Lucia, Lucia (2003, Mexica, Antonio Serrano) AKA Another Tequila Sunrise

Lucia (Cecilia Roth) is an author of children’s books, struggling with boredom, unhappiness and routine in her life and marriage, who only realizes this once her hubby is kidnapped in an airport as they are about to depart on their holiday getaway together. With the help of a friendly neighbour named Felix (Carlos Álvarez-Novoa) and one-time Castro devotee, as well as the companionship of Adrian, an attractive young man (Kuno Becker), who is clearly smitten with the older, beautiful Lucia, the three amigos try to unravel the many mysteries of both her hubby’s shady past and the plot to abduct him. Once they get their footing, the chase is on.

Only, as Lucia is happy to remind us, she is the auteur of this tale, and much of what she says we must take with the proverbial grain of salt. Within minutes of the film’s start, she is revising her text, changing her hair colour and living space (among other things), so that we are kept constantly on edge and off-balance, uncertain of what’s real and what’s Lucia’s fancy. Contributing to this vertiginous feel are the film’s jittery staccato editing rhythms that include a number of jump edits that are meant, I suppose, to remind us of the films of the French New Wave, though there is little in Lucia, Lucia that is otherwise reminiscent of La Nouvelle Vague.

Roth (All About My Mother) is a terrific choice for the title role, as her warmth and intelligence guarantee audience allegiance, even when she’s pulling the narrative rug out from beneath our feet, and even though her story doesn’t, in the end, amount to much. And while the good-looking Becker is something of a non-entity as an actor, the affectionate almost-love affair between the older woman and younger man is developed nicely with touching and subtle moment, as when they take each other’s hand when feeling nervous. The real chemistry in the film is with the white-bearded Álvarez-Novoa, and it is a shame that the film doesn’t find more interesting things for these characters to do. The film’s early promise, built on these performances and Mexican director Antonio Serrano’s sometimes interesting visual style, dissipates after the story’s mid-point is reached, and the mystery of the kidnapping becomes of increasing disinterest. While there is some appealing material to be found here in the life of a maritally-disaffected but professionally-creative middle-aged woman, Serrano does not seem to have the willingness to really get to the heart of the matter, at either a personal or broader social level, and allow Lucia to really let her narrative instincts rip.

On the whole, Lucia, Lucia is a playful, though not strikingly original, engagement of the whole question of the unreliable narrator, as well as a fluffy study of the contrast between wish-fulfilling fiction and cold, hard reality. This film is not in the same darkly riveting vein as David Lynch’s nightmarish Mulholland Dr., a film that treats similar ideas in a much more thoroughly unforgettable style, Lucia is content to tease us rather than torment or haunt us. Unlike Lynch’s film, where the narrative discrepancies are vital to understanding what has become of the story’s protagonist, in Serrano’s film, it is used mostly as a gimmick to mess with the audience’s head and leave the questions of Lucia’s credibility ever-hanging. Lucia, Lucia plays a cute game of "Is she or isn’t she?" but it all seems to amount to not much of all. The end result is a film that is stylistically pleasing, but, because it toys with its ideas on a rather superficial level, ultimately not entirely fulfilling.

Score: 72/100

La Strada (1954, Italia, Frederico Fellini) AKA The Tears of a Clown

The legendary Frederico Fellini began his career in movies as a screenwriter for neo-realist pioneer filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, and his great success would establish the expectation that Fellini would follow in his mentor’s footsteps. While his earliest films, including I Vitelloni, met with neo-realist’s approval, Fellini was soon subsequently denounced as a turncoat to the cause for crafting films, the first of which would be La Strada, that operated at a heightened level of reality, where fancy and fantasy would play vital roles. Fellini considered his films those of the Italian reconstruction, and rather than dwelling on the devastation left behind by the war, he wanted to point his films in a more guardedly hopeful direction. Yet, there is little doubt that La Strada has at least one foot firmly in the "old school" language of neo-realism, with its unvarnished depiction of a ravaged countryside, peopled by an often inarticulate and taciturn citizenry. Still, the film has an unmistakable other-ness to it as well, as it is an early precursor to the sort of magical realism the would take hold in Fellini’s late-career efforts.

La Strada is centered around the decidedly atypical and quite possibly symbolic figure of the part imbecile, part saint Gelsomina. Played by Fellini’s wife, Guilietta Masina, Gelsomina is an expressive, Chaplin of City of Lights-era character who’s as open-hearted as she is dull-witted. It seems fitting (if cruel) that she is sold by her impoverished mother to a carnival strong man, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who viciously trains her as both his sidekick and sexual conquest. Gelsomina has a bird-like quality, delicate and strangely beautiful, as well as a prophetic ability to predict the weather, yet she is unable to avoid the brutish Zampano’s fits of ineffable rage and violence.

With Gelsomina operating in full clown make-up, it is fitting that much of the film’s second half takes place in and around a circus, filling the film with quirky secondary characters who help give the film an alternate sense of reality. It is here that the put-upon Gelsomina meets the Fool (Richard Basehart), who appears to her almost as an angel, full-winged and floating above her on a tightrope (an image Wim Wenders would apprehend to full effect in the magnificent Wings of Desire). While he would later disappoint her, the Fool tries to guide her with his parable of the pebble, an act that would prove to be both her doing and undoing, urging her as he does to remain with and tend to the spiritually bereft Zampano.

Typical of most Fellini films, the narrative is episodic in nature, with the familiar motif of travel (La Strad literally means the road) providing the justification for the picaresque nature of the film. The film’s central characters —Gelsomina, Zampano and the Fool--are character types who somehow manage the neat trick of also being distinctive and dimensional creations. And Fellini knows how to push the empathy buttons, particularly with Gelsomina, whose innate saintliness and simultaneous powerlessness sometimes threaten to flood the film in tidal waves of pathos, as well as with the judicious deployment of a memorable Nino Rota-penned score (The Godfather). Fellini’s talent for using striking images to evoke moods and themes operates throughout, as the shot of a deserted Gelsomina watching a lonely horse clopping down the street in the wee hours can attest.

La Strada ends where it began, on a long stretch of abandoned shoreline. However, the journey that we (and the characters) have traveled leaves us perhaps even radically affected, and, like Zampano, changed permanently, and hopefully for the better.

Score: 88/100

Reefer Madness (1938, USA, Louis Gasner) AKA Teach Your Children Well

Reefer Madness opens with a siren-warning that "[m]arijuana is…a violent narcotic…the Real Public Enemy Number One!" The camera then focuses on Dr. Carroll, a school principal working on the side for the "Department of Narcotics" lecturing a middle-aged audience on this scourge, preaching right to the camera (and you and me, by obvious implication) warning the assemblage that ganja is a greater Menace 2 Society than heroin or opium, in the apparent hopes that they’ll scurry home and lock their kids in the closet to keep them safe and sound from the temptation of the spliff. Didn’t anyone tell these folks not to oversell their product? Regardless, as the evidence mounts before us, it becomes clear that general purpose of Reefer Madness was not pedantry, but vicarious lasciviousness.

According to Reefer Madness, "marihuana" use leads to rampant sex, brutal violence, murder and mental insanity. You’d also think that with such debauchery to its credit, the film would be more entertaining, wouldn’t you? Ah, well. The film proper then gets underway, as Dr. Carroll’s hysterical warnings segue into a flashback that serves as both example and once-lost hour long episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. All right, I’m kidding about the latter, but not so much. Reefer Madness soon tips its intent to be the same sort of instructional film as those lensed at the time that were aimed at educating young people about perils of sexual promiscuity. However, (gasp!) oft-times these films were made to appeal to the very audience they were supposedly railing against. That’s right, those less-than-pure of heart who bought their tickets in hopes of seeing some less-than-wholesome action portrayed up there on the big screen, and you can be sure that the filmmakers knew it, tossing in just enough lurid shots to keep the customer satisfied.

And one suspects that the Reefer Madness’s filmmaker’s intentions may not have been exactly above reproach here. Either that or they were a group of terrible hypocrites, because the way the camera leers at the behaviour of these crazy mixed up kids as they engage in all sorts of degenerate activities will make you want to take a shower. The film is not much more than a series of ogling shots of women getting dressed, couples smoking dope (these have gotta be the most inefficient smokers of this particular herbal remedy that I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder they were able to find any sorta buzz at all) then making out, and finally descending into the sort of group lunacy (whose rapid deterioration from weed is mystifying. I mean, how’d they get their hands on such killer grass back then?) that you can only appreciate if you view the film as pure camp, or make a drinking game out of spotting cliched expressions of mental illness (bug-eyed, jibbering hyperventilation being a personal favourite).

Director Gasnier, who built his minor career around these sorts of instructional flicks, uses a lot of silent film school techniques—extreme close-up (ill-advised when working with a group of mediocrities, as is the case here) to push the film’s key emotional buttons (both of them), as well as rapid cross-cut editing to build tension and establish mood through contrast (again, recommended only if you have tension to build and moods to contrast, unlike here). So, while the movie is pretty poorly written, and terribly overacted, at least you can give Gasnier his props for understanding some of the basic grammar of film. That he uses his limited skills to produce such ridiculous material is to his embarrassment something that can only be appreciated through our amusement.

Score: 50/100

Tupac: Resurrected (2003, USA, Lauren Lazin) AKA The Power and the Glory

Tupac: Resurrected is a fascinating, if flawed, documentary that finds an unusual hook to lure in its audience: The film tells Tupac’s story in his own words, culling the ubiquitous voice-over narration from a plethora of interviews and layering them over videos and found footage of Shakur. This is at once the film’s greatest strength, as the immediacy of hearing Tupac tell his own story in his own words, years after his own death, is both eerie and affecting, as well as its Achilles heel, as the story of Tupac’s life would benefit from the sort of critical external analysis and interpretation that Shakur is unable to bring to his own life. Still, there’s something unshakably powerful and affecting in this tragic tale of one gifted young man’s rise from misery of poverty to the sort of fame and great wealth that most of us can only dream of. That this did not bring him the peace and happiness we would have hoped, and in fact almost certainly contributed to his very early death, is the film’s final sorrowful lesson.

A gifted actor and poet, a teenaged Shakur was invited to attend the Baltimore School of Performing Arts. Although he loved all his classes, his mother withdrew him from the school to head to California where she hoped to escape the violence of Maryland’s mean streets. Unfortunately, once in SoCal, the Shakur’s found only more of the same. Tupac claimed that this helped him to relate to everyone’s struggle, and that he was able to dedicate his music to depicting this reality in graphic detail in hopes of stopping the disintegration of the African American inner-city reality. To critics of his song’s brutality he retorted, "I didn’t create the violence, I diagnosed it." There is no doubt that Tupac’s music has a rawness that speaks directly about things that affect his community, but Tupac’s life, riddled with violence, arrests and imprisonment, leads one to wonder if he wasn’t just identifying the problem, but also identifying with it. He seems to have been well on the way to becoming the self-destructive figures depicted in his music when he was shot to death in 1996.

The enigmatic Shakur was perhaps the most influential rapper to emerge out of hip hop’s remarkably fruitful era of the early 90s. His paradoxical life was both extraordinary and typical, as he was a sensitive and artistically-inclined mama’s boy who filled the paternal gap in his single-parent home by gravitating to the macho world of gangsters. Yet, unlike so many young men who fall into a life on the streets, Tupac was encouraged by his street patrons, those same shady pimps and drug dealers who would swallow up the lives of so many other young men, to get out of this life, to use his talents to rise above the gangsta life. That he would take their advice to such wild success, yet fall victim to the influences of these same figures and forces, is perhaps the film’s ultimate irony. That this keenly intelligent and socially active young man would be foolish enough to believe that Suge Knight, a gangsta record exec of the ominously-named Death Row Records, was not only a good man to trust his career with, but even a trusted friend, shows something of Tupac’s naivete and desperate need for strong masculine models in his life, and his willingness to turn just about anywhere to satisfy it.

"You need a man to teach you how to be a man," notes Tupac, which is something Bill Cosby might wanna think about before he starts condemning the behaviour of young male African Americans, and the lyrical content of many hip hop artists, whose work he proclaims is letting the side down, to borrow a sports metaphor. And if Tupac were still here, I’m sure he’d ask the Cos where all the successful elder male role models have gone? They sure aren’t in the ‘hood anymore, imparting their pearly wisdom for the younguns. They’ve fled the communities from which they were born, and by and large successfully melted away into the giant, insular pot of secure, patrolled and fenced neighbourhoods. Tupac would surely remind Bill of the perils of being raised by a single mother, where the only strong men available to turn to for guidance were drug dealers and pimps. While drug dealers were urging Tupac to get out and live his dream, where are the Bill Cosby’s of this world when the Tupac’s of the ‘hood are casting around for positive male influences?

As a young man trying to find his footing and establish his place in hip hop culture, Tupac promoted the theory of Thug Life, which he suggested as a means of championing the underdog, rather than the criminal. Thug life, he contended, is about overcoming obstacles, about being strong. "America" he famously suggests, "IS thug life." Tupac also noted, in a moment of introspection, that he was "most like my mom cuz I’m arrogant, totally arrogant." His self-diagnosis proves astute when he states that "My ego was out of control; I had to get humble." Unfortunately, this lesson came at a cost, as Tupac’s early supporters seem to have had a profound effect upon his behaviour. He began to evolve into the stereotype, beginning to look more and more like the criminal gangsta rather than a follower of the thug life. Whether it was residual resentment against his mother, one-time Black Panther and radical activist Afeni Shakur, a rising antipathy borne out of her drug addiction or arrogance, or if it was merely the predictable effect of having as his principle male influence people with pronounced destructive and misogynist viewpoints, Tupac’s attitude towards and treatment of women in his music and subsequently in his life was to prove troubling, and even vile, as his later arrests for sexual misconduct and assault would attest. As a statement on the significance of Tupac’s life, the film would have been strengthened if it had been a little more willing to challenge Tupac’s behaviour toward and treatment of women. The central contradiction in Tupac’s life, that he was capable of astute self-analysis, yet often too cocky to wonder if he wasn’t being as adversely affected by this life as the people he wrote about, is one of the keys to understanding Shakur’s complex life.

In the end, the pressure of being a 20-something black role model for men may simply have been too much to bear. Tupac expressed his fear of the responsibility that such a position put him in. And while he hints at some personal growth and maturity, particularly after his eventual incarceration proved a humbling experience that "Kills the spirit. I couldn’t write in prison," it remains something of a gap in the film that, while he assures us it is so, we cannot be sure that his time in prison caused Tupac to abandon his youthful hubris and destructive treatment of women. However, his evolution as an artist showed us a young man who was an activist, involved in the community, who showed signs of becoming a more self-aware and self-critical artist, as his music moved from the political to the personal. Was he learning the skills of self-examination necessary to be not just a great artist and good citizen but also a good person? Unfortunately, his murder renders the question moot.

Score: 77/100

Giant (1956, USA, George Stevens) AKA You Bought it Sight Unseen

Giant is a great big old-fashioned film that is framed as an epic, as it spans several decades in the lives of an extended family of characters at a time in Texas history when sweeping social and economic changes were besetting its people. Yet, the story has a quiet intimacy to it despite the immense grandeur of the setting and the scope of the historical backdrop. The heart of the story is found in the protagonists, the Benedict family, and their changing relationship to the land, its people and each other, with the consequent triumphs and tragedies forming the emotional screen onto which these images are cast.

Giant covers the better part of the first half of the 20th Century Texas as it moves from traditional agrarian forms of commerce (specifically, cattle ranching) to more risky but economically rewarding forms (fossil fuels). While the film may simplify the history a bit, it doesn’t whitewash it either, describing the theft of the land, which was bought by acquisitive white ranchers for 5 cents an acre, which left the indigenous (as well as subsequent illegal immigrant) Mexicans impoverished. The arrogance of Texans towards these folks is implicit in every exchange, and at first goes largely unquestioned. That is, until Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) arrives. After Jordan Benedict (Rock Hudson) successfully wins her heart in a whirlwind and stormy courtship, Leslie is swept away from her gentrified East Coast existence and dropped rather unceremoniously into a frontier Texan life that nearly proves her undoing. However, in a nice twist on the whole "fish out of water" cliché, Leslie proves a quick study, and rather than being crushed by the experience, finds herself not only adapting, but bringing about significant change herself.

What makes Giant an atypical film of its genre (epic western) is the primary importance of Leslie’s civilizing influence on the rough and ready denizens of the Benedict Reata. Director Stevens (Shane, A Place in the Sun) is right at home in the western genre, which allows him to play around with its conventions in order to drive his points home. Those familiar with westerns will recognize the tensions at work between the traditional ranchers and the more modern-minded oil farmers. Stevens quickly establishes a number of dualities. "Your country, our county. Makes us sound so far apart," says Leslie. The "us versus them" conflicts are not just between Texas and the east coast, but also between Mexicans and Texans, rich and poor, men and women, as well as cattle and oil. There is also plenty of antagonism between genders (as Leslie refuses to play the dutiful wife) as well as emergent racial tensions (as Leslie refuses to accept the residing opinion that Mexican-Americans are somehow lesser humans) which add considerably to the complexity of film’s themes. The feminization of the Benedict ranch, which plays with the macho credo of traditional westerns, while the interesting gender-bending friendship of Jordan’s rather butch sister, the Calamity Jane-like Luz (Mercedes McCambridge) and his rather effete nemesis Jett (James Dean) further complicates the film’s subtextual sexual politics. One of my favourite images in the film is the silhouette of the Luz and Jett shot against the great big west Texan sky. Not only does it highlight the film’s interestingly ambiguous sexuality, it’s just way cool.

Elizabeth Taylor is in rare thespian (rather than movie star) mode, giving a capable performance as the high-spirited and high-minded Leslie. Raised on the dreaded East Coast, with its book-learning and snooty attitudes, Leslie quickly becomes the ranch’s conscience, determined to guide her strong-willed and self-assured husband to discover his humility. Taylor is charming and likeable, and in the lighter scenes she and Hudson make a believable pairing. There is little doubt that she is the film’s moral centre, and Taylor proves up to the task. As her cattle-ranching husband, Hudson certainly looks the part of a western hero, tall, rugged, square-jawed. But he quickly gets wooden and unconvincing when trying to emote in the film’s dramatic scenes, and is always at his best in the moments of light romance and comedy. James Dean, in the third of his breakout roles in 1956 (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden) is an interesting choice to play Jett. At first he is all self-conscious twitches and tics, but Dean undergoes an interesting transformation as his character’s fortunes change, emerging as a degenerate symbol of the modern Texan oilman.

Giant certainly makes great use of its Texan setting, with a palette rich in dusty-tinted hues, and vast vistas, one heaped upon the next. Stevens’ imagery is often quite resonant, as he proves capable of making powerful statements with nary a word spoken, such as when we suddenly see Angel’s flag-draped coffin, a moving elegy while also making an understated but eloquent statement about the costs of war. However, once the character dynamics and thematic elements are established by the film’s midpoint, the remainder of the film starts to stutters and stumbles through the suddenly episodic narrative. As the characters begin to age rather rapidly in this scenario, contemporary audiences may find the makeup and wigs used to depict these changes rather laughable. And while the film seems to veer off course at times, and occasionally lose its way, staggering towards the finale like an exhausted marathon runner at high altitude, Stevens does manage to find a hidden reserve in order to deliver one last push to the finish line, as the dust-up in a small diner between Rock and the racist owner proves to be a rollicking knock-em-down, drag-em-out conclusion to an uneven, but satisfying variation on the traditional western.

Score: 81/100