Capsules

Chris & Don. A Love Story, CSNY/Déjà Vu and Love Comes Lately

New Releases

When 48-year-old novelist Christopher Isherwood began his three-decade relationship with 18-year-old future portrait artist Don Bachardy in 1953, both men looked their ages. Their union understandably turned heads, particularly in an era when most prominent homosexuals kept their sexuality behind closed doors.

One of the best aspects of the documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story is that it doesn’t care about the chasmic age gap, much less that the pair were, you know, two dudes. As the intimate title suggests, this is a film that puts aside sociopolitical context and other such matters to portray these men as two individuals in love.

Of course, it would be impossible to ignore the sociopolitical context altogether, and so directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi take the time to showcase their luxurious life lived backstage. Isherwood, most famous for writing the autobiographical Berlin Stories, which yielded the stage and film adaptations of both I Am a Camera and Cabaret, jet-setted among the rich and famous, from Tennessee Williams and Igor Stravinsky to such closeted types as Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins and Montgomery Clift.

Bachardy, meanwhile, was a starstruck teenager and autograph collector who suddenly found himself sharing dinner tables with the likes of Leslie Caron and Anna Magnani. Bachardy later earned recognition for his extensive collection of intimate portraits of any celebrity with whom he came in contact.

But how much can he really attribute to himself and how much is simply the product of him being with Isherwood? Chris & Don catches up with Bachardy, now 74 and still drawing, and he acknowledges what everyone thinks: that he was essentially molded by Isherwood into a sort of Isherwood clone.

Friends remark that Bachardy, a California native, adopted Isherwood’s posh Brits accent not long into their bumpy but committed relationship, while archival footage of Isherwood in his twilight years finds him boasting several of the same mannerisms and speaking patterns as footage of Bachardy today.

Chris & Don could actually stand to delve a little further into the way committed lovers tend to bleed into one person. But as the title says, this is, at heart, a love story, and ultimately Chris & Don raises a lot of fascinating issues but pays them only limited attention. Apparently even in documentaries you have to keep the story moving.

In 1971 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young released the song “Ohio,” a rally cry against the government’s handling of the Kent State shootings in a time of war and political division. The people listened and rallied.

In 2006 Neil Young penned “Let’s Impeach the President.” Barring remarkable action in the next few months, it appears no one took that song title to the streets and enacted change (though CNN’s Sibila Vargas did ask him to explain what the song was about).

CSNY/Déjà vu, which debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, is a documentary chronicling the band’s experiences through both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. It begs the question, if a bunch of aging hippies took the stage again—as they did in 2006 during their “Freedom of Speech” Tour—to speak out against their government, would anyone still listen?

Journalist Mike Cerre followed the band on their tour, and just like the Dixie Chicks—who are mentioned multiple times in this film in regard to their own anti-Bush sentiments—CSNY had their fair share of loyal listeners who just want to hear them play their music.

In Atlanta the band was met with an intensely hostile reaction to their politically charged show. Others, including many Iraq war vets whose stories are featured in the film, took their message very close to heart. And this is where the movie takes on a whole other life.

While the archived footage of the band during the Vietnam years, current concert footage and a spirited clip of Neil Young appearing on The Colbert Report convey the story of this legendary band, it’s the widely ignored Iraq war vets who make this movie into something timely and important.

The film shows more footage of the Iraq war in two hours than the mainstream news shows in a month. It pays homage to the lives lost, but most importantly, to those still living with the horrors of war.

Give Woody Allen a little credit: He did stop treating himself like a romantic lead after 2002’s Hollywood Ending. (But not before depicting himself in relations with Debra Messing and Téa Leoni, both 30 years his junior.) If he hadn’t, his films might look a bit like Love Comes Lately, a Woodyesque, postmodern saga whose fairly virile protagonist is played by an actor who has 13 years on Allen.

Austrian actor Otto Tausig, currently 86, plays Max Kohn, an elderly writer of beloved short stories and übermensch to the extreme. No neurotic quip-slinger, Kohn is doddering and perfunctorily responsive at best, suggesting he may simply be on leave from the nursing home.

Regardless, he manages to render a series of women—Elizabeth Peña, Barbara Hershey and Tovah Feldshuh, plus Rhea Perlman as his long-suffering live-in girlfriend—hot and bothered throughout the film’s succinct length. Granted, each one’s middle-aged and not some fresh piece of hotcha—Olivia Thirlby of Juno and The Wackness swings by early to pay purely respectful, non-sexual reverence to the author—but it still tests the cliche of women preferring their men older.

Love Comes Lately’s saving grace is the formal elegance with which it adapts its source, namely three lightly surreal and semi- autobiographical short stories from Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Under the pen of writer/director Jan Schütte, the overarching story finds Kohn traveling to two literary appearances, all the while either dreaming one of his stories, relating it aloud to a captive audience or actually living it. Yes, that was basically the plot of Woody’s Deconstructing Harry, with which it also shares the presence of Caroline Aaron, but Schütte’s after something decidedly less caustic and more contemplative.

Love Comes Lately is, at times, the loose, ruminative cine-essay on life, sex, lust, age and death it so wishes to be. Most of the time, though, it’s simply a movie about an octogenarian getting flattered by the opposite sex almost as much as the 85-year-old Mae West did in 1978’s Sextette. The sex lives of the elderly is an undermined subject—and that goes triple for the sex lives of middle-aged women—but Schütte’s film comes off like pure fantasy, making the gnomic and ruminative Singer come off as no more than a randy old-timer typing his stories with one hand.

Not Reviewed

Six years after the show ended and 13 years after anyone cared, Mulder and Scully hit the big screen.
(Opens Fri., July 25.)

Ongoing

Produced by Merchant Ivory—still a trademark name apparently despite the 2005 death of Ismail Merchant—Before the Rains works a similar vein as the pair’s Indian-set films. As with Shakespeare Wallah and Bombay Talkie, Santosh Sivan’s film is just as awestruck over the environs as it is keenly alert to the prickly relationship between East and visiting (or in this case, occupying) West. B- (M.P.)

A sprawling three-hour epic squeezed into 152 minutes, The Dark Knight is a backbreakingly ambitious picture, grappling with so many meaty, sophisticated ideas and depressingly timely concerns inside its densely layered, too-breathlessly paced crime saga, you can’t quite wrap your head around it all in just one viewing. B+ (Sean Burns)

A calculated sobfest, Elsa & Fred pairs a reserved, hypochondriac family-first type (Manuel Alexandre) with a hot-tempered, speaks-her-mind Argentinian (China Zorrilla) after the former moves into the Madrid apartment building across the street. Both blessed with offspring so horrible they make the yuppie kids from Tokyo Story look altruistic, the pair embark on that rarely depicted journey: old-timer romance. C- (M.P.)

The meandering, must-see record of Werner Herzog’s journey Encounters at the End of the World might feel at first like a loosely organized collage of impressions and unrelated anecdotes. But like most of his pictures, this one develops a peculiar cumulative power as the reels unspool. A (S.B.)

Matthew Broderick plays a drunk gambler sent to Vegas to reform his slutty niece. (Not reviewed.)

The film is a love letter for Thompson’s most hardcore fans and will create new ones in those who knew nothing about him. A- (A.S.)

Essentially Hoop Dreams remade with the same endearingly madcap sensibility that wrought the videos for “Shake Your Rump,” “Body Movin’” and “Ch-Check It Out,” Gunnin’ introduces us to an octet of the country’s premiere precollegiate b-ball players en route to a tournament held at Harlem’s hallowed Rucker Park. B- (M.P.)

Hancock is deeply strange, devoting its entire first half to our dirtbag crusader’s failed, stubbornly unlikable antiheroics. Smith purses his lips into a boozy sneer; he’s incapable of even smiling convincingly. C+ (S.B.)

Hellboy II is all visuals. With little attempt to organically implement them into the plot, it’s essentially nothing more than one awesome creature after another. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. B- (M.P.)

Brendan Fraser travels to the Earth’s core and probably doesn’t die. In 3-D. (Not reviewed.)

A little girl brings home some hobos and is surprised when her stuff gets stolen. (Not reviewed.)

Thanks to lavish scenery, giddy choreography and impeccable casting, Mamma Mia! translates effortlessly from the stage to the screen. Despite taking 20 minutes to get on its dancing feet, the movie will leave audiences grinning over its sweet ending and catchy songs. B+ (A.S.)

Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny when he was in the movies they couldn’t get Richard Pryor for? This is the movie they couldn’t get Robin Williams for. (Not reviewed.)

Via his usual blend of silent era-style filmmaking and obtuse wackiness, Guy Maddin summons up the oft-snowy Winnipeg of his childhood. B+ (M.P.)

Surfwise has nothing much to do with surfing. The subject is one Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, father of the much-reported “first family of surfing.” When he was young he pulled an Albert Brooks in Lost in America and left his lucrative profession, deciding on a life lived out of a Winnebago. B (M.P.)

With cleverly crafted storylines keeping viewers guessing until the end, Tell No One is the finest whodunit since Mystic River. B+ (A.S.)

The meat of the story is a bizarre side industry. Luxury tourist cruises—nicknamed “farewell tours” by the locals—offer one last chance to glimpse rural Chinese villages before the dammed-up Yangtze swallows them all forever. B+ (S.B.)

In case you haven’t heard of it from its Sundance semi-infamy, The Wackness is the movie where Ben Kingsley gets to second base with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth. Take that as not so much a spoiler—it happens early on—but as a warning that such daredevil tactics are the film’s very lifeblood. C+ (M.P.)

Wall-E should make Michael Medved hopping mad, and that’s good, but its biggest strengths are its assured visuals and Chaplinesque wit. The images of Earth are impressively, almost disturbingly realistic (famed cinematographer Roger Deakins is credited as a visual consultant), as is Wall-E himself—you can almost smell the rust on his Johnny-5 peepers. A- (M.P.)

Wanted has everything that should be expected from a summer action movie—uncontrollable volume, gratuitous violence and sex, inane dialogue, plot holes, fast cars—and yet somehow still manages to sprinkle in animal cruelty and racism. D+ (A.S.)

Any hopes you might be holding out for a sophisticated political satire will immediately be squashed at first sight of Aykroyd on the toilet, barking black-ops orders while groaning his way through an unruly bowel movement so epic he can’t help but describe it aloud in vast and frightening detail. D (S.B.)

Lacking even the mawkish deathbed catharsis one would expect from this sort of male weepie, David Nicholls’ stilted screenplay doesn’t do Blake Morrison’s memoir many favors. The author comes off as a self-pitying heel, and Firth’s uptight turn doesn’t do much in the way of suggesting the necessary roiling inner torment. C- (S.B.)