On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

The first gay-pride march took place 40 years ago, setting the tone for a new era. What stood between then and the previous bad old days were the Stonewall riots in June of the year before, 1969.

The Stonewall Uprising, directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner and based on David Carter’s book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, vividly explains the context of the events through clips of old news shows; public service announcements; instructional films from the 1950s and 60s; interviews with Stonewall rioters as well as the police officer in charge of the raid, Seymour Pine; and chats with eye witnesses including two Village Voice reporters, Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott IV. Though the general outline of the uprising is well known, the interviews and clips astound us with how recent and rank was the homophobia embedded in our society, and how victimized and vulnerable were gays and lesbians, even those in relatively tolerant NYC.

Here’s Mike Wallace enlightening us in 1966 on CBS that “the average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” Here’s a 1950s group-therapy flick singling out the nicely dressed boy straightening his hair as abnormal, unlike that well-adjusted kid nearby playing with a saw (!). Here are the paddy-wagon raids and arrests in Greenwich Village that could ruin a career in a heartbeat. The era’s medical solutions to homosexuality were electroshock aversion therapy, a pharmaceutical equivalent of waterboarding, or, in rare cases, lobotomy or castration.

“People talk about being in and out now; there was no out, there was just in,” Eric Marcus, the author of Making Gay History, tells the filmmakers.

Aside from meat-packing transport cars, New York’s homosexual men seeking sex or companionship were largely limited to a few Genovese-family mob-run gay bars, some of which New York City circa Mayor John Lindsay had recently closed. The Stonewall Inn, despite its illegal, overpriced, watered-down beer, its poorly washed mugs, its badly maintained toilets, and its regular raids by the cops, was thus a precious refuge, a place not just to meet and to relax, but to dance–even in drag in one room. And in the era of social revolution, when minorities and women and youth were suddenly not taking it any more, something sparked when in the wee hours of June 28, 1969, a handful of police from the morals squad raided the inn. Some of the patrons, particularly one lesbian woman who’d had more than enough abuse at the wrong end of a patrolman’s baton, did not go willingly into the cops’ wagon. A crowd grew, and grew, and grew, and suddenly the police (and the Village Voice reporters) were the ones trapped and surrounded in the dingy bar, praying for backup to arrive.

Backup did arrive eventually, and for several days rioters and police tactical units squared off and and ran in cat-and-mouse laps around the Village. When it was over, gay men and lesbian women may still have been an underclass, but they were one with a more unified and vivid political and social voice, and a decidedly more aggressive one.

Says one rioter to the filmmakers: “All of a sudden the police faced something they had never seen before. Gay people were never supposed to be threats to police officers. They were supposed to be weak men, limp-wristed, not able to do anything. And here they were … fighting them and attacking them and beating them.”

Feminist, ethnic, and other activists can’t, and haven’t, let down their guard, and neither can gay advocates. This film is a bracing reminder that the best political defense is offense, and that when societal contents are under sufficient pressure, they will explode.

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

A nihilistic Irish caper film that blends grotesque, casual violence with slapdash humor, Perrier’s Bounty is bountiful in talent applied to a turnoff of a script by Mark O’Rowe.

Cillian Murphy is Michael, in debt to merciless mobster Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson). As Michael happens into a robbery-blackmail scheme he hopes will spew the cash he needs, his life is complicated by a love-sick suicidal neighbor, Brenda (Jodie Whittaker), and an out-of-the-blue appearance by Michael’s estranged pop, Jim (Jim Broadbent). An unruly assortment of miscellaneous other thugs, womanizers, and Satanically inclined dog trainers complete the ominous package.

Director Ian Fitzgibbon hits very 90s notes in the Guy Ritchie/Quentin Tarantino-imbued self-awareness of the narrative, to the point of actually having a slacker-ominous voice-over of doom. The project accompanies its heaping plate of head bashings, leg breakings, shootings, and attack-dog mayhem with a chilled glass of low-end metaphysics. But the picture is too busy being cool for us to take its tired hipster-philosophical affectations terribly seriously.

Too bad, because Fitzgibbon knows how to pull robust performances from a strong cast; his pacing is spry (you may be revolted by the movie, but you won’t be bored); and he gives an evocative feel for the vacant lots, abused warehouses, and corrupt watering holes of the Dublin ganglands.

Murphy is compelling as the hapless, instinctively good-hearted, self-sabotaging everyman toughie. Gleeson exudes spooky, fleshy calm, and savors the acid ironies of Perrier’s politically correct soliloquies on the subject of gay gangster equality. Whittaker makes us feel for Brenda’s wronged and love-blind womanhood. And Broadbent is superb as a coke- and sleep-starved ne’er-do-well with deep-running loyalties and some surprising handy criminal skill sets.

David Holmes’s percussive rock-jazz score helps propel Seamus Deasy’s streetwise cinematography. And there are some smart moments compliments of stunt, effects, and makeup personnel.

But despite its guise of escorting us on a tour of colorful-character-stuffed criminal hell, Bounty feels more like a screenwriter’s soulless creative calisthenics. It leaves us fairly breathless, but feeling none the healthier for the exercise.

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

Say your son is a preppy lit major and a bit of a dilettante. What future could there possibly be for him? Presuming, that is, that he doesn’t go on to professional school the way lit majors are supposed to once they’re scared straight by a grounded relative or career counselor. A professorship? Good luck! School teacher? Perhaps, if he lacks ambition. Writer? God help you. Journalist? Pity the fool.

But fear not! There’s another path, or at least a supplementary one, as we learn in Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s enjoyably eccentric, low key new farce, The Extra Man, which they coscripted with Jonathan Ames based on his novel. Berman and Pulcini proved in American Splendor (2003) that they know how to take intelligent risks when it comes to a surly blending of character study and comedy. They do likewise here, in this quirky tale of sexual, chronological, and fiscal disorientation in Manhattan, capitalizing on an excellent cast led by a scruffily suave Kevin Kline.

Louis Ives (Paul Dano, looking like a wan, WASPy lost lamb) teaches English at a Northeastern prep school, enthusiastically if stiffly explicating the marvels of Fitzgerald to his affluent charges. Swept up in the flapper-era romance, he’s dressed to a T and every inch a gentleman, except that he has this itsy little urge to dress up as a gentlewoman, especially fancying the lingerie. When a misstep in that arena gets him dismissed from his teaching position, he takes the opportunity to move to New York and try his hand at writing. He finds a day job selling ads for an environmental magazine and sublets a room from one Henry Harrison (Kline), a failed playwright and erstwhile world traveler who has burned through his money and found a niche for himself as an “extra man,” or escort to rich, elderly women, particularly the ninetysomething Vivian (a rapacious, gleaming-eyed Marian Seldes).

Nothing in the befuddled Louis’s life fits tidily into categories. He likes women, but so much so that he toys with becoming one. His mind is in the 20s; but his car, a huge gas-guzzler that he associates with his deceased father, is in the 70s; and his green-advocacy job is distinctly new millennium. He cares for the environment, of course, but likes eggs too much to be vegan and spareribs too much to be vegetarian. You might say that he’s a young man of principles that he can’t quite adhere to.

Perhaps Louis is able to bond with the crabby, manipulative, but undeniably vivacious Henry because he, too, is difficult to peg and less than consistent. Nominally and rantingly conservative politically, he’s certainly not profoundly judgmental. He seems of somewhat unstable sexuality. And he has a taste for the luxurious life, but on the criminal cheap (conning his way into the opera and whatnot). He’s Charles Winchester III from M*A*S*H crossed with Paul Varjak from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, seasoned with a dash of namesake Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady. Kline pushes the part to the brink of caricature, but because his role is a self-conscious quasi-caricature anyway, I’m pretty sure the approach is justified. It also plays off his ambisexual filmography from titles like In & Out and De-Lovely.

What’s convivial about The Extra Man is that it reveals its untidy characters in an appropriately untidy way, never surging into hyped, raucous “hilarity ensues” sex gags or easy marriage-comedy couplings. More in keeping with the Wes Anderson universe, The Extra Man’s fun is a little miserable and its miseries a little fun–all a big unholy social stew.

Big-eyed, gawky Louis has simmering hots for his adorable office mate Mary (a brittle and charming Katie Holmes), but while the plot hints that there may be a place for them as a couple, it’s clear that Louis has psychological miles to go before he can find much common ground with any significant other whom he doesn’t pay by the hour. Similarly connected, but not, are Henry and his friend Gershon (the ubiquitous John C. Reilly in a shifting character romp), who lives downstairs. As with Henry’s former flatmate, a cosmopolitan hunchback whom Henry suspects has stolen his prized play manuscript, Gershon’s exact relationship with  Henry is murky, but with romantic and sexual vibes aplenty.

Yet do these tangled social and psychological boundaries make Henry and, possibly, Louis, who becomes Henry’s protege of sorts, less or more valuable as extra men?

Like flirtatious, preening elderly widows who decide they’re eternal debutantes, the extra men, we discover, fill an essential role in the unconventional world for the very reasons that they fill no obvious essential role in the conventional world. In the lid-for-every-pot universe, they are the dented, weirdly colored, poorly-sealing tops to assorted vintage cookery. The Extra Man entertainingly intimates that such odds and ends, in people as in objects, are almost always a tad unseemly, but often very valuable as well.

Release Note: The Extra Man premieres on Video On Demand, Amazon, Vudu, XBOX Live, and Playstation on June 25, and opens in theaters July 30, 2010.

Follow Me

Alex Kafka

Cine Synapse

• My Profile
• My Headline Grabs
• My RSS Feed

---

Jun. 13 2010 — 6:06 pm | 33 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

‘Best Worst Movie’: fond tribute to a crappy cult flick

By ALEX KAFKA

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

To really fail, you can’t try to fail. Folks will see through any cynical effort at badness. To really fail, you must try your utmost to succeed, then crash spectacularly, as did ski jumper Vinko Bogataj, of the famed “agony of defeat” clip on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

So what is the cinematic equivalent of Bogataj’s disastrous spill? According to reviewers at the Internet Movie Data Base, it’s Troll 2 (see trailer below), Italian director Claudio Fragasso’s 1990 Utah-localed horror flick about–well, no one’s sure really what it’s about, which is one of its many problems. Its plot, more or less regarding a family trip fouled by man-eating monsters (goblins, by the way; there are no trolls) and a valiant boy aided by the ghost of his grandad, is pretty incoherent; its script by Rossella Drudi is alternately hackneyed, offensive, and meaningless; its acting is atrocious; its production values, if possible, even worse. And yet, everyone involved in it, from all appearances, and according to way too many recent interviews, worked really, really hard! They knew there were problems, they weren’t generally having much fun, but they were taking it quite seriously, and hoping for the best.

The result is a badness with a very special quality that almost circles around to goodness. The movie has become a cult sensation, not a self-consciously campy one like Rocky Horror, but a very un-self-conscious dud that almost makes dudness an artistic criterion unto itself. It’s so bad that it has squirmed through some sort of aesthetic wormhole into another dimension of lousy that has a noble purity.

Michael Stephenson, who starred in the film as a boy and spent years hating it, has now come around to realizing the one-in-a-million sweepstakes of awfulness that Troll 2 inadvertently won, and he has made an amusing if highly repetitive documentary about its new lease on life, its emergence from the “holy f___ing sh__” category of terribleness in one video store to sold-out screenings in New York and Los Angeles. He drags back into the limelight the film’s cast, especially the affable Alabama dentist, George Hardy, who looks like a cross between Dennis Quaid and Craig T. Nelson and has twice their combined acting abilities, if you add a minus sign before that number. Inducing special cringes, the film’s director and screenwriter, Fragasso and Drudi, are also rounded up for interviews in Italy as well as appearances at the U.S. screenings. Drudi explains, politely if unhelpfully, that the plot was inspired in part by how pissed off she was at her friends turning vegetarian. Fragasso proves to have as little chemistry with his cast now as he had then, though his English has apparently improved, and he is befuddled and insulted by the critical knocks and the celebration of the film’s through-and-through inadequacies. At first, he seems to be oblivious to the fact that the film’s fans are laughing at him, not with him. Then, when he realizes, he is clearly not pleased.

Hardy, who did the role of the dad in 1989 as a lark, has moved on to become a beloved member of his Alabama town, a sweet dad, a gregarious guy with a winning smile who is cherished even by his ex-wife. This is a fellow who volunteers his time to help out patients who can’t pay, who roller-blades in the town parade dressed up as the tooth fairy. You would want him as your friend, if not your leading man. The cult-film madness draws him back into the limelight for a spell, but after some less-than-gratifying appearances at memorabilia conferences (at a horror-film convention, he is parked near a table with stars from Nightmare on Elm Street 4), he realizes that Z-list celebrity status isn’t all it’s cracked up to be–or maybe that it is. But poignantly, he confesses that he wishes he’d made a success of acting and that he’d eagerly star in Troll 3.

Margo Prey, who played his wife in Troll 2, has hunkered down in Utah, caring for her elderly mother, into what seems like a life of more than mild eccentricity. She is convinced that Troll 2 is a quality drama, worthy of Tracy and Hepburn. Connie Young, who played the couple’s daughter, has continued to act and, to this day, refuses to list the film on her resume. Robert Ormbsby, who played the grandpa, and says he’s more or less made a career out of playing grandpas, feels he’s frittered his life away, despite playing hundreds of stage roles. And so on.

Are there grand lessons to be drawn from any of this? I think maybe one, which we already knew but can always constructively be reminded of. And that is that most of what we do passionately, and well-meaningly, comes through as a gift of heartfelt energy, even if it sucks.

Troll 2 is a movie by people who put their asses on the line for art, then have them shot off. Long live ill-conceived projects, eagerly, energetically, carefully, and horrendously executed. Without them, as Best Worst Movie instructs, everything would be at least pretty good, and then, to our great disadvantage, we’d forget how bad bad can be.

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

OSS 117: Lost in Rio, from director Michel Hazanavicius, is the second in a parody franchise drawn from a non-parody book and movie franchise about a postwar French superspy who predated Bond. Lampooning the sexist, racist presumptions of the de Gaulle-era establishment, the film might remind American audiences of  Bond parodies including the 1967 Casino Royale, Johnny English, the Austin Powers movies, as well as more general spy spoofs like Top Secret and the Hot Shots flicks. Rio’s consciously un-PC retro-hero even brings to mind the 1987 Hanks/Aykroyd parody-action version of Dragnet.

When you think about it, those other movies represent a pretty broad range of parodies, with varying MO’s and targets, and, alongside some slightly narrow French political references and concerns, plus some intermittent pacing problems, Rio runs into troublesome comedic mission creep in competing in so many subgenres. It even takes on Hitchcock burlesques like High Anxiety in a stale, gaudy Vertigo subplot, and Producers-type Nazi send-ups too. Much like its clueless hero, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, or agent OSS 117, the film has lots of juicy targets but becomes disoriented and isn’t sure which ones it’s chasing after at any given moment.

Still, if you have a taste for generally well-executed and sometimes culturally daring humor, you might want to give Rio a little of your time, because it does have some things going for it, not least among them the clownishly charismatic Jean Dujardin as Hubert. He’s got the smarmy, condescending 60s-era spy poses and attitude down cold, and shoulders up against Peter Sellers Clouseau territory and Monty Python edge too in his absurd bumble in the jungle. He is pursuing, you see, ex-Nazis in Brazil, while pursued by Chinese assassins angry about an Austin-Powersish melee in Gstaadt. The prize is a microfilm listing French Nazi collaborators. Aiding Hubert is an obnoxious CIA agent, Trumendous, played by Ken Samuels with a belligerently barking laugh and horribly accented French dotted with English swearing. Trumendous is like Fleming’s Felix Leiter crossed with one of Graham Greene’s most obnoxious American spooks.

While it doesn’t all come off, there are some ambitiously boundary-pushing bits playing off the anti-Semitic and just plain ignorant Hubert’s collaboration with a beautiful go-go-booted, mini-dressed Mossad agent, Dolores (Louise Monot), and French hypocrisy regarding Vichy-era political compromises. Hubert’s  carnivorously manly spit-roasting of a crocodile, an amusing open-gowned chase in a hospital, scattered bad-guy gunfire allergic to its heroic target, and similarly imaginative gags provide lots of visual ribaldry.

And in general, Rio just looks fantastic, nailing its 60s-inspired vision from Nathalie Chesnais’s crisp, colorful costuming to Eric Lecuyver’s well-scouted modernist locations. Guillaume Schiffman’s cinematography has that beiged-out panoramic postcard look of the Goldfinger period; editor Reynauld Bertrand adds some over-the-top Thomas Crown Affair-type split screens; and Ludovic Bource’s musical score is right on genre cue, down to the reverbed, delayed flute riffs when Hubert is spooked (although the Bernard Herrmann Hitchcock quotes seem to cross the boundary from musical tribute to possible copyright infringement).

While surely not for everyone, Rio will nonetheless be a moderately fun romp for a self-selecting few who can’t resist a spy who has everything, except common sense and tact.

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

***

He deserts you every day, in the evening over dinner talks only about himself, and then, in bed, just uses you. Being a sex doll is no picnic.

But, from Japan–land of digital and robotic pets, and pioneer of 3-D TV porn–comes a melancholy fantasy, written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda from a manga graphic novel, about one inflatable sex toy who comes to life, then looks for love and meaning in the big city. Air Doll is too long, and its central metaphor worked a little too strenuously and obviously. But it is also beautiful, thought provoking, and poetic, and its star, Bae Doona (The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) is captivating as Nozomi, the object of desire who desires to be more than an object.

Nozomi belongs to Hideo (Itsuji Itao), a put-upon restaurant waiter who bought her to help him get over his old girlfriend. One day when Hideo leaves to go to work, Nozomi comes to life, puts on her French maid’s outfit, and heads out into the city streets. She finds work at a video store, begins to learn about life from movies, and also starts a romance with Junichi (Arata),  a fellow employee who learns Nozomi’s secret and confesses that he too is empty inside. (The ambiguity of that confession is not insignificant.)

There is, needless to say, more than a shred of perversity to all this. But while Bae, a former model from South Korea, is certainly lovely, this is, for the most part, a conspicuously unsexy movie. Its kinks are more existential than sensual. Nozomi’s plasticity is played as metaphor for the objectification, disposability, loneliness, and malnourished aesthetics of modern, and particularly urban, life. The video store, and visual and spoken references to light through plastic, hint aggressively that Nozomi’s situation is also a metaphor for film itself, attractive but also a dubious substitute for more directly lived experience.

While the doll’s artificiality is transformed by the vicissitudes of living, the people’s vitality is sapped by a discomfort with their mortality. The person within the awkward airy machine meets the awkward fleshy machine within the person. Nozomi and the humans who actually and allegorically rub up against her are opposites, but their fundamental struggles, reconciling the soulfully animate with the preprogrammed automatic, are the same. It’s a theme with universal resonance. “Control yourself” is, after all, the battle cry of both the puritanical scold and the smug countercultural free spirit.

Particularly striking is Junichi’s joy in deflating, then reanimating, his new love. The notion of sexual pleasure as godly control is sadomasochistic but, again, also metaphorical, as is, I suppose, sadomasochism itself.  Much like the replicants’ parent-seeking in Blade Runner, Nozomi, in action reflective of idiom, goes to meet her maker. That makes for a strangely engaging sequence, perhaps because on our most deflated days, everyone is prone to reach for that breath of our creation and some assurance, to pump ourselves up, that our creation has a purpose.

If life does have a purpose, Koreeda suggests, it’s not one we are likely to find by ourselves. Linking the movie’s explicitly sexual premise and its societal critique, Nozomi says: “It seems life is constructed in a way that no one can fulfill it alone. Life contains its own absence, which only another can fulfill.”

**
On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See
**

California’s first gay marriages took place two years ago. But it was a sadly brief moment of civil-liberties sunshine. Mostly funded and energized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Proposition 8, outlawing same-sex marriage, stomped on those rights just months later.

Thanks in large part to the investigative work of political activist and watchdog Fred Karger, it’s no secret that the Mormon Church was the primary bankroller and mover behind Prop 8. Particularly after the ballot proposition passed, the church actually touted its involvement, though during the hugely expensive campaign–in which supporters spent some $43 million against proposition opponents’ roughly $40 million–LDS strategically kept its profile fairly low as part of an ostensible coalition with Catholics and Evangelicals. It had earlier done the same in successfully sabotaging same-sex marriage rights in Hawaii.

But if the outlines of the story have been clear for some time, the ugly details and tone of the Mormon effort are brought to the fore in Reed Cowan’s passionate documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition. Cowan and most of his crew, as well as many of their featured interview subjects, grew up gay and Mormon in Utah, and 8 has the feverish indignation of an intrareligious insurgency. The project began as a chronicle of cast-off homeless gay Mormon teens, but when Salt Lake LDS elders systematically invaded California politics, Cowan changed the film’s angle and scope.

Still, elements of the preliminary project remain, and once the machinations of the Prop 8 politics are explored, by Karger and others, Cowan focuses on the history of Mormons’ persecution of their gay youth. At the political level this is embodied in the mouth-foaming hatred of Mormon Bishop and Utah State Senator Chris Buttars. At the college level, an alumnus of Brigham Young University harrowingly recounts psychological and physical torture of its gay students. And if you think “torture” is an overstatement, listen to the testimony of that alum, Bruce Barton, who describes university officials stripping and binding him, and electrically shocking his genitals in an effort to brainwash away his homosexual urges. His friends were treated similarly, he says, and were not all as successful as he has been in surviving it. Cowan interviews several gay and lesbian Mormons who tried to kill themselves in moments of shamed despair, and other cases are cited in which such attempts succeeded. A church member describes an LDS official essentially saying good riddance to the deceased at the funeral in one of those instances.

Mormon and ex-Mormon commentators explain not just the financial but the socio-religious torque of Prophet Thomas S. Monson’s call to “do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time.” “Means and time” is a far-from-casual phrase signaling, we’re told, that Mormons who didn’t devote their checkbooks and time to the Prop 8 efforts would be in dire social and spiritual straits, and that threat was followed up, church members say, with visits to their homes by LDS officials suggesting very specific (and hefty) donation amounts. The campaign incorporated skillful and deceptive fear politics, suggesting that religious freedoms were at stake when they simply weren’t.

California and federal tax and election officials have investigated the financial and political ramifications of a tax-exempt religious organization’s initiating such a blatant and specific political campaign. Meanwhile, the movie documents Prop 8’s toll on individual Mormon families, like those of Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones, who got married in San Francisco during that brief statutory window before Prop 8 and after the California Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the previous ban on same-sex marriage. Cowan highlights the irony of Mormon-fueled anti-gay discrimination against Barrick, who is a direct descendant of an LDS founding father, Frederick Granger Williams. Williams was hounded from state to state and eventually out of the country because of his polygamy.

Sociologists, psychologists, and religious-studies scholars can study whether the LDS hierarchy’s extreme aversion to homosexuality is related in some compensatory way to polygamy in the church’s history, however distant, and the practice’s enshrinement in its theology of the afterlife. But Cowan makes clear that in the here and now, the church’s actions are tearing many of its members’ families apart, in addition to fueling discriminatory practices beyond the borders of the church.

Mormon leaders themselves cast their Prop 8 campaign in terms of “war.” Well, if it’s war they want, it’s war they’ve got. They have the hard-won American freedom to get politically involved within the legal confines that municipal, state, and federal officials determine legitimate. Maybe they even have the freedom to hound their own members to early deaths and rip apart their families–they certainly don’t have a denominational patent on psychological manipulation of their congregations. Lots of religions are guilty of that.

But Mormons and ex-Mormons have the right to make eloquent, justly outraged films, and to form powerful, well-funded coalitions of their own. And if the Mormon church narrowly won the Prop 8 battle, the legal same-sex marriages being performed in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.; recognition of same-sex marriages in Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island; the long-overdue impending shove being given to don’t ask, don’t tell; a summit in the works of gay college presidents; and similar developments suggest the church will lose this war.

Meanwhile, to Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones, and to all the other devoted couples out there, mazel tov. Don’t give up hope. Time and democracy are on your side.

**

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

**

Don’t overload Neil Jordan’s moody idyll Ondine with too many expectations, and you’ll be carried away for a spell by this Irish fable about the luck we bring when it’s luck we seek.  This is Jordan in low-key magical-realism mode, but as writer as well as director, he knows how to balance his magic and realism deftly, if manipulatively.

Colin Farrell plays a disheveled fisherman–Syracuse, nicknamed Circus for his drunken exploits before he went on the wagon–who nets a mysterious beautiful woman (Alicja Bachleda). Syracuse and his ill daughter Annie (Alison Barry) come to call the woman Ondine, after the water spirit of European lore. Ondine appears to change their fortune, even as her fear of being spotted by others in the village makes us wonder about her own circumstances.

Jordan presents the tale with effectively archetypal simplicity, but his script is cloddishly foreboding and too heavy on the whimsical wisdom of the wheelchair-bound Annie. Barry is undeniably cute, but  her character bears more than her manageable share of the story’s actual and symbolic weight. Behind his stringy mop of hair, Farrell plays up Syracuse’s sweet, lovelorn, arch-browed mopeyness. Bachleda is voluptuously enigmatic, and Jordan has a grand old time parading her around in lingerie and tight dresses, especially wet ones. Stephen Rea, on the other hand, is divinely dry in his peripheral role as a droll, patient priest, whom Syracuse confesses to because there are no AA meetings available.

Kjartan Sveinsson’s fluid music, interspersed with Celtic folk-rock, is a resonant complement to cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s enticing aquatic locales.

**

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See

**

There are films so wildly uncommercial that, whatever their actual merits, you have to love them for their sheer trueness to self. If they happen also to be moving, historically relevant, gorgeous, and therapeutically antithetical to 99 percent of the mass media we wallow in, all the better. Sweetgrass is all of those things.

Directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the film follows a Scandinavian-American sheep-ranching family in Montana, that of Lawrence Allested, on one of their last, and also one of the last, sheep drives on a federal grazing permit to the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. After filming, the ranch and most of the sheep were sold in 2006, thus closing out a chapter of more than a century for the Allested family. With no narration, no musical score, and unobtrusive editing down, over eight years, of some 200 hours of footage, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor essentially embed themselves in the 2001 sheep shearing and birthing on the ranch, and then the 150-mile drive, all on hoof, of several thousand sheep. It’s more anthropology than it is entertainment, and richer for that.

The sheep are gorgeous and have a dignity that any more-standard narrative approach would only mar. They have individual and family and group personalities, rhythms, and, of course, noises that can’t be described too well, only witnessed. Lovely, patient camera work brings us quite literally into the herd, making us feel, without sensationalizing, tense jumps from a mountain stream onto an embankment; the suckling of new lambs, who butt restlessly into their mothers’ undersides before nursing; the sheep’s raucous bleating when a wolf is nearby; their stoic agitation as they are braced between the ranchers’ legs during shearing; and the instinctual geometry of the sheep’s herding patterns as they’re ushered through ranch gates. Interspersed are occasional slow zooms in and out on spectacular Montana and Wyoming panoramas.

What occurs is the cumulative opposite of anthropomorphizing. Not only are we shepherded away from comparing the sheep to humans, we start to see the humans as sympathetically but distinctly mammalian–well within and not particularly atop any great chain of being. Wrestling the new mothers and their babies, chain-smoking or gnawing on bacon while making taciturn chat by a primitive tent, agonizing over fitting together pieces of pipe, waking up scared in the night to fire rifles at some flashlit bears stalking the herd, these cowboys are tough, but endearingly vulnerable too. Also fascinating is the interspecies collaboration between the cowboys and their sheep dogs. While the homo sapiens may be ostensibly in charge, the whole operation is clearly symbiotic, and in ancient ways too.

This ain’t no March of the Penguins either–don’t bring the young ‘uns. In one impressively foul-mouthed soliloquy, one of the hands, fed up with bad weather; injured, ineffective dogs; wayward sheep; insufficient sleep; a fading cellphone battery; and a screwed up knee; expresses his deep misery in a burst of Stetson-style swearing Larry McMurtry or Thomas McGuane would be proud to have written. Then, like toughies the world over, he calls his mom. The cowboys sometimes chat with and sing to and cajole their dogs and their sheep and themselves. Aside from their walkie-talkies and such, they could be driving those sheep in 1910 as easily as in the new millennium.

A bit in subject matter, but more in its pace, dignity, and unsentimental reverence of nature, Sweetwater reminds me a little of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It captures a particular vanishing way of life, but in doing so reasserts some fundamentals of every way of life–its strivings, frustrations, terrors, but also those rare and blissful moments of stillness and overwhelming beauty. Grazing on that for a while, we feel our film horizons being broadened, our skies made bigger.

Ken Loach, that accomplished English chronicler of the working class, is more convincing and compelling as director of feel-bad films than of feel-good films. Looking for Eric is a whimsical take on a down-and-out postman who turns hallucinated confabs with a soccer star into self-administered life coaching. The film has both feel-bad and feel-good elements , but while the latter are fun, only the former feel authentic.

Manchester postman Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is divorced and depressed, at wit’s end rearing two out-of-control teenage stepsons, Ryan (Gerard Kearns) and Jess (Stefan Gumbs). Eric’s daughter, who has a new baby and is trying to complete a university degree, needs him to share sitting duties with his first wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop). In regular contact with his estranged love, Eric faces his regrets over leaving Lily decades before. On top of that, Ryan’s gotten in with a very bad lot, forced to hold a gun for an impulsive, ruthless gangster on probation.

Eric retreats to booze and weed, befriending the hallucination of his hero, 90s Manchester soccer star Eric Cantona (an actor, producer, and beach-soccer entrepreneur now, Cantona plays himself). Cantona not only talks Eric through his dilemmas but sets out with him on a fitness regime too. Aided by Cantona and a bevy of Eric’s work and pub pals, most notably the self-help advocate Meatballs (a likably boisterous John Henshaw), Eric starts to pick up the slivers of his shattered life and glue them back together.

Evets is a fabulously sympathetic, gaunt, good-hearted hero, and Bishop’s Lily is a woman whose earthy tenderness is worthy of renewed late-midlife adoration. Cantona plays himself with an enjoyably low-key, handsome zen mischief. And the fix Ryan gets the family in seems all too real and harrowing.

But that’s when the late forced sunshine of Paul Laverty’s screenplay brightens things up far too tidily and unnaturally. For it’s the depressing messiness of Eric’s life that persuasively grounds the Cantona fantasy bits. And the ensuing far-fetched plot points end up knocking those very naturalistic quotidian details off their tracks. It’s almost like watching two movies: The first one’s quite good and the second one’s pretty goofy. Loach and Laverty would have done better to find a gloomier but more credible middle ground, but instead kick significantly high of the goal.

****

On the Cine Synapse rating scale, this film receives a:

Nah
Take It or Leave It
Well Worth Your While
Must See