Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:31:10 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Bruce Bennett :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Bruce+Bennett istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/around-the-world-and-back/86634/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The noncompetitive, keenly curated New York Film Festival, which begins its two-week run Friday, is neither a far-ranging marketplace nor a prelude to an awards night. Therefore, it's tempting to look upon what is, by the increasingly popular "more is more" programming standards of Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, and Tribeca, a comparatively small slate of 28 contemporary features as a reliable bellwether of global cinematic trends. In the four decades since its creation, Lincoln Center's autumn... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/eagle-eye-let-it-go-to-voicemail/86639/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST If one is inclined to entertain the notion of hurling one's cell phone into traffic, immersing it in water, or doing whatever else it takes to make it stop delivering bad news, garbled messages, and unsolicited contact from without, "Eagle Eye," a new thriller from Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks creative brain trust, may be just the ticket. Within the first reel, slacker Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) gets drawn and quartered by his phone. First, a voice belonging to Jerry's mother delivers the worst... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/manny-farber-91-eccentric-film-critic/84241/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Manny Farber, who died August 18 at 91, was a critic who helped establish mainstream American filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, and even animation guru Chuck Jones, as legitimate subjects for serious artistic criticism. Farber was also an accomplished fine artist and art teacher with five decades of solo and group shows and multiple grant awards to his credit. His canvases are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Los... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/buying-and-selling-justice-in-rio-elite-squad/86175/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST According to Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the narrator and dramatic catalyst of José Padilha's fiction film debut "Elite Squad," on the mean streets of modern-day Rio de Janeiro, "the drug gangs and the police had to work out ways to get along." The captain, leader of a cadre of the titular paramilitary cops called BOPA, initially presides over a flashy but quotidian cinematic tour of Rio after dark, rendered in a style and tone similar to the kinetic view of Brazil's urban underworld in... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/lean-spirited/85698/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST "Nothing lasts, really," Laura Jesson, the guilt-hobbled heroine played by Celia Johnson, laments in director David Lean's 1945 film "Brief Encounter." "Not happiness, not despair, not even life lasts very long." Though inspired by Noël Coward's play "Still Life," Laura's musing (delivered, like much of her dialogue, in voice-over) was co-scripted by the British-born Lean (1908-91). Indeed, that resigned assessment of the impermanence of things would make sense delivered by nearly anyone in the... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/righteous-kill-the-case-of-the-vanishing-legacies/85695/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In a heavily circulated bootleg tape of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis recording radio spots for their 1953 Paramount film, "The Caddy," Martin mangles the ad copy they've been given and mispronounces one piece of hyperbole as "righteous" instead of "riotous." "'Righteous'? Where the f--- do you see 'righteous,'" Mr. Lewis demands, ad-libbing. "What is this, a religious picture?" Both actors then descend into an exchange of barbs even less printable in a family newspaper. Each time I've read or... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-downeys-no-budget-genius/85404/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Since its founding by director Martin Scorsese in 1990, the nonprofit preservation organization the Film Foundation has provided support and funding for restorations of key works by filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray, David Lynch, Jean Renoir, and John Casavettes. The foundation's wide-ranging efforts have also broadened to include experimental and underground cinema artists such as George and Mike Kuchar and Jonas Mekas. Beginning Friday, Anthology Film Archives will... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/everybody-wants-to-be-italian-love-is-never/85230/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the eight years since he was dumped by his girlfriend, Jake (Jay Jablonski), the ardent but clueless hero of the new romantic comedy "Everybody Wants to Be Italian," has worked overtime to keep from moving on. Even the fact that Isabella (Marisa Petroro) is now a married mother of three cannot persuade her former beau to let go of the past. Undaunted, Jake continues to fruitlessly woo his ex to the combined irritation, embarrassment, and amusement of Isabella, her husband, and their children... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/sukiyaki-western-django-imitation-takes-the-form/84866/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The Italian-produced, Spanish-shot, and internationally cast cowboy movies of the 1960s, known on these shores as spaghetti Westerns, have been admired and appreciated by Japanese film buffs (who refer to them as "macaroni Westerns") for four decades. The fact that Sergio Leone's initial international success, 1964's "A Fistful of Dollars," was lifted from Japanese filmmaking maestro Akira Kurosawa's 1961 "Yojimbo" (Kurosawa had borrowed his own influential both-sides-against-the-middle plot... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/charlton-heston-at-lincoln-center-the-man-of/84869/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST When word arrived in April that Charlton Heston had succumbed to pneumonia at 84, the first image from the Illinois-born actor's deep gallery of outsized roles that came to my mind was not one that was excerpted in the news coverage announcing his passing. Heston's Oscar-winning part in "Ben Hur," his turn as a scowling Mexican policeman in Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil," his ultimate ride into history and eternity in "El Cid," his climactic disclosure of precisely what ingredients made up the... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/day-of-wrath-dreyers-tyranny-of-the-heart/84857/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST It's easy to argue that, quality-wise, new movies are spinning their collective wheels as summer draws to a close. But the old ones just keep getting better and better. This season's repertory riches have been extravagant: News in July of the discovery of lost sections of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" briefly but soundly drowned out the trumpeting of lumbering blockbusters as they immodestly squeezed themselves into multiplexes. This summer's crop of digital restorations and new prints of old films... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/pasolinis-cruel-masterpiece/84572/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" contains some of the most repellent and disturbing imagery ever put on film and was instantly banned in Pasolini's native Italy upon its release in 1975. But that's not the only reason why production history alone has assured "Salò" a morbid notoriety: Pasolini was murdered under highly suspicious circumstances prior to the completed film's contentious premiere. "Salò" has also assumed the pinnacle of covetous film-buff fascination because... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/che-its-a-long-story/86827/ Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST During last night's post-screening press conference for "Che," the two-part, 268-minute film based on the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara that makes its debut at the New York Film Festival on October 7, the film's director, Steven Soderbergh, addressed a fundamental irony at the heart of his ambitious and technically polished new project. Though Che Guevara dedicated his life to fomenting Marxist revolution intended to abolish capitalism, the Argentine physician-guerrilla's name and image have... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/nyff-opens-albert-lewins-magic-box/86641/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Though the likely audience favorite among the revivals in the 46th New York Film Festival will be the restored version of Max Ophuls's "Lola Montès," an equally glittering cinematic jewel is sure to get audiences talking. As part of Martin Scorsese's ongoing preservation and presentation work, Albert Lewin's 1951 romantic fable "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" will unspool at the festival on October 10 in a new print from the George Eastman House. This new edition returns the film's... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/pierre-rissient-is-the-man-to-know/85882/ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST A simple Internet search for the name Pierre Rissient turns up little more than an assistant-director credit on Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless," two director credits of Mr. Rissient's own for films made in the Philippines and Hong Kong, and a host of appearances in documentaries about film luminaries such as Budd Boetticher and Fritz Lang. It's sparse notice for a man revered by filmmakers of all ages around the world, from Clint Eastwood to Werner Herzog to Quentin Tarantino, all of whom exalt... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/towelhead-ball-throws-in-the-towel/85681/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST When Jasira (Summer Bishil), a 13-year-old Arab-American girl, accepts an offer from her mother's live-in boyfriend to assist her in some highly personal grooming, her mother, Gail (Maria Bello), decides it's time for her daughter to go live with her father in far-off Houston. But the uptight Houston of Alan Ball's "Towelhead," which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center, is preparing for the first Gulf War, and Jasira's Lebanese-Christian father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi), is a priggish and... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/richard-widmark-rebel-with-a-cause/84385/ Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In 1983, the Telluride Film Festival was known to film aficionados as much for its annual tributes to cinema greats as it was for being a showcase for emerging talent. Arriving in the thin Rocky Mountain air 25 years ago, I was pleased to discover that one of the tributees was to be the Russian writer-director Andre Tarkovsky. But I was ecstatic about the other honoree: the American actor and sometime producer Richard Widmark. Beginning Monday, Widmark, who was 93 when he passed away in March... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/richard-serra-man-of-steel/84120/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Note: Correction appended. "I think of myself as a builder," the sculptor Richard Serra says early in "Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet," a 2005 documentary portrait of the artist as a restless 66-year-old that opens tomorrow at Film Forum for a two-week engagement. The film is nominally devoted to documenting the preparation and execution of "The Matter of Time," a massive grouping of Mr. Serra's signature steel walls, cones, and ellipses commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/laura-cantrell-courts-the-country-goddesses/84107/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For an increasing number of contemporary musicians romancing the American country and Western idiom, self-expression goes hand in hand with an archival zeal. There is arguably no better local example of this than the Nashville-born, Queens-residing singer, songwriter, and lapsed radio DJ Laura Cantrell. Ms. Cantrell, whose new EP of cover renditions, "Trains and Boats and Planes," draws from such varied musical sources as Canadian folkie Gordon Lightfoot, British post-punks New Order, and... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-rocker-and-the-man-played/84119/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST No offense to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but if recent Hollywood movies are any indication, there are, in fact, nothing but second acts in American lives. In "The Rocker," a comedy opening in the city tomorrow, Act 1 of Robert "Fish" Fishman's (Rainn Wilson) saga climaxes in 1986 at the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio. Propelled by Fish's googly-eyed, grouper-mouthed drum attack, local hair-band heroes Vesuvius whip the hometown crowd into a frenzy. Clearly (a couple of characters even say so in... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/remembering-arthur-lipsett-the-collage-makes/83924/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the joyful delusions shared by successive generations of film students is that though most aesthetic discoveries have deep roots in the work of yesteryear, they nevertheless spring fully formed from the bright young minds of today. This is particularly the case with nascent filmmakers working in the cinematic avant-garde (for want of a better word). The pleasures of discovering and applying the tools of filmic expression for abstract, non-narrative reasons can sometimes blind a hungry... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-life-of-a-jazz-singer-the-ballad-of-anita-oday/83925/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For the bulk of her career, the late Anita O'Day (1919-2006) described herself, quite accurately, as a "song stylist" rather than just a jazz vocalist. Not surprisingly, then, the central sequence in "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer," which makes its premiere Friday at Cinema Village, is a performance. In 1958, O'Day was invited to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival — the same year that filmmakers Bert Stern and Aram Avakian were asked to document what was then the fifth annual seaside... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/star-wars-clone-wars-painted-in-the-stars/83922/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," the latest — and first digitally animated — feature-length addition to the "expanded universe" of narrative digressions from the mainline "Star Wars" saga, was directed by big-screen newcomer Dave Filoni and scripted by three veteran video-game and TV-animation writers. But the film, which makes its premiere Friday, also lists George Lucas as its executive producer and bears a story credit for the creator of the franchise and director of four of the six prior "Star... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-anxious-galaxy-holds-its-breath-for-the-new/83422/ Fri, 8 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For more than 30 years, George Lucas's "Star Wars" franchise has offered itself up to new initiates for discovery, and to longtime fans as a kind of comfort food. The first three films, "Star Wars" (1977), "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), and "Return of the Jedi" (1983), have been theatrically rereleased in digitally enhanced versions, reissued in multiple VHS, laserdisc, and DVD packages, and aired on cable to the point of ubiquity. (Lucasfilm is reportedly preparing 3-D editions of all six... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/elliot-gould-comes-home-to-bam/83010/ Fri, 1 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In a 1970 cover story profile, Time magazine branded Elliot Gould "the standard bearer for the Western World's hung-up generation." Dated jargon notwithstanding, for the first half of the 1970s, the actor did indeed personify the Nixon-era antihero in all its three-dimensionally neurotic glory. Beginning today, BAMcinématek will honor Elliott Gould with a 10-film retrospective of the actor's essential on-screen work titled "Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age." The BAM retrospective, which... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/about-a-boy-boy/82591/ Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST On the surface, the director John Crowley's new film "Boy A," which opens Friday at Film Forum, is somewhat typical of what might be called the Ken Loach school of socially aware contemporary English melodrama. Like Mr. Loach's films "My Name Is Joe" and "Sweet Sixteen," "Boy A" depicts a social outcast's climb back up from rock bottom and attempt to create a stable life as a contributing member of a community that has shunned him. But in "Boy A," Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) has fallen... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/falling-in-love-with-furniture-in-brideshead/82602/ Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST No book-to-screen creative journey is likely to please every admirer of the original source material. The more one is attached to a novel, the more likely a film version will fall short of expectation. As Tom Teodorczuk observed in the July 18-20 New York Sun, Miramax's characteristically ornate new film version of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel "Brideshead Revisited" is doubly handicapped as an adaptation. Waugh's best-selling novel is a revered (though by some accounts not by its author) example... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/julian-schnabel-revisits-lou-reeds-berlin/82143/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST By his own accounting, the artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel spent three and a half decades under the spell of "Berlin," the third solo album by Lou Reed, the Brooklyn-born singer, songwriter, guitar player, and Velvet Underground founder. In his new film "Lou Reed's Berlin," Mr. Schnabel has erected a cinematic monument to Mr. Reed's 1973 musical story of amour fou between two fictional junkies clinging to life, love, sanity, and each other. In the film Mr. Reed performs his songs, shot... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/malice-and-mayhem-in-gotham-city/81949/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The summer of the superhero continues unabated with the arrival of "The Dark Knight," the second installment in director Christopher Nolan's highly praised reboot of the Warner Bros. and DC Comics Batman franchise. As in "Batman Begins," Christian Bale returns as both Gotham City's masked avenger and his daytime alter ego, "millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne," as the character was designated on the 1960s campy TV serial version. The film energetically picks up where its predecessor left... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/david-gordon-green-at-bam/81866/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Time was, American directors found their style over the course of decades. But today, successive turns behind the camera don't necessarily yield increasingly impressive results. The time-consuming, ego-taxing, and insular nature of modern movie development and production can leech the creative voice from even the most gifted storyteller. An exception to this is David Gordon Green. Since his long-form debut in 2002 with "George Washington," this writer and director has made five features in... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth-updating/81651/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST With the Hannah Montana-Miley Cyrus 3-D concert film comfortably banking some $60 million in domestic ticket sales earlier this year and James Cameron's highly anticipated 3-D epic "Avatar" slated to open next year, the latest revival of the venerable 1950s glasses is, if nothing else, likely to be the most profitable go-round yet. Not surprisingly, the lure of big-screen spectacle that is bigger than flat-screen TV and deeper than PlayStation immersion has struck a chord with younger filmgoers... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/william-holdens-unscripted-fall-from-grace/81095/ Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Among the smorgasbord of genre-film delights on view in William Holden: A Different Kind of Hero, a 20-film tribute to the actor beginning today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, are five Westerns, a paradigmatic prize-fighting picture, four war films, and Billy Wilder's oft-quoted film-buff 101 cult classic "Sunset Boulevard." And the timing is perfect: A midsummer-film fortnight that includes David Lean's "Bridge on the River Kwai," Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," George Seaton's... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/zeitgeist-films-the-little-studio-that-could/80785/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Trade publication descriptions of Zeitgeist Films, the excellent New York-based movie distributor that is the subject of an ongoing 20th anniversary retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art titled "Zeitgeist: The Films of Our Time," usually incorporate the word "niche." But the company, which is owned and operated by co-presidents Emily Russo and Nancy Gerstman, who founded Zeitgeist together in 1988, has shown real genius in repositioning that niche in a way that has advantageously introduced... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/trumbo-interrupted/80800/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST "At rare intervals," fellow blacklisted screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. intoned during his eulogy at Dalton Trumbo's funeral in 1976, "there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drives to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the prevailing standards of the community, that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/times-new-viking-offers-a-living-breathing-museum/80797/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Perhaps the greatest effect of the Internet on the music industry has been the role of Web communities such as MySpace and Facebook, as well as individual Web logs, in helping to spread the word about regional independent music scenes, emerging groups, and their gigs and recordings. It's a far more immediate tool, blanketing a thicker cross section of curious listeners, than the photocopied fanzines, college radio airplay, local record stores, real-time word of mouth, and record-label publicity... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-blood-of-heroes-on-set-with-akira-kurosawa/80529/ Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST As a retrospective within a retrospective, Film Forum's ongoing tribute to the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai features five films directed by Japan's grand master of filmmaking, Akira Kurosawa. It's difficult to overestimate this great movie artist's influence on mainstream filmmaking. One could, for instance, compile a weeklong screening series of films that were cribbed from Kurosawa's 1954 classic "The Seven Samurai," ranging from John Sturges's "The Magnificent Seven" (1960) to... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/brick-lane-rejecting-the-straight-narrow/80359/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST "I have an unquiet mind," Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) pleads in one of the many letters she frequently exchanges with her beloved sister back home in their native Bangladesh. Based upon Monica Ali's well-received 2003 debut novel, "Brick Lane" nimbly skirts the fringes of female-empowerment cliché as Nazneen's mind finds both quiet and cacophony in a series of difficult and defining choices. Firmly anchored to the present via an increasingly strained 16-year arranged marriage and the... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/everything-but-the-smart/80350/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST It's too easy to dismiss "Get Smart," the latest in an unending series of latter-day cinematic adaptations of TV Americana, as a film that barely exists beyond its own pitch — "Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart." It's also too true. Mr. Carell, the modern master of meshing comic innocence ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin") with unction (NBC's ongoing and surprisingly sure-footed remake of "The Office") is indeed perfectly cast in the part of bumbling, snarky, and sweetly enduring secret agent 86, a... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/beauty-in-trouble-the-choice-of-a-new-generation/79940/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Hinging, as it does, on a woman's decision either to move to an Italian villa with a gentle older man or remain married to a petty crook whose controlling, abusive ways quicken her heartbeat, "Beauty in Trouble," a new film from the Czech Republic, could have been made in Hollywood in the 1950s or France in the '30s — at least on a superficial plot level. Nevertheless (and in spite of being inspired by the English poet Robert Graves's verse of the same name), director Jan Hrebejk and co-writer... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/blue-planet-its-a-beautiful-world-after-all/79942/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Franco Piavoli's 1982 film "Blue Planet," which screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater Tuesday and at Anthology Film Archives over the last two nights as part of a retrospective of the Italian director's hard-to-see and hard-to-forget nonfiction film poetry, opens Friday in a new print at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater. One hopes that this week's prior screenings won't have exhausted local interest in Mr. Piavoli's paradoxically modest (in subject) yet... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/motives-and-excuses-for-roman-polanski/79432/ Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST 'People have a right to their own opinion about what happened," the attorney Douglas Dalton offers in Marina Zenovich's excellent new documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which makes its debut Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO. "But they don't have a right to their own facts." To be sure, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" is solidly anchored in facts. More important, it is a film whose real-life characters — from Mr. Dalton, who defended Polanski on charges that the Polish director... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/dont-bother-messing-with-the-zohan/79437/ Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST One bad turn deserves another. Actor, producer, and co-writer Adam Sandler's new vehicle, "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," is such a witless, joyless, and cynically conceived enterprise that the film deserves to be discussed in movie critic clichés as conceptually threadbare as the misguided creative impetus that spawned it. Critic Cliché no. 1 — Hoist a film on the petard of its title. "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" is indeed a mess. Almost from the first scene, the film clings to coherence... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/howard-hawkss-glowing-twilight/79127/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The director Howard Hawks (1896-1977) is, by mainstream critical consensus, seated alongside John Ford in the pantheon of American-born auteurs. In a career that produced nearly 50 films in as many years, Hawks made significant, defining contributions to screwball comedies, gangster and detective movies, Westerns, war films, musicals, and science fiction. Humphrey Bogart met Lauren Bacall on Hawks's watch. Only in Hawks's pictures was John Wayne able to rival the quality of the on-screen goods... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/stuck-a-song-for-the-deer-in-the-headlights/78913/ Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The filmmaker Stuart Gordon, whose new movie "Stuck" opens Friday, is surely the only director in history with both a debut stage production of a David Mamet play and a Fangoria magazine Chainsaw Award to his credit. Though Mr. Gordon's previous feature-length outing, 2005's "Edmond," was written by Mr. Mamet, "Stuck" was inspired by headlines, not the two men's longtime association. The film is loosely based upon the notorious 2001 Chante Mallard case, in which a Texas woman driving under the... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/king-hus-house-of-flying-daggers/78615/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Though it single-handedly rebooted the Asian action film, director King Hu's gloriously poetic, two-fisted 1966 martial arts spectacle "Come Drink With Me" is finally reissued on DVD as part of the Shaw Brothers Classic Collection, a long-overdue American series initiated under the auspices of the Weinstein Company, Genius Products, and the current Shaw catalog copyright holders, Celestial Pictures. By the mid-1960s, the Shaw Brothers Studios had been churning out period action dramas for... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/jason-bourne-takes-his-case-to-moma/78614/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Beginning Thursday, the Museum of Modern Art will celebrate its addition of the Jason Bourne trilogy (2002's "The Bourne Identity," 2004's "The Bourne Supremacy," and 2007's "The Bourne Ultimatum") to the museum's permanent collection with screenings of all three films. Then on Friday night, MoMA's Titus 1 theater will host a symposium featuring the producer, screenwriter, and film educator James Schamus as he moderates a discussion with Doug Liman, director of the first "Bourne" film, and Dr... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-romantic-icon-trapped-in-typecasting/77327/ Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The Film Society of Lincoln Center will begin a changing of the guard this weekend as its 11-day, two-sided program extolling "Saints, Sinners, Obsession, and Seduction" transitions from American leading lady Jennifer Jones to vintage French screen heartthrob Charles Boyer. Friday's screening of Marcel L'Herbier's 1934 "Le Bonheur" is the first of 10 Boyer films (including Ernst Lubitsch's final completed feature, 1946's "Cluny Brown," in which Boyer co-starred with Ms. Jones) showing at the... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/indiana-jones-and-the-return-to-glory/76741/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The most vital thing that one needs to bring to the movies these days is diminished expectations. This is particularly the case when en route to a highly touted summer blockbuster, or worse, a numbered franchise entry. The feeling of disappointment when a sequel fails to live up to the beloved original film that spawned it is a mute agony all its own. Having suffered through George Lucas's grotesque, intellectually down-market, and emotionally fraudulent latter-day entries in the "Star Wars"... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/stewart-goes-west/76691/ Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Given how effective Jimmy Stewart's forays into the Western genre were, it remains astonishing that, on the eve of his centenary, the late actor is still remembered almost entirely for his aw-shucks "Harvey" and "It's a Wonderful Life" personae. A recent tribute by the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, for instance, praised the extremes of emotion lurking beneath the surface of Stewart's do-right everyman roles prior to World War II, and the flawed but graceful neurotics he played for... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/song-of-jennifer/76549/ Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In his memoir, "An Open Book," the late film director John Huston remembered the actress Jennifer Jones thusly: "Jennifer looked for direction in every move she made. She put herself completely in the hands of the director, more than any other actress I've ever worked with. And she was not an automaton. Jennifer took what you gave her and made it distinctly her own." Beginning Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's weeklong, 13-film retrospective showcases the work of Ms. Jones, now 89...