Movie within a Movie: "Gilda"

Andy: I understand you're a man that knows how to get things.
Red: Yeah, I'm known to locate certain things from time to time. What do you want?
Andy: Rita Hayworth.

By the time Andy Dufresne, a quiet young banker wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover, asks to have Rita Hayworth smuggled into Shawshank Prison, he's served two years of two life sentences. It's a significant moment that will ultimately lead to his salvation; not for nothing is the novella on which Frank Darabont's film is based named "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption." Part of what makes The Shawshank Redemption such a great and popular movie is that it shows us how our passions and hobbies – whether they're books or pin-up queens or chess or other interests – can liberate us from our present circumstances. In the case of Andy Dufresne, they provide a literal means of escape.

Andy (Tim Robbins) asks for Rita Hayworth during a picture show. In Stephen King's novella, the movie that's playing is The Lost Weekend with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. Instead of The Lost Weekend, Darabont uses the 1946 film noir Gilda, which provided Hayworth with her most iconic role. The change is good for several reasons, the most obvious of which being that we immediately get to see the amazing beautiful woman Andy is talking about. There are also some nice parallels between the movie that Red (Morgan Freeman) and Andy are watching (Gilda) and the movie that we're watching (The Shawshank Redemption), which I'll get to shortly.

I'm not all that impressed with Gilda as a piece of film noir. It lacks the complexity of The Big Sleep, and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is miles beyond it. In Wilder's classic, we understood why Barbara Stanwyck held Fred MacMurray spellbound. Hayworth's femme fatale and the movie she's in don't have that kind of pull. I had more fun imagining Andy Dufresne watching Gilda (he claims to have seen it three times during the month he asks Red for the pin-up poster) than I did actually watching it myself.

One thing that occurred to me while watching Gilda is how the characters and setting would have appealed to Andy. Gilda and the two men she's involved with are all Americans hiding out in Buenos Aires. Seventeen years after the picture show, Andy will also be an expatriate living in a Latin American country, hoping to forget his past in "a warm place with no memory." Another parallel: in Gilda, the cartel that allows the Americans to live so lavishly abroad is run by German businessmen who cover up their shady dealings by using Gilda's husband (George Macready) as a front. Years later, Andy will have a similar scheme going when he conjures Randall Stevens ("second cousin to Harvey the Rabbit") out of thin air, so as to render the schemes of Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) untraceable.

The characters in Gilda are so irredeemable and Hayworth is so sexy that I'm surprised corrupt, pious Warden Norton would allow his inmates to watch it. Indeed, Hayworth is shockingly uninhibited in the role. Early on she states bluntly, "If I'da been a ranch, they would have named me the bar none." Later, in a vaguely S&M scene, she brings a whip to a costume party. You can imagine what kind of effect this screen goddess (described by King in the novella as "Woman in Heat") would have had on a mostly heterosexual audience of inmates locked up for decades. It's easy to understand why Red shushes Andy so he can watch Hayworth do "that shit with her hair."

More than just a chance to ogle at an unattainable object of affection, what Rita Hayworth provides the men of Shawshank is an opportunity to forget about the mess they've gotten themselves into. This is a thread that runs throughout the movie. When Andy plays Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" over the prison's loudspeakers, Freeman sums up the opera's transformative power in one of his most unforgettable voiceovers:

I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about... I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like a beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.

A slow pan of Andy's prison cell in the mid 1960s reveals the ways in which he's pursued his interests on the inside – as a chess player, rock hound, bookworm and admirer of the female form. These have helped him keep going for 19 years, and they illustrate the movie's central theme: that no matter what you have to hold onto a sense of hope. Of course, by now, Rita has been replaced by Marilyn, who has in turn been replaced by Raquel. The secret Raquel spills when Warden Norton throws a chess piece at her is about the best metaphor I can think of for how our passions can set us free.

Best Picture: "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

"'Look, teacher,' the New York Times reported a child shrilling as the Twin Towers were becoming pyres: 'the birds are on fire.' Here was a sweet, infantile rationalization for an uncommon sight: human beings who had hesitated too long between the alternatives of jumping to their deaths or being burned alive, and who were thus jumping and burning." – Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Directed by Stephen Daldry, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is perhaps the most controversial of the nine films nominated for this year's Oscar for Best Picture. I'm not sure it's best-of material; the young hero's emotional outbursts could have been toned down, and the last 10 minutes drift into syrupy Pay It Forward territory. But overall this is a very powerful film. I disagree with those who maintain it has somehow exploited our national tragedy. Like Pan's Labyrinth, it's a whimsical tale with a very dark heart, showing an imaginative child dealing with unimaginable horror.

From its opening moments, the movie confronts that horror head on. We see a man with a familiar face (it's Tom Hanks) falling from the World Trade Center. My initial reaction was, "You can't show that!" But then I realized what the movie was doing. That terrifying shot isn't meant to be taken literally; we're in the headspace of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the movie's preteen hero. This is Oskar imagining the fate of his father, who was killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

I'll grant that it's a risky proposition, but I don't see why this is an invalid or inappropriate subject to tackle. A lot of kids must have gone through the same kinds of emotions Oskar goes through in the days, months and years following 9/11. He refers to the day his father was killed as "the worst day," and is bewildered by the idea that "you can be killed by people who don't even know you." Putting us in his shoes is an easy way to give the audience's tear ducts a good workout, but do the filmmakers overreach or have him do or say anything that a gifted, intelligent little boy wouldn't in the wake of catastrophic loss? I don't think so.

The movie has been adapted from the bestseller by Jonathan Safran Foer. I've read none of his books and only one of his short stories, "The Sixth Borough," which I highly recommend you read and which I gather from Wikipedia is part of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He's accused in some circles of making twee bullshit, but I think I'd enjoy most of his writing. I end up admiring most artists (like Wes Anderson) who have that charge leveled against them, if for no other reason than the sheer breadth of their creative resources. Foer's creativity is evident in Oskar's narration (having flipped through it, I know many of the lines in the film are taken directly from the novel), like when he talks about everyone swallowing microphones so we can listen to each other's heartbeats. And you can't say Foer doesn't know how to build a dramatic centerpiece; the secrets Oskar is hiding about the voicemails his father left on "the worst day" are absolutely devastating.

As mentioned earlier, Oskar can be a bit shrill at times, but I think that's more the director's fault than the actor who's playing him. Horn gives a performance that's extremely loud but incredibly convincing. 2011 was apparently beat-up-on-Tom Hanks year, which is unfortunate and unfair. The movie he starred in and directed last year, Larry Crowne, is about the sweetest, most harmless thing I can think of. I agree that his post-Cast Away filmography is spotty, but he's consistently made thoughtful choices; by no means has he sunk to the I'll-do-anything level of latter day Robert De Niro. This story needs an Everyman to give us the full weight of the 9/11 atrocities, and who better than Hanks? Best Supporting Actor nominee Max Von Sydow does fine work as an elderly man who befriends Oskar, though I find it amusing that this extraordinary Swedish actor, who possesses one of the most unforgettable accents in all of movies, has earned his second Oscar nomination for playing a mute. (Eleven Ingmar Bergman movies and only two nominations? Sheesh!) Maybe the filmmakers have successfully manipulated me, or maybe I'm just a sucker for movies that invite me on a tour of New York City. But I think Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is pretty underrated. It shouldn't (and won't) win Best Picture, but it's worth two hours of your time.

Best Picture: "The Artist"

With just a few days left before Oscar's big night, I've decided to review two nominees for Best Picture that I haven't blogged about yet: The Artist and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. A quick recap of what I think about the other nominees: Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse all made my best of the year list. The Descendants is arguably the year's most overrated film; with Sideways and now this, director Alexander Payne seems to be making movies that appeal primarily to middle-aged movie critics. And while I wouldn't mind seeing Viola Davis or even Octavia Spencer take home the gold, I found The Help to be a problematic portrait of the civil rights era; you can read about said problems in my review.

In my next post I'll let you know what I think about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. This time I'll be reviewing Michel Hazanavicius' silent romantic dramedy, The Artist. This is the year's frontrunner, and after finally seeing it I have no idea why. (Okay, I have a hunch; I'll get to that in a minute.) People I respect really love this film, and that combined with its reputation makes me want to revisit it to see if I can figure out what all the fuss was about. My impression right now is that this is a very minor film. It tells a story that's been told before (and with a lot more wit than Hazanavicius can muster).

Best Actor nominee Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a movie star whose refusal to make the leap from silent pictures to talkies leads to his ruin. George's downfall is contrasted with the rise of Peppy Miller (Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), a dancer whose killer moves send her shooting to the top in the earliest days of talkies. Djujardin and Bejo are both faultless, and indeed the movie is splendidly cast across the board. It was particularly nice to see Joel Murray (from One Crazy Summer) and Penelope Ann Miller, even though she appears in a thankless role. Hazanavicius has chosen performers with very expressive faces, so that the beats in each scene are always clear without the actors reading any lines.

That's not to say the movie doesn't have any dialogue. It crops up sporadically in the form of intertitles, providing what is perhaps the film's most moving moment: When a despondent George says of his beloved doggy/co-star, "If only he could talk." As the intertitles indicate, The Artist plays by the rules of an earlier era of filmmaking, which explains why there's not a whole lot of cutting in the dance and action scenes. Forced to think in strictly visual terms, Hazanavicius comes up with some real beauties. I'm especially fond of the scene where George and Peppy meet on a stairway; he's on the way down while she's on the way up, which is nice way of showing what's going on in the story.

Still, for a movie that's often described as a nonstop charmer, I found much of The Artist to be depressing. George spends much of the time moping around and pining for his glory days. I think the reason the film has failed to ignite at the box office has less to do with its silent method and more to do with Hazanavicius' failure to give us an endearing hero to root for. The story of the washed-up showbiz figure has been told countless times before – and in much more engaging fashion. Just look at the average Krusty the Klown episode of The Simpsons (especially "Krusty Gets Kancelled" and "The Last Temptation of Krust"), or Tim Burton's treatment of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.

Burton’s Ed Wood shames this movie on all levels: as comedy, as period piece, as an emotional human story. Most of all, it shames The Artist on a technical level. Burton’s mid-‘90s masterpiece was a loving, visually impeccable tribute to Z-grade genre filmmaking. Hazanavicius doesn’t approach his material with the same sort of seriousness or panache. For example, he shot The Artist in color and converted it to black-and-white in post. When he employs silent movie techniques, it’s like he’s winking at the audience, as if to say, “Look at this cute thing we’re doing.” The entire movie is like Uggie the dog: It’s being cute for a gag.

So why is this featherweight film considered a lock for Best Picture? The answer starts with Harvey and ends with Weinstein. Back in the '90s, the movie mogul mastered the art of Oscar campaigning, so that whatever prestige picture Miramax had just released became, in the minds of voters, the crossword puzzle answer to, "What was the best film of the year?" I'll love him forever for championing filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Anthony Minghella, but Harvey seems to be up to his old tricks again. The Artist is not without its charms, but if it wins big on Sunday night it'll go down as the most eye-rolling choice since Paul Haggis' Crash.

"The Grey"

 "The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive." – Pvt. Joker, Full Metal Jacket

One of a handful of very satisfying movies to be released in the first several weeks of 2012, The Grey caught me completely by surprise. Liam Neeson's last few star vehicles (Taken, Unknown) have rebranded him as a cartoonish he-man. That image, along with the pumped up ads for The Grey, had prepared me for an all-out brawl between man and beast, something along the lines of the final scene of Legends of the Fall (in which Brat Pitt wrestles a grizzly) stretched to feature length. What I got instead was a remarkably contemplative action picture in which death is given its full weight, one that invites comparisons to John Boorman's classic Deliverance. Not bad for a movie directed by Joe Carnahan, a filmmaker I'd pretty much written off after his and Neeson's disastrous screen update of The A-Team.

The Grey is structured like a teen slasher flick, in which the characters are picked off one by one by a merciless foe. It's about a group of oil rig workers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wild. Soon after, the men discover they've touched down in the hunting territory of a pack of gray wolves. These early scenes do an efficient job of explaining why the men are being hunted (they've crashed near the wolves' den), and of setting up the expertise of its main character, Ottway (Neeson), whose job it is to kill wolves that threaten the safety of the drilling team.

Deliverance and The Grey both tell stories of modern men tested in the woods by pre-civilized forces. They also share a subtext: payback for environmental atrocities. Boorman's city slickers go on vacation to enjoy the "last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South," and end up encountering the mountain men whose home is being taken over by a power company. Similarly, the oil rig workers in The Grey are confronted by wild animals whose habitat is being threatened by the plundering of natural resources. What's different about the films is that, unlike Boorman's ill-fated vacationers, Ottway and company don't go from "soft" city men to backwoods survivalists; no, their main transformation is to go from breathing to not breathing.

I can think of few other films that depict death in such an unsettling, realistic fashion. Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing comes to mind, as does the powerful, bizarre, stand-alone scene in David Lynch's Wild at Heart in which Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) witness the final few moments of a teenage car crash victim. ("She died right in front of us, Sailor.") All of the killings in The Grey are shocking because these men are strong enough to work in the harshest conditions imaginable, and we're seeing their lives cut off in midstream. Two killings that stand out for me: the astonishing scene after the plane crashes where Ottway talks a man through his own death, and a drowning late in the film.

The latter scene is especially disturbing because the victim is fighting hard for his life, screaming at the top of his lungs underwater. It hits us really hard because we understand exactly what he's fighting for. For such a bleak film (one that takes an arguably atheistic stance on whether we're alone in the universe), The Grey places a very high value on family and emotional ties. These are what keep you tethered to the world. Thoughts of loved ones give a majority of these men the will to survive, and provide a final moment of grace and comfort for some of them before the inevitable.

The effects in the wolf attack scenes aren't always convincing, but you never doubt the degree to which the men are in danger. Carnahan and his cinematographer, Masanobu Takanayagi, capture the harsh beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. A post-credits scene is unnecessary, adding nothing more than a tally of the final body count.

Film Geekdom Awards, 2011

Best fight (between wizards): Harry Potter vs. Lord Voldemort, HP7: Part 2
Best fight (between Muggles): Steve vs. Burke, The Mechanic
Best villain: Lord Naritsugu, 13 Assassins

Best family film: Winnie the Pooh
Best soundtrack: Drive
Best duet: Annie and Helen sing "That's What Friends Are For" in Bridesmaids

Best original song: "Life's a Happy Song" by Bret McKenzie, The Muppets
Most overrated film: The Descendants
Most underrated film: 30 Minutes or Less

Harry Knowles award (for most juvenile film): Sucker Punch
Best reboot: X-Men: First Class
Best female performance: Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia

Best male performance: Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Best documentary: Into the Abyss
Best Christian-themed movie: Soul Surfer

Christopher Hitchens award (for skepticism): Paul
Best product placement: POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
Best 3D: Hugo

Best opening credits sequence: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Best sex: Ellen Page and Rainn Wilson, Super
Most generous nude scene: Nicky Whelan, Hall Pass

Most deserving of a wider audience: Terri
Grand Guignol award (for graphic violence): I Saw the Devil
Worst career turn: Indie darling David Gordon Green directs big-budget schlock (Your Highness, The Sitter)

Most likable character: Ned Rochlin, Our Idiot Brother
Least likable character: Abin Cooper, Red State
Most unexpected dinner guest: The Monkey Ghost, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Cutest couple: Mélanie Laurent and Ewan McGregor, Beginners
Most annoying couple: Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, Like Crazy
Best ending: The West Memphis Three are freed after 18 years and 78 days behind bars in Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

The best movies of 2011

I should mention that I haven't seen one of the frontrunners in this year's Oscar race, the acclaimed silent comedy The Artist. Other movies I'm still looking forward to seeing: Coriolanus, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Shame, A Dangerous Method and Margaret. If you'd like to read longer write-ups on some of the films mentioned here, please click on the words in blue.

1. The Tree of Life

More than 30 years in the making, Terrence Malick’s 140-minute marvel is a one-of-a-kind mix of the epic and the intimate. The opening 40 minutes are as mind-blowing as anything in a Michael Bay disaster movie, showing us the formation of the universe, the Paleolithic Era and a meteor hurtling toward the earth. The remaining 100 minutes are as vivid as anything in the childhood memoirs of Tobias Wolff and A.E. Hotchner, telling the simple story of a postwar American family, the O’Briens. It's a movie of staggering ambition and strangeness. An angel hovers around the action, just barely visible in the frame. A chair moves of its own accord. Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) flies around the yard at one point, and later we see her encased in a glass coffin in the woods, like Snow White. The camera pauses to notice things other movies wouldn’t, like a boy’s shadow dancing on the front doorstep. Big Questions are posed. (Chief among them: Why do bad things happen to good people?) Many viewers seemed perplexed as to what Malick was doing here, mingling the finite with the infinite. My take: By showing us man’s place in the cosmos, he reveals nothing less than the miracle of being alive.

2. Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's first bona fide hit in ages invites the viewer on a magical mystery tour, as an American screenwriter named Gil (Owen Wilson) is whisked back in time to the Jazz Age. Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody and Corey Stoll give giggle-inducing performances as some of the famous artists Gil meets. A sly and very funny celebration of la vie boheme, Midnight in Paris is pure wish fulfillment.

3. War Horse

I was less than enamored by Tintin, the first Steven Spielberg movie since Amistad to make me fall asleep. In contrast, War Horse is among the director's finest achievements, a stirring homage to the sweeping Technicolor vistas and unabashed sentimentality of filmmaker John Ford. I once saw Ford's How Green Was My Valley in glorious 35mm. This rivaled that experience.

4. 13 Assassins

It's John Wayne meets John Wayne Gacy as 13 samurai are forced to confront the sadistic Lord Matsudaira. The final 45-minute battle is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen since "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves."

5. Drive / Hanna

Exhilarating, over-the-top, ultra-violent thrillers by Joe Wright (Hanna) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive). Hanna is a dark urban fairy tale like Running Scared (2006). Drive is a pastiche of American crime films from the '70s and early '80s, with formidable performances by Ryan Gosling and Albert Brooks.

6. Rango

Just like Fantastic Mr. Fox gave a creative boost to Wes Anderson, director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) seems to have been reinvigorated by switching from live-action to animation. The nonstop references to everything from The Wizard of Oz to Chinatown to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone are a movie lover's dream.

7. Crazy, Stupid, Love.

I just couldn't stop smiling. The silly backyard brawl didn't quite work for me, but almost everything else did: the Mr. Miyagi scenes between Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell, the wry teenager who's determined to show his babysitter that she's the one, the hilarious reenactment of the scene in Dirty Dancing where Patrick Swayze catches Jennifer Grey. If he weren't up against Woody Allen, I'd say Dan Fogelman had written the year's most charming screenplay. An unoriginal but sparkling romantic comedy, with the perfect final shot.

8. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy / Warrior

Tom Hardy, an actor with the looks and charisma of Dean and the ferocity of a young De Niro, gives a standout performance in both of these films. Tinker is a wintry, exceptionally smart adaptation of John Le Carre's classic spy novel. Warrior is a meat-headed UFC movie that builds to an overwhelming emotional climax. Like Hardy himself, they're an ideal mix of coolness and warmth, brains and brawn.

9. Young Adult

Imagine a love story told entirely from the perspective of a home-wrecking hussy. That's the risky proposition put forth by director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, the creative team that brought us Juno. This biting comedy skews so heavily towards the POV of a grown-up mean girl that you might not realize what kind of person she is until halfway through the movie, when one of her former classmates refers to her as a "psycho prom queen bitch." Wearing that crown with an admirable lack of vanity, Charlize Theron once again makes the most of a meaty, unflattering role. A wonderfully cast Patton Oswalt matches her scene for scene as an endearing uber-nerd who, like the movie's alcoholic anti-heroine, has never quite gotten over high school.

10. Poetry

I considered saving this spot for I Saw the Devil, directed by Jee-woon Kim, who seems to be trying to outdo Chan-wook Park (Oldboy) in the depravity department. But I have to go with my heart and profess my love for Poetry, a far subtler but very dark South Korean drama from Chang-dong Lee, the acclaimed director of Secret Sunshine. It's about a sixty-something woman who, while in the early stages of Alzheimer's, discovers her grandson is guilty of raping a classmate and, in effect, causing the girl to take her own life. The ending is an absolute knockout – a glimpse at what the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones could have been.

Honorable mentions

Hugo
I Saw the Devil
Melancholia
Moneyball
The Myth of the American Sleepover
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Rum Diary
Take Shelter
Terri
Weekend

Guilty pleasures

Chillerama (segment "Wadzilla") 
Fright Night
Immortals
Kaboom
Tucker and Dale vs Evil

"New York Stories" by Scorsese, Coppola and Allen

New York Stories isn't the only anthology film to take a metropolis as its subject (Tokyo! and Paris, Je T'Aime are two more recent examples). What's notable about this one is that rarely if ever has an omnibus movie been so suited to the sensibilities of its makers. When the three-part film came out in 1989, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen were basically synonymous with the Big Apple, each having made a film named after the place they grew up (New York, New York in the case of Scorsese, and Manhattan in the case of Allen). And while Francis Ford Coppola can be more accurately described as a West coast filmmaker (he's chronicled, along with many other great filmmakers who lived and worked in San Francisco, in the terrific documentary Fog City Mavericks), the director of The Godfather films has given us some of the most iconic scenes of New York life. The young Vito Corleone's arrival on Ellis Island is certainly one of the great New York movie moments, if not one of the greatest movie moments, period.

Despite the seemingly perfect fit of authors and subject, New York Stories is just as much of a mixed bag as any other omnibus movie. Not quite as mixed as this year's horror-comedy anthology, Chillerama, which ranged from the inspired (Adam Rifkin's "Wadzilla") to the unwatchable (Adam Green's "The Diary of Anne Frankenstein"). Still, these short films by Scorsese, Coppola and Allen make for a wildly divergent whole, mostly because Coppola's contribution is so weak. Think of New York Stories as the vital work of two major artists, with a diverting intermission in between.

The films of Martin Scorsese are often associated with a particular kind of New York life: a gritty, violent, pre-gentrification NYC, the one that existed before Mayor Giuliani started arresting homeless people, thus turning Travis Bickle's soliloquy about "a real rain [that] will come and wash all this scum off the streets" into eerie prophecy. As an artist, Scorsese seems to have no real interest in this new New York; the Big Apple movie he made when Giuliani was mayor, Bringing Out the Dead, is a period piece set in the early '90s. His contribution to New York Stories, Life Lessons, is not a quintessential statement on the city like, say, his brilliant 1985 dark comedy After Hours is. But it's set in one of those sprawling studio lofts that seem almost inseparable from the city, and it features one of the director's recurring themes: the artist and his muse.

The 50-minute film reunites the director with Rosanna Arquette, whose character in After Hours may or may not have been the victim of a fire that left her horribly disfigured. (It's difficult to tell how much of what occurs in that film is the result of an overactive imagination on the part of its hero.) Arquette sports wounds of a more emotional kind in "Life Stories", playing Paulette, the assistant and former lover of a celebrated abstract painter named Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte). The subject matter is thoroughly unpleasant, depicting what is perhaps the most tumultuous affair the director has ever given us outside of Casino. It's clear Lionel needs Paulette to fuel his art, but Scorsese, screenwriter Richard Price and a grizzled Nolte refuse to make him into a monster; he's genuinely lovesick. ("You think I just use people. You don't know how involved I get or how far down I go.") This sour love story is distinguished by the splashes of color on Lionel's canvas, Scorsese's unmistakable camera moves and one of the director's most haunting soundtrack selections: "A Whiter Shade of Pale" played endlessly on a paint-spattered boombox.

Paulette is partially tied to Lionel because of the economic reality of living as an aspiring artist in NYC. Her situation is quite a contrast to that of the lead character in Coppola's Life Without Zoe, which could be renamed "The Suite Life of Zoe Montez". We follow 12-year-old Zoe (Heather McComb), a one-percenter who lives in the Sherry-Netherlands Hotel without parental superision. The movie is annoying and head-smackingly unfunny when it tries to be amusing.

More than anything, though, it's wrecklessly indulgent. Coppola wrote the script with his daughter Sofia when she was in her teens, making this the first of two disastrous collaborations between the two. (The following year she would appear in The Godfather: Part III, for which she won a Golden Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress.) "Life Without Zoe" shares a lot of attributes with the screenplays Sofia wrote for Lost in Translation and Somewhere, in that they're about spoiled rich people living in swanky hotels in the world's most beautiful cities. Those later films prove what a gifted artist she turned out to be. And while "Life Without Zoe" marked the beginning of a decades-long downward slide for Francis Coppola, he's rebounded nicely in recent years, delivering the kind of experimental art films (Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt) that he and George Lucas have talked about making for years but that only Coppola has made good on. Still, "Life Without Zoe" has to be a career nadir for both Coppolas, with only Jack as its rival in infamy.

“Everyone that I know that is compulsively funny for a living seems to have had a similar kind of mother. I guess it’s the ultimate result of being raised by a heckler. You learn how to have a lot of comebacks.” — Merrill Markoe, author of Cruel, Calm and Contentious

If "Life Without Zoe" is the unfortunate result of a doting father, then Woody Allen’s segment of New York Stories, Oedipus Wrecks, seems to have been inspired by a much less encouraging parent. In the recent must-see PBS documentary American Masters: Woody Allen, we see the auteur’s mother criticizing his career choices. I know Allen often resists comparisons to his work and his real life (Stardust Memories was unfairly judged in this way; critics seemed to think that, by casting himself as a movie director named Sandy Bates, Allen had relinquished any right to make a work of fiction). Still, it’s hard not to think there’s at least a little autobiography involved in "Oedipus Wrecks", which features perhaps the most comically unsupportive parent in movie history.

This is how the mother in "Oedipus Wrecks" greets her son Sheldon (Allen) when he brings his fiancé, Lisa (Mia Farrow) over to meet her: “Gee, you look terrible.” As played by the wonderful Mae Questel, Mrs. Millstein is a living nightmare for Sheldon. “I love her,” he tells his therapist, “but I wish she would disappear.” That’s exactly what Mrs. Millstein does when she attends a magic show with Sheldon and Lisa, only to reappear later as a giant face in the sky. I love the surreal aspects of this film, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Allen’s latest, the great Midnight in Paris; in these movies, magic doesn’t have to be explained. The sight of Mrs. Millstein hovering in the Manhattan skyline and scolding her son in front of everybody is one of Allen's most memorable set pieces, a scene of public humiliation that’s a quintessential New York moment if there ever was one.