flick with talking animals is inferior to the over-eighteen crowd by virtue of their grown-up sophistication. Sadly, it is precisely a cartoon like Barnyard that upholds this attitude...

United 93 - 2006 - DVD

Friday, December 15, 2006

The Matador - 2006 - DVD

Friday, December 15, 2006

The Fountain - 2006 - Film

Thursday, December 14, 2006


Despite much of The Fountain's criticism as being discombobulated in its structure of interconnected stories, I enjoyed getting lost in the scenery. Nor have I seen imagery so artful that it is almost a scientific equation. Sorry, folks, that I don't have more notes. Too many movies in one day.

Statistics - 2006 - DVD

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - 2006 - Film

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Borat: A True American Hero


...and creepy in weird thong-unitard


An honorable mention for one of the best 10 movies of 2006.

Red River - 1948 - DVD

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

I saw this by accident. In the chaos of my Netflix queue I bumped it into the list of to-see John Ford movies. It is, of course, not directed by John Ford, but by Howard Hawks, and might be the most homoerotic Western I've seen. Not that that's bad.

Here's a picture!

The Queen - 2006 - Film

Sunday, December 10, 2006



It's been awhile since I've seen this. Alas! I'll omit the comments I promised. Do note that it made the Top Ten of 2006.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Merry Christmas and Happy Top 10 Season!

The end of the year is here and I've seen more movies than you can shake a stick at. Actually, it's only been about ten. Still, ten movies in roughly a week is a lot. Especially when you're prepping to head home for the holiday, and if your travels have been anything like mine it's more of an obstacle than a quick vacation. My flight home to Denver was cancelled due to the blizzard (my parents have 4' drifts outside their backdoor) and I ended up meeting 3 strangers from an ad on Craigslist.org Friday (12/22) morning, jumping in a rental car and driving through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and finally Colorado to get home for the holidays. So I am little tired. But stuffed full of homemade truffles, cookies and wine, so I guess things turned out okay!

For the next few days I'll be updating this page with short notes on all the movies I've seen over the last couple of weeks. Normally, I would say to heck with it and just post a picture, but the last handful of movies have been utterly fantastic and I can't fall silent in their presence. The Top Ten of 2006 movie lists are due out this Friday, December 29th, and a mess of us from Termite Art, Tativille, and Fourteen Seconds will be participating. Crunch time is on to arrange my list of this year's greatest, so come back over the next week and see what I've been seeing, and find out what are the Best Movies of 2006. I get shivers from the excitement!

Finally, a shout-out to my new friends from the Craigslist Roadtrip---Merry Christmas to Schae, Trey, and Carol. And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Peace,
Pammy

Monday, December 4, 2006

3 Godfathers - 1948 - DVD

Sunday, December 3, 2006

The picture at right is not from the film, though it captures John Wayne in a pose simultaneously filled with vulnerability and grit, the perfect point of entry into the film, 3 Godfathers, directed by John Ford in 1948. And when you get right down to it, 3 Godfathers is essentially about John Wayne, and the evolution of his on-screen character as he and Ford redefine what the West means to America. Wayne plays Robert Marmaduke Hightower (a handsome name if there ever was one) who is in a kind of transition between the hopeful days of the Western and the defeatist West that begins to surface in later years, a clear marker being Ford's The Searchers (1956), where Wayne's Ethan Edwards practically rejects God and anticipates a fruitless future. Hightower hasn't lost respect for ceremony, unlike Ethan stomping through his family's funeral in The Searchers, but he has an ambivalent relationship with the God. One minute he stands over a cross at a funeral, the next he tosses the bible to the dust, letting its pages wither in the wind. Hightower is a bad guy, but he has his moments of sensitivity that reassure us that he has a conscience.

The film is dedicated to Harry Carey, who starred in the original 1916 version, The Three Godfathers. Carey and Ford were long-time friends who had a working relationship together, making roughly twenty "Cheyenne Harry" serials in 1919, two films in 1918, and their first film together, The Fighting Gringo in 1917. Carey died in 1947, a year after the release of 3 Godfathers, but has a credited role in another 1948 film, Howard Hawks' Red River. On the set of 3 Godfathers Wayne told Carey's son, Harry Carey, Jr. that his father was the one who taught him how to act, how to talk, and how to walk. The film is almost in the presence of Carey's ghost with the amount of influence he extends to the plot, acting style and subtext.

I'm prone to point out the credit sequences in Ford's films, and 3 Godfathers is no exception to that habit. The "directed by" credit appears as the credits music crescendos; the title fades, but the music lingers on as the narrative begins. This musical superimposition of Ford's credit extends his role directly into the narrative—his presence is known, and is in fact undeniable, as the story begins even if he is not a visible character in the narrative. Within the first few shots Ford gives us the basic outline of the story: the first image is a train puffing across the plains (which represents Wayne's antagonist, as we learn later), and just before the credits there is a three-shot of the protagonists, Wayne, Carey, Jr., and Pedro Armendariz, the "three godfathers" on horseback trotting into town. Without an ounce of dialogue and two simple shots we already have a representation of what this story is about; a perfect example of tight, efficient narrative structure.


The three horsemen are bandits that rob the town bank where Ward Bond's Perley "Buck" Sweet is sheriff. The bandits swiftly escape, but though they get out of town unscathed, their water canteen does not. Surrounded by miles of desert, Buck blasts a hole through it, guaranteed to make the three stop at watering holes in neighboring towns. Now that Buck has them on the map, he and his crew set off via train to cuff Wayne and his posse on the spot. Along the way we meet characters played by Jane Darwell (famously known for her role in Ford's The Grapes of Wrath [1939]), Ben Johnson (who plays his best role in Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949]), and Mae Marsh and Hank Worden.

Hightower catches on to Buck's game and uses his cowboy skills to outlast him. Hightower and William (Carey, Jr.) are shown, in an almost documentary style, taking machetes to cactus plants, and squeezing their liquid as sustenance. It's almost as if these guys are real cowboys, real men outside of their filmed characters who know how to manipulate the land to their advantage.

Finally they meet an abandoned wagon, inside of which is a woman on the verge of death and about to give birth. At this point Wayne could have left the woman to perish, but like I said, this crude cowboy still has his conscience.
Pedro (Armendariz) delivers the baby, the woman dies, and the three bandits are now the three godfathers by virtue of the woman's last wish.

Watching how the three rough and tumble men care for the newborn are some of the funniest moments in Ford film history. Hightower, William and Pedro debate technique on how to bathe a baby, which is apparently by smearing it with axle grease in place of olive oil (and they actually rub the baby with grease--such lengths for realism) and what to name him, which they all reluctantly decide it is "Robert William Pedro," a combination of the three of their names, are the heart of the movie. There are close-ups of Hightower with the baby, his thick, leathery man hands patting the baby's back so awkwardly as to make him cry. He yells, "Don't leave me out here all alone!" as the boys walk away momentarily, and spits lines calling the kid "a drunkard at a 4th of Ju-ly barbie" when it takes its bottle.

For anyone who's not a fan of John Wayne, for those who think he simply can't act (I too was once included in this population) I encourage you to see this movie—I encourage you to see it in conjunction with a few of his other films (Stagecoach [1939] and The Searchers, et. al), but 3 Godfathers in particular. In one scene early on in the film he delivers a speech to William and Pedro. For the duration of his talk the camera doesn't cut away; he talks the entire time with altering emotions and changing facial expressions. It is a gorgeous performance, delicate and genuine.



Saturday, December 2, 2006

Contempt - 1963 - DVD

Friday, December 1, 2006



Here's a beautiful picture from Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. That's all I can offer for now, and I promise I am making up for it with my glowing notes on 3 Godfathers, which is very soon to follow...

Great picture, though, huh?

The Architect - 2006 - Blu-Ray DVD projection


Thursday, November 30, 2006

More thoughts on this later. Suffice it to say for now that it is the worst movie of the year (I dare you to find anything worse, more leaden in its script and character, and so visually inarticulate that even its precision Blu-Ray picture clarity can't aid it.)

In the meantime, here's a bloody great review from Stephen Holden.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Volver - 2006 - Film


Monday, November 27, 2006

New Review! Read it in Four Magazine!


Sansho The Bailiff - 1954 - Film




Sunday, November 26, 2006

This is an absolutely amazing movie and it is a crying shame it has taken me this many years to finally see it. Then again, the wait was worth it because I had the privilege of seeing it on 35mm at The Music Box theater, which in case you haven't checked the list of "Best Movie Theaters" on the right scrollbar of this blog, is one of the finest movie theaters in the country.

Thoughts on the film will be brief because I am completely backlogged with other movies to be covered, but I couldn't sign off without noting how gorgeous the long shots are in the forest sequences. In fact, every shot is calculated so meticulously with different scales of light and dark that they are worth noting. In particular though, when I remember the movie the shots that call to mind are the ones of the children trekking through the forest, vines and leaves strewn in the fore, thick tree trunks and foliage in the background--all of which comes together with a clean, matte finish over it. And I haven't even mentioned the story itself, which is a heartbreaking tale of a mother separated from her son and daughter, both of whom go to the ends of the earth to find her again, after years of rape, abuse, slavery and torture.

I can't wait to watch it again, and afterwards I'm eager to get to The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), too. Kenji Mizoguchi fans and experts, please weigh-in for a list of recommendations and favorites, it will be a greatly appreciated guide.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Marie Antoinette - 2006 - Film


Friday, November 24, 2006

Marie Antoinette is lovely for its scenery, for its graceful long shots, elegant costumes, poetic choreography, and for Kirsten Dunst, who, by virtue of her thorough dedication to the characters she plays is one of the best actresses in Hollywood. When you watch Dunst her star persona simply fades away and she is completely that character. With Dunst, director Sofia Coppola gives us one of the prettiest-looking films of the year, not only through the highly stylized costumes and makeup that create this version of Marie Antoinette (Dunst) that looks like a cross between the eighteenth-century and 1980s pop culture, but through every inch of the set that seems to be coated in shiny pink icing. Ironically, the silence that befell Marie Antoinette in its long, picturesque scenes is exactly what brings its energy to a dead halt.

Coppola's last film Lost in Translation (2003) was quiet in terms of dialogue, which made sense thematically since its lead characters played by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, as Americans in Tokyo, literally could not communicate verbally--their characters really are lost in translation. Marie Antoinette looks like it is riding on the fumes of Coppola's former film with the same kind of muted peace, but the momentum of the two stories are too disparate to pace at Lost's cadence.

Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is fourteen when she arrives in Versailles to rule with King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), himself a teenager at the time. The story, based on Antonia Fraser's book "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," is a revised history of the infamous queen's life, which adds a little more sheen to her character than has been popularly thought. What intrigued Coppola about the story was how much pressure this teen was under. She had to give up her former life: her friends, family, clothing, everything. Then she was put in charge of a country. How would a contemporary teen deal with such pressure, Coppola wondered? To see, she tried it out with Dunst and Schwartzman, punching up the costume drama with a stellar soundtrack and a lot of bright color, but the movement of everything she tints with her retro nostalgia sit still, they hardly react. It was clear that Coppola was commenting on celebrity lifestyle, and perhaps her own rather privileged upbringing. But rather than explain the emotional and mental consequences this kind of responsibility and fame burdens upon someone so young and impressionable, there are long, almost still shots of scenes that simply present the problems, as means for our observation.

They are beautiful scenes to observe, I'm the first to become entranced by their depth and detail. Without Coppola to guide us through the long shots with more sympathy, and maybe even a little mockery of Marie's extravagant lifestyle, however, we don't leave the theater seeing eye-to-eye with her, which is after all, the purpose of the story.

Scoop - 2006 - DVD


Friday, November 24, 2006

New DVD Review! Read it at Cinema Blend!






The Battle of Midway - 1942 - DVD


Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I read the credits for The Battle of Midway days after the DVD was on its way back to the Netflix warehouse, so unbeknownst to me Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell both have voice-over dialogue in this John Ford WWI propaganda piece. Too bad! It would have been the second most interesting thing about the 18-minute film. The best part being the final intertitle that reads "300 Japanese Aircraft Destroyed" while a hand paints a "V" in bright red paint across it--which looks a hell of a lot like blood. Get it? Victory spelled with blood? Maybe not.

I was loath to watch this movie, but as it turns out I would have anticipated it with interest if only I had done some superficial research before I screened it. Not only would I have known that there was a reputable cast and crew behind it (yes, Gregg Toland is an uncredited cinematographer, per IMDb), but I would have had a better sense of the danger during the actual shooting. Ford is out there shooting real battle scenes, not picking up stock footage from some nameless soldier drafted to the field. In many shots you can see the camera shake as the bombs rattle the ground (or ship deck, etc.) around it. From that angle, there are a few amazing images of ships and land structures that lay victim of the bombings. The most memorable instance is towards the end as thick, black smoke snakes through the top layer of the blue sky. It's an incredibly surreal moment of chaos and peace in one shot, of an ordinary day gone terribly awry that reminded me of this:








That's some heavy punctuation to follow my otherwise light observations, so I will continue, however briefly, and say as a pseudo-historian I am grateful for this live, historical footage. Sure, it's propagandistic, but the images seen by themselves have meaning, and provide even more context for an event in history that is slowly dying out of collective memory.

Next up in the Ford Movie Marathon: 3 Godfathers (1948).

Monday, November 20, 2006

Floating Weeds - 1959 - DVD


Sunday, November 19, 2006

Years ago Roger Ebert brought Floating Weeds (1959) to The Conference on World Affairs (CWA) in Boulder, Colorado, which is an annual meeting of minds and scholars in the sciences, arts, and beyond. There, Ebert famously hosts "Cinema Interruptus", a 5-day screening and shot-by-shot analysis of a film of his choosing. At the event in the University of Colorado's Macky Auditorium, the film is screened in its entirely the first day (Monday). Each subsequent day the "interruptus" begins; at any point in the film, including the opening credits, audience members yell "stop!" at which point they must either have a comment or question about something within that freezed frame. As you can imagine, it is a long process getting through a movie in total, and in fact, the year I saw Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) at CWA we hardly got past the credit sequence before our time was up for the day. Luckily, the conference keeps running until Friday, but rarely is the whole film seen in full after Monday's introductory screening.

I missed that 2003 "Interruptus," and have meant to see Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds ever since. I finally did, and I am a better critic for it. Now I am left longing to see the original version, The Story of Floating Weeds (1934). The word on the street is that the original is even better. In the meantime, I am mesmerized with the 1959 version, the poetic long-takes of Ozu's characters who move in-and-out of and throughout the frame naturalistically. At once the composition is both simple and complex; in one shot, for instance, Ozu frames two rooms that are separated by one wall: a dining area and a staircase. The shot is simple in terms of the camera movement, since the camera doesn't move; but the shot's complexity is illustrated though the choreography of the characters within the spaces in simultaneous time.

I'm a novice in the Ozu department, but once this John Ford movie marathon is over (does it have to be?) there might be an Ozu marathon in the works. Stay tuned...

'G' Men - 1935 - DVD


Saturday, November 18, 2006

For years 'G' Men looked to me like one of those good, gritty gangster flicks from the 30s that would be loaded with shadowy sets and equally shady characters. Sadly, for a long time I confused it with Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) (which it looks nothing like), and though the confusion in titles is cleared up the film 'G' Men itself was an utter let down.

James Cagney stars as as "Brick," a freshman employee with the FBI, the newly formed government unit that is keen on showing off their covert ops technology. Most of the picture includes leaden scenes of FBI officials presenting different machines that examine evidence (e.g. high-powered microscopes), almost as if the group is proving its legitmacy to the public. It's like a Hollywood version of a public service announcement.

The most ridiculous scene takes place with Cagney at his lady crush's car. She's about to drive away, but Cagney, with a small secret camera hidden in his coat keeps haranguing her for a photograph of herself. Does she have any he can give him as a momento? Very subtle. Cagney literally pulls the "hidden" camera into plain sight while he's talking to her in his not-so-coded language, and you know what the worst part is? She never figures out what he's talking about. He's that sly.

On the other hand, the movie has some great posters. Here are a few I found, including a screenshot from the movie's credits (above).



10 Items or Less - 2006 - Film



Tuesday, November 14, 2006

I snuck into an early screening of 10 Items or Less (in theaters December 1st), the new indie flick from director Brad Silberling, who is most recently known for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Moonlight Mile (2002), and City of Angels (1998). As I filter through the press packet the bio section has no mention of Mr. Silberling's directorial contributions to the 1994 series The Byrds of Paradise--a credit for which I know him better, since I haven't seen any of his movies.

I hope someone out there in Blog Land remembers that TV show, it was with Seth Green and Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played brother and sister in a Hawaiian teen/family drama. It was profound stuff for my 14-year-old self, but I bet it wouldn't pack the same punch all these years later. My main point in mentioning the above TV show is primarily for the sake of my own nostalgia, but it also shows the background that the director Mr. Silberling had before testing out indie waters.

10 Items or Less is about an actor, "him" who is played by Morgan Freeman, a character in the film who is famous in Hollywood, but who has been out of work for four years. To get the momentum back in his career he tries out a small indie picture, which at the very least keeps him busy for a few weeks. On this point, the movie is probably a bit autobiographical for Mr. Silberling, who also wrote (and co-produced) the film.

The story begins as Mr. Freeman's character visits a bodega in a working class area of L.A. to research his role. There, he meets Scarlet (Paz Vega), the head checker of the "10 items or less" lane. After a small series of mishaps the two are inconveniently stuck with one another for the afternoon. It is a simple plot from there. They each spend a lot of time listening to one another while touring through mundane daily activities. Scarlet takes "him" to the local Target store in one scene, where he stands in slack-jawed awe of the low prices, "$8 for a designer t-shirt!" A marvel for a guy wearing a tee retailed at more than ten times that price. The story isn't particularly exciting, but the interactions between these two strangers is delicate and kind. It isn't a movie I plan to buy or watch again, but it was a pleasant time in the theater where I felt a kind of priviledge to watch these two people simply be together.

10 Items or Less opens on December 1, 2006 in select cities.

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