Me and Orson Welles (UK 2008, 114 min. dir: Richard Linklater, cast: Christian McKay, Claire Dames, Zac Efron).

Towards the end of his life Orson Welles would agree to appear in any film, TV show, or commercial that would pay him $2000 a day. His bulk required a wheel chair and an oxygen tank at the ready to help him breath. He died owing thousands on his house account at Ma Maison: the one restaurant that let him run a tab.

The Orson Welles of this film is young, vital, creative, egoistic, charismatic and thoroughly mesmerizing. Christian McKay played Orson in a one-man show long before signing to play this part. His familiarity and ease with the role make the movie.

The plot isn’t much. Orson’s Mercury Theatre troupe is about to perform Julius Caesar on Broadway. Orson hires a young aspiring actor (Zac Efron) to play a small part. Zac falls in love with Claire Danes (Sonja) without realizing Orson is also bedding her.

What makes Me and Orson Welles rise above the plot is its examination of the theater, of the belief that great things came happen there, and that actors are really escape artists fleeing from themselves. “If for 90minutes I get this great reprieve from being myself—that is what you see in every great actor’s eyes.”

Too bad a movie about the soul of Broadway had to be shot in London. This is a British production trying to overcome the lack of money by faking just about everything from Central Park to 45^th Street. Maybe it was deemed too risky for Hollywood.

The risk also led to an advertising campaign featuring the young romance angle (Zac and Claire) and completely ignoring the power of the film vested in Christian McKay as Orson. His wonderful examination of an actor’s soul—or lack of it is what’s worth watching. Me and Orson Welles also has a lot to say about an amazing period in American theater (during the Great Depression) and the crazy genius who went from staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a Nazi parable to vowing “We will sell no wine before its time” in TV commercials.

Greenberg (USA 2010, 107 min. dir: Noah Baumbach, cast: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans.

Every generation makes its mid-life crises movie going back to Bye Bye Braverman. But Noah Baumbach’s take on the problem is especially good because of Greta Gerwig and Ben Stiller.

Yes, Ben Stiller can actually act. That’s the news from Greenberg. And Greta Gerwig is nothing but a very good actress in a role that calls for underplaying. She’s Florence, the assistant to Roger Greenberg’s (Ben Stiller) successful brother. The brother and his family are conveniently away on vacation, allowing his brother from New York to live in their house and build a new doghouse for the German shepherd (Greenberg is a carpenter).

Florence sings at a small, empty club when she isn’t taking care of the dog. Roger laments that his life is nothing more than his life. Of course they have an affair and the first sex scene is wonderful for it’s total lack of emotion. He can’t give much more than a good ejaculation. She expects nothing more of any man.

Roger laments to his old drop-out buddy Ivan (Rhys Ifans) that it is probably too late to go to med school or even veterinarian school at 50. Truth be told, at fifty he doesn’t even drive a car and seems confused by more than Florence. “Where is my life going?” is the question none of this genre a movies can ever answer except to shrug and conclude, “That’s my life.”

What makes this one different is good performances, especially from Greta Gerwig as the sweet, clunky girl who is not quite pretty enough and ambitious enough to find herself. And to make it more complicated, she’s pregnant by someone else (whom we never meet).

We know where this will end, but the curiosity that sustains the movie is our getting there with them. Too bad the setting is Los Angeles’ west side. There’s a lot of truth in this story that gets lost in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. The map restricts the point of view because everything is circumscribed by wealth and ease.

But you can’t help warming up to poor schnook Greenberg as he flails and fails and even brings a cheeseburger to Florence’s hospital bed while she recovers from her abortion. “I thought you might be hungry,” he explains as he sets it on her stomach.

Brothers (two versions). (Denmark 2004 117 min. dir: Susanne Bier, cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Connie Nielsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas.USA 2009 105.min, dir: Jim Sheridan, cast: Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal).

The most amazing fact about Brothers is that it was made twice. Once might have been more than enough. There is an old Hollywood story about the producer and the writer alone in the desert dying of thirst. They spot a cold clear jar of water. The writer says, ‘Shall we drink it?’ The producer says, “let’s piss in it first.”

Susanne Bier’s Brothers is a modest movie about the romantic yearnings of two people when one happens to be the brother of the other’s husband. The husband has conveniently been declared dead on an Afghani war mission. But he is really being held captive and we know he will return.

It’s a good movie (which is why it is included in MovieWithMe, we only review the ones we like). But it is plot driven rather than character driven. Things have to happen to push it forward, and the audience knows where it is headed. Plot driven movies are like building a fence around the property and thinking what kind of house you will put in the middle.

Taking this modest house and remodeling it so Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman can live in it ruins the architecture. To begin with, Tobey Maguire has no sex appeal. The Muppet of Spiderman is not a leading man. Natalie Portman has some heat with Jake Gyllenhaal, so did she marry Tobey?

Jim Sheridan is a very talented director, up there with Susanne Bier in all respects except one: he’s working from a script that has been remodeled like the house to suit the new star tenants. No subtlety is allowed. Many of the scenes are exactly alike, but the remake doesn’t play like the original. When the military messengers come to inform the wife that her husband is dead, Susanne Bier gets to do it almost without dialogue.

Jim Sheridan’s version is more concerned with the two cute, precocious little girls who open the door for the soldiers. Everybody has to talk and explain. I guess the producers wanted to make sure they milked every emotion from wife to children. Did I say milk? I started this review talking about a joke with water. Choose your liquid but don’t drink the remake. Somebody has pissed in it.

Entre Nos (USA 2009, 80 min, dir: Gloria La Morte with Paola Mendoza, cast: Paola Mendoza, Sebastian Villada, Laura Montana.

If you are Latin, the proving ground for human strength is not Colombia or Mexico, it is Queens. At least according to several recent films set in the borough. Entre Nos joins Paraiso Travel and Where God Left his Shoes (both on Movie With Me) as a gritty emotional movie about tough life and tough love on the streets off Roosevelt Avenue.

Laura Montana (as Mariana) stars in her own story, which she dedicates to her mother. Her husband leaves at the beginning of the movie and she is penniless with two children. The downward progression to homelessness doesn’t take very long and the family is reduced to collecting cans from garbage to sell for food.

Montana’s own story is not so different. Her Colombian mother brought her up on the streets of LA until she became a teenage gang member.Then she was shipped back to Colombia to live with an aunt. It was there, she says, that she learned that life was more than survival. She came back to LA and went to UCLA film school. That led to a part in a student movie that led to a major role in Sangre de mi Sangre (2007). That film is set in Brooklyn.

Entre Nos is remarkable that it got made at all. Small films like this are only possible because of filmmakers who burn to tell human stories. Laura Montana says in a YouTube Interview that her film is about survival and coming of age: first for the woman she plays, then for her son (Sebastian Villada). “We’re told time and again stories of white males, but we’re not told stories of complex people of color…and I thought instead of complaining about it I was going to do something about it and I started writing.”

The result is effecting, personal, and original.

Palindromes (USA 2004, 100 min. dir: Todd Solondz, cast: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur. Matthew Fabur).

Locked away in some dusty attic is the small dollhouse in which Todd Solondz played out his childhood fantasies. There are droll dolls, pervert dolls, and dead dolls. No wonder his first film was Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

The meaning of Palindromes is frozen among cobwebs in one of the dusty doll rooms; as if it were a single cell in the director’s mind. This is to say you can’t understand a Todd Solondz movie unless you know the inside of that dollhouse, and nobody has been there or ever will be except for Todd.

The best the rest of us can do is sniff at the scent of genius and an order of depravity as we watch movies like Palindromes. But we must always remember that the whole is not the some of its parts, the whole is a hole. The parts are all. Some are delightful, some confounding, some are stupid.

The theme of Palindromes is a pubescent high school girl played by various actresses who wants desperately to get pregnant. You can read the rest of the plot at Wikipedia.

Cousin Mark (Matthew Faber, my favorite character in the film) says that life is like a palindrome where everything is only self-referential. “It doesn’t matter if you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds or you have a sex change: what have you, all these shapes and sizes in the center; is a part of ourselves that is palindromic by nature.”

He alone really understands the dollhouse. The rest of us are tour visitors wandering from room to room in hope we’ll either found the toilet or the exit. Either way, it’s a journey worth making at least once.

Real Women Have Curves (USA 2002, 90 min, dir: Patricia Cardoso, cast: America Ferrara, Lupe Ontiveros, Ingrid Oliu, George Lopez, Jorge Cevera Jr.)

Before fatties became trendy in American movies and on television, Real Women Have Curves celebrated cellulite in the Mexican-American community of LA. The film was ahead of its time trying to give new meaning to the term jiggle.

The storyline could be a TV movie if it were not for America Ferrara. She came on the scene here, and hasn’t stopped. Most TV watchers know her as Ugly Betty in the American adaptation of the Spanish language TV show. This is fortunate because she is rumored not to speak much Spanish.

She’s not from the barrio. She grew up in Woodland Hills. That’s right, she’s a Valley Girl. It’s kind of cute to watch her handle the occasional Spanish phrase in this thoroughly American movie.

Her father Raul ( Jorge Cervera Jr.) works as a gardener, runs a leaf blower, and wears a straw hat. You couldn’t get more stereotypical in LA unless he ran a lunchero (taco truck). Mother (Lupe Ontiveros) is more interesting. She runs her own little dress making sweatshop with her older daughter Estela as the overseer (Ingrid Oliu).

Sweet Ana (America Ferrara) is forced into the trade because mamma and daddy don’t want to break up the family by letting her follow the pleas of school advisor Mr. Guzman (Geroge Lopez) and take a full tuition scholarship to Columbia University.

The movie is a sweet flan that is engaging and engrossing despite being a little too sugary. America Ferrara made her major debut in this picture. Her past work had been a student short at USC Film School (she married the director). What’s in a name? Would she be the major star she is if her name had been something like Graciela Pachuco? Not to take away from her talent, but a promotable name sure helps. Those old Hollywood publicists who named Kirk Douglas (Isur Danielovitch) and Cary Grant (Archie Leach) knew the game.

The Road (USA 2009, 111 min, die: John Hilcoat, cast: Viggo Mortsensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron)

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Glen and Randa, (USA1971, 93 min. dir: Jim McBride, cast: Steven Curry (Glen), Shelly Plimpton (Randa), Garry Goodrow (Magician).

Why does every post-apocalypse movie always feature abandoned cars strewn along the highways like a used car lot hit by a tornedo? Are we supposed to believe that the end of mankind climaxed with a demolition derby? Any news report of people freezing to death in the mountains are roasting to death in the desert usually has them quietly pulling off the road and waiting calmly for the end.

Hollywood movies believe that the dying will careen at top speed, slamming into other unfortunates in a race to destroy themselves. Or maybe it is just cheap set design to buy wrecked cars and cover them with rust paint and dust.

See I Am Legend for the big budget version of the road wreck of civilization. See The Road for the economy model. But don’t see The Road because you want a good movie experience. It is a dog. Bad story, bad acting, and boring.

So why review it here? Because it is a good contrast that was one of the best post apocalypse movies. Glen and Randa, a 1971 gem by Jim McBride. The Road is about a father and son traveling through a grim landscape pocked with lots of broken cars. The message of this mess is: the future without people will be kind of boring.

Glen and Randa trip through a land stripped of all but a hardy few who have survived by returned to primitivism. There’s The Magician (Gary Goodrow) who pushes and old wheelbarrow filled with glowing embers. He’s a magician because he has fire. Anybody who wants some has to barter with him. The lovers, Glen (Steven Curry) and Randa (Shelly Plimpton), are sort of Adamish and Evee hippy types who (as I remember) fuck in a tree and wander into abandoned Interstate rest stop restaurants for shelter.

When the movie was made the hippie movement was in full flower. Make Love Not War was written on every tie-dye t-shirt. Looking at the film now, it’s more of an ecological statement about our excesses. It has something to say whereas The Road makes only guttural sounds.

One scene I’ll never forget from Glen and Randa has them walking along the shoulder of a former Interstate highway. Randa needs a piece of string or wire for something (pardon my memory). Glen says there must be piece somewhere here, and starts searching the ground. Randa asks how he knows he will find it. Glen answers, “Because there’s everything everywhere.”

What he’s saying is that our wasteful society has thrown away so much, especially along American highways, that you can find whatever you need. And it’s true! Need a piece of wire to jimmy a lock? A length of rope to tie the trunk? A plastic bag to hold wet swimsuits? A cup to pour water in the radiator?

All you’ve got to do is hunt along the highway shoulder for a couple of minutes and you’ll see it’s true: everything is everywhere.

Post apocalypse America will be a place much like modern day American. It will be drowning it the shit we’ve thrown away for a century, and foraging primitives will depend on this bounty to survive. Nobody will care about stripping car hulks. The man who finds a beer can opener will be king.

It’s easy to see a copy of The Road but don’t. It’s tough to find a copy of Glen and Randa but worth the wait.

Sadly, you won’t find Glen and Randa in Netflix, but Amazon says they have a few copies. http://www.amazon.com/Glen-Randa-Steve-Curry/dp/B001UHKPHU/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1307567514&sr=1-1

Where God Left His Shoes (USA, 2007, 96 min. dir: Salvatore Stabile, cast: John Leguizamo, Leonor Varepa, David Castro, Samantha M. Rose)

In the list of Christmas movies, few end badly. The most popular ever, It’s a Wonderful Life, manages to pull joy from despair in the last reel. But Where God Left His Shoes doesn’t have an uncle Billy to arrive with a basket of money and save the day.

Frank (John Leguizamo) is a down on his luck boxer who finds himself homeless along with his wife and two children. Together they range through a gulag of homeless shelters and welfare centers across New York City while Frank hunts for the elusive job that will qualify his family for subsidized housing. Angela (Leonor Varepa) is his long enduring wife who tries to manage the two kids and bed them down among bums and crazies in bed bugged dormitories.

How do you teach your son values when the world around you has ceased to value you? What do you do when there is no place to sleep? How can you make your pleas heard in a system where everyone else is pleading too?

Frank tells son Justin (David Castro) they are the forgotten. The title refers to the fact that they have been forsaken even by God. He does not dwell in the places they do. You won’t find him leaving his shoes there when he beds down for the night.

This is not a perfect film, and critics have torn it apart for plot problems. The lack of a happy ending also goes against the traditional Christmas movie. We don’t want to be depressed on Christmas any more than we wanted to be depressed on Thanksgiving when Edward R. Murrow presented Harvest of Shame on CBS network, on Thanksgiving weekend 1960.

The Murrow doc followed migrant field workers toiling in the land of plenty and suffering poverty and hopelessness. Like Where God Left His Shoes, Harvest of Shame tried to raise a little indigestion in the stomachs of a nation filled with turkey and stuffing.

The effect of both films has been limited. Harvest of Shame got all the awards but nothing changed for the migrants. Where God Left His Shoes was slammed by the critics, seen by few, and never credited for social issues it raised and the people it profiled.

But its story and subject deserve greater attention. This is also one of the small but growing list of films about the outer boroughs of New York City. Far from the LED lights of Times Square, this is the New York where most of the City’s 20 million people actually live (see also Paraiso Travel on MovieWithMe.com).

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans (USA 2009, 122 min. dir: Werner Herzog, cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk).

This film turns its genre upside down and spits on it. It does for police crime stories what Cat Ballou (1965) did for westerns. From singing iguanas to philosophical drug kings to a hero with a bad back and a roaring coke habit; it has it all.

The tone, story, and intentions are all very different from Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant movie (1992). All that is preserved is Cage’s interpretation of Harvey Keitel’s famous blowjob scene in his patrol car (now a stand up fuck in a parking lot).

At the center of this amazing maelstrom is Nick Cage in a role he was born to play. Not since Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) has he worn a suit that fits so well. In Vegas it was a flying Elvis suit. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans it is a light tan stoop-shouldered business suit that looks bought off the rack at Syms. He’s permanently bent over by a bad back and an equally oppressive cocaine habit. His snort and chase method of getting the bad guys is fascinating to watch.

His girlfriend, Frankie, is Eva Mendes. She has trouble wearing anything that is not sexy. But then, she’s a prostitute and her clothes are her uniform. Steve, (Val Kilmer) is Terence’s (Cage’s) better-looking cop partner who always manages to look cool while Terence looks more and more manic.

The plot makes no difference because writer William Finkelstein has written so many TV crime show episodes he can name the scene by its button line (that wrap-up line when movie and TV cops leave the room or get out of the car or walk away from the cemetery).

Werner Herzog is no stranger to obsessed characters. Fitzcarraldo is his masterpiece, and My Best Fiend is his doc that probes the dark soul of Klaus Kinski. Cage gets the Kinski prize in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans. Kinski is dead but we’ve still got Cage to play splendidly insane characters. Too bad he also keeps doing dumb movies where he is tries to be sensitive.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans failed at the box office. It was mistakenly sold as a crime story and nobody screamed loud enough to viewers that it was a truly original and totally inventive genre-busting black comedy. Hopefully it will become a cult on Netflix streaming. It would make a great evening with The Big Lebowski as a double feature.

I hope God keeps a credit list where there are special awards of merit for Cage, Herzog, and Finkelstein. Would be nice if Eva Mendes and Fairuza Balk (Heidi here, but amazing since her first appearance in Gas, Food, and Lodging) are included as honorable mentions. In fact, there’s not a single actor in this whole cast who isn’t pretty amazing.