Movie Reviews

Glenn or Glenda?

The answer in 19th-century Ireland echoes that of 21st-century America: It's about jobs, stupid!

Albert Nobbs has a painfully constricting one as butler-waiter-valet in a Dublin hotel, whose pretentious proprietress is always on the lookout and ready to dismiss her staffers for any real or imagined infraction. But she has no need to worry about Albert. He is ultra-meticulous, by inclination and necessity.

Virtuoso Polish director Lech Majewski's "The Mill and the Cross" is a moving picture in three senses: It gives motion to a 16th-century oil painting. It translates the artist's unique storytelling technique from canvas to cinema. And the resultant narrative cannot fail to move its viewers viscerally.

Which is not to say it's easy viewing ... or reviewing. But it is perhaps the most extraordinary visual experience of this fiscal-filmic year.

The canvas we literally enter and inhabit here is "The Way to Calvary," by Pieter Bruegel (1525-69), the Flemish Renaissance master of landscapes and peasant genre scenes. His potent subject is Christ's Passion, set "locally" during the brutal Spanish occupation of the Low Countries. The Reformation was then flourishing in Flanders, and Catholic inquisitor forces pursued Protestants with a vengeance: Male heretics were executed by sword or torture; female heretics were buried alive.

Snakes have had a bad rap ever since the Book of Genesis hit the stands. Do one bad thing, and suddenly you're the eternal embodiment of evil, with the creepy ability to shed and replace your skin. When Flesh and the Devil are so intertwined, in and out of the Garden of Eden, that's a highly useful skill. Humans don't come by it naturally. They need the help of a very good plastic surgeon -- or a very malevolent one.

Friday, October 28, 2011

"The Rum Diary" -- Hunter S. Thompson's first novel -- chronicles the late great gonzo journalist's fear and loathing in Puerto Rico, where he sought a freelance reporting gig at San Juan's not-so-great English-language newspaper. It opens in the fabulous fall of 1960, when miracles could still happen, with a couple prescient predictions.