The 1949 Great Gatsby was directed by Elliott Nugent, who directed Bob Hope in three features, and co-written by Richard Maibaum, who would go on to write thirteen James Bond films. In this version, Alan Ladd as Gatsby has acquired his fortune as a bootlegger. To be fair, his bootlegging past is mentioned several times in the novel (as well as the rumor that he had “killed a man”), though a trailer fragment I found shows Gatsby in a shootout, blasting away at gunmen in another car as they pursue him through city streets at night, so I’m thinking they play up this aspect. This may not be the tone Fitzgerald was after, but as I learned from reading a synopsis at the Turner Classics Movies website, the film does follow the basic plot of the novel, as do the 1974 and 2013 versions.

Other than the fact that the 1949 film turns him into more of a tough guy than Fitzgerald probably intended, I have the feeling that Alan Ladd could make a fairly credible Gatsby. His slight stature (5′ 6″ is the most commonly reported height) and vulnerable smile seem appropriate to the character, at least as far as looks go. Again, I haven’t seen this version, which is currently unavailable on home video (I’m hoping it will turn up on TCM), but I think the following brief clip gives a sense of what this Gatsby might be like.

It’s also interesting to see the ways the studio marketed this film, taking the beefcake route in this particular presentation of Alan Ladd, as seen in the poster at left and the movie tie-in paperback cover at right. Again, I’m assuming this is probably not what Fitzgerald had in mind, though it does put an intriguing spin on things.

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The first film version of The Great Gatsby was made in 1926, just one year after the novel was published. The book received mixed reviews and sold only 20,000 copies in its first year (when Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was certain he’d been a failure). Despite this, a successful stage adaptation opened on Broadway within a year, followed by this silent version, starring Warner Baxter as Gatsby and Neil Hamilton (better known now as Commissioner Gordon on TV’s Batman series in the 60s) as Nick Carraway. It is by all accounts a lost film, though I did find the following trailer. Note the hyperbole of the on-screen description that refers to Gatsby as a “record-selling novel.”

I also ran across an interesting review of the 1926 Gatsby (I don’t know where it appeared or who wrote it — other than the initials “E. G.”) What strikes me about the review is that it could just as well be talking about the new Baz Luhrman version, which has received many of the same criticisms (and quite a few more).

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I had reasonably high expectations for the 1974 Gatsby, which I haven’t seen since its initial release, but remember finding it flat and turgid. This was disappointing, since the cast and filmmakers felt right. Robert Redford, 36 at the time, seemed an excellent choice, maybe an obvious one, to play Jay Gatsby. He was extremely popular, and his golden looks were thoroughly American. He was a good fit for the part. And as I recall,  he said “old sport” as well as anyone is likely to get away with. I also liked Jack Clayton’s work, a British director with strong credentials. His previous films included Room at the Top (1959) with Lawrence Harvey and Simone Signoret; The Innocents (1961) with Deborah Kerr, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw; and The Pumpkin Eater (1964), an extraordinary film with Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, and James Mason. In retrospect, Clayton wasn’t the right director for The Great Gatsby. I’m not sure who would have been better, though it’s interesting to imagine what might have been had Francis Ford Coppola directed. Coppola wrote the Gatsby screenplay, taking over when the original screenwriter, Truman Capote, was fired. In Capote’s version (per IMDB), Nick Carraway was a homosexual and Jordan Baker a “vindictive lesbian.” This might have brought some needed life to the picture, but we’ll never know.

Baz Luhrman’s three-ring (3D) circus version of The Great Gatsby came out earlier this year, preceded by much advance hoopla. For me, nearly everything about the film is too much, over the top, inflated, and numbing. This approach worked well for Luhrman with Moulin Rouge (2001), which I loved, but for Gatsby, not so much. The only justification I can see for shooting Gatsby in 3D, other than higher ticket prices, is to render the excessiveness of Gatsby’s lifestyle even more so. The only scene that seemed real to me was set in the Plaza Hotel in New York, with Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker, Daisy and her husband Tom knocking back drinks in the stultifying heat while the tension rises. This is where truth gets told and the knives come out. It has a snap and electricity that I felt nowhere else in the film, and suggests what the film could have been.

For all the glitz and glitter on display, nothing is more excessive than Leonardo DiCaprio’s endless use of the term “old sport” to punctuate nearly every sentence. I realize “old sport” comes from the novel, where it’s used ninety-four times, but DiCaprio says it so frequently here that it just becomes a joke, an awkward affectation. What works on the page doesn’t necessarily work when you hear it spoken.

I’ve always liked DiCaprio as an actor, though I didn’t buy him as J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar (2011), a film that seemed more about prosthetics and makeup than anything else. But he’s been basically incredible in films such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Marvin’s Room (1996), The Departed (2006), and Django Unchained (2012). And he certainly looks right for Gatsby (though maybe not as right as Redford). He was a good choice in 2013, as Redford was in 1974, but he may have been undone by Luhrman’s style of filmmaking (and having to say “old sport” so many times).

There’s much that’s wrong with this Gatsby; the weird framing device of Nick writing the novel in some sort of sanitarium back in the Midwest, for example. Though oddly enough, the anachronistic music choices didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I think Luhrman should have gone all the way and made the film a musical. That might sound like a joke, but the more I think about it, the better it sounds. I’m serious. Or imagine Gatsby directed with this cast by Martin Scorsese. Think about that. He’d be perfect for this. But whatever Luhrman’s Gatsby is or isn’t, it’s never as unwatchable and annoying as a lot of other movies, such as Eat Pray Love (2010), or a film I saw earlier today, the totally meaningless Now You See Me. Baz Luhrman is a director with skill, energy, and imagination, and when his films work, they’re something to see.

There have been six film versions of Gatsby since 1926, including a TV movie in 2000, with Mira Sorvino as Daisy and Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, which caused barely a ripple from what I can find. G appeared in 2002, with Richard T. Jones, Blair Underwood, and Andre Royo in a more radical interpretation about a hip-hop mogul who moves to the Hamptons in search of his lost love. It, too, was not a success. Maybe films of The Great Gatsby are destined to be made every twenty years or so until someone finally gets it right. Or maybe some books should just be left alone. - Ted Hicks

The role of First Sergeant Milt Warden was a definitive one for Lancaster. As an actor, Lancaster projected great strength, authority, virility, and intelligence, and this role used all of that and then some. Throughout his career he always seemed like the toughest guy in the room, the most capable, and the most dangerous. I’m always struck by his precise diction, the way he bites off his words without any waste, and the way he uses “ain’t” repeatedly in From Here to Eternity and can still sound sharply intelligent.

From Here to Eternity is filled with great film acting, down to the smallest parts. As Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a haunted outsider who loves the army but is determined to go his own way, Montgomery Clift also had a definitive role. Prewitt is the moral center of the film; it’s impossible not to empathize with him. Frank Sinatra is equally amazing as Private Angelo Maggio, Prewitt’s friend and a “tough monkey” destined for the stockade and the sadism of Sergeant “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Sinatra had campaigned heavily for the role, which resuscitated a flagging career. All three figure strongly in my single favorite scene in the movie, where Lancaster breaks up a fight between Maggio and “Fatso” Judson in a bar, and says the great line, “Okay, Fatso, if it’s killin’ you want!” It’s a terrific scene that foreshadows much to come for Clift and Sinatra’s characters.

Earlier in the bar scene, before the fight starts, there’s another key moment when Prewitt displays his considerable talent with a bugle, playing with a clarity and passion that  deepens our understanding of and feeling for his character. It’s quite thrilling.

Though without a doubt, the most famous scene in From Here to Eternity has to be Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach. It’s the one that almost everybody knows, even if they haven’t seen the movie. It has a life outside the film. The image, seen in the poster above, is iconic. The scene itself has been referenced, imitated, and parodied in countless films, TV shows, and publications, including Mad magazine (of course).

It’s ironic, considering what the characters go through, that From Here to Eternity is set in Hawaii, an exotic location often seen as a kind of paradise. Lancaster’s Milt Warden, involved in an illicit and illegal affair with the company commander’s unhappy wife, Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr), is unwilling to take the step of becoming an officer – he hates officers – that would allow them to be together. Clift’s Robert E. Lee Prewitt falls in love with Lorene (Donna Reed), a hostess at a “gentleman’s club” (a brothel in the novel). She loves him, but doesn’t want to marry a career soldier. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sets in motion the resolutions to these storylines. No one walks away happy, and some don’t walk away at all, but it all feels right. It’s a wonderful movie, probably a great one.

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Lancaster occasionally played weak characters, such as his roles in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and The Rose Tattoo (1955), but those were exceptions. His film debut was the lead in The Killers (1946), adapted from the Ernest Hemingway short story and directed by the underrated Robert Siodmak. It’s interesting, and I think unusual, that Lancaster was the star of the films he was in right from the start. He followed The Killers with a series of exceptional film noirs. These included Jules Dassin’s grim and violent prison drama Brute Force (1947); I Walk Alone (1948), Lancaster’s first pairing with the equally intense Kirk Douglas; Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), with Barbara Stanwyck; the evocatively titled Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948); and his second film with Robert Siodmak, Criss Cross (1949), which includes Tony Curtis, in an unbilled bit part, who would later co-star with Lancaster in Trapeze (1956) and the incredible Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

Per the typical film noir template, the characters Lancaster played in these films, while tough and capable, were often victims of forces beyond their control and larger than themselves. Lancaster went on to star in  The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952), swashbuckling adventure films that utilized his training as a gymnast and acrobat. These films featured Nick Cravat, who Lancaster knew from the 1930s when they were an acrobatic duo performing in a circus. Lancaster’s ability to do his own stunts added credibility and authenticity to his films, quite literally in a film like Trapeze. To my knowledge, there was never anything physically clumsy or awkward about the characters he played. Even in roles that didn’t require stunt work, his physicality informed the way he moved, the way he walked across a room, or even just sitting still.

Lancaster made four films directed by Robert Aldrich including  Apache and Vera Cruz in 1954, and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977). My favorite Aldrich film with Lancaster is the extremely stark and brutal Ulzana’s Raid (1972). I saw Apache and Vera Cruz earlier in the week. They don’t hold up all that well, whereas Ulzana’s Raid, which I saw yesterday, is every bit as good as it ever was. Set in 1880s Arizona, Lancaster plays a scout for the U.S. Army who accompanies a troop of soldiers to track down and capture the Apache warrior Ulzana, who has left the reservation to raid homesteads in the area, torturing and killing everyone they meet. It’s an exceptionally tough-minded film, and you see things you haven’t seen in a Western before.

As much as I love Lancaster in his earlier films, such as Brute Force, Criss Cross, and especially From Here to Eternity, his later films often have greater weight. As he gets older, his energy and strength become, for the most part, more self-contained, but it’s still there. He becomes more of an authority and less of an acrobat. In films such as the corrosive Sweet Smell of Success, Lancaster is a truly menacing figure in his horn-rimmed glasses as a powerful newspaper columnist (based on Walter Winchell) who cuts people to ribbons with his words. In John Frankenheimer’s great political thriller Seven Days in May (1964), he plays an equally threatening figure, an Air Force general engineering a coup d’état against the government (this was also the fifth of seven films he would appear in with Kirk Douglas).

Lancaster made five films directed by John Frankenheimer, including Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), but my favorite has to be The Train (1964). Frankenheimer took over direction of the film from Arthur Penn after Lancaster, who had the clout, had Penn fired. Lancaster plays a French railway yard official during World War II who reluctantly agrees to help stop a Nazi plan (led by an excellent Paul Scofield) to transport French art treasures to Germany by train. Shot in black & white, using little or no special effects (the train smash-ups are the real thing, and you can feel it), the physical production feels tremendously authentic. Once again, Lancaster does his own stunts.

Another favorite Lancaster film of mine is The Professionals (1966), written and directed by Richard Brooks, who had previously directed Lancaster’s Oscar-winning performance in Elmer Gantry (1960). This is a tremendously enjoyable Western set in 1917 with Lancaster and Lee Marvin leading Robert Ryan and Woody Strode on a mission to rescue a wealthy cattleman’s wife, Claudia Cardinale, from Jack Palance, a former Mexican revolutionary who has abducted her. The story may be a bit thin, but Lancaster and Marvin are great together, and the early 20th Century period and advanced weaponry (machine guns and automobiles) set it apart from other Westerns. Three years later, Sam Peckinpah would set The Wild Bunch (1969) in a similar context. The score by Maurice Jarre, who also did the music for The Train, is very effective and does a lot to sell the movie.

In 1978 Lancaster starred in Go Tell the Spartans, a grossly underseen film about U.S. military “advisors” in Vietnam set in 1964. It was one of the first films to critically address U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Green Berets it is not. It was critically well-received in its limited release, but isn’t that well known today.  Lancaster, 65 at the time, obviously believed in the film and its message to the extent that he put up $150,000 of his own money to cover a short-fall in the budget.

In addition to winning for Elmer Gantry, Lancaster received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in From Here to Eternity, Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980), for which he received numerous other nominations and awards. It’s a wonderful performance, filled with grace, dignity, and bravado.

Finally, a good way to wrap up this piece is with a brief Turner Classics Movies tribute to Burt Lancaster, narrated by his frequent director, John Frankenheimer. The clips are excellent, and it’s great hearing what Frankenheimer has to say, especially about his  working relationship with Lancaster. - Ted Hicks

All of the films cited are available on home video through Netflix, Amazon, and other sources.

Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” – 1963

Maisie (Onata Aprile) is the six-year-old daughter of Susanna (Julianne Moore), a fading rock star, and Beale (Steve Coogan), an art dealer. To say that these parents are neglectful and self-absorbed is an extreme understatement.  Susanna comes off as a narcissistic monster, while Beale just seems very weak, distracted, a child himself. They both seem to love Maisie, in their way, but neither is able to actually be a parent. I think that Susanna, especially, sees Maisie as a possession rather than a person with needs and feelings. Maisie basically has to take care of herself and find her own way,  often with Susanna and Beale screaming at each other in the background. I was particularly touched by a scene showing Maisie home from school, in the kitchen making herself a peanut butter sandwich with potato chips on the side. You can tell that she’s done it many times before. Maisie is constantly let down by these people, but never acts out or throws a tantrum. She just endures it and moves on.

When Susanna and Beale angrily break up at the beginning of the film, Maisie becomes the pawn in an acrimonious custody battle. It turns out they weren’t actually married, so there’s no divorce. Beale marries Maisie’s nanny, Margo; then Susanna marries Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgård), a bartender she knows from the club scene, apparently in an effort to show the court they can each provide “stable” home environments for Maisie. We see all this through Maisie’s eyes, so we only get bits and pieces of what Susanna and Beale are doing. The title is, after all, What Maisie Knew. The film maintains her point of view throughout, though we have a more objective view and understanding of what she “knows.”

The word “heartbreaking” has been used to describe What Maisie Knew in reviews I’ve seen, and it is that, for sure, but also more. The film creates a great deal of empathy for Maisie, largely due to the performance of Onata Aprile, who is a wonder, every bit as amazing as Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). The question is how a person like Maisie could even exist as she does, given the awesome dysfunction of her mother and father. It’s a mystery. Maisie seems thoughtful and aware, but she’s not a precocious movie kid, full of smart cracks and putdowns, which is a relief. As Margo says to Lincoln at one point, “She’s a child.”

Maisie is very much at risk, which makes the film painful to watch and anxiety-inducing  at times. But what provides a strong core of hope for me, and makes this much more than the sad story of a neglected child,  is the love that develops between Maisie and Lincoln as he becomes more involved in her life and welfare. This is the heart of the movie for me. The chemistry between Onata Aprile and Alexander Skarsgård is what really sells this. I first became aware of Skarsgård in David Simon’s Generation Kill series on HBO in 2008, and then as the vampire Eric Northman in True Blood, also on HBO. He was excellent in the feature Disconnect, which I saw earlier this year. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen him convey the depth of feeling he does in What Maisie Knew. In the following interview conducted at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival, the affection they have for one another is obvious.

What Maisie Knew is well directed by Scott MacGehee and David Siegel. I’ve seen only the first two of their four previous features, Suture (1993) and The Deep End (2001). Based on Maisie, I’d now like to see their subsequent films, Bee Season (2005) and Uncertainty (2009). They bring a delicate touch to What Maisie Knew, as well as a sense of mystery and wonder, without becoming sentimental. The emotions the film brings out are well earned. It’s sometimes more fun watching stuff blow up, but that seldom makes me feel as good as this. - Ted Hicks

Filmed over 11 days in April and May of 1965 during his U.K. concert tour, Dont Look Back shows us Dylan in the process of evolving out of the role of a more traditional singer/songwriter of protest songs. The half-acoustic, half-electric Bringing It All Back Home had already been released. Later that year Dylan would record the epic “Like a Rolling Stone” and make his third appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, where he would seriously upset a lot of folk purists by unleashing several electric numbers. (Another fascinating film that documents Dylan in the process of becoming “Bob Dylan” is Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963 – 1965. It’s well worth seeing.)

Dont Look Back gets your attention right away with a kind of prototype music video. We hear “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the sound track as Dylan stands in an alley, staring blankly at the camera and discarding cards bearing hand-written words from the song’s lyrics as it plays. There’s a homemade, improvised vibe to this, fresh and funny. This clip of the opening has a DVD commentary from Pennebaker and Bob Neuwirth on how the scene was put together.

Alan Price & Dylan

Seeing Dont Look Back this time, I was struck by how boring and tedious life on the road during this tour must have been. We see Dylan in a seemingly endless series of hotel rooms that are always crowded with the many friends, hangers-on, and sycophants who swarm around him. He’s never alone. Members of his entourage that Dylan seems to take seriously are Joan Baez, who disappears from the film half-way through (this is reportedly when they broke up as a couple), Alan Price (who had recently left The Animals and would later go on to write and perform a great score for Lindsey Anderson’s O Lucky Man [1973]), his manager Albert Grossman, and Bob Neuwirth, Dylan’s constant shadow and yes-man.

I was also struck, once again, by how nasty and unpleasant Dylan could be at times. The  condescending way he takes apart the “science student” (Terry Ellis, later a co-founder of Chrysalis Records in the U.K.) who tries to interview Dylan before a concert is almost painful to see. The poor guy doesn’t stand a chance. Dylan nails him to the wall while strumming his guitar and blowing notes on his harmonica as Alan Price plays piano in the background. But this encounter is almost friendly compared to the way Dylan lays into a Time magazine reporter later in the film. It’s no surprise that he would channel that anger and impatience through songs such as the “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Idiot Wind,” and the awesome and excoriating “Positively 4th Street.”

I first saw Dont Look Back in San Francisco sometime in ’68. I’d started listening to his music with Bringing It All Back Home (1965). His first four albums, to the extent that I had heard them, were a little too ascetic for my tastes at the time. Dylan needed to go electric to get my full attention, and by the end of a year in which he’d also brought out what might be his greatest album, Highway 61 Revisited, he definitely had it.

Dont Look Back is an incredibly important film, and not just because of its subject matter. It really felt like something new, raw and rough, with scenes caught on the fly, the camera just observing whatever might happen. It was also the first time I’d ever heard anyone say “fuck” in a film (and not just once, but several times). I was startled, alarmed, and a little frightened, like someone had just gotten punched in the face right in front of me. I’d been seeing movies all my life, but this was something new, and it disoriented me. The scene takes place in yet another crowded suite of hotel rooms. Someone has drunkenly thrown a glass out the window to the street below, and Dylan grows increasingly angry trying to find out who did it. It feels like he’s not playing around, that he’s dropped any pretense and we’re seeing something real.

The second part of this scene, after the disruptive mood has become calmer and relaxed, is an equally important one. Donovan is in the room; we see him watching from the sidelines. Donovan had been lately in the news, heralded as a sort of British Dylan. He’s been on Dylan’s radar from the start of the film; earlier we’ve seen Dylan referring to newspaper articles, saying somewhat jokingly that he’s got to meet Donovan. Now he’s here in the room. Almost shyly he begins to sing his song “To Sing for You.” In the midst of singing, Dylan breaks in and says, “Hey, that’s pretty good, man!” When the song is over Dylan takes the guitar from Donovan and launches into “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a devastating performance that leaves no doubt as to who the top dog is. The camera lingers on Donovan’s face for a long time, and we know he knows, too. Here’s the scene:

Dont Look Back certainly gained Pennebaker a wider awareness, but he’d been making films since 1953. His first film of record is Daybreak Express (1953), set to the music of Duke Ellington.

Primary, a film he made in 1960 with Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, and Albert Maysles was key to the development of Direct Cinema (or Cinéma vérité). The film, covering John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey’s campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary, was a breakthrough in its use of smaller, mobile cameras and lightweight sound equipment, which allowed filmmakers to be relatively unobtrusive and get in closer than they ever had before.

Along with filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers, D.A. Pennebaker was instrumental in creating a style of documentary that didn’t use voice-over narration or interviews, and was more observational. In a 1971 interview Pennebaker said, “…it’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide (what) it tells them about any of these things. But you don’t have to label them, you don’t have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it’s good for you to learn.” We see this method in the extreme in the films of Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman makes films about institutions, as reflected in titles such as High School (1968), Basic Training (1971), Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), and Domestic Violence (2001). The Maysles Brothers, Albert and David, started making films in 1962. Their best-known films are probably What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964), Gimme Shelter (1970), and the mesmerizing Grey Gardens (1976). David died in 1987, but Al continues to work and has not slowed down much.

Pennebaker has made many films about musicians over the years, including John Lennon, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and David Bowie. In 1967 he filmed the Monterey Pop Festival. Released in 1968, Monterey Pop basically invented the rock concert film as we know it. This was also a time when music had a strong connection to the counterculture. Monterey Pop showcased powerful performances from many artists, including this one from Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company (I especially like the cut to Mama Cass Elliott in the audience at the end of the number mouthing “Oh wow!” in reaction). Notice how effectively this clip is edited.

Since 1976 Pennebaker has worked in partnership with Chris Hegedus, co-directing, shooting, and editing films together through their company Pennebaker Hegedus Films. They were married in 1982. It happens that their offices are a block away from where we live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For several years now I’ve gotten a kick out of seeing Pennebaker on the street, walking a dog or pushing a cart in our local Fairway grocery store, and having an occasional conversation with him about this or that film. It knocks me out to think of how important he is historically to documentary filmmaking, and at the same time I can see him carrying a bag of groceries. At nearly 88 years of age, and not looking anywhere near it, Pennebaker is still making films, the latest being The Kings of Pastry (2009), which follows French pastry chefs during a 3-day competition to win the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Craftsman in France) award. It may not have as much resonance as some of the earlier films, but it’s impeccably made and extremely  entertaining. The Kings of Pastry showed me something new that was fun to learn and also made me quite hungry for pastries.

This year D.A. Pennebaker received an honorary Academy Award, a well-deserved recognition of his extraordinary body of work and a life dedicated to filmmaking. It’s impossible to overestimate his importance in this regard. He helped to change the landscape.

Donn Alan “D.A.” Pennebaker

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All of the films cited in this piece are available on home video from Netflix and/or Amazon. Of special note is The Criterion Collection DVD edition of The Complete Monterey Pop Festival, a 3-disc set including the feature Monterey Pop (with commentary track by D.A. Pennebaker), Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey (the complete performances of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding at Monterey), and 123 minutes of outtake performances. - Ted Hicks

Upstream Color - Thursday, March 29 at Magno Review and Friday, April 5 at the IFC Center. In addition to directing, writing, and producing Upstream Color, Shane Carruth also was director of photography, a camera operator, co-editor, wrote the original score, and one of the lead actors as well. This degree of hands-on control is unusual in feature filmmaking. He pulled similar duty on his debut feature, Primer (2004), a very twisty science-fiction film concerning time travel. Both films are perplexing and demanding, but quite rewarding if you open yourself to them. This is especially true of Upstream Color, which affected me emotionally in ways I don’t yet understand and can’t explain. I was frustrated the first time I saw it, because I couldn’t figure it out and couldn’t see the connections, assuming there were any. It was like watching a feature-length trailer that didn’t want to give anything away. I was ready to write it off as some sort of opaque, arty puzzle without a solution. But I also had the urge to see it again. The film has a haunting quality that’s hard to shake. Something had really engaged me and I wanted to feel again whatever the hell it was I’d just experienced.

At the beginning of Upstream Color we see a man walking through a nursery examining plants, poking in potted soil, then sorting out pale worms and putting them in containers. He later abducts a young woman, Kris (Amy Seimetz), outside a nightclub. We’ve seen her earlier working at a film production job, or possibly it’s advertising. He forces her to ingest one or more of the worms. She’s now totally under his control, following every suggestion and command, performing seemingly meaningless tasks. We watch Kris transcribe passages from Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The man has her sign over large amounts of money to him. We see another man (Andrew Sensenig) who makes odd sound recordings with elaborate equipment, such as the sound a stack of bricks makes when he pushes them over. He also operates a pig farm where he carries out some kind experiments on the pigs. He almost never says a word. He’s called “Sampler” in the end credits, which makes sense when you see it, but this is never mentioned in the film.

We see Sampler outdoors at night with his equipment. He puts large speakers face down on the ground and begins blasting loud thrumming sounds directly into the earth. Earlier Kris awoke in her bed to see worm-shapes moving just under the skin of her arms and legs. Alarmed, she tried to cut them out with a kitchen knife. She now appears in a daze at Sampler’s farm (perhaps somehow drawn by the sound). Sampler puts Kris on a kind of operating table and connects her via tubing to a pig on an adjacent table. He begins to transfer something either from Kris to the pig or from the pig to Kris. Later Kris meets Jeff (Shane Carruth) on a commuter train in an unnamed city. There are intimations Jeff has undergone the same testing as Kris. We see similar marks or scars on their bodies. They begin to fall in love (or something like it). As they get to know each other, their memories begin to overlap. Kris’ recollections become Jeff’s, slightly altered. His memories become hers. They argue about whose memories are whose. There’s a stunning sequence where this plays out in increasingly frenetic rapid-fire dialogue.

There were moments when Upstream Color felt like a horror movie, a monster movie, movies by David Cronenberg and David Lynch, or about alien abduction. It’s none of these things, or maybe a bit of all of them.

Upstream Color gives us fragments of a larger story. It’s up to us to make sense of it. The film is like a dream or memory you’re right on the edge of grasping or understanding, but it’s just out of reach, like something half heard, half remembered. The music creates a sense of expectation, of momentous events about to happen. At no point in the film is there a moment that tells us this is it, where all the strands neatly come together. But Upstream Color is not a Rorschach test; it’s more like a jigsaw puzzle with some missing pieces. I don’t think there are different stories we can come up with here. I think there is one story; we just have to see it. There are very definite signposts, but it’s up to us to fill in the blanks. Of course, we have to use our imaginations to do that, so even if there is only one story, probably no two viewers will see quite the same film.

It was after seeing Upstream Color the second time that connections became clearer, particularly in the last moments. Not that everything makes sense. For example, I don’t know why Walden Pond appears on tables and bookshelves repeatedly in the film. Though maybe if I had ever read Walden Pond, I might have a better idea. I don’t what the deal is with the two young black kids on bicycles at the beginning, or the guy who puts the worms in Kris’ body and steals her money. It occurs to me just now that he may be working for Sampler, recruiting test subjects. It’s okay not to understand everything. The idea that there is more to Upstream Color than I’ve been able to comprehend doesn’t bother me. That’s part of the mystery and beauty of it. I don’t know, I may be way off the mark here. But I wonder when was the last time I was this engaged or moved by a film. And yes, I want to see it again. - Ted Hicks

Shane Carruth’s first film, Primer, is available via Amazon Instant Video and for rental or streaming from Netflix. Upstream Color is currently being distributed by the filmmaker for a limited theatrical release. It will be available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon on May 7, as well as Instant Video. Also check Netflix for availability after that date.

The IFC Center in New York recently ended a week’s run of Stanley Kubrick films. I saw a double feature of two of my favorites, The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), then topped that off the next day with the always awesome 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In terms of style, technique, acting, and story, The Killing, made when he was 28, is a huge advance on his first two features, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955). In it we see him becoming Stanley Kubrick. And it’s one of the best film noirs ever.

Based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White, The Killing was written by Jim Thompson, author of tough novels with terrific titles, such as The Killer Inside Me and A Hell of a Woman, mostly original paperbacks with lurid covers. Kubrick was impressed with The Killer Inside Me, and thought Thompson would be right to adapt Clean Break, though in the end Kubrick claimed the screenplay for himself, giving Thompson a “dialogue by” credit. This greatly upset Thompson, who nevertheless worked on the screenplay for Kubrick’s next film, Paths of Glory. I read a lot of crime fiction, and Thompson figures high in  the hard-boiled pantheon. None of his books were in print when he died in 1977, but have been subsequently re-printed and re-discovered. His books, grubby and violent, written in a point-blank style, were perfect for neo-noir adaptations. Films from his books include The Getaway (filmed twice, first by Sam Peckinpah), The Killer Inside Me (also filmed twice), Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.

The Killing is about a complex race-track robbery, filmed in a semi-documentary style. The structure of the film is equally complex, presenting the story out of chronological order. An omniscient, totally objective narrator (an uncredited Art Gilmore, who narrated 156 episodes of the Broderick Crawford TV series Highway Patrol and documentary films during the ’50s and ’60s, making him perfect for this) introduces the characters and action, and keeps the time sequence clear by linking scenes with phrases such as “About an hour earlier, that same Saturday afternoon in September, in another part of the city…” Kubrick frequently used narration in his films. In discussing Barry Lyndon (1975) with French critic Michel Ciment, Kubrick says “A voice-over spares you the cumbersome business of telling the necessary facts of the story through expositional dialogue scenes which can become very tiresome and frequently unconvincing… Voice-over, on the other hand, is a perfectly legitimate and economical way of conveying story information which does not need dramatic weight and which would otherwise be too  bulky to dramatize.” More importantly, in The Killing, the voice-over narration is crucial in keeping the audience situated in time and place, as well as building tension and suspense.

Interestingly, the film’s narrative structure was not even mentioned in the original New York Times review (May 21, 1956) when The Killing opened. The source novel, Clean Break, employs the same fragmented chronology, which is reportedly what interested Kubrick in the book in the first place. In a 1973 interview with Kubrick, Gene Phillips writes, “Kubrick was confident that his method of telling the story by means of fragmented flashbacks would work as well on the screen as they did in the novel. ‘It was the handling of time that may have made this more than just a good crime film,’ Kubrick said.”

Flashbacks had been frequently used in films up to this time, especially in film noir, notably in films such as The Killers (1946) and Out of the Past (1947), but what The Killing did with time hadn’t been done quite this way before, as far as I’m aware. The Killing‘s circular chronology must have influenced Quentin Tarantino’s use of time in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. I’d be amazed if he hadn’t seen it.

The following clip of the beginning of The Killing quickly gives a sense of the look and feel of the film, the fragmented editing structure, and the narration that sets up the plot and introduces five key characters in the first 8 minutes 30 seconds. The music by Gerald Fried gives an urgency and importance to the scenes, but is not overdone or used to excess. Fried went to high school with Kubrick and did the music for his first four features.

Of particular note in this clip is the scene that starts at the 6:36 mark, with the narrator telling us, “At 7:00pm that same day, Johnny Clay, perhaps the most important thread in the unfinished fabric…” The camera follows Clay in a low-angle, lateral tracking shot from screen left to right as he opens a bottle of beer in the kitchen and walks through at least three rooms. As he walks he explains the robbery plans to someone we don’t see until he reaches the living room. We see Clay from behind furniture in the foreground of the shot. The effect of moving past foreground objects seen between us and Clay creates an almost 3D effect, and gets my attention every time I view the film. Take a look. The shot is much more elegant than I can describe.

The Killing stars Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay, ex-con and architect of the scheme to rob the race track, a character similar in appearance and manner to Dix Hanley, who he played in John Huston’s great The Asphalt Jungle (1950), also a film about the careful planning and eventual failure of a robbery. Hayden has always been a favorite of mine. He was best at playing strong, imposing figures (being 6’5″ and muscular helped), such as a cop in the little-seen and underrated Crime Story (1954); an insane Air Force general who starts a nuclear war in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964); a corrupt police captain who famously gets his brains blown out by Al Pacino in The Godfather (1972); and an alcoholic writer in The Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Altman’s revisionist take on Raymond Chandler’s novel.

In addition to Hayden, Kubrick assembled an excellent cast for The Killing,  with Timothy Carey being a standout. Carey plays Nikki Arcane (great name), a marksman hired by Johnny Clay to shoot a horse at the race track to create a diversion from the actual robbery. With his bizarre line readings and facial expressions, Carey was an eccentric screen presence throughout his career. He would appear to great effect in Kubrick’s next film, Paths of Glory. The following clip shows Johnny Clay explaining the job to Nikki. I love that Nikki cradles a puppy in his arms throughout this scene.

A fascinating piece of casting in the film is that of Kola Kwariani, a professional wrestler and chess player from Russia, who plays Maurice, hired by Clay to start a fight at the race track to create yet another diversion at the time of the robbery. Besides having a wonderful name, Kwariani and Kubrick knew each other from the New York chess world. He brings an unusual presence to the film, both in appearance and in the way he speaks. The following scene shows Clay speaking with Maurice in a chess club, explaining what he needs from him. The dialogue is great.

And here’s the brawl Maurice initiates.

A pivotal character in the film is George Peatty (a perfect name for this nervous, henpecked little man), played by Elisha Cook Jr. at his twitchiest. Cook was a familiar presence in films of the ’40s and ’50s, anxious and bug-eyed in most of his roles, or acting tougher than he was. Memorable parts include the gunman Wilmer Cook, sold out by his boss Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941); the doomed Harry Jones in The Big Sleep (1946); and as hotheaded farmer Stonewall Torrey, shot down in the mud by hired gun Jack Palance in Shane (1953). As Johnny Clay tells his girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray), none of the men he’s recruited for the robbery are criminals in the usual sense. Cook’s character, George Peatty, is a betting-window teller at the race track whose sole function in the heist is to open a locked door for Johnny Clay at a crucial moment. George’s wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), brassy and manipulative, knows something is up and pressures him to tell her. She gets enough out of him to interest her lover, Val Cannon (another great name), played by a thuggish Vince Edwards before he gained fame as Ben Casey on television.

A staple of most crimes films is the carefully planned job that goes south, and The Killing is no exception. Johnny Clay has put together a plan that requires interlocking precision and adherence to an exact time table by all participants. In retrospect it may seem odd that he didn’t get a whiff of George Peatty’s basic weakness, but Clay obviously wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was. When Val Cannon’s attempt to horn in on the take forces Clay to improvise, we see what all that precise planning was worth. But by then things were already coming apart. Author Alexander Walker, in his book Stanley Kubrick Directs, points out that what attracted Kubrick to Lionel White’s novel, besides the fragmented structure, is that “the novel touches on a theme that is a frequent preoccupation of Kubrick’s films: the presumably perfect plan of action that goes wrong through human fallibility and/or chance.” Both are at play in an ending that recalls that of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), rich in irony and resignation. - Ted Hicks

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An excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, directed by long-time Kubrick associate Jan Harlan, is well worth seeing. Take a look.

Leviathan - Wednesday, February 13  at Magno Review. A film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. This film may be nominally called a documentary, but it’s so far from any documentary I’ve ever seen that it defies description. The press notes call Leviathan a “groundbreaking, immersive portrait of the contemporary fishing industry.” The only accurate word in that phrase is “immersive.” From the very first image the viewer is plunged deep into a swirl of who-knows-what images and sounds, without any context whatsoever.

I thought it might be appropriate, given the raw-feed nature of the film, to show my tortured, unedited notes as I scrawled them in the dark during the screening:

“…like being waterboarded by a movie…disorienting…alienating…horror film…matter-of-fact brutality…never a sense of what’s going on or why or how…violent and dehumanizing…no establishing shots at all…45 minutes into it a guy taking a shower, very abstract image that goes on and on…what am I supposed to take away from this film?…motion sickness…like being on another planet with no reference points…Lovecraft…Bosch…vision of Hell…activity without meaning…assaultive, negative experience…long, static shot in the galley, fisherman at table watching TV we don’t see, goes on and on, he falls asleep…film gives no idea of what it’s like being on one of these ships…as if things aren’t abstract enough, lengthy shots of birds in the sky are suddenly turned upside down…much of the time we don’t know what we’re looking at.”

It’s a good thing I knew beforehand that Leviathan was shot aboard a fishing trawler off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, because the film is simply not interested in supplying that (or any other) information. Leviathan is a purely sensory experience, visual and aural. Titles at the start of the trailer supply a context that you never get in the film.

I’m not saying I don’t want to see films that are experimental, impressionistic, and avant-garde, which this definitely is. But Leviathan seems to be a collection of arbitrarily selected shots edited in such a way as to be as chaotic as possible. If the trailer sparks your interest at all, be warned that nearly every one of these shots goes on for what seems forever. I love long takes in films, but this is something else entirely. If I’m going to be shown the blurry image of a man taking a shower for maybe five minutes, I’d like to have some idea, however vague, of why it’s in the film. The most interesting shots in Leviathan are of birds flying against the sky, but then this footage is turned upside down, and we watch that, also for a very long time.

I obviously just don’t get it. I’m certainly not the best audience for Leviathan, but I’m not sure who would be. The film seems to go out of its way to beat you up with sound and image. When I later watched a video of the filmmakers’ press conference at last year’s New York Film Festival, I was put off immediately when co-director Lucien Castaing-Taylor began by asking if anyone in the audience had an asthma inhaler he could borrow. When asked what the filmmakers were trying to say about the fishing industry, he said they weren’t trying to say anything, that they didn’t want to say anything reducible to words and meaning. This seems pretty pretentious to me. He also acknowledged that the film can be quite stressful and anxiety-inducing to watch. So maybe my reaction was exactly what was hoped for. He seemed hostile and condescending in the press conference, very much the superior artiste. His co-director, Véréna Paravel, has a limited command of English, yet Castaing-Taylor, who is quite fluent, continually insisted that she answer questions rather than himself. Instead of  expanding the way I might see Leviathan, the press conference only reinforced my negative take on the film.

To be fair, Leviathan has been shown at a number of film festivals, has won several awards, and definitely has its champions. For example, Rich Juzwiak’s review in Gawker is much more positive and open to the film than mine. As I’ve indicated, I have a hard time with a film this abstract (and for me, abstract in a hostile way, which is what bothers me the most). I need to be able to relate to whatever I’m seeing, to find a way to hook into the material, which is usually through story and (most importantly) characters. Though I agree with Jean-Luc Godard, who once said that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

I saw Leviathan at a screening in February, and wasn’t sure I wanted to write about it. It’s much more rewarding and definitely more fun writing about films I like. I try to convey my enthusiasm for those films. But Leviathan is still playing here in NYC, and since I’m still trying to sort out my response to the film, I decided to go ahead and lay out my thoughts. You’ll have to decide if Leviathan is a film you want to see if it comes your way.  - Ted Hicks

** From what I can find, Leviathan is not yet available from either Amazon or Netflix. This is definitely not multiplex fare; art houses and film societies are the likely venues. **

At less than two minutes, Fresh Guacamole is the shortest film ever nominated for an Academy Award. It was made by Adam Pespane, who goes by the name of PES. I’d not heard of him before, but this guy is amazing. He’s been making incredibly inventive stop-motion films since 2001, when he unleashed his first film, Roof Sex, in which two easy chairs have a passionate, no-holds-barred encounter on a New York City rooftop. Caution: This film depicts graphic chair-on-chair sex.

In 2004 PES made KaBoom!, a war film showing a bombing raid on a tiny city using children’s toys and other ordinary objects in very unordinary ways. It makes an effective anti-war statement, or maybe more of a comment than a statement.

His Oscar-nominated film this year, Fresh Guacamole, shows how to make guacamole using materials such as hand grenades and baseballs. It’s brainy and amusing, but doesn’t have much substance beyond showing how clever it is. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad a film with this kind of spirit could get nominated.

Head Over Heels (10 min.), directed by Timothy Reckart in the UK, is the only nominated animated film not from the United States, which seems a little odd to me. Surely there’s great animation being done in other countries as well.  Along with Fresh Guacamole, this claymation film is the most conceptually unusual of the nominees. After a long marriage, Walter and Madge no longer see eye to eye — literally, since what’s up for Walter is down for Madge. The laws of gravity don’t apply; Walter’s ceiling is Madge’s floor. During the course of the film they take tentative steps to reconcile. The trailer gives a sense of what this looks like and how it works.

Adam and Dog (16 min.), directed by Minkyu Lee, is a very interesting film about the first dog’s efforts to become the first man’s best friend in the Garden of Eden. Where they are and who they are isn’t spelled out in so many words, but it becomes obvious rather quickly. There’s also a tasteful honesty in the way Adam, and later Eve, are shown to be anatomically correct, but without drawing attention to it. The animation is quite beautiful.

Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare” (5 min.) I love The Simpsons, and it’s nice seeing the perpetually ageless Maggie get her own story for a change. At the Ayn Rand Daycare Center (nice touch), instead of being put in the “Gifted Area” where she longs to be, Maggie is deposited in a dreary room called “Nothing Special,” where she tries to protect butterflies from demonic, beetle-browed Baby Gerald, who only wants to smash them against the wall with a mallet. The Longest Daycare is fun, though it seems rather slight for an Oscar nomination. Or maybe I’ve gotten so used to seeing the Simpsons world on television that this doesn’t seem new enough.

Last year’s Oscar winner in this category, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, was a truly remarkable, beautifully rendered 15 minute film using a combination of traditional hand-drawn techniques, miniatures, and computer animation. I was particularly interested to learn that the character of Morris Lessmore was visually based on hero of mine, Buster Keaton. The film deservedly received fourteen awards, including the Oscar. If you’ve not seen it before, or want to see it again, here’s your chance.

I want to end by highlighting another short film, the virtually unclassifiable Plastic Bag. It was never nominated for an Oscar and isn’t even animated, but I’m including it here because it’s such a great film, and I don’t think many people know about it. Plastic Bag was made in 2009 by the American-born Iranian director, Ramin Bahrani, whose first two features, Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007), have received international acclaim and numerous awards. The film relates the journey of a plastic kitchen bag in a search for its Maker and the meaning of its life, told by the bag itself in commentary spoken by Werner Herzog. This is, of course, an absurdly fanciful premise, but one that’s taken seriously here. Plastic Bag aspires to achieve a spiritual dimension and a kind of transcendence, and by the time the film is over it very nearly gets there. Herzog’s mesmerizing narration, extraordinary photography by Michael Simmonds (no digital effects were used), and evocative music by Kjartan Sveinsson, help give poetic life and sadness to an everyday object made to be discarded. I was surprised to be as moved as I was by the end. It’s quite an achievement to find the human spirit in a plastic bag and not be joking. - Ted Hicks

Boardwalk Empire (HBO) I was impressed, but not overwhelmed, when I watched the first episode of this series, set in Atlantic City on the eve of Prohibition in 1920. The pilot was directed by Martin Scorsese (Executive Producer on the series). My expectations were very high, and while the period ambiance and attention to detail was amazing, there didn’t seem to be much life to it, and I found it hard to connect with the characters. But I stayed with it, and after a few episodes became more and more involved. Strong, interesting characters are essential to any story, and Boardwalk Empire has an abundance of them — embodied by a great cast, led by Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, who oversees bootlegging and vice in Atlantic City. Two of my favorite characters this past season have been Richard Harrow, the badly disfigured WWI veteran who wears a painted mask on one side of his face (played by Jack Huston, a grandson of director/actor John Huston), and Gyp Rosetti, a psychotic gangster who threatens Nucky’s turf. Gyp is played by Bobby Cannavale, in a genuinely frightening performance.

Breaking Bad (AMC) I didn’t watch this series when it first appeared in 2008 because I thought I wouldn’t be interested in a protagonist who cooked and sold methamphetamine. Little did I know. I kept hearing great things about the series in both the press and from friends, but still stayed away. When a friend sent us boxed sets of the first three seasons, I was finally ready to dive in, and was immediately blown away. My wife and I burned through the boxed sets, bought the fourth season and finished that just in time to start watching the fifth, though now we had to watch the episodes one at a time on a weekly basis like everyone else. Breaking Bad is amazing, breathtaking, the best series since The Wire – and that’s saying something, since I’m one of those true believers who thinks The Wire is the greatest television series ever. Like all good series, Breaking Bad has a great cast. Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of Walter White, as he transforms from a terminally ill high school chemistry teacher to a meth-dealing gangster capable of murder and worse, is something to behold. He’s a monster, but you can’t take your eyes off him. The moral center of the series is Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman, Walter’s partner. Other favorites include Bob Odenkirk as shifty lawyer Saul Goodman (“Better Call Saul!”), Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring, and Jonathan Banks as enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut. I can’t wait to see the final eight episodes this summer. I’ll feel bummed out when it’s over for good; but like The Wire, it will always be there.

Downton Abbey (PBS) This high-toned soap opera from the U.K. portrays the aristocratic Crawley family and servants in their palatial home, Downton Abbey. The series begins in 1912, progresses through the First World War, and is now in the 1920s — all periods of change and upheaval for a tradition-bound society. Downton Abbey is impeccably produced from top to bottom, and has terrific performances by a top-notch cast. The storylines and characters are so compelling and well played that I can forgive it for being painfully contrived at times (Matthew walks!). Each episode is filled with one melodramatic turn after another, but it doesn’t matter. I just want to spend as much time with these people as possible (especially Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley). We didn’t watch the first season when it originally aired, but I was definitely aware of it (though for a long while I thought the title was Downtown Abbey, which would probably be a different sort of show). My wife wanted to watch it, and when the first season re-aired as a lead-in to the second, we jumped in and got hooked.

Fringe (Fox)  A case can be made that without The X Files (1993-2002), Fringe would not have existed. They certainly share DNA in their basic set-up of federal agents investigating paranormal cases. As much as I loved The X Files (excluding the final two seasons when it went fatally off track), for me Fringe was the better show; the stakes were higher. Never that strong in the ratings, the series ended last month after an abbreviated fifth season. Fringe, through complex storylines, increasingly became about fathers and sons, parents and children, regeneration and redemption. Initially attracted by the bizarre sci-fi trappings, I was drawn in by the strong emotional content and an ensemble of characters I truly cared about.

This promotional clip offers a recap of the show leading into the final season.

The Good Wife (CBS) I was skeptical of this series when it first appeared in 2009: the story of a humiliated “good wife,” Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), who stands by her husband, Peter (Chris Noth), the Illinois state’s attorney, when he is sent to prison as the result of a sex and corruption scandal (sound familiar?). But I was quickly won over by a great cast, interesting characters, and strong storylines. The show, now in its fourth season, has continued to grow and improve. I wasn’t that thrilled with the recent subplot involving Kalinda’s violent ex-husband, but that’s been the only real misstep so far.     Julianna Margulies anchors the series as Alicia. I wasn’t watching ER when she was on that show, but Margulies got my attention in a short-lived series in 2008, Canterbury’s Law. She’s excellent in The Good Wife, as are the rest of the cast. Standouts for me include Archie Panjabi as the mesmerizing Kalinda Sharma, and Alan Cumming as Peter Florrick’s campaign manager, Eli Gold.

The Hour (BBC America) In just two short seasons of six episodes each, The Hour quickly became one of my favorite shows. “The Hour” of the title is a fictional British news program, similar in format to “60 Minutes.” The first season was set in 1956 against the background of the Cold War and the developing Suez Crisis. The sense of period is spot-on and the production design is stunning. But, as always, it was the cast, the characters, and the writing that drew me in. I always like seeing former cast members from The Wire in new roles: Clarke Peters and Wendell Pierce in Treme, Lance Reddick in Fringe, Michael K. Williams in Boardwalk Empire, and now Dominic West as philandering, morally conflicted news anchor Hector Madden on The Hour. The strengths he showed as alcoholic detective Jimmy McNulty on The Wire are more than in evidence here. Ben Wishaw, who I first remember seeing as poet John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), and more recently as the new Q in last year’s Bond film, Skyfall, plays Freddie Lyon, a young, whip-smart reporter determined to ferret out the truth. Ramola Garai completes the triangle as Bel Rowley, the show’s producer and close friend of Freddie’s, who has an affair with Hector in the first season.  Last year’s second season focused on an investigation into police corruption and illegal arms deals involving nuclear weapons. In each season so far, six episodes didn’t seem like enough time to fully work out the stories, but it’s been excellent nonetheless.

Justified (FX) This series, now in its fourth season, is based on an Elmore Leonard short story, and really captures the Leonard tone. Justified is relaxed and easy-going, with great dialogue and off-beat characters, and given to sudden, matter-of-fact displays of violence. Timothy Olyphant stars as Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, a looser version of his role as Sheriff Seth Bullock in HBO’s Deadwood (2004-2006). At the start of the series, after a questionable shooting in Miami, Raylan has been reassigned to Harlan County, Kentucky, where he grew up. He’s someone who doesn’t go out of his way to shoot someone, but doesn’t hesitate when he has to. Olyphant is enormously appealing as Raylann — as is the rest of the cast, especially Walter Goggins as Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s boyhood friend and now criminal adversary. The show is filled with Southern good-old-boy behavior, with everyone on a first-name basis, lawmen and criminals alike, most of whom have known each other for years. Justified has gotten better from year to year, more assured of itself. So far, the second season (2011) has been the strongest, but that was mainly due to the presence of Margo Martindale in her Emmy-winning role of Mags Bennett, one of the most memorable, multidimensional villains I can remember seeing in anything. I love the series. It’s always a pleasure seeing something this well done.

Mad Men (AMC) After five extremely popular seasons (2007-2012), Mad Men is unquestionably a phenomenon. The series tells the stories of people working at a Manhattan advertising agency in the 1960s, reflected through the light and shadows of the events and issues of that decade: civil rights, Vietnam, sexism, homophobia, women’s liberation, the Kennedy assassination, etc. Mad Men gets talked about a lot, and with good reason. It’s a show that makes you wonder how it can possibly get better, and then it does. From the beginning,  the narrative has been very strong and has continued to build throughout subsequent seasons. As with so many good series, an excellent cast and compelling characters really sell the goods. At the center of it all is Jon Hamm as Don Draper, a supremely confident man who hides the secret of another life, another identity entirely. A large part of the show has been putting Don through the wringer and seeing how he weathers that. Standouts in the cast include Elizabeth Moss as Peggy Olson, who rises from secretary to successful copywriter in a business mainly run by men; Vincent Kartheiser as the weasely, ambitious Pete Campbell, who I particularly enjoyed watching get punched out by Jared Harris’ Lane Pryce last season; John Slattery as Roger Sterling, Don’s confidant, drinking buddy, and fellow womanizer; Christina Hendricks as Joan Harris, office manager and eye-candy for propective clients. Hendricks was amazing (and heartbreaking) in one of the strongest episodes of the series last year, “The Other Woman,” in which Joan, with the promise of a partnership, is pressured to prostitute herself in order to land an important client for the firm. This was Mad Men at its best.

Here’s a clip of Don’s new wife Megan surprising him even more at his surprise birthday party in a scene that got a lot of attention when the episode aired last year. It’s followed by a video of series creator Matthew Weiner and some of the cast of Mad Men on Inside the Actors Studio last May:

The Simpsons (Fox) From its beginnings as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman in 1987 to its own half-hour show in December 1989, The Simpsons is now in it 24th season, an amazing accomplishment for any show. In 2009 it surpassed Gunsmoke (1955-1975) as the longest-running primetime, scripted show on television — a feat that I’m sure would have incensed James Arness, who was quite perturbed when Law & Order (1990-2010) matched Gunsmoke‘s record of 20 seasons in 2010. The Simpsons has become ingrained as a part of American culture. Homer’s signature “D’oh!” has entered the vocabulary. It’s odd now to remember how many guardians of society and culture were totally bent out of shape when The Simpsons first appeared, certain that its irreverent attitudes (“I’m Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?”) were going to destroy American family values. The show has so far received 27 Primetime Emmys and a prestigious Peabody Award (1997). Books written about The Simpsons include “The Simpsons and Philosophy,” “The Psychology of the Simpsons,” and “The Gospel of the Simpsons.” Aside from all this serious acceptance, it’s just a great show and shows little sign of slowing down. Through absurd, complicated storylines, The Simpsons references itself and the world at large, socially, politically, and culturally. Not every episode hits the mark, but when it does it can be stunning.

The opening couch-gag segments are a constant source of delight, the show at its most consistently inventive. Here are three that illustrate that. The first takes off on Mad Men (the clip compares The Simpsons version side by side with the original Mad Men title sequence); the second was created by the artist Banksy; the third, the extended “Homer evolution” couch gag, is simply amazing (though I apologize for the distracting Hulu banner at the bottom of the screen).

30 Rock (NBC) Inspired by Tina Fey’s experience as a head writer on Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock is set in the world of a fictional sketch-comedy series called TGS (aka The Girly Show). Though never strong in ratings, 30 Rock received critical acclaim and many Emmy nominations (22 in 2009 alone) and awards (Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 2007-2008-2009). In a world where new shows are sometimes cancelled after one or two episodes, NBC kept 30 Rock on the air for seven seasons (2006-2013), until the series finale on January 31 of this year. Tina Fey is obviously some kind of comic genius. The combination of Fey with Alec Baldwin (now more popular than ever), and supported by an excellent cast with inspired guest appearances, has achieved a level of comic inspiration that will be hard to match. I don’t know if 30 Rock will be as fondly remembered as Seinfeld – which, for all it’s craziness, was more reality-based and reached more people, but it probably doesn’t matter. From one season to the next, 30 Rock became increasingly outlandish and inventively deranged. It seemed to me that in this final season they cast off all restraint and went for broke, which was great to see.

Treme (HBO) Created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer, who previously worked together on The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street, this series is a celebration of life and survival set in a post-Katrina New Orleans. A large part of that celebration is conveyed through some of the most beautiful, energized music you’ll ever hear that weaves in and out of each episode. Simon brings his usual razor-sharp eye to showing us how things work. A great cast, including Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters from The Wire, takes us through storylines that feel largely plotless in any conventional sense and that unfold in ways that feel more like life than fiction. The third season, which aired last year, was the strongest so far for me. The word is that HBO has renewed Treme for an abbreviated fourth season that will end the series. This won’t be the first good series to end before its time (Deadwood, Rome, Bored to Death, Fringe, and Men of a Certain Age come to mind), but it seems a shame. The show has so much heart.

David Simon spoke about Treme in an excellent interview in Wired magazine last November. And finally, here’s a clip with Wendell Pierce, who played Jimmy McNulty’s partner Bunk in The Wire. His character, Antoine Baptiste, is a musician who has taken a job teaching music in a high school in order to earn some needed cash. This scene conveys some of the relaxed beauty of the series.

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Runners Up

Doctor Who (BBC America)

Girls (HBO)

Project Runway (Lifetime)

The Mindy Project (Fox)

Veep (HBO)

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If you’re wondering why Homeland isn’t on this list, there’s a simple explanation: I haven’t seen it yet. Everything I’ve heard about Homeland makes me think I’d love it, and I plan to catch up with it soon. I’m sure there are other great shows out there I haven’t seen, but there’s only so much time, alas. - Ted Hicks

Of the ten films on my list of favorites for the year, my two “most favorites” are Beauty Is Embarrassing and Searching for Sugar Man. I’ll go further and say that Sugar Man is one of the best films I saw last year, documentary or otherwise. I put off seeing it for weeks, despite hearing nothing but good things about it from friends and in press coverage. When I finally did see Searching for Sugar Man, I loved it, and was surprised by how emotional it made me feel, and how much I cared for Sixto Rodriguez, aka Sugar Man.  This is similar to my response to last year’s Buck and Bill Cunningham, New York. And Beauty Is Embarrassing just made me smile from beginning to end (and after). I was in awe of  the playful genius and expansive spirit of its subject, Wayne White. All four are films with engaging, charismatic persons as the subjects, seen in artfully made films. - Ted Hicks

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry ­– Alison Klayman (Available via Netflix & Amazon)

Beauty Is Embarrassing – Neil Berkeley (Available via Netflix & Amazon)

The Central Park Five – Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon

The Flat – Arnon Goldfinger (Israel/Germany)

Gerhard Richter Painting – Corinna Belz (Germany) (Available via Netflix & Amazon)

How to Survive a Plague – David France (Available via Netflix and Amazon)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi – David Gelb (Available via Netlix & Amazon)

Searching for Sugar Man – Malik Bendjelloul (Sweden/U.K.) (Available via Netflix & Amazon)

This Is Not a Film – Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Iran)

West of Memphis – Amy Berg