The Great Movies III

Richard Linklater is one of the best directors we have. He makes commercial films (7he Bad News Bears, with Billy Bob Thornton). He makes wry films that are applied sociology (his SubUrbia, with a screenplay by Eric Bogosian, was about a crowd of teenagers who hang out pointlessly at a strip mall). He makes quirky comedies (7he School ofRock). He makes bold experimental films (Tape, which starred Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Robert Sean Leonard as three friends in one motel room for continuous talk and dispute, shot with a hi-def video camera). He makes period films (his Me and Orson Welles, one of the best films at Toronto 2oo8, recreates the early days of Welles's Mercury Theatre and his brilliant but sometimes not pleasant behavior).

Above all, Linklater is a man who doesn't like to be bored and doesn't want to bore us. You can tell that from his films. He's intensely interested in his subjects. You may think you'd know all about The Bad News Bears just by reading the title, but you wouldn't. In my review, I said Billy Bob's character "is like a merger of his ugly drunk in Bad Santa and his football coach in Friday Night Lights, yet he doesn't recycle from either movie; he modulates the manic anger of the Santa and the intensity of the coach and produces a morose loser who we like better than he likes himself."That's not boring. Linklater has never made a formula story, and I don't believe he ever will.

Now here's an intriguing thing. The final shot in Waking Life isn't a POV shot. I wonder what that means.

Linklater himself appears near the end, as the pinball player.

Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (zooo) is maddening if you are not in sympathy with it, mesmerizing if you are. If you have not walked out after twenty or thirty minutes, you will thereafter not be able to move from your seat. "Dreamlike,"Jim Jarmusch calls it. Nightmarish as well; doom-laden, filled with silence and sadness, with the crawly feeling that evil is penetrating its somber little town. It is filmed elegantly in black and white, the camera movements so stately they almost float through only thirty-nine shots in a film of 145 minutes.

To know where we stand as the film begins, we should start with these words by the director, Tarr: "I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another.... All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine-time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds."

And what is time anyway but our agreement to divide one rotation of the Earth around the Sun into units? Could there be hours, minutes, seconds, on a planet without our year? Why would one Earth second need to exist except as part of one Earth year? Perhaps such questions lead us into the extraordinary, funny, ingenious eleven-minute shot at the start of the picture.

It is the dead of winter, almost closing time in a shabby pub. An eclipse of the Sun is due, and Janos (Lars Rudolph), the local paper carrier, takes it upon himself to explain what will happen in the heavens. He pushes the furniture to the walls, and enlists a drunk to stand in the center of the floor and flutter his hands, like the Sun's rays. Then he gets another pal to be the Earth, and walk in circles around the Sun. And then a third is the Moon, walking in his own circles around the Earth. All of these circles stagger around, the drunks rotating, and then the Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth, and there is an eclipse: "The sky darkens, then goes all dark," Janos says. "The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds ... the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then ... complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us?"

Janos continues, and the others listen in befuddlement, because in their village at this hour there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. And now I've got you through the first eleven minutes of your twenty-or thirtyminute test, and you certainly haven't left yet. The pub owner announces closing time and throws them all out, and Janos goes to the newspaper office to pick up his papers. There, and at a hotel that is his first stop, he begins to hear alarming rumors, almost Shakespearean portents, that all is not right on heaven and earth, that a circus is coming to town with a huge stuffed whale and "the Prince," who has darkling powers. Whole families have started to disappear ...

The shot of the arriving circus truck is haunting. It appears for a long time as a huge, square shadow on the house fronts. I was reminded of the monster shadow in The Third Man that turns out to be only a balloon vendor. Then headlights. Then the truck itself, outsize, gargantuan, large enough to hold, well, a whale. Its full length passes Janos as he stands and regards.