From Up On Poppy Hill

I think that the world would be vastly improved with Hayao Miyazaki as its landscape architect.  Imagine your street, now a slab of concrete sidewalks, lined with trees and flowering shrubs.  There,  don't you feel better?  From Up On Poppy Hill is directed by Goro Miyazaki, Hayao's son, but the influence of the father is in every frame. Hayao's screenplay provides the story, and the lavishly painted backgrounds provide the beauty we have come to expect from a Miyazaki production.

Poppy Hill is a neighborhood in Yokohama where a girl named Umi lives in 1963.  She has taken on the responsibility of cooking for the boarding house owned by her grandmother.  Umi's mother is in America studying for what I am not certain.  Her brother and sister live in the boarding house along with a handful of sympathetic residents. Her father was killed in the Korean war when he was a captain on a supply boat. Umi's ministrations in the kitchen show her to be a competent cook, and conscientious worker.
However, she is still in school, attending classes every day.  Next to the school house is a clubhouse attended by boys interested in archeology, philosophy, chemistry, literature, and other things.  Their home base is a beloved wreck of a place, stuffed to the gills with years of accretions.  It makes Citizen Kane's basement look like a tidy pantry. It is part of the ethos of the movie to honor the past not just for nostalgia, but as a traditional Japanese value.

The Tokyo Olympics are to take place in 1964, and all of Japan is busy cleaning up, putting on its best face, trying to impress the world with its modernity and efficiency.  Taking down an old building would be part of this cleanup.  Umi joins forces with the boys in the clubhouse, and with her expert and conscientious cleanup efforts, they take their cause to the man who would be razing the building.
I loved the use of the song, "Sukiyaki," a song I remember well from my youth, shot through with longing and tenderness and the inevitability of a love affair cut off too soon.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The feeling we have as children, because we don't know any better, is that we have power over other people.  When I was in sixth grade, I hated my teacher and wished that she was dead.  Then she died.  I felt bad at first, then relieved.  Later, when I grew up and graduated from college, I realized that her double pneumonia had nothing to do with me, just her bad lungs in the drafty convent where she lived. In the meantime, though, I thought I might have been responsible.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower tells the story of a boy who thinks that he had power over an adult in his life and that as a result something bad happened.   But that is not really what the movie is about.  The boy named Charlie has a bit of baggage besides that, and has just started high school.  He is vulnerable.  He is alone.  Then he meets some older people who lead him to a better place.

Logan Lerman is very good as Charlie.  Paul Rudd looks great as the sympathetic teacher.  Why can't he play the responsible adult more often?  He is capable of subtlety and is so often used in throwaway buddy pictures.  Emma Watson speaks with not a trace of a British accent in this Pennsylvania based movie.  But the breakthrough part goes to Patrick played by Ezra Miller.  Homophobia is alive and well in this movie, and Patrick is a hero.

Besides the fact that I liked this movie because it reminded me of my guilty pleasure of killing my teacher, I liked this movie because my friend Peter Agliata did the camera work, and it is a well shot movie, especially the scenes in the tunnels, and the feeling we get of the Catholics in church -- all that guilt! There is also a scene where Charlie goes to the cafeteria and tries to sit down with an acquaintance of his who informs him that he can't sit with her. He is forced to get up and relocate to a different table like a leper. He is photographed awkwardly trying to balance his tray and his backpack, then sitting at a big table by himself. The camera moves away to show how isolated and alone he is. This is a classic sequence of high school life.

Kings Point (documentary)

Produced and directed by Sari Gilman
2012.  31 minutes.  HBO

Kings Point, a short documentary on HBO, introduces us to several residents of a retirement community in Florida.  We hear them describe their wishes for companionship, their reasons for leaving NYC in the 1970s for the better climate, the attractions of the location, the common desire for a better life.

Now thirty years later, those who were just beginning their retirement in the 1970s are in the last stage of life, and some wonder what they gave up by leaving their families behind up north.  By family, they mean their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren.  In this community it does not seem that there is a wing for those whose health declines and need nursing care.  There is little discussion of this among the old people, just a wish not to have to listen to bad news (which inevitably means the decline of someone's health).

There are so many more women than men here, a single man creates conflicts and bitchy behavior.  The one man we get to know who looks much younger is blunt.  "I already buried my wife.  I want someone to bury me."

The idea of survival is temporary as we witness the quick decline and death of most of the subjects of this sobering film.

There are so many stages that lead us to our final demise, it is hard to prepare for all of them.  The movie made me question what is the most dignified way to grow old.

I am still thinking of it days later.

Amour (dir. Michael Haneke)

Amour, the French language film directed by Michael Heneke, begins with the fire department entering an apartment that has been locked up with a corpse inside. So we know how the life of one of the two stars ends up. It is inevitable after her little episode that signals she has had a stroke.

What is most intriguing and gives suspense to the rest of the picture is what will happen to her caregiver, her conscientious, loving I suppose, husband. Haneke is a master of establishing relationships with a graceful series of scenes. The two old people have lived with each other for at least forty years. The way the apartment is decorated, the furniture arrangement, the kitchen table set round with two chairs, all these details speak to the regularity of their habits, the comforts of their cultured home. There are paintings of open landscapes and the freedom they imply sit on walls that seem to close in around the couple as they become trapped in their mortality.

The two are dependent on each other. As Anne loses the use of her limbs, Georges boosts her up to a standing position and the two move in lockstep like awkward dancers. Amour is a close study of two intimates who become strangers to each other. Decisions about the end of life come up. Anne has Georges promise her that he will never bring her back to the hospital. You can easily see why. The operation that was supposed to remove the obstruction of the carotid artery was a failure. According to Georges, only 5% of the operations of this type end in failure.

At one point Georges tells Anne about going to the movies when he was young, how the movie made him cry it was so overwhelmingly sad, how he could still remember how it made him cry, it was so sad, but he couldn't remember the name of the movie or what it was about exactly. Even though we witness scene after discouraging scene of a human body breaking down, and then the mind going away, leaving the survivor alone with a breathing shell of the beloved, there is something abstract or archetypal about Amour. It lacks the impact a truly emotionally warm filmmaker would bring to this material.

The film has much to admire. There is a brilliant tiny scene with a mean nurse whose cruelty is vivid and shocking (Haneke's home territory). The subtlety of the use of running water and what it might mean to Georges and Anne (life, dependability, cleanliness, the ability to do ordinary things) is very resonant. Images of things breaking in or trying to get out -- that sense of entrapment -- repeat and add depth and intelligence to what is potentially an emotional horror show.

I think Love is the wrong name for this movie. Haneke recognizes love when he sees it. He is such a chilly director he merely observes objectively what is happening as one person deteriorates and the stronger mate hangs on and keeps caring. I went in to the movie prepared to be moved by the emotional devastation of what happens when a couple devoted to each other through a long life die. But I left thinking, that was a very well presented case study, very artfully done. It did not really touch me.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is not realistic. It is most dreamlike, except when real things happen. One of these things is when the six year old girl named Hushpuppy sets the kitchen on fire. Until then, she had been careful enough to take out her flame proof helmet from her freezer in order to start the gas flame with a blow torch. But something bothered her enough to make her take a stand which involved burning her house down. Before that, she was just trying to cook herself some dinner.

This is just one of the scenes in the movie leaving the audience an emotional mess. You are torn between thinking logically when will an adult be a responsible parent to when will this brave little girl get to stop being seen as a child so that she can ditch the useless grown ups in her life. The logic is there, but it gets half way up your brain and then stops because logic is not operating in this movie.

Young children who are abandoned in one way or another must learn to take care of themselves. In this movie they learn not to feel sorry for themselves.

Among some of the questions I found myself asking were these. How can a boat made out of a pickup truck bed float? How did this girl of six learn to say her lines with such force and clarity that I went home reciting them in my own head?


If this is a reverie on children and people left behind to live in poverty, it has pretty brilliant visuals for the most part. For one thing it creates a place outside of the grid. The people here are independent, feral almost. They are the wild in the Southern wild. The beasts (that remind me a little of Maurice Sendak's in Where the Wild Things Are) come to claim the land that has been ruined by the hurricane. People can't live there anymore. As the actor who plays Wink, Hushpuppy's father, says:

"He's resilient," Henry said, explaining why audiences are so drawn to Wink. "He's a resilient person, and people love resilience -- and people love people that stand behind and stand for things that they love more than anything in the world. And this group of people (in 'Beasts'), they're standing behind the things they love, the people they love, their culture their beliefs that they won't leave under the worst circumstances in the world. These people won't abandon the things they love more than anything in life."

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted."

Still, it was hard watching Hushpuppy who never does anything wrong get beaten and abandoned by her father, and also watching a bunch of adults get sloppy drunk over and over again as if that is the only way to celebrate.

Bicycling

This morning I decided to fix up my bike. It needed air in the tires, a mirror, and new lights. I thought of getting different handle bar wraps, but didn't. The book, Just Ride, a Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike by Grant Petersen convinced me that my three speed was a good thing, nothing to be sneered at by the men in bicycle pants and streamlined helmets whizzing past me on the bike paths. There is an inspired passage in the book about things that are worn out. I quote it here at length.

Beausage (byoo-sidj)

In 1992 or so, at the Interbike Trade Show in Las Vegas,there was a 1952 Bianchi that had been ridden by Fausto Coppi, a famous racer from the 40s and 50s. The bar tape was tattered, 20 percent of the paint was worn away, and the leather saddle was well worn and looked like it had been ridden by a guy who didn't want a new saddle because he hadn't completely worn out the old one. It was the best-looking bike at the show, and the only one with beausage.

Beausage is kind of like patina, but not exactly. Patina is environmental degradation of metal, or something hard, at least. Nobody has to use the Statue of Liberty for it to acquire patina. Beausage, though, comes only through use. It's not the same as worn out, though. Willie Nelson's guitar, Trigger, straddles the fence between beausage and just worn out.

Willie Nelson's guitar

You probably own a hatchet, chair, knife, guitar, camera, baseball glove, typewriter, or pair of blue jeans that have been well worn and look better for it.

Beausage can't happen to just anything. The object has to be well made with good durable materials in the first place, so that use makes it beautiful without making it dysfunctional. A plastic storage box that gets sunburnt and brittle won't acquire beausage.

Bikes should have beausage.

--Grant Petersen

So that's what my bike has, beausage.

Just saw Premium Rush with Joseph Gordon Levitt.  He plays a free spirited messenger in Manhattan who must deliver a package quickly from Columbia University on the upper west side to Chinatown on the lower east side. The package has different meanings to three different people, a compulsive gambling cop, a worried mother, and a Chinese gambling house matron in Chinatown where the package is supposed to end up.   The movie is full of chase scenes that take place on bicycle.  There is joy in the riding.  Once you learn how to ride a bike as a kid, bicycling comes with a liberating spirit.   That feeling of childhood delight is what I came home with when the lights went down.

Some of the most amazing stunts were done by Danny Macaskill whose relationship with gravity is nebulous. 

Nanni Moretti

from Palombella Rossa

Nanni Moretti is sometimes compared to Woody Allen.  He writes, directs, and often appears as a major character in his films.  Though his tone is humorous, Moretti considers politics, life and death, the future of cinema, and other less cursory things that make you not laugh so much as think very hard afterward about you just saw.

Otherwise, I don't think that the comparison between the two men is just.  Moretti is very athletic, for instance.  In his last movie, Habeas Papem, he plays a psychiatrist who coaches a team of cardinals in the Vatican in volleyball.  Moretti is quite capable of instructing how to spike the ball.  He is lean, and tall, and coordinated.  

Still, one of the first Moretti films I saw, Palombella Rossa, was about two things: communism and water polo. Moretti was the lead, and he spent most of the film dressed in one of those water polo helmets that are inherently funny to look at.   He was on the national Italian team when he was in his twenties, and was obviously very good at it.

The night I saw him in person, after the screening of Il Caimano (thanks to IFC which is running a retrospective of his work), he spoke with a translator about why he made the movie.  The movie is about a movie producer who up until a woman hands him a screenplay,  has only made grade B movies that are strictly genre pieces and sort of laughable, but cult hits.  The new screenplay is an open critique of Berlusconi's regime,  a very serious movie,  that shows how he has stripped Italy of its democracy and put himself above the law.

Moretti said that he wanted to show the Italian people what they were used to seeing but because they were so used to seeing it, it had lost all sense of its danger.  He wanted to show the dangerous side of Berlusconi.  He avoided  the bits about Berlusconi's cosmetic surgery and his fascination with young women.  The real danger was in how he subverted democracy by outwitting the judiciary who had prosecuted him for financial fraud and conflict of interest.

After Moretti spoke at length about the making of the movie about Berlusconi, through a charming translator who was able to keep up with his spirited and quick witted commentary in Italian, the director wanted to show us two minutes from an earlier film, the film about water polo and communism.  The reason was long in being explained.  The scene included an old friend of Moretti who had been cast as one o f the water polo players. In the scene, the coach wanted the slender, even slight of build teammate to act as point  guard to a big burly Hungarian.  At this point, the dialogue called for the man to object simply by saying "I am scared."

Which the actor/friend did.  But Moretti insisted on his saying the line twenty six more times, taking another two full minutes to do it, goading him on all the while.  The man is still playing water polo, Moretti explained, but I am no longer his friend.  He never spoke to me again after that. 

The point of the story was to demonstrate how obsessive he is as a director to be sure that everything is just right.  Each take that the young man made was better than the next, even though the first one was perfectly good.  I wonder where that man is now, and if it is true that they are no longer friends.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

I love Ewan McGregor, and Emily Blunt plays his leading lady with charm and grace. The whole movie is charming, but somehow too insistently a romance with swelling music telling us how to feel. Sometimes the director lets us figure out things for ourselves, but mostly he is forcing himself on us. He insists that the crowd be pleased. Of course we are pleased at the Scottish landscape and rivers, at the Yemeni desert coming to life with transplanted farmed fish, and the adults behaving graciously in the face of absurdity.

The Artist

Like Hugo, another movie about movies, The Artist is also about the fading allure of has-beens in the moving picture business. Unlike Hugo, The Artist not only quotes from silent movies, it is a silent movie shot in black and white, with no dialogue until the very end of the movie.

The themes of silence, and powerlessness in the face of not being heard, make me want to go back and watch those old movies that depended on the power of the scenario, of the actors' ability to express the spirit of what the movie was about through movement, gesture, stillness, silence.

Margin Call

What a wonderful cast. Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons. To see one at a time in a film is to know the pleasures of fine acting. To see all three working together in a fast paced smartly written film takes away the sour taste that the movie left in my mouth of the plot. I had already seen this plot in a documentary film, Inside Job, from a different point of view, from the point of view of the muckrakers who were pointing the finger at the villains of the economic crisis of 2008.

Margin Call takes us inside the board room where the decision was made to begin unloading the worthless stocks that set off the mortgage crisis. Watching the process of large scale chicanery from the point of view of the villains may humanize them but nobody comes off unscathed.

Drive

The thing about cars in Los Angeles is that they stand in for much more than transportation. As a New Yorker, I don't think I can understand the deep bond that forms between car and driver.  Drive strips down a character's identity to his action of operating the car. Even though the driver has scenes with human beings, and he looks genuinely fond of a boy and his mother, there is little real communication except for lots of meaningful smiles.

The driver likes LA basketball. He watches it, he listens to it, even when he is eavesdropping on the police radio so that he can tell how close he is to his final escape.The driver's identity in the opening scene when he drives a getaway car for a couple of robbers shifts quickly when the police home in on them and he coolly walks away in a basketball cap and jacket.

Next he wears a police uniform so we think oh a law enforcer escaping the law, but no, he is an actor in a film, no a body double for an actor in a film, no a stunt double for an actor in a film. So he is a character within a character within a character. It would take a lot of digging to find out who he really was.

After just watching Martha Marcy May Marlene, whose main character's identity is sketchy and finally unrevealed, watching this movie, with very slow takes on the actors, and lots of musical exposition, I wondered how much music videos have had an impact on filmmaking.  Screenplays for these two movies were were really stingy with talk for the main characters.

Do modern young directors think that we don't want meaningful dialogue any more? Do they think that music should stand in for words? Have we stopped speaking to each other in absorbing ways? Does language not count? Or is this just the feminist in me wondering what happened to the snappy actresses of old who had plenty of lines to say and said them with aplomb and were the reason to go to the movies.

As it is, we have Ryan Gosling, who is a pleasure to watch, and Carey Mulligan whose hair is always impeccably styled.  Albert Brooks as a singularly bad man has all the good lines.  

Martha Marcy May Marlene

The main character is living in a cult with a satanic leader when she calls her sister to retrieve her. Little information is shared between any of the characters in this movie. It is as if they were all living underwater not just in the actual swimming scenes of which there are many, but in the murky exposition of the story.

It is frustrating to hear the older sister ask repeatedly "What the fuck is wrong with you?" and not really mean it. She does not wait for the answer. She does not get it, and neither do we. Poor Martha. She has no one to turn to. Her sister and her sister's husband seem like they want to take care of her, but there is something off in the tone of the direction that makes you doubt it. Poor audience who don't really know what the meaning of the movie is, except that at the heart of it is a sterling performance by the young actress, ...

Well photographed, with effective music, the movie's editing includes transitions that are out of a horror movie.

Who would you become if you had a sketchy childhood with no present parents and then joined a commune where you had to sublimate your better instincts to the abusive leader. What is most spooky perhaps is how Martha repeats the phrase, "I am a teacher and a leader" because it is what her guru told her she was. But we never learn who she really is, even with this string of names.

Good Hair

Chris Rock is a good interviewer. He chooses well who he wants to talk to and gets them to say what he needs to know, and he treats everyone with respect. Yet you know he wants to be funny and sometimes he is. Good Hair is about African American women's desire to have straight hair. He finds the mogul who controls the "relaxer" industry, he has one brief moment with the inventor of "Jeri curl", Al Sharpton chimes in on his experience with James Brown and how they got the look together. Other subjects he chose are Nia Long who is a pleasure to watch and listen to, and all of the competitors at the Bonner Hair Show in Detroit where there is a style contest whose rules.

MoneyBall

Moneyball appeals to me for many reasons. First there is the idea that baseball is rigged for the rich, and with a new formula the poorer teams stand a chance. Second there is the story of a nerd who is overweight attaching himself to an industry that thrives on the elite athlete and taking over the game. Third there is the dialogue which is delivered with real understatement. Of course there is the pleasure of watching Brad Pitt redeem himself in a movie of genuine quality. But especially I love the game of baseball, and this movie does not glorify it but demonstrates why we get so caught up in it, and how heartbreaking it can be.

Bridesmaids

When a woman gets married, it can force a wedge between her and her friends.  She must sacrifice relationships that are not based on sacred rituals.  She has now pledged her troth to her husband and children, and his parents claim higher priority than her best friend  or even her sister.  It changes the whole social matrix of a woman's life.

Bridesmaids acknowledges this painful and poignant change.  Mostly it is just a very funny series of sketches about the perfect wedding run amok, which has become a genre of comedy since the wedding business has loomed large enough to become a huge industry.  (One of my favorite lines comes from the bride's father who says "I am not paying for this.")

Kristen Wiig plays Annie, the maid of honor to her best friend, Lily, (Maya Rudolph), who is now moving in higher class circles than Annie is used to.  A new best friend has emerged from this pricier circle, Helen (Rose Byrne) who is prettier, richer, and more ready to spend the manic energy needed for a perfect wedding.

The cast is very talented, and the love interest of Kristen Wiig, Chris O'Dowl, is so perfect she can't see it at first.  There are some funny scenes having to do with police cruisers and missing persons. 
It is a relief to find a comedy that is full of talented women and written by women.  The few times the comedy doesn't work that well I suspect were inserted by guys and sort of just gross you out.

MIdnight in Paris

Woody Allen's new movie gives the audience not only very attractive actors doing their work perfectly but also some philosophy to think about.  How many of us have wished we lived in a different time, or thought that we were born too late?  (We rarely think we were born too early.)  Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter whose visit to Paris with his fiance brings on a bit of magic, allowing him to visit his favorite artistic era just as he is in the throes of writing his first novel.  While we are chewing over the meditative bits about needing to accept the time you live in, there is some fine music being played by Sidney Bechet, beautiful costumes worn by the lovely Marion Cotillard, and  shots of the city's landmarks and rooftops.

Adrien Brody does a wonderful comic turn as Salvador Dali, Kathy Bates plays a humane Gertrude Stein.  All of the casting and makeup are marvelous.  It reminded me a little of my other favorite Allen movies, like Zelig, and Purple Rose of Cairo where the leap off the screen, the leap of imagination is gracefully done from scene to scene, and the audience has no trouble accepting this alternate reality.

The absurdity of life pops up and makes you laugh at regular intervals, but a movie that is both  intellectually accessible and challenging  is extremely rare.

Source Code

Science fiction about time travel trips me up.  It depends on the belief that someone can be in two places at the same time.  Source Code would have us believe that the main character played by Jake Gyllenhaal is not traveling through time, he is just living in an alternate reality in order to discover  the criminal intending to wreak havoc on a major metropolis.  He can go back to the last eight minutes of an explosion when everyone on a train is about to be killed, an infinite number of times.  Each time our hero learns a little more about a crime about to take place, and Gyllenhaal's delivery of the lines he must repeat over and over again is one of the pleasures of this film.  He is the not the only one whose acting buoys up a rather baffling premise.  There is lovely Vera Fermiga as a sympathetic military official, and Jeffrey Wright chewing the scenery as an evil scientist, and Michelle Monaghan looking winsome as the love interest.

Even though it left me scratching my head, I enjoyed the movie's well edited suspense.

Barney's Version

Barney’s Version

Paul Giamatti is having a great career.  He has played John Adams, Harvey Pekar,  and Joe Gould as well as the  misanthropic wine taster in Sideways.  In Barney's Version,  he plays a man whose life we see develop from youth to the onset of senility.  Sometimes because of certain plot elements, we wonder if the version Barney gives has something to do with a crime, but it turns out that we see things through his eyes as he falls in love and stays in love with the lovely woman he finds at his second wedding.

He really loves this woman, and she is worthy of his love, but is he worthy of hers? We are not quite sure with all the scotch drinking and cigar smoking if that is enough to understand his character.   It isn’t Giamatti's fault.  The men who create Barney's foursome of friends have more life together than the man and the woman at the heart of the story. The direction lingers too much on the scotch drinking and seems repetitive or draggy in ways that keep the characters from truly developing.  Giamatti is a fine actor.  Dustin Hoffman plays his father beautifully.  (Hoffman’s son plays his grandson and is also quite good).  Barney’s second wife, played by Minnie Driver, is delightful as a vulgarian with her master’s degree being waved in his face every other minute.  

There are fine details and charming scenes mostly between the men which create a feeling of poignancy, of a life really being lived.   For this I am grateful.  A movie about a realistic person who chased a woman for years until he could marry her and never fell out of love with her, that is a sweet dream many of us could wish for.  So I forgive the movie its flaws for its romanticism.  

Inside Job

This muckraking movie makes me mad with its shocking analysis.  

People are interviewed  from  Iceland, where banks once regulated and stable were deregulated and drowned in debt, nearly bringing down the government, and laying off thousands of people.  In a country of 300,000 that has a huge impact.  In the United States where deregulation began with the Reagan administration, the continued ripple effect on the global economy resulted in larger layoffs, more recessions, and continues to this day under Obama and what one interview subject called the "Wall Street government."

Money is made on debt that cannot be paid.  The higher the debt, the more leveraged the bank becomes, until eventually, so large (too large to fail), the executive who was supposed to be overseeing this, bails out and gets his package, which includes millions of dollars.  Sometimes these executives, knowing that the company is headed south, sell their shares and take them home with their severance package, and here's the funny thing, their heads held high.

When what you are selling is so complicated that it cannot be explained without a programmable calculator something is wrong.  And it is sinking the financial markets around the world.  Unbridled capitalism bankrupts us all, punishes the poor, and makes the rich make out like bandits.  This movie urges us to take the system back from the criminals.  And to change the way government works.  This movie, though most of its heavy firepower is aimed at the GOP, does not exempt Clinton, sitting very cosily with the biggest of the marauders, or Obama, who has allowed the status quo to continue.

There are some heroes in this film, who speak before and after those caught red handed.  Unlike the Federal Reserve Governor, and the Harvard University economist, and the bankers forced to testify to Congress,  there are  heroes like a consumer advocate who warned Greenspan, and then Bernanke about what was happening to no avail.  There is an executive at the International Monetary Fund whose paper was published criticizing the mathematical model that used derivatives to make money on bad mortgages; he was subsequently shunned.  George Soros says some things about the inequity of executive compensation that sound dead on. 

Eliot Spitzer sits in a large vacant room with miles of windows making us wish he had never gotten in trouble with someone not unlike the madam who was interviewed earlier about what Wall STreet traders like to do after their fifteen hour days on the floor.  Spitzer reminds us how he used to go after the people who were raiding consumers' accounts to line their own pockets.  He says he isn't in a moral position to say much about their morals now. Damn.

Inception

When did Leonardo DiCaprio grow a vertical line in his brow?   In Inception, he plays Cobb, an expert at prompting other people's dreams to be available to him so that he might steal what secrets lie therein.  Cobb has a lot to worry about since his wife in the dream state keeps trying to murder him or get back at him or get him back.   His new mission is to go into a man's dreams and plant an idea there, an idea that will benefit a corporate client mightily.  It will be necessary to outwit or outshoot the security police who guard the dreamer's dreams.  There is also the risk of landing in limbo if after the third level of dreaming you get stuck between levels one and two.

Besides learning how the invasion and creation and manipulation and suspension of dreams work, the viewer is treated to hair raising action scenes, one piled on top of the other.   It is hard to keep from admiring the visual mastery of the dream sequences mixed in with these action scenes.

Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the part of Arthur, one of the team of experts who help Cobb on his missions.   He is supposed to lack imagination but he walks on the ceiling with ease.  I can't wait to see Gordon Levitt's next movie, not that he outshines anyone else in a cast that includes Tom Hardy as the shape shifter, Michael Caine as a concerned father, Ellen Page as a wizardly architect and Cillian Murphy as a very well protected victim.  

Next day, remembering the scenes of the architecture breaking up and going sideways, and of the mazes the dream architect invented, and of the van falling off the bridge for what seemed like days, I hoped that my dreams would become a bit richer in visual content. But poor Leonardo.  He has lost his boyish look. The groove in his forehead is there to stay.